@inproceedings{bhagwatkar-etal-2025-cave,
    title = "{CAVE} : Detecting and Explaining Commonsense Anomalies in Visual Environments",
    author = "Bhagwatkar, Rishika  and
      Montariol, Syrielle  and
      Romanou, Angelika  and
      Borges, Beatriz  and
      Rish, Irina  and
      Bosselut, Antoine",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1379/",
    pages = "27098--27139",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Humans can naturally identify, reason about, and explain anomalies in their environment. In computer vision, this long-standing challenge remains limited to industrial defects or unrealistic, synthetically generated anomalies, failing to capture the richness and unpredictability of real-world anomalies. In this work, we introduce CAVE, the first benchmark of real-world visual anomalies. CAVE supports three open-ended tasks: anomaly description, explanation, and justification; with fine-grained annotations for visual grounding and categorizing anomalies based on their visual manifestations, their complexity, severity, and commonness. These annotations draw inspiration from cognitive science research on how humans identify and resolve anomalies, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in detecting and understanding anomalies. We show that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with visual anomaly perception and commonsense reasoning, even with advanced prompting strategies. By offering a realistic and cognitively grounded benchmark, CAVE serves as a valuable resource for advancing research in anomaly detection and commonsense reasoning in VLMs."
}