Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown capabilities in interpreting visual content, but their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains insufficiently explored. We introduce VERI, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 200 synthetic images (100 contrastive pairs) and additional 50 real-world images (25 pairs) for validation. Each emergency scene is paired with a visually similar but safe counterpart through human verification. Using a two-stage evaluation protocol (risk identification and emergency response), we assess 17 VLMs across medical emergencies, accidents, and natural disasters. Our analysis reveals an "overreaction problem": models achieve high recall (70–100%) but suffer from low precision, misclassifying 31–96% of safe situations as dangerous. Seven safe scenarios were universally misclassified by all models. This "better-safe-than-sorry" bias stems from contextual over-interpretation (88–98% of errors). Both synthetic and real-world datasets confirm these systematic patterns, challenging VLM reliability in safety-critical applications. Addressing this requires enhanced contextual reasoning in ambiguous visual situations.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from hallucination issues, generating information about objects that are not present in input images during vision-language tasks. These hallucinations particularly undermine model reliability in practical applications requiring accurate object identification. To address this challenge, we propose TL-DPO, a preference learning approach that mitigates hallucinations by focusing on targeted areas where they occur. To implement this, we build a dataset containing hallucinated responses, correct responses, and target information (i.e., objects present in the images and the corresponding chunk positions in responses affected by hallucinations). By applying a preference learning method restricted to these specific targets, the model can filter out irrelevant signals and focus on correcting hallucinations. This allows the model to produce more factual responses by concentrating solely on relevant information. Experimental results demonstrate that TL-DPO effectively reduces hallucinations across multiple vision hallucination tasks, improving the reliability and performance of MLLMs without diminishing overall performance.