arXiv AI

Seeing Depth but Choosing Cues in Vision-Language Models

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

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.

By Dingyang Lin, Yingfeng Luo, Chenglong Wang, Chenwei Zhu, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

In-Context Learning Can Help Vision-Language Models Overcome Training Priors

The paper shows that controlled visual in‑context learning can help vision‑language models (VLMs) overcome errors caused by training priors. By providing demonstrations, the models focus more on visual evidence, yielding significant accuracy gains on counterfactual examples while leaving prior‑aligned performance largely unchanged. This effect is observed across five VLM families and five vision‑centric tasks, indicating that many VLMs possess latent visual grounding abilities that standard tests may miss.

By Kun Wang, Xindi Wu, Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky, Esin Tureci
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 AI
Aug 20

ReWEIGH the Evidence: Calibrating Token-Level Ordinal Visual Evidence to Mitigate Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

ReWEIGH the Evidence is a training‑free decoding technique that calibrates token‑level ordinal visual evidence to reduce hallucinations in large vision‑language models. It aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions, compares candidates to a token‑specific reference derived from unlabeled images, and applies a bounded penalty only when evidence falls below this reference. Experiments on four 7B backbones show up to a 21.3% reduction in hallucinated object mentions while largely preserving or improving descriptive and general performance, with minimal added latency.

By Jihae Jeong, Junha Choi, Hwanjo Yu
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