The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Adversarial Misclassification of Safe Inputs as Unsafe in Multimodal Guardrails

Multimodal guard models have emerged as critical safety components for screening content in vision-language systems. While adversarial research has extensively studied jailbreaking attacks that produce false negatives, the inverse threat of inducing false positives on benign inputs remains unexplored. We introduce Unsafe Induction Attacks, where adversaries distribute imperceptibly perturbed safe images that trigger guard models to reject legitimate user requests, causing a "Boy Who Cried Wolf"

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ethics.ai (2 August 2026), “The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Adversarial Misclassification of Safe Inputs as Unsafe in Multimodal Guardrails,” evidence record 16168, https://ethics.ai/record/16168 (originally published by arXiv red teaming query).

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