The paper investigates whether Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) can understand visual persuasiveness by evaluating image‑message pairs that humans consistently judge as persuasive. It introduces Visual Persuasive Factors (VPFs), a taxonomy from cognitive psychology, to quantify visual cues influencing persuasive judgments. Empirical analysis shows VLMs tend to over‑predict persuasiveness, partially reproducing human patterns but often generating false positives, and that VPF‑guided interventions can improve performance only when properly framed.
By Gyuwon Park, Hyounghun Kim
arXiv:2609.37656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the visual and textual evidence supporting the generated responses rema...
By Bowen Yuan, Danny Wang, Ruihong Qiu, Zijian Wang, Zi Huang
arXiv:2602. 15278v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The web is littered with images, once created for human consumption and now increasingly interpreted by agents using vision-language models (VLMs).
By Manuel Cherep, Pranav M R, Pattie Maes, Nikhil Singh
The paper introduces UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasive techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that retains the original visual content. The authors evaluate vision‑language models in a zero‑shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. They also compare Layer‑wise Relevance Propagation and model‑generated token attributions to analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.
By Nazar Andrushko, Vera Schmitt, Veronika Solopova
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.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
The paper introduces Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. HSS covers a wide range of image and video inputs, organizes them under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human‑written prompts that probe implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract cues that humans can infer at a glance. Current state‑of‑the‑art models, including GPT‑6‑astra, achieve far lower accuracy than humans (53.6 % vs. 93.1 %), highlighting a significant gap in intuitive visual understanding.
By Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Daniel Quigley, Steven Li, David Yan, Daniel Yue Zhang, Darvin Yi, Forrest Huang, HiJae Kim, Tianyi Zhang, Jared Lichtarge, Jihua Huang, Le Xue, Manan Tomar, Qiuyi Richard Zhang, Ruofei Yu, Seth Neel, Yaning Hu, Marcella Valentine, Xinzhe Jiang, Daniel Evans, Chenguang Wang, Dustin Tran, Tong Zhao, Yinfei Yang, Yunzhong He
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:2605. 28215v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to classify images from a few labelled examples.
By Carmen Quiles-Ram\'irez, Leticia L. Rodr\'iguez, Nicol\'as Martorell, Natalia D\'iaz-Rodr\'iguez
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:2511. 17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven remarkably effective for eliciting complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
By Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao, Chen Tang, Xiangyu Yue, Chenyu You
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang
arXiv:2608. 06938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The visual reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream applications, particularly counter-commonsense reasoning, which requires models to reason beyond common assumptions.
By Chen Ling, Hanqian Li, Dongnan Liu, Keyu Qian, Jungang Li, Xinglong liu, Shiyi Wang, Xin Dong, Pengcheng Zhu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Nai Ding