Hazard or Anomaly? Evaluating VLMs for Understanding Dangers and Discrepancies
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often confuse anomalies with hazards, as current binary safe/unsafe evaluations fail to differentiate true physical dangers from unusual scene elements. This research introduces an explicit hazard vs. anomaly distinction, evaluating multiple VLMs across datasets. Results show VLMs frequently misinterpret anomalousness as hazardous, relying on contextual irregularity as a proxy for danger. Separating the two provides more informative safety reasoning evaluations, exposing failure modes obscured by binary judgments. A public dataset is available on Roboflow.
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[Submitted on 18 Jul 2026]
Title:Hazard or Anomaly? Evaluating VLMs for Understanding Dangers and Discrepancies
View a PDF of the paper titled Hazard or Anomaly? Evaluating VLMs for Understanding Dangers and Discrepancies, by Murali Indukuri and 4 other authors
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Abstract:Modern safety-critical systems increasingly rely on human-robot interaction to reduce disaster risk and support decision-making during emergencies. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are promising for these settings because they can interpret complex scenes and communicate safety-relevant information, but they still require careful evaluation to ensure reliable safety reasoning. In particular, current evaluations often frame danger recognition as a binary decision (Safe/Unsafe), making it unclear whether a model is identifying true physical hazards or merely reacting to unusual scene elements. We address this limitation by introducing an explicit distinction between hazard and anomaly, and by separately recognizing hazardous and anomalous states. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs across two datasets and multiple prompting strategies to test whether this distinction changes model behavior. Our results show that VLMs frequently misinterpret anomalousness as hazardousness, revealing an over-reliance on contextual irregularity as a proxy for danger. We further show that explicitly separating anomaly from hazard provides a more informative evaluation of VLM safety reasoning and exposes failure modes that binary safety judgments can obscure. Our public dataset is available on Roboflow this https URL.
Comments: 8 pages, accepted to RO-MAN 2026
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.18325 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2607.18325v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18325
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Mohammad Eskandari [view email] [v1] Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:24:06 UTC (4,273 KB)
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