HoliSafe: Holistic Safety Benchmarking and Modeling with Safety Meta Token for Vision-Language Model

Despite emerging efforts to enhance the safety of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), current approaches face two main shortcomings. 1) Existing safety-tuning datasets and benchmarks only partially consider how image-text interactions can yield harmful content, often overlooking contextually unsafe outcomes from seemingly benign pairs. This narrow coverage leaves VLMs vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in unseen configurations. 2) Prior methods rely primarily on data-centric tuning, with limited architectural innovations to intrinsically strengthen safety. We address these gaps by introducing a holistic safety dataset and benchmark, HoliSafe, that spans all five safe/unsafe image-text combinations, providing a more robust basis for both training and evaluation. We further propose SafeLLaVA, a novel VLM augmented with a learnable safety meta token and a dedicated safety head. The meta token encodes harmful visual cues during training, intrinsically guiding the language model toward safer responses, while the safety head offers interpretable harmfulness classification aligned with refusal rationales. Experiments show that SafeLLaVA, trained on HoliSafe, achieves state-of-the-art safety performance across multiple VLM benchmarks. Additionally, the HoliSafe benchmark itself reveals critical vulnerabilities in existing models. We hope that HoliSafe and SafeLLaVA will spur further research into robust and interpretable VLM safety, expanding future avenues for multimodal alignment.

DIAL: Dense Image-text ALignment for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches typically rely on class activation maps (CAMs) for initial seed generation, which often fail to capture global context due to limited supervision from image-level labels. To address this issue, we introduce DALNet, Dense Alignment Learning Network that leverages text embeddings to enhance the comprehensive understanding and precise localization of objects across different levels of granularity. Our key insight is to employ a dual-level alignment strategy: (1) Global Implicit Alignment (GIA) to capture global semantics by maximizing the similarity between the class token and the corresponding text embeddings while minimizing the similarity with background embeddings, and (2) Local Explicit Alignment (LEA) to improve object localization by utilizing spatial information from patch tokens. Moreover, we propose a cross-contrastive learning approach that aligns foreground features between image and text modalities while separating them from the background, encouraging activation in missing regions and suppressing distractions. Through extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, we demonstrate that DALNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art WSSS methods. Our approach, in particular, allows for more efficient end-to-end process as a single-stage method.