V-DEAL: Diagnosing Video Safety De-Calibration as an Understanding-Refusal Coupling Failure

Zhetong Zhang, Honghao Fu, Miao Xu, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai

As Video Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their safety alignment has become critical. Counterintuitively, we find that harmful videos paired with benign queries achieve higher attack success rates than the same videos paired with explicitly harmful queries. To understand the underlying mechanism of this vulnerability, we present V-DEAL, a three-level diagnostic framework that jointly analyzes this failure across model behaviour, understanding, and internal representations. By progressively ruling out perception failure and quantifying the model's internal refusal tendency, V-DEAL provides a new diagnostic perspective for analyzing the underlying mechanism of the observed vulnerability. We tested six Video LLMs on three public benchmarks and observed that models correctly recognize harmful video content with over 81\% accuracy, yet the average attack success rate still reaches 48.33\% under the condition pairing harmful videos with benign queries. Hidden-state analysis further shows that visual understanding activates a weaker refusal tendency than textual understanding. Furthermore, we introduce a prompt injection intervention method that reduces attack success rates by an average of 48.24 percentage points and achieves performance comparable to prior fine-tuning-based methods, providing an effective and practical means to address such safety risks in Video LLMs.