Blind, Not Weak: A Best-of-Suite Safety-Utility Frontier for Recover-and-Reguard Defenses Against Encoded VLM Jailbreaks

Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng +9

Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet a guard judges an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encod…