USB: A COMPREHENSIVE AND UNIFIED SAFETY EVALUATION BENCHMARK FOR MULTIMODAL LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
Paper · 2026 · Baolin Zheng, Guanlin Chen, Qingyang Teng et al.
Summary
Existing safety benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) cover few risk types and contain few samples. Most also pair harmful text with innocuous images, so they miss cases where the image alone, or the image–text combination, creates the danger. The authors present USB (Unified Safety Benchmark), which organises risks into a three-level taxonomy and crosses every risk category with four modality combinations. They first show that even pooling earlier benchmarks leaves much of this space empty. To fill the gaps, they combine curated samples from existing datasets with new data from a multi-stage synthesis pipeline that selects, classifies and augments examples. USB also measures over-refusal on benign inputs, using probes adopted from MOSSBench, so that a model cannot score well simply by refusing everything. A harder subset, USB-Hard, collects especially aggressive samples. Tests on 22 MLLMs show that models struggle to avoid harmful outputs without over-refusing, and they fail most often on image-only and cross-modal risks. The benchmark therefore offers a single, more discriminative way to check safety alignment.
Key points
- The taxonomy has 3 primary, 16 secondary and 61 tertiary risk categories. These are crossed with four modality settings (RIRT, RIST, SIRT, SIST), giving 244 risk–modality cells. Political topics are deliberately left out.
- USB covers 98.3% of these cells with more than 20 samples each. The best earlier benchmark, JailBreakV, reaches 30.7%. Data size is about 13.1k samples in USB-Base plus 3.7k in USB-Hard.
- Averaged over 10 MLLMs, the safety rate on USB's vulnerability data is 46.38%. Most prior benchmarks yield rates above 75%, so USB is the harder test.
- The evaluation covers 9 commercial and 13 open-source MLLMs, with GPT-4o serving as the automatic judge.
- On USB-Hard, Claude-Sonnet4 falls from 91.16% to 77.82% and Qwen3.6-Plus from 88.01% to 72.85%. Many open-source models drop below 20%. Code and data are published at github.com/Hongqiong12/USB-SafeBench.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works
🧭 Topics 4Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,320 worksEvaluation & benchmarks · 1,220 worksVision & language · 657 worksBias, fairness & safety · 517 works
Cite
Cite as Baolin Zheng, Guanlin Chen, Qingyang Teng, Hongqiong Zhong, Yingshui Tan, Zhendong Liu, Weixun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Jian Yang, Huiyun Jing, Jincheng Wei, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng and Kaifu Zhang. 2026. USB: A COMPREHENSIVE AND UNIFIED SAFETY EVALUATION BENCHMARK FOR MULTIMODAL LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{zheng2026usb,
title = {{USB: A COMPREHENSIVE AND UNIFIED SAFETY EVALUATION BENCHMARK FOR MULTIMODAL LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS}},
author = {Baolin Zheng, Guanlin Chen, Qingyang Teng, Hongqiong Zhong, Yingshui Tan, Zhendong Liu, Weixun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Jian Yang, Huiyun Jing, Jincheng Wei, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng and Kaifu Zhang},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.970},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.970}
}References
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