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.
arXiv:2608. 05000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining.
arXiv:2606. 19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts.
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
arXiv:2606. 00275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multimodal tasks through scaled architectures and extensive training.
arXiv:2606. 20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals.
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
arXiv:2606. 06890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently rely on language priors, producing confident answers that are weakly grounded in visual evidence.
arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
arXiv:2607. 16311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer visual questions using learned language and category priors rather than grounding their predictions in the image itself.
The paper introduces CAIT, a benchmark of 400 synthetic scenes featuring counter‑intuitive actions that challenge multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Human participants and proprietary models like Claude and Gemini perform well, but standard open‑source instruction‑tuned MLLMs fail, largely due to a strong language prior that overrides contradictory visual evidence. The study shows that Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning can help but introduces new issues, while targeted fine‑tuning and structured prompting can reduce reliance on language priors and improve visual grounding.
arXiv:2606. 00105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on vision-language tasks, but they may also memorize and expose sensitive or restricted knowledge, raising concerns about privacy and broader safety risks.