arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

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.

By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv AI
2d ago

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
6d ago

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Model

arXiv:2512. 05277v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances.

By Kevin Cannons, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Mohammad Asiful Hossain, Ahmad Rezaei, Mohsen Gholami, Alireza Heidarikhazaei, Zhou Weimin, Yong Zhang, Mohammad Akbari
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

What do VLM-Based Vision-Language Navigation Models Rely on: Interpreting and Steering Policy Behavior

arXiv:2609.24576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models rely mostly on pre-trained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to predict navigation actions. While th...

By D\'ebora Oliveira Makowski, Samiran Gode, Abhijeet Nayak, Marco Hutter, Cordelia Schmid, Lukas Rosenberger Schmid, Wolfram Burgard