Beyond the Explicit: Benchmarking and Detecting Implicit Harm in Short Videos

Chenyang Li, Qifan Yu, Saihui Hou, Zhaofeng He

Short videos have become a dominant online medium, where harmful content is increasingly conveyed in implicit and fragmented forms. Prior work largely focuses on explicit categories, such as violence and hate speech, and often fails to detect videos that subtly promote misleading values through narrative context, emotional framing, or cross-modal cues, partly due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks for implicit harm. To bridge this gap, we construct DeepHarm-7K, a large-scale harmful short-video dataset comprising 7,110 samples annotated according to a fine-grained harmful-content taxonomy. The dataset systematically covers implicitly harmful videos across diverse real-world scenarios and is constructed through a rigorous multi-stage quality-control process. Building on this dataset, we propose DeepHarm-VL, a multimodal detection framework that integrates visual, audio, and cross-modal reasoning. The framework employs a two-round reasoning strategy to progressively identify surface-level evidence and infer latent harmful implications. Experimental results show consistent improvements over strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods across multiple open-source video-language…