The paper investigates a failure mode in multimodal large language models called multimodal contextual sycophancy, where external text can override conflicting image evidence. A diagnostic set of 998 cases independently varies visual evidence, commonsense priors, and external text to probe when this failure occurs. Experiments across six models show that a System‑2 Visual Arbitration (S2VA) approach, which withholds text from the visual witness, significantly improves performance over direct witness reports, with the best information boundary varying by model and context source.
arXiv:2509. 22415v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong vision-language performance, yet their token-level visual evidence remains difficult to inspect.
arXiv:2606. 17710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image.
arXiv:2606. 19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts.
arXiv:2608.29193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can assign similar confidence to answers that fail for different reasons. We propose HalluPrism, a behavioral...
arXiv:2609.00550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly provided with contextual evidence in heterogeneous forms: as a text passage, as a rendered im...
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.
arXiv:2606. 26874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) planning requires meticulous multimodal reasoning.
arXiv:2609.02573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current evaluations and training of multimodal models predominantly focus on multi-image tasks, largely overlooking interleaved text-image scenarios. I...
arXiv:2608. 04509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language systems combine images with retrieved text, but these sources can disagree or jointly fail to support an answer.
arXiv:2607. 25467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stateful multimodal assistants encode an image once but may answer questions about it many turns later.
arXiv:2608.21819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable image captioning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires captions to be both precise and complete, avoiding unsupported object mentions wh...
arXiv:2603. 18373v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When VLMs answer correctly, do they genuinely rely on visual information?