aiqbench analysis
This research demonstrates that safety constraints in generative models can be treated as portable latent directions, allowing a single safety vector learned from one model to effectively steer diverse target architectures without accessing unsafe data. The approach achieves performance comparable to native training while maintaining generation quality, suggesting that safety representations are modular and transferable across heterogeneous generators. This offers a practical pathway for deploying lightweight, reusable safety mechanisms that avoid the need for retraining or re-exposure to harmful content on every new model.
Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation
arXiv:2606.05290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture. In this work, we ask whether safety can be represented as a portable latent direction, learned once and reused across heterogeneous generators. We introduce the first framework for cross-model safety steering, in which a safety direction is estimated in a source LLM from paired safe-unsafe prompts, transported to a target generator through a lightweight alignment fitted on benign data alone, and applied at inference time. Crucially, our pipeline never accesses unsafe data on the target side, isolating whether safety can be transferred through shared representation geometry. Beyond a single global direction, we also identify a multi-vector extension that captures category-specific safety behaviors, enabling more selective control. We evaluate our approach in text-to-image and text-to-video generation across diverse source-target model pairs. Across models, transferred safety directions achieve ASR reduction and CLIP-Score/FID trade-offs comparable to directions learned natively on the target model using unsafe data, while requiring no target-side unsafe data. This indicates that safety improvements do not come at the expense of generation quality. Our results point to a modular view of safety: safety-relevant behavior is not purely model-local, but can be controlled through latent directions that persist across models. This suggests a new path toward lightweight, reusable safety mechanisms that do not require target-side unsafe data.
Title:Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation
Abstract:Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture. In this work, we ask whether safety can be represented as a portable latent direction, learned once and reused across heterogeneous generators. We introduce the first framework for cross-model safety steering, in which a safety direction is estimated in a source LLM from paired safe-unsafe prompts, transported to a target generator through a lightweight alignment fitted on benign data alone, and applied at inference time. Crucially, our pipeline never accesses unsafe data on the target side, isolating whether safety can be transferred through shared representation geometry. Beyond a single global direction, we also identify a multi-vector extension that captures category-specific safety behaviors, enabling more selective control. We evaluate our approach in text-to-image and text-to-video generation across diverse source-target model pairs. Across models, transferred safety directions achieve ASR reduction and CLIP-Score/FID trade-offs comparable to directions learned natively on the target model using unsafe data, while requiring no target-side unsafe data. This indicates that safety improvements do not come at the expense of generation quality. Our results point to a modular view of safety: safety-relevant behavior is not purely model-local, but can be controlled through latent directions that persist across models. This suggests a new path toward lightweight, reusable safety mechanisms that do not require target-side unsafe data.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multimedia (cs.MM)
arXiv:2606.05290 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2606.05290v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05290 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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