CCRV-Bench is a constraint‑driven benchmark designed to evaluate visual causal reasoning in vision‑language models on single‑image physical scenarios. It assesses four causal task dimensions—causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention—while applying constraints such as entity symbolization, spatial grounding, factual adversarial constraints, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut learning. Experiments on 15 multimodal models reveal that constraint sensitivity varies by task and model, with intervention and spatial grounding having the largest impact and factual adversarial constraints improving causal diagnosis across models.
By Linyuan Gao, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv:2606. 21806v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep generative models reproduce the observational distribution of their training data, inheriting any spurious associations it contains.
By Jingyuan Chen, Kangrui Ruan, Junzhe Zhang
arXiv:2609.37165v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle under visual distribution shifts, often relying on spurious correlations tied to domain-specific f...
By Junghyun Kim, Ngseo Kim, ChungWoo Lee, Seoyeon Lee, Woo-Jeong Baek, Adam Zhou, Chip Huyen, Jun-Ki Lee, Gi-Cheon Kang, Byoung-Tak Zhang
arXiv:2606. 11745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects.
By Haoping Yu, Yuanxi Li, Jing Ma
MetaSteer is a new method for steering large language models that learns nonlinear, context-dependent interventions applied to attention projection matrices. Unlike traditional linear, context-independent techniques, MetaSteer adapts its effects based on the input, requiring no linear concept-geometry assumption. Trained once on a pooled preference corpus, it transfers zero‑shot to unseen concepts and out‑of‑distribution contexts, matching or surpassing strong task‑specific baselines on multiple benchmarks and model families.
By Mehdi Jafari, Hao Xue, Flora Salim
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:2609.39920v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet this ability degrades substantially as mod...
By Yanshu Li, Jiaqian Li, Canran Xiao, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Yongtai Liu
arXiv:2608.28603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Unified Multimodal Models aim to achieve any-to-any understanding and generation across arbitrary modalities. However, existing methods primarily rely...
By Yujie Shen, Lianlei Shan
arXiv:2609.05834v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: World models promise a general route to embodied intelligence: learn predictive dynamics once, then reason, plan, and act with them. Increasingly, the...
By Todd Y. Zhou, Daniel Zhang
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
The study examines how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual evidence into language‑based decisions by applying layer‑wise causal interventions on video‑text attention pathways in a video‑based generative multiple‑choice setting. Findings reveal that visual information is primarily incorporated while processing candidate answer options, with nouns serving as key semantic anchors and verbs becoming important during temporal reasoning. The research also uncovers a distinct pattern in temporal reasoning, indicating that VLMs struggle to reconstruct sequential information across video frames, possibly due to linguistic biases in temporal expressions.
By Davide Testa, Hugh Mee Wong, Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magnini, Albert Gatt
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