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
arXiv:2606. 07647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision language models (LVLMs) have made rapid advancements and are deployed across various applications, yet hallucinations remain a major challenge.
By Ruipeng Zhang, Zhihao Li, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang
The paper introduces a free, label‑free visual evidence signal that improves fine‑grained vision‑language reasoning. By selecting image crops that maximize the model’s answer distribution peak, the method locates answer‑bearing regions without training or annotations, boosting accuracy from 70 % to 85 %. The evidence gap also complements model confidence, enabling better correctness prediction and error flagging.
By Santi Ram Tiwari, Nihal Naik, Devbrat Pandey, Nishant Sinha
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang
arXiv:2606. 11599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration.
By Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou
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.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
Self-improvement for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is typically driven by reward-based methods that provide only coarse scalar feedback. Distillation offers a richer alternative through dense token-level supervision, but in the visual domain it usually depends on privileged context constructed using external annotations and tools, or stronger models.
The paper introduces ViD, a vision‑dominant gender bias mitigation framework for large vision‑language models. ViD uses causal analysis of attention patterns and dual mechanisms—backdoor adjustment and refined token selection—to suppress bias while preserving reasoning and generation quality. Experiments show a 14.7% reduction in gender bias on FACET and significant improvements on MS COCO image captioning, all without extra training overhead.
By Zhipeng Zhao, Zhaoqiang Wei, Peishun Liu, Youwei Zhao, Ruichun Tang
arXiv:2606. 01923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit "contextual disregard" when faced with input evidence that conflicts with their internal parametric memory, leading to persistent factual hallucinations.
By Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
arXiv:2606. 27596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit sophisticated reasoning but remain susceptible to object hallucination.
By Liu Yu, Can Chen, Ping Kuang, Zhikun Feng, Fan Zhou, Gillian Dobbie
arXiv:2607. 03738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate responses autoregressively, integrating visual and linguistic information in an evolving context.
By Varun Gupta, Vineet Gandhi, Makarand Tapaswi
arXiv:2606. 08454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight inference-time mechanism for controlling large language models (LLMs) by modifying their internal activation vectors toward desired behaviors.
By Tuc Nguyen, Thai Le