Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation

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 79k 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 40% boost in accuracy on multiple-choice questions with negated captions.

Long-Tailed Recognition via Weight Balancing

In the real open world, data tends to follow long-tailed class distributions, motivating the well-studied long-tailed recognition (LTR) problem. Naive training produces models that are biased toward common classes in terms of higher accuracy. The key to addressing LTR is to balance various aspects including data distribution, training losses, and gradients in learning. We explore an orthogonal direction, weight balancing, motivated by the empirical observation that the naively trained classifier has "artificially" larger weights in norm for common classes (because there exists abundant data to train them, unlike the rare classes). We investigate three techniques to balance weights, L2-normalization, weight decay, and MaxNorm. We first point out that L2-normalization "perfectly" balances per-class weights to be unit norm, but such a hard constraint might prevent classes from learning better classifiers. In contrast, weight decay penalizes larger weights more heavily and so learns small balanced weights; the MaxNorm constraint encourages growing small weights within a norm ball but caps all the weights by the radius. Our extensive study shows that both help learn balanced weights and greatly improve the LTR accuracy. Surprisingly, weight decay, although underexplored in LTR, significantly improves over prior work. Therefore, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm and propose a simple approach to LTR: (1) learning features using the cross-entropy loss by tuning weight decay, and (2) learning classifiers using class-balanced loss by tuning weight decay and MaxNorm. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy on five standard benchmarks, serving as a future baseline for long-tailed recognition.