When Safe Unimodal Inputs Collide: Optimizing Reasoning Chains for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract: Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) are susceptible to the implicit reasoning risk, wherein innocuous unimodal inputs synergistically assemble into risky multimodal data that produce harmful outputs. We attribute this vulnerability to the difficulty of MLLMs maintaining safety alignment through long-chain reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce Safe-Semantics-but-Unsafe-Interpretation (SSUI), the first dataset featuring interpretable reasoning paths tailored for such a cross-modal challenge. A novel training framework, Safety-aware Reasoning Path Optimization (SRPO), is also designed based on the SSUI dataset to align the MLLM's internal reasoning process with human safety values. Experimental results show that our SRPO-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results on key safety benchmarks, including the proposed Reasoning Path Benchmark (RSBench), significantly outperforming both open-source and top-tier commercial MLLMs.