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
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.
By Bayar Menzat, Maximilian S\"uss, Ruizhi Wang, Benno Steinegger, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu
arXiv:2607. 16311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer visual questions using learned language and category priors rather than grounding their predictions in the image itself.
By Jingyu Sun, Jiachen Tu, Yuyang Xue, Yaoxin Jiang, Guoyi Xu, Zhengtao Yao, Rui Qian, Yizheng Sun, Hongpeng Zhou, Jingyuan Sun, Yan Lin
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
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.
By Xurui Song, Weishi Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Kuluhan Binici, Tao Bai, Hongxin Shao, Daniel Dahlmeier, Jun Luo
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.
By Chen Ling, Tongwei Zhang, Hanqian Li, Nai Ding
arXiv:2610.27756v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are exact on small sets and drift into estimation on larger ones, a profile reminiscent of children before they master co...
By Yingxin Jia, Hui Geng, Wenxin Yang, Mohan Zhang
arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.
By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy
Vision-language models (VLMs) are exact on small sets and drift into estimation on larger ones, a profile reminiscent of children before they master counting. Children cross the barrier with epistemic...
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.
By Gyuwon Park, Hyounghun Kim
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
OccludeBench is a manually curated benchmark that tests vision‑language models (VLMs) on their ability to recover fully occluded objects from remaining visual evidence. The benchmark distinguishes direct cases—requiring recovery from a specific physical cue such as a shadow or reflection—from inferential cases, which rely on broader scene context. Across five VLMs, accuracy averages 42.7 % on direct cases versus 62.7 % on inferential cases, a 20‑point gap, while humans achieve 63.4 % and 68.5 % respectively with no significant gap. The study introduces OccludeTrace, a four‑stage diagnostic that isolates the failure point, revealing that models struggle most when recovering the relevant object from the full image projection. Interventions such as inpaint‑then‑confront reduce the gap to a statistically non‑significant difference for models with image‑generation capabilities.
By Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Ryo Mitsuhashi, Linrong Cai, Xingyu Fu, Zhuang Liu