The paper investigates how vision‑language models (VLMs) resolve conflicts between image features using a Stroop‑style benchmark. By prompting contrastive and generative VLMs on images where text and color disagree, the authors find a consistent bias toward textual cues, with models preferring to respond based on text rather than color. Analysis of the embedding space reveals that textual signals are represented more strongly and separably than color signals, explaining why steering models toward text is easier than toward color.
arXiv:2608. 14286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in industrial decision-making systems, such as recruitment support and recommendation.
The paper introduces Embedded Stroop, a diagnostic test that embeds text prompts directly into images to study interference in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Using the What-Color-Is-the-Text (WCIT) benchmark, which tests 59 fine‑grained colors in standard, flipped, and masked conditions, the authors evaluate 16 models and find that while exact color accuracy is low (6.3%), models still recognize coarse color families (38.4%) but frequently hallucinate the embedded word instead of the true color (Stroop Hallucination Rate of 21.6%). Masking or flipping the embedded text reduces hallucinations, indicating that semantic legibility can dominate visual color perception in MLLMs.
arXiv:2609.00293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how vision-language models (VLMs) handle context-memory conflicts; that is, situations in which the model is given information in contex...
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.
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.
arXiv:2610.19407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models must reconcile conflicting text and images. Prior work has characterized the resulting behavior in terms of modality biases--e.g...
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.
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
arXiv:2608. 11510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Congruency effects, observed in conflict tasks such as Stroop and flanker tasks, have been investigated for nearly a century in psychology and neuroscience, but their mechanistic basis is not fully understood.
arXiv:2609.06011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) jointly process vision, audio, and text, yet their modality bias under cross-modal conflict remains underexp...
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.
Vision-language models must reconcile conflicting text and images. Prior work has characterized the resulting behavior in terms of modality biases--e.g., a "blind faith in text"--but why preferences v...