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.
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:2603.04419v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models produce different object and use descriptions under different persona prompts, but low overlap alone does not identify...
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: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.
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:2609.06011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) jointly process vision, audio, and text, yet their modality bias under cross-modal conflict remains underexp...
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.
The paper introduces visual adaptations of counterfactual tests—vCT and vCCT—to evaluate whether chain-of-thought explanations in vision‑language models faithfully reflect the visual evidence driving predictions. Using these tests, the authors benchmark eight open‑source VLMs on two datasets and find that CoTs often fail to track visual evidence, sometimes omitting removed objects or mentioning them inconsistently. They also release two new datasets, Counter‑SNLI‑VE and Counter‑A‑OKVQA, consisting of image pairs that differ by a single object to facilitate further research.
arXiv:2508. 04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks.
arXiv:2608. 03791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora.
arXiv:2607. 02089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance across diverse multimodal tasks, yet they remain vulnerable to unreliable reasoning.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora. Removing such knowledge is essential for building trustworthy AI systems.