Immuno-VLM: Immunizing Large Vision-Language Models via Generative Semantic Antibodies for Open-World Trustworthiness

Abstract (source: OpenReview · © authors)

Large Vision-Language Models have achieved unprecedented success in zero-shot recognition by aligning visual features with broad semantic concepts. However, this semantic abstraction creates a critical vulnerability in open-world deployment: the "Hubris of Semantics", where models force-fit unknown anomalies into known categories with high confidence due to the lack of explicit negative knowledge. To address this Open-World Trustworthiness Paradox, we propose Immuno-VLM, a bio-inspired framework that adapts the biological principle of Immunological Negative Selection to high-dimensional latent spaces. Departing from traditional Open-Set Recognition methods that rely on passive density estimation or inefficient pixel-space outlier generation, Immuno-VLM leverages the generative reasoning of Large Language Models to actively hallucinate "Semantic Antibodies", textual descriptions of near-distribution outliers (e.g., look-alikes, contextual anomalies) that effectively bound the decision space of known classes. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K and four challenging OOD benchmarks reveal that Immuno-VLM establishes a new state-of-the-art.

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