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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 17, 2026 · UTC

Traditional scene understanding focuses on affirmative information objectively present in images. However, in safety-critical domains, comprehending key information that should exist but is actually absent is vital for risk mitigation. To bridge this gap, we focus on visual scene negative captioning with safety as the cognitive constraint. The core challenge is to convert physical absence into semantic negative events. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this process because affirmation bias suppresses negative reasoning, while limited mental filling capability and representat

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