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Esra Dönmez

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2 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

HNC: Leveraging Hard Negative Captions towards Models with Fine-Grained Visual-Linguistic Comprehension Capabilities

Image-Text-Matching (ITM) is one of the defacto methods of learning generalized representations from a large corpus in Vision and Language (VL). However, due to the weak association between the web-collected image-text pairs, models fail to show a fine-grained understanding of the combined semantics of these modalities. To address this issue we propose Hard Negative Captions (HNC): an automatically created dataset containing foiled hard negative captions for ITM training towards achieving fine-grained cross-modal comprehension in VL. Additionally, we provide a challenging manually-created test set for benchmarking models on a fine-grained cross-modal mismatch task with varying levels of compositional complexity. Our results show the effectiveness of training on HNC by improving the models' zero-shot capabilities in detecting mismatches on diagnostic tasks and performing robustly under noisy visual input scenarios. Also, we demonstrate that HNC models yield a comparable or better initialization for fine-tuning

preprint2026arXiv

Misaligned by Reward: Socially Undesirable Preferences in LLMs

Reward models are a key component of large language model alignment, serving as proxies for human preferences during training. However, existing evaluations focus primarily on broad instruction-following benchmarks, providing limited insight into whether these models capture socially desirable preferences. As a result, important failures in social alignment can remain hidden. We extend reward-model benchmarking to four socially consequential domains: bias, safety, morality, and ethical reasoning. We introduce a framework that converts social evaluation datasets into pairwise preference data, leveraging gold labels where available and directional bias indicators otherwise. This enables us to test whether reward models prefer socially undesirable responses, and whether their preferences produce systematically biased distributions over selected outputs. Across five publicly available reward models and two instruction-tuned models used as reward proxies, we find substantial variation across domains, with no single model performing best overall. The models fall well short of strong social intelligence: they often prefer socially undesirable options, and their preferences produce systematically biased distributions. Moreover, stronger bias avoidance can reduce sensitivity to context, revealing a key alignment trade-off between avoiding biased outcomes and preserving contextual faithfulness. These findings show that standard reward benchmarks are insufficient for assessing social alignment and highlight the need for evaluations that directly measure the social preferences encoded in reward models.