arXiv AI

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Visual Attention Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models is Heterogeneous

The study investigates whether attention weights in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) accurately reflect model reasoning for visual inputs. Using causal perturbation analysis, it identifies three distinct processing modes—Faithful‑Sufficient, Faithful‑Distributed, and Non‑Focal—indicating heterogeneous visual attention faithfulness. The research also shows that human‑annotated ground‑truth regions align with model attention in only about 60% of cases, highlighting a systematic divergence between model visual reliance and human intuition across VQA, document, and chart tasks.

By Xurui Song, Weishi Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Kuluhan Binici, Tao Bai, Hongxin Shao, Daniel Dahlmeier, Jun Luo
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Seeing vs. Believing: Evaluating the Language Bias of Open-Source MLLMs in Counter-Intuitive Scenes

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.

By Chen Ling, Tongwei Zhang, Hanqian Li, Nai Ding
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Seeing What Is Actually There: PriVE-Bench and PriVE-Tools for Counterfactual Evaluation of Agentic Visual Evidence in VLMs

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.

By Jingyu Sun, Jiachen Tu, Yuyang Xue, Yaoxin Jiang, Guoyi Xu, Zhengtao Yao, Rui Qian, Yizheng Sun, Hongpeng Zhou, Jingyuan Sun, Yan Lin
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Probing Visual Concepts in Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Automated Driving

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.

By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy
arXiv AI
Jun 24

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605. 08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input.

By Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu