Better Safe Than Sorry? Overreaction Problem of Vision Language Models in Visual Emergency Recognition

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15367v3
• Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2025 05:26:41 GMT
• Title: Better Safe Than Sorry? Overreaction Problem of Vision Language Models in Visual Emergency Recognition
• Authors: Dasol Choi, Seunghyun Lee, Youngsook Song,
• Abstract summary: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown capabilities in interpreting visual content, but their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains insufficiently explored.<n>We introduce VERI, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 200 synthetic images (100 contrastive pairs) and an additional 50 real-world images (25 pairs) for validation.<n>Each emergency scene is paired with a visually similar but safe counterpart through human verification.
• Score: 12.054081112688074
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown capabilities in interpreting visual content, but their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains insufficiently explored. We introduce VERI, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 200 synthetic images (100 contrastive pairs) and an additional 50 real-world images (25 pairs) for validation. Each emergency scene is paired with a visually similar but safe counterpart through human verification. Using a two-stage evaluation protocol (risk identification and emergency response), we assess 17 VLMs across medical emergencies, accidents, and natural disasters. Our analysis reveals an "overreaction problem": models achieve high recall (70-100%) but suffer from low precision, misclassifying 31-96% of safe situations as dangerous. Seven safe scenarios were universally misclassified by all models. This "better-safe-than-sorry" bias stems from contextual overinterpretation (88-98% of errors). Both synthetic and real-world datasets confirm these systematic patterns, challenging VLM reliability in safety-critical applications. Addressing this requires enhanced contextual reasoning in ambiguous visual situations.

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