arXiv Computation and Language

Slow to See, Slow to Suppress: Understanding the Effects of Modality in Context-Memory Conflicts

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.

By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

arXiv:2606. 14883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge.

By Salimeh Sekeh, Mary Wisell