arXiv AI

Which Modality Decides? Counterfactual Modality Attribution for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2608. 00076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly support high-stakes decision making by combining complementary information from images and text.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Counterfactual Modeling with Fine-Tuned LLMs for Health Intervention Design and Sensor Data Augmentation

arXiv:2601. 14590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide human-centric interpretability by identifying the minimal, actionable changes required to alter a machine learning model's prediction.

By Shovito Barua Soumma, Asiful Arefeen, Stephanie M. Carpenter, Melanie Hingle, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Same Semantics, Different Outcome: On the Modality Robustness of Multimodal LLMs under Knowledge Conflict

The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.

By Jungyeon Lee, Yejin Yoon, Taeuk Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

SurrogateSHAP: Training-Free Contributor Attribution for Text-to-Image (T2I) Models

arXiv:2601. 22276v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models are increasingly used in real-world creative workflows, a principled framework for valuing contributors who provide a collection of data is essential for fair compensation and sustainable data marketplaces.

By Mingyu Lu, Soham Gadgil, Chris Lin, Chanwoo Kim, Su-In Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

I Don't Miss You, but I Do: Self-Explanation Faithfulness of Modality Missingness in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces an interventional protocol to assess how vision‑language models (VLMs) explain the impact of missing modalities on their predictions. By comparing the models’ self‑explanations with actual changes observed after restoring missing inputs, the study finds that VLMs routinely overstate the sufficiency of available evidence and underestimate the effect of adding back missing modalities. Across eight open‑weight VLMs and four tasks, the discrepancy between predicted and realized changes is substantial, revealing systematic mischaracterization of modality dependence.

By Aydin Javadov, Daniel Schoess, Florian von Wangenheim
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

arXiv:2606. 17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored.

By Jingyu Hu, Giuseppe Tripodi, Reed Naidoo, Sarah F. McGough, Tapabrata Chakraborti
arXiv AI
Jun 30

IMCBench: A benchmark for multimodal LLMs in Image-grounded Medical Conversations

arXiv:2606. 28556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging.

By Maria Xenochristou, Ashutosh Joshi, Korosh Vatanparvar, Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Prasad Kasu, Deepak Bansal, Anchal Nema, Nivedita Wadhwa, Prashams S Jain, Rebecca Abraham, Will Kimbrough, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Wilko Schulz-Mahlendorf
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

MedPMC: A Systematic Framework for Scaling High-Fidelity Medical Multimodal Data for Foundation Models

arXiv:2607. 07673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medicine is inherently multimodal, requiring clinicians to synthesize information across diverse data streams.

By Hyunjae Kim, Dain Kim, Pan Xiao, Serina S. Applebaum, Younjoon Chung, Xuguang Ai, Yu Yin, Roy Jiang, Yuexi Du, Yawen Wei, Yiming Kong, Tuo Guo, Zhiyuan Cao, Mengmeng Du, Yuelei Fu, Yan Hu, Rui Shi, Gui Yang, Kevin W. Jin, Yuntian Liu, Yuxuan Tian, Jonathan Marquez, Zhen Chen, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Hua Xu, Jaewoo Kang, Qingyu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 7

When Seeing Overrides Knowing: Visual Dominance and Deferral-Based Method for Personalized Safety in VLMs

The paper introduces MPS-Bench, a benchmark of 5,181 scenarios from 584 real-world images across 12 high-risk domains, each paired with a hidden user profile, to evaluate personalized safety in vision‑language models (VLMs). Eight leading VLMs were tested and found to almost always respond directly (86‑99%) without seeking missing context, scoring no higher than 2.6/5 on personalized safety. The authors identify a phenomenon called visual dominance, where visual information enters text representations early and suppresses textual risk signals, and propose PRISM, a lightweight input monitor that predicts when a query should be deferred, achieving 0.978 AUC and outperforming all tested models on the safety‑utility Pareto frontier.

By Edward Sun, Yuchen Wu, Zixian Ma, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yijia Xiao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ranjay Krishna, Wei Wang, Jindong Wang, Aylin Caliskan