Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Alhamoud, Kumail, Alshammari, Shaden, Tian, Yonglong, Li, Guohao, Torr, Philip, Kim, Yoon, Ghassemi, Marzyeh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Alhamoud, Kumail
Alshammari, Shaden
Tian, Yonglong
Li, Guohao
Torr, Philip
Kim, Yoon
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
author_facet Alhamoud, Kumail
Alshammari, Shaden
Tian, Yonglong
Li, Guohao
Torr, Philip
Kim, Yoon
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
contents Many practical vision-language applications require models that understand negation, e.g., when using natural language to retrieve images which contain certain objects but not others. Despite advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) through large-scale training, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored. This study addresses the question: how well do current VLMs understand negation? We introduce NegBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate negation understanding across 18 task variations and $79$k examples spanning image, video, and medical datasets. The benchmark consists of two core tasks designed to evaluate negation understanding in diverse multimodal settings: Retrieval with Negation and Multiple Choice Questions with Negated Captions. Our evaluation reveals that modern VLMs struggle significantly with negation, often performing at chance level. To address these shortcomings, we explore a data-centric approach wherein we finetune CLIP models on large-scale synthetic datasets containing millions of negated captions. We show that this approach can result in a 10% increase in recall on negated queries and a 28% boost in accuracy on multiple-choice questions with negated captions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation
Alhamoud, Kumail
Alshammari, Shaden
Tian, Yonglong
Li, Guohao
Torr, Philip
Kim, Yoon
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Many practical vision-language applications require models that understand negation, e.g., when using natural language to retrieve images which contain certain objects but not others. Despite advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) through large-scale training, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored. This study addresses the question: how well do current VLMs understand negation? We introduce NegBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate negation understanding across 18 task variations and $79$k examples spanning image, video, and medical datasets. The benchmark consists of two core tasks designed to evaluate negation understanding in diverse multimodal settings: Retrieval with Negation and Multiple Choice Questions with Negated Captions. Our evaluation reveals that modern VLMs struggle significantly with negation, often performing at chance level. To address these shortcomings, we explore a data-centric approach wherein we finetune CLIP models on large-scale synthetic datasets containing millions of negated captions. We show that this approach can result in a 10% increase in recall on negated queries and a 28% boost in accuracy on multiple-choice questions with negated captions.
title Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09425