arXiv Computer Vision

Absence is Presence: Understanding Visual Scene Negative Events Under Safety Cognitive Constraint

The paper introduces a new task called visual scene negative captioning, which aims to describe what should be present in an image but is actually absent, a capability crucial for safety-critical applications. It proposes the CRCD framework, which uses counterfactual reconstruction and contrastive decoding to overcome affirmation bias, limited mental filling, and representation bias. CRCD employs a dual-branch architecture for amodal completion and functional association, along with multi-condition representation learning, to generate accurate negative captions and sets a high-performance baseline for this emerging task.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Benchmarking MLLMs via Cognitive Expected Scene Graph for Safety-Critical Visual Negation Understanding

The paper introduces a new benchmark for evaluating Multi‑Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on visual negation understanding, focusing on safety-critical scenarios. It defines the Scene Negation Understanding under Safety Cognition (SNUS) task and presents a high‑fidelity negative caption dataset that maps dense assertions of localized hazards. The authors also propose the Cognitive Expected Scene Graph (CESG) Score, a polarity‑aware, structure‑grounded metric that remains robust under semantic reversals, revealing that existing models and traditional metrics fail on this task.

By Zhiyun Jiang, Hanyong Wang, Binbin Liang, Yu Xie, Menglong Yang, Wei Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

When Safety Overrides Vision: Exploring Dynamics between Vision Influence and Safety Alignment in Vision-Language Models

Aligned vision‑language models (VLMs) are designed to combine grounded visual reasoning with safe generation. The study finds that when safety constraints are applied, these models often abstain from answering questions that they could answer under default instruction, yet visual evidence continues to influence the decoding process. The authors show that safety‑induced abstention alters late‑stage hidden‑state dynamics, and that targeted interventions can restore grounded answering without retraining or changing visual inputs.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606. 24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision.

By Xiaowei Gao, Pengxiang Li, Yitai Cheng, Ruihan Xu, James Haworth, Stephen Law, Yun Ye
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605. 08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input.

By Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Reducing Hallucination in Vision-Language Models via Stage-wise Preference Optimization under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2605. 16411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a fundamental challenge in vision-language models (VLMs), where autoregressive generation may produce linguistically plausible yet physically inconsistent or visually ungrounded responses due to likelihood maximization under joint probabilistic modeling.

By Qinwu Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Steering Multimodal Large Language Models Decoding for Context-Aware Safety

The paper introduces Safety-aware Contrastive Decoding (SafeCoDe), a lightweight, model‑agnostic framework designed to improve context‑aware safety in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). SafeCoDe operates in two stages: a contrastive decoding step that highlights tokens sensitive to visual context by contrasting real and Gaussian‑noised images, and a global‑aware token modulation strategy that adjusts refusals based on scene‑level reasoning and predicted safety verdicts. Experiments across various MLLM architectures and safety benchmarks demonstrate that SafeCoDe consistently enhances context‑sensitive refusal behaviors while maintaining model helpfulness.

By Zheyuan Liu, Zhangchen Xu, Guangyao Dou, Xiangchi Yuan, Zhaoxuan Tan, Radha Poovendran, Meng Jiang