TPCD: Tone-Pressure Contrastive Decoding and the Label-Free Gating Bottleneck in Vision-Language Models
High-pressure prompts can push vision-language models (VLMs) into unsupported commitments, such as reading illegible text, reporting indeterminate times, or affirming absent objects. This paper asks whether the pressure-induced distribution itself can serve as a contrastive-decoding negative branch. Tone-pressure contrastive decoding (TPCD) subtracts logits produced under a high-pressure instruction from logits produced under a safe neutral instruction. On the 800-example tone-matters benchmark, LLaVA-1.5-7B under pressure reaches 66.75% attack success rate (ASR); safe neutralization reduces ASR to 9.88%; full TPCD reaches 0.50% but collapses positives to 15.56%. A benchmark-specific task...
| Authors | Jinkun Zhao, Kui Zhang, Wenjun Wu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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