Directional Embedding Smoothing for Robust Vision Language Models

Abstract: The safety and reliability of vision-LLMs (VLMs) are a crucial part of deploying trustworthy agentic AI systems. However, VLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that undermine their safety alignment to yield harmful outputs. In this work, we extend the Randomized Embedding Smoothing and Token Aggregation (RESTA) defense to VLMs and evaluate its performance against the JailBreakV-28K benchmark of multi-modal jailbreaking attacks. We find that RESTA is effective in reducing attack success rate over this diverse corpus of attacks, in particular, when employing directional embedding noise, where the injected noise is aligned with the original token embedding vectors. Our results demonstrate that RESTA can contribute to securing VLMs within agentic systems, as a lightweight, inference-time defense layer of an overall security framework.