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Learn "No" to Say "Yes" Better: Improving Vision-Language Models via Negations

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arxiv 2403.20312 v1 pith:YKP77T36 submitted 2024-03-29 cs.CV

Learn "No" to Say "Yes" Better: Improving Vision-Language Models via Negations

classification cs.CV
keywords negationsvlmsclipcon-clipmodelstextunderstandingcaptions
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Existing vision-language models (VLMs) treat text descriptions as a unit, confusing individual concepts in a prompt and impairing visual semantic matching and reasoning. An important aspect of reasoning in logic and language is negations. This paper highlights the limitations of popular VLMs such as CLIP, at understanding the implications of negations, i.e., the effect of the word "not" in a given prompt. To enable evaluation of VLMs on fluent prompts with negations, we present CC-Neg, a dataset containing 228,246 images, true captions and their corresponding negated captions. Using CC-Neg along with modifications to the contrastive loss of CLIP, our proposed CoN-CLIP framework, has an improved understanding of negations. This training paradigm improves CoN-CLIP's ability to encode semantics reliably, resulting in 3.85% average gain in top-1 accuracy for zero-shot image classification across 8 datasets. Further, CoN-CLIP outperforms CLIP on challenging compositionality benchmarks such as SugarCREPE by 4.4%, showcasing emergent compositional understanding of objects, relations, and attributes in text. Overall, our work addresses a crucial limitation of VLMs by introducing a dataset and framework that strengthens semantic associations between images and text, demonstrating improved large-scale foundation models with significantly reduced computational cost, promoting efficiency and accessibility.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Remote sensing MLLMs perform poorly on negation tasks with hallucinations and accuracy drops, but the NeFo test-time learning method substantially improves negation understanding and generalizes to unseen tasks using ...

  2. DCR: Counterfactual Attractor Guidance for Rare Compositional Generation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DCR uses a counterfactual attractor and projection-based repulsion to suppress default completion bias in diffusion models, improving fidelity for rare compositional prompts while preserving quality.

  3. A Sanity Check on Composed Image Retrieval

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The paper creates FISD, a controlled benchmark for composed image retrieval that removes query ambiguity via generative models, and proposes a multi-round agentic evaluation to assess models in interactive settings.

  4. Omni-NegCLIP: Enhancing CLIP with Front-Layer Contrastive Fine-Tuning for Comprehensive Negation Understanding

    cs.CV 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Omni-NegCLIP improves CLIP's negation understanding by up to 52.65% on presence-based and 12.50% on absence-based tasks through front-layer fine-tuning with specialized contrastive losses.

  5. TPD: Temporal Prior Decoupling for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    TPD restores suppressed late-segment events in text-to-video diffusion by projecting classifier-free guidance onto a frame- and timestep-selective lower bound along a temporal-counterfactual direction.

  6. Spatiotemporal Sycophancy: Negation-Based Gaslighting in Video Large Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Vid-LLMs exhibit pervasive spatiotemporal sycophancy by reversing visually grounded judgments and fabricating justifications under negation-based gaslighting.