The paper evaluates uncertainty estimation (UE) methods for clinical vision‑language models (VLMs) on visual question answering (VQA). Across 8 UE techniques and 12 VLMs, UE quality tracks model accuracy, degrading where performance is weakest, and fails to signal uncertainty when models are stressed by hiding the correct answer (NOTA perturbations). However, UE on unperturbed inputs reliably predicts which predictions will collapse under NOTA, suggesting UE can diagnose model fragility.
By Arnisa Fazla, Alberto Testoni, Ameen Abu-Hanna, Barbara Plank, Iacer Calixto
arXiv:2608. 13267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading).
By Paul Osemudiame Oamen, Owusu-Banahene Osei, Ananya Mukherjee, Christian Greisinger, Steffen Eger, Pius Onobhayedo, Wei Zhao
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:2603. 16728v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy.
By Robert Welch, Emir Konuk, Kevin Smith
The paper introduces MOTIVE, a multi-view self-verification framework for vision-language models that evaluates candidate answers from complementary perspectives and learns a reliability score aligned with correctness. By using this score to decide whether to accept an answer or trigger history-guided rethinking, MOTIVE improves reliability and efficiency compared to existing self-verification and self-correction methods. Extensive experiments on diverse multimodal benchmarks and VLM backbones show consistent performance gains and reduced unnecessary reasoning turns.
By Ziquan Zhu, Hanruo Zhu, Si-Yuan Lu, Morris Yu-Chao Huang, Yicheng Lin, Wei Han, Tianlong Chen, Mingyuan Wu, Hanchao Yu, Gaojie Jin, Lu Liu, Bo Sun, Tianjin Huang
arXiv:2603. 06828v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We uncover a behavioral law of long-horizon vision-language models: models that maintain temporally grounded beliefs generalize better.
By Md Ashikur Rahman, Md Arifur Rahman, Niamul Hassan Samin, Abdullah Ibne Hanif Arean, Juena Ahmed Noshin
arXiv:2607. 14099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world settings requires not only strong visual reasoning but also stability under sustained conversational pressure.
By Shayda Moezzi, Bishoy Galoaa, Lorena Genua, Taskin Padir, Sarah Ostadabbas
LightEMMA is a longitudinal evaluation framework that tests the autonomous driving performance of vision‑language models (VLMs) without fine‑tuning or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, the authors evaluated 15 VLMs from five major families on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and found that larger, more capable models do not consistently outperform earlier generations. The study identifies common failure modes such as overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues, underscoring the need for domain‑specific adaptation to enhance VLM safety in autonomous driving.
By Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao, Henry X. Liu
arXiv:2605.31351v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: AI-based Visually Impaired Assistance (VIA) remains challenging, largely due to the high cost of human evaluation. The VLM-as-a-Judge paradig...
By Yi Zhao, Siqi Wang, Zhe Hu, Yushi Li, Jing Li
PhysVista is a new benchmark that evaluates physical intelligence in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) by integrating perception, reasoning, and plausibility assessment into a closed cognitive loop. It distinguishes between event‑level and scale‑level reasoning and tests models on both real‑world and AI‑generated videos to provide a holistic, fine‑grained analysis of physical understanding. Experiments show significant gaps in VLMs’ physical reasoning and plausibility assessment, underscoring the need for more principled, physically grounded multimodal designs.
By Xinge Peng, Yiting Lu, Tianwu Zhi, Wen Wen, Jianzhao Liu, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen
The paper introduces DoublesEval, a diagnostic framework that uses professional doubles badminton to test visual‑language models’ ability to reason about dynamic multi‑agent interactions. It decomposes rallies into key moments and evaluates models across four dimensions—atomic recognition, intra‑segment composite understanding, cross‑segment causal reasoning, and high‑level tactical abstraction—highlighting specific reasoning failures. The authors also propose TacticCheck, a lightweight consistency checker that improves performance without retraining the models, yet significant gaps remain in tactical reasoning.
By Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li
The paper shows that chain‑of‑thought (CoT) instructions can distort evaluation of vision‑language models (VLMs) when a scorer reads answer‑label logits before the model generates a rationale. On ScienceQA, Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B’s accuracy falls from 80.76% to 45.48% under this CoT‑prefix scoring, and most predictions incorrectly pick the first option. Linear probes and free generation recover most of the lost accuracy, indicating that the answer information remains in the hidden states but is missed by the early readout. The authors explain the mismatch with vocabulary and layer diagnostics, noting that probability mass shifts toward continuation tokens while answer information stays linearly accessible in later layers. The effect varies across datasets and models, but the study demonstrates that CoT‑prefix scoring can misrepresent model knowledge unless the requested and scored outputs are aligned.
By Zeyan Li, Siyuan Qiu, Jianfeng Xu