How Many Unicorns Are in This Image? A Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Vision LLMs

This work focuses on the potential of vision large language models (VLLMs) in visual reasoning. Different from prior studies, we shift our focus from evaluating standard performance to introducing a comprehensive safety evaluation suite Unicorn, covering out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization and adversarial robustness. For the OOD evaluation, we present two novel visual question-answering (VQA) datasets, each with one variant, designed to test model performance under challenging conditions. In exploring adversarial robustness, we propose a straightforward attack strategy for misleading VLLMs to produce visual-unrelated responses. Moreover, we assess the efficacy of two jailbreaking strategies, targeting either the vision or language input of VLLMs. Our evaluation of 22 diverse models, ranging from open-source VLLMs to GPT-4V and Gemini Pro, yields interesting observations: 1) Current VLLMs struggle with OOD texts but not images, unless the visual information is limited; and 2) These VLLMs can be easily misled by deceiving vision encoders only, and their vision-language training often compromise safety protocols. We release this safety evaluation suite at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/vllm-safety-benchmark.