arXiv AI By Anisha Saha, Varsha Suresh, Teodora Kamova, Sophia Wiedmann, Timothy Hospedales, Vera Demberg

Learning to Reason About Implicit Multimodal Harm: From Diagnosis to Generalization

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The paper introduces MuPHI, a diagnostic benchmark that isolates multimodal harm arising solely from image‑text composition, providing benign counterfactuals and annotated harm rationales. Evaluation with MuPHI shows that vision‑language models can ground individual modalities but struggle to bind evidence into a coherent harm mechanism, and that existing harm detection methods transfer poorly to new harm distributions. To address this, the authors propose Compositional Harm Interpretation Learning (CHIL), which rewards evidence identification, cross‑modal binding, and verdict consistency, leading to significant improvements in out‑of‑distribution transfer and counterfactual robustness.

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