The study investigates whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) report bistable images, like the duck‑rabbit, in a manner similar to humans. Using the LLaVA family, researchers examined two dimensions: modulability (the influence of visual cues and linguistic priors) and exclusivity (whether responses commit to a single interpretation). Results show that both visual and linguistic manipulations shift reports in human‑consistent ways while maintaining predominantly exclusive responses, driven by competing image‑token representations and distinct bottom‑up and top‑down pathways.
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...
arXiv:2606. 05843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency on complex vision-language tasks, the mechanisms by which they extract query-relevant visual features from complex, noisy contexts remain opaque.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 03738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate responses autoregressively, integrating visual and linguistic information in an evolving context.
CounterCount is a diagnostic dataset that pairs factual and counterfactual images to test whether Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) rely on visual evidence or on world knowledge when counting attributes. Humans achieve near‑perfect accuracy on both types of images, whereas VLMs drop from 91.6% to 49.5% on counterfactuals, often defaulting to canonical counts. The study shows that VLMs exhibit a System‑1‑like bias, underutilize visual evidence, and that targeted input manipulations can mitigate this bias.
arXiv:2606. 14703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious.
arXiv:2503. 08884v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unimodal vision models are known to rely on spurious correlations, but it remains unclear to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar biases despite language supervision.
Melange is a synthetic visual bias benchmark designed to evaluate social biases in multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs). It extends the language‑only BBQ dataset by generating controlled visual scenarios that clearly depict target attributes, and validates images through automated VQA screening and human inspection. Using Melange, 23 open‑source MLLMs were tested in text‑only, image‑only, and image‑with‑context settings, revealing that switching from text to vision reduces fairness by an average of 0.291 and that models often choose stereotypical responses when biased answers are made.
The paper introduces visual adaptations of counterfactual tests—vCT and vCCT—to evaluate whether chain-of-thought explanations in vision‑language models faithfully reflect the visual evidence driving predictions. Using these tests, the authors benchmark eight open‑source VLMs on two datasets and find that CoTs often fail to track visual evidence, sometimes omitting removed objects or mentioning them inconsistently. They also release two new datasets, Counter‑SNLI‑VE and Counter‑A‑OKVQA, consisting of image pairs that differ by a single object to facilitate further research.
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: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...