arXiv Computer Vision

Reading Right, Answering Wrong: How Visual Configuration Changes Affect Evidence Use in VLMs

Vision‑language models (VLMs) can lose accuracy when images are resized, even with minimal changes. The study shows that such small visual configuration changes—like tiling or token arrangement—cause more correctness flips across multiple checkpoints and benchmarks. Interestingly, in many cases the models still read the correct answer but fail to use it, and attention interventions reveal that configuration shifts weaken the use of readable information. By guiding models with field cues and their own transcriptions, the authors correct 97.2% of these errors.

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

When Safety Overrides Vision: Exploring Dynamics between Vision Influence and Safety Alignment in Vision-Language Models

Aligned vision‑language models (VLMs) are designed to combine grounded visual reasoning with safe generation. The study finds that when safety constraints are applied, these models often abstain from answering questions that they could answer under default instruction, yet visual evidence continues to influence the decoding process. The authors show that safety‑induced abstention alters late‑stage hidden‑state dynamics, and that targeted interventions can restore grounded answering without retraining or changing visual inputs.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

arXiv:2602. 00344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens.

By Beidi Zhao, Wenlong Deng, Xinting Liao, Yushu Li, Nazim Shaikh, Yao Nie, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.

By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

ReViCo: Unveiling the Limitations of VLMs in Visual Text Understanding via Error Correction

ReViCo (Real Visual Correction) is a new benchmark that tests Vision Language Models (VLMs) on the task of correcting text errors in real‑world images, requiring deep understanding of visual text and its context. The study evaluates VLMs using both prompt‑based and targeted training approaches, revealing a significant performance gap between current models and humans. The results show that most VLMs struggle to accurately perceive visual text, leading to frequent correction mistakes, thereby underscoring the need for more robust, text‑aware VLMs.

By Bojun Zhang, Junhong Liang, Feifei Zhai, Fengxian Ji, Yu Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Visual Access Boundaries in Vision-Language Model Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.