As deep learning advances, Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have shown exceptional performance in many real-world tasks. However, VLMs face significant security challenges, such as jailbreak attacks, where attackers attempt to bypass the model’s safety alignment to elicit harmful responses. The threat of jailbreak attacks on VLMs arises from both the inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs and the multiple information channels that VLMs process. While various attacks and defenses have been proposed, there is a notable gap in unified and comprehensive evaluations, as each method is evaluated on different dataset and metrics, making it impossible to compare the effectiveness of each method. To address this gap, we introduce MMJ-Bench, a unified pipeline for evaluating jailbreak attacks and defense techniques for VLMs. Through extensive experiments, we assess the effectiveness of various attack methods against SoTA VLMs and evaluate the impact of defense mechanisms on both defense effectiveness and model utility for normal tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation contribute to the field by offering a unified and systematic evaluation framework and the first public-available benchmark for VLM jailbreak research. We also demonstrate several insightful findings that highlights directions for future studies.

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) on vast text corpora enhances natural language processing capabilities but risks encoding social biases, particularly gender bias. While parameter-modification methods like fine-tuning mitigate bias, they are resource-intensive, unsuitable for closed-source models, and lack adaptability to evolving societal norms. Instruction-based approaches offer flexibility but often compromise general performance on normal tasks. To address these limitations, we propose $\textit{FaIRMaker}$, an automated and model-independent framework that employs an $\textbf{auto-search and refinement}$ paradigm to adaptively generate Fairwords, which act as instructions to reduce gender bias and enhance response quality. $\textit{FaIRMaker}$ enhances the debiasing capacity by enlarging the Fairwords search space while preserving the utility and making it applicable to closed-source models by training a sequence-to-sequence model that adaptively refines Fairwords into effective debiasing instructions when facing gender-related queries and performance-boosting prompts for neutral inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $\textit{FaIRMaker}$ effectively mitigates gender bias while preserving task integrity and ensuring compatibility with both open- and closed-source LLMs.