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arXiv · 2609.37837

Can Vision-Language Models Stay Helpful When Facing Implicit Risks? Intent-Privilege OPSD for Efficient Safety-Helpfulness Alignment

Haotian Deng·Wenbin Xing·Gang Xu·Tao He·Jinkai Zheng·Chun Li·Zheng Zhu·Ming Li
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Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain vulnerable to cross-modal implicit risks: visual and textual inputs that appear benign in isolation can jointly elicit unsafe responses. Existing safety methods often require large preference datasets, costly multi-rollout training, or additional safeguards at inference time. They may also sacrifice helpfulness by directly refusing requests that could be answered safely. In this paper, we propose Intent-Privilege On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), which leverages evidence-grounded intent as privileged supervision during training to help VLMs recognize implicit risks and provide safe, useful responses instead of blanket refusals. OPSD distills a teacher's intent-conditioned preferences over responses into a student using a single rollout per prompt; the student then responds without intent annotations or an additional safety module. With only 1,447 safety-specific examples - 95% fewer than standard preference datasets - OPSD reduces training time by 5x relative to multi-rollout GRPO-style training and average inference length by 7%. It attains the highest ratio for joint safety-helpfulness success, which measures the proportion of responses that are both safe and helpful, across all five evaluation groups. Remarkably, on pooled SIUO+HoliSafe, this success ratio rises from 43.9% to 53.5%. These results show that training-time intent supervision can improve both safety and helpfulness while substantially reducing data, training, and inference costs.

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Haotian Deng, Wenbin Xing, Gang Xu, Tao He, Jinkai Zheng, Chun Li, Zheng Zhu, Ming Li. 2026-09-29. Can Vision-Language Models Stay Helpful When Facing Implicit Risks? Intent-Privilege OPSD for Efficient Safety-Helpfulness Alignment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37837

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