The rapid advancement of large models, driven by their exceptional abilities in learning and generalization through large-scale pre-training, has reshaped the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These models are now foundational to a wide range of applications, including conversational AI, recommendation systems, autonomous driving, content generation, medical diagnostics, and scientific discovery. However, their widespread deployment also exposes them to significant safety risks, raising concerns about robustness, reliability, and ethical implications. This survey provides a systematic review of current safety research on large models, covering Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and large-model-based Agents. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We present a comprehensive taxonomy of safety threats to these models, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, backdoor attacks, jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, energy-latency attacks, data and model extraction attacks, and emerging agent-specific threats. (2) We review defense strategies proposed for each type of attacks if available and summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks for safety research. (3) Building on this, we identify and discuss the open challenges in large model safety, emphasizing the need for comprehensive safety evaluations, scalable and effective defense mechanisms, and sustainable data practices. More importantly, we highlight the necessity of collective efforts from the research community and international collaboration. Our work can serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners, fostering the ongoing development of comprehensive defense systems and platforms to safeguard AI models.

Despite their superb multimodal capabilities, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which are inference-time attacks that induce the model to output harmful responses with tricky prompts. It is thus essential to defend VLMs against potential jailbreaks for their trustworthy deployment in real-world applications. In this work, we focus on black-box defense for VLMs against jailbreak attacks. Existing black-box defense methods are either unimodal or bimodal. Unimodal methods enhance either the vision or language module of the VLM, while bimodal methods robustify the model through text-image representation realignment. However, these methods suffer from two limitations: 1) they fail to fully exploit the cross-modal information, or 2) they degrade the model performance on benign inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel blue-team method BlueSuffix that defends the black-box target VLM against jailbreak attacks without compromising its performance. BlueSuffix includes three key components: 1) a visual purifier against jailbreak images, 2) a textual purifier against jailbreak texts, and 3) a blue-team suffix generator finetuned via reinforcement learning for enhancing cross-modal robustness. We empirically show on three VLMs (LLaVA, MiniGPT-4, and Gemini) and two safety benchmarks (MM-SafetyBench and RedTeam-2K) that BlueSuffix outperforms the baseline defenses by a significant margin. Our BlueSuffix opens up a promising direction for defending VLMs against jailbreak attacks. There has been a notable surge in research focusing on incorporating multimodal capabilities into Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4o (Achiam et al., 2023) and Google's Gemini 1.5 (Reid et al., 2024).

Large language models (LLMs) have shown their potential in long-context understanding and mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we study the problem of using LLMs to detect tabular anomalies and show that pre-trained LLMs are zero-shot batch-level anomaly detectors. That is, without extra distribution-specific model fitting, they can discover hidden outliers in a batch of data, demonstrating their ability to identify low-density data regions. For LLMs that are not well aligned with anomaly detection and frequently output factual errors, we apply simple yet effective data-generating processes to simulate synthetic batch-level anomaly detection datasets and propose an end-to-end fine-tuning strategy to bring out the potential of LLMs in detecting real anomalies. Experiments on a large anomaly detection benchmark (ODDS) showcase i) GPT-4 has on-par performance with the state-of-the-art transductive learning-based anomaly detection methods and ii) the efficacy of our synthetic dataset and fine-tuning strategy in aligning LLMs to this task.