T2I Models Rarely Invert Negation but Often Fail to Suppress Negated Concepts: Benchmarking Negation Suppression in Text-to-Image Generation

Akansha Gautam, Aparna Bharati, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

Text-to-image diffusion models often fail to suppress explicitly negated concepts, such as a lamp for "a desk without a lamp." We introduce T2I-NSI, a benchmark and metric for measuring negation sensitivity in text-to-image generation. It pairs each negated prompt with a canonical positive counterpart and factorizes negation by linguistic form (lexical/semantic, morphological, syntactic) and target type (objects, attributes, relations, compositions, and nested cases). The benchmark contains 759,869 paired prompt atoms over a 5,082-object catalog, with 916,272 images (911,982 open-weights, 4,290 closed-source), scored by a Basic CLIP estimator and a Robust ensemble of CLIP, VQA and open-vocabulary detection. Negation sensitivity is low: open-weights generators score NSI <= 0.038, while GPT-Image-1.5 and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image reach about 0.09. The dominant failure is under-suppression rather than misdirection. Inverse interpretation is essentially absent (0.00% across over 450K atom-model evaluations), whereas models render the concept under both prompts on 8-19% of atoms and only partly suppress it on a further 9-25%; most remaining atoms are too weakly rendered to label. A…