arXiv Computer Vision

Search-Based Testing of Modality Sensitivity in Vision Language Models

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Towards Reliable Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving

The paper evaluates five vision‑language models on autonomous driving tasks under various visual input conditions, finding that visual corruption affects accuracy and confidence differently across models and datasets. It then tests Visual Evidence Augmentation (VEA) as an inference‑time technique to enhance reliability, observing mixed improvements depending on the model and setting.

By Manasa Mariam Mammen, Priyanka Mary Mammen, Zafer Kayatas, Stefan Wagner
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Same Answer, Different Representations: Hidden instability in VLMs

arXiv:2602.06652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The robustness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) is commonly assessed through output-level invariance, implicitly assuming that stable predictions r...

By Farooq Ahmad Wani, Alessandro Suglia, Rohit Saxena, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Wai-Chung Kwan, Fazl Barez, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Fabrizio Silvestri, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv AI
Jun 9

A Mechanistic Analysis of Adversarial Fine-tuning of Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606. 07593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The widespread use of image classification models in high-risk, real-world situations necessitates making these models robust to slight disturbances or perturbations, such as blurring or sharpening, in the input images.

By Hannah Gao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Isha Agarwal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Rachel Ma (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Corrupted but Correct: Why Vision-Language Models Lie to Themselves Internally

The paper demonstrates that a targeted adversarial perturbation can reduce a vision‑language model’s training loss to near zero for a fixed target caption, yet the same model, when generating freely, still produces the correct description. This phenomenon, termed the train/inference gap, is traced to a single autoregressive step where the target token’s rank is fixed across all images, and further analysis shows that the language decoder, rather than the visual encoder, determines whether the corrupted signal is amplified or suppressed. The study uses a controlled two‑stage PGD attack on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and evaluates the effect on 200 held‑out COCO images, revealing that adversarial robustness in autoregressive VLMs largely depends on the language decoder’s prior. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that defenses and faithfulness evaluations for deployed vision‑language models should focus on the language decoder rather than the visual encoder, as the former is the key determinant of robustness to adversarial perturbations."

By Arun Josephraj Arokiaraj, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

A Unified Evaluation Framework of Physical Adversarial Robustness in the Edge VLM Era

The paper introduces a unified evaluation framework for assessing the physical adversarial robustness of Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) deployed at the edge. It defines a conditional attack success rate (cASR) metric that counts only images where the model still localizes objects under a gray occluder, and categorizes failures into omission, substitution, and displacement. Benchmarking shows that compact grounding VLMs can be as vulnerable as traditional object detectors, with omission being the only failure visible to downstream systems, while displacement and substitution pose potentially more dangerous risks, especially under distribution shift.

By Eric Liang, Alan Luo, Kaiwen Yuan
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

FusionAudit: Pathway-Conditioned Robustness Auditing for Native Multimodal Models

FusionAudit introduces PaRMA, a pathway-conditioned robustness auditing framework for native multimodal vision‑language models. It evaluates two image‑level interventions—pixel perturbation and rendered‑text insertion—to expose architecture‑specific blind spots. The study applies diagnostic‑motivated attacks (MANTIS and Nat‑Evid) to 18 open‑weight VLMs, revealing that legacy single‑attack rankings are unstable and that PaRMA uncovers higher residual risk than standard benchmarks.

By Jiaming Zhang, Zherui Li, Siqi Guo, Junhao Dong, Kun Wang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
arXiv AI
Aug 18

OODBench: Out-of-Distribution Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2602. 18094v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID).

By Ling Lin, Yang Bai, Heng Su, Congcong Zhu, Yaoxing Wang, Yang Zhou, Huazhu Fu, Jingrun Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 7

FindIt: A Format-Informed Visual Detection Benchmark for Generalist Multimodal LLMs

The paper introduces FindIt, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the promptable localization abilities of generalist multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It covers four core task categories—object detection, referring expression detection, instance-level detection, and video-based detection—and provides a unified framework that standardizes inputs, enforces parsable bounding box outputs, and defines transparent evaluation protocols. Using this benchmark, the authors assess a range of open-source and proprietary MLLMs, revealing both their strengths and limitations, particularly their sensitivity to formatting constraints and difficulty generalizing to minor variations.

By Eshika Khandelwal, Jingjing Pan, Mingfang Zhang, Quan Kong, Lorenzo Garattoni, Hilde Kuehne