When the Defense Writes the Refusal: Auditing Keyword-Scored Evaluation of Inference-Time Defenses for Multimodal Large Language Models

Bulat Nutfullin, Vladimir Evgrafov, Dmitry Namiot

Prompt-based inference-time defenses for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emit safety language into the very answers they defend, and a lexical keyword scorer whose refusal…