The paper introduces MPS-Bench, a benchmark of 5,181 scenarios from 584 real-world images across 12 high-risk domains, each paired with a hidden user profile, to evaluate personalized safety in vision‑language models (VLMs). Eight leading VLMs were tested and found to almost always respond directly (86‑99%) without seeking missing context, scoring no higher than 2.6/5 on personalized safety. The authors identify a phenomenon called visual dominance, where visual information enters text representations early and suppresses textual risk signals, and propose PRISM, a lightweight input monitor that predicts when a query should be deferred, achieving 0.978 AUC and outperforming all tested models on the safety‑utility Pareto frontier.
By Edward Sun, Yuchen Wu, Zixian Ma, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yijia Xiao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ranjay Krishna, Wei Wang, Jindong Wang, Aylin Caliskan
arXiv:2511. 16107v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual in-context learning (VICL) solves visual tasks by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations without any model training.
By Shao-Jun Xia, Huixin Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu
arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.
By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang
arXiv:2608. 07435v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are improving rapidly, but benchmark development lags behind, making weaknesses hard to identify.
By Zixuan Lan, Luzhe Sun, Matthew R. Walter, Jiawei Zhou
arXiv:2606. 20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact.
By Bo Yin, Xiaobin Hu, Chengming Xu, Ruolin Shen, Mo Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Cheng Tan, Shuicheng YAN
arXiv:2603. 16250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LVLMs encounter significant challenges in image understanding and visual reasoning, leading to critical perception failures.
By Jaechang Kim, Yotaro Shimose, Zhao Wang, Kuang-Da Wang, Jungseul Ok, Shingo Takamatsu
arXiv:2608.22174v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) can perform both understanding and generation, raising a central question: can visual generation improve understanding...
By Yubo Zhu, Zhehan Kan, Jingyi Yang, Miaolin Chen, Jinbo Xing, Kai Zhu, Zijian Wang, Sheng Zhong, Wei Tong
arXiv:2607. 18615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning for vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored.
By Zijie Liu, Jinhao Duan, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv:2605.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90\% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. How...
By Jingru Chen, Yiming Liu, Mingtao Chen, Sijie Chen, Richeng Xuan, Liang Yang, Zhichao Hu, Fanyang Lu
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
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