Distributed Implicit Harm: A Compositional Safety Blind Spot in MLLM-Based Video Moderation
Despite their growing use in video moderation, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit a compositional safety blind spot: videos composed of seemingly benign components can convey harmful meaning when interpreted as a whole. We refer to this phenomenon as Distributed Implicit Harm (DIH), where harm arises from relations among components distributed along a decomposition axis of the video, rather than from any single explicit cue. Among many possible axes, we study two representative cases: temporally distributed harm across visual segments (DIH-T) and cross-modal harm between audio and visual streams (DIH-M). Studying and mitigating DIH at scale requires data that is difficult to...
| Authors | Ruotong Wang, Zihao Zhu, Siwei Lyu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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