arXiv AI

How Do VLMs Behave When Blind or Misled? Behavioral Evaluation of VLMs on Scientific Figures

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).

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Seeing vs. Believing: Evaluating the Language Bias of Open-Source MLLMs in Counter-Intuitive Scenes

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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

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 AI
Aug 20

When to Call an Apple Red: Humans Follow Introspective Rules, VLMs Don't

The paper introduces the Graded Color Attribution (GCA) dataset, a benchmark that tests whether Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) and humans can articulate and follow a threshold rule for labeling objects by color. In experiments, humans consistently adhere to their stated rules, while VLMs—despite accurately estimating color coverage—often violate their own introspective rules, especially when world‑knowledge priors are present. This discrepancy highlights a miscalibration in VLM self‑knowledge that differs from human cognition.

By Jonathan Nemitz, Carsten Eickhoff, Junyi Jessy Li, Kyle Mahowald, Michal Golovanevsky, William Rudman
arXiv AI
2d ago

VisionQ: VLM-as-a-Judge Taxonomy, Dataset and Benchmark for Qualitative Analysis in Computer Vision

VisionQ is a new benchmark for qualitative analysis in computer vision that evaluates vision‑language models (VLMs) on criterion‑conditioned visual discrimination. It is built from over 1,800 peer‑reviewed comparison figures in CVPR and ICCV papers, linking each image crop to author‑stated visual claims through 3,911 hand‑annotated data points. The benchmark includes a 51‑leaf taxonomy of visual criteria, a protocol that hides method identities and reports accuracy per criterion, and a DPO‑tuned Gemma‑4‑E4B judge that improves accuracy on a held‑out test set.

By Vu Dinh Xuan, Duc-Hai Nguyen, Minh-Dung Dao, Vu Quynh Giao, Quang Hong Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua, Barry O'Sullivan, David Murphy, Hoang D. Nguyen