# Quantifying the human visual exposome with vision language models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03863/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal emotion understanding, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 2 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Multimodal emotion understanding](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/multimodal-emotion-understanding/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12289/) (2024)
- [Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14414/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The visual environment is a fundamental yet unquantified determinant of mental health. While the concept of the environmental exposome is well established, current methods rely on coarse geospatial proxies or biased self reports, failing to capture the first person visual context of daily life. We addressed this gap by coupling ecological momentary assessment with vision language models (VLMs) to quantify the semantic richness of human visual experience. Across 2674 participant generated photographs, VLM derived estimates of greenness robustly predicted momentary affect and chronic stress, consistent with established benchmarks. We then developed a semi autonomous large language model (LLM) based pipeline that mined over seven million scientific publications to extract nearly 1000 environmental features empirically linked to mental health. When applied to real world imagery, up to 33 percent of VLM extracted context ratings significantly correlated with affect and stress. These findings establish a scalable objective paradigm for visual exposomics, enabling high throughput decoding of how the visible world is associated with mental health.