arXiv Machine Learning

TwinICL: Diagnosing Multimodal In-Context Learning through Paired Counterfactuals

TwinICL is a procedurally generated benchmark that pairs matched text and image versions of tasks to enable controlled comparison of in‑context learning (ICL) across modalities. Experiments on six open‑weight models and 38 tasks show that multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text‑only ICL, with varying gaps by task family. Interventions targeting visual access, task framing, and reasoning can recover strong multimodal performance on a diagnostic subset, yet a modality gap remains even when explicit task instructions are provided, highlighting the dual role of demonstrations as context and evidence.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

V-ICAL Bench: Evaluating Video In-Context Learning for Multimodal Agents in Interactive Environments

arXiv:2609.15683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While In-Context Learning (ICL) enables models to adapt from exemplars without parameter updates, multimodal ICL remains largely underexplored, particu...

By Ziqian Fan, Shibo Xu, Junjie Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Yifan Yang, Zhenjie Yang, Haodong Duan, Yue Zhou, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Hyper-ICL: Attention Calibration with Hyperbolic Anchor Distillation for Multimodal In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.

By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Beyond Surface Imitation: Contrastive Modeling for Reasoning Path Alignment in Multimodal In-Context Learning

The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.

By Mingbo Yang, Wenqiang Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Peng Chen, Yannan Chen, Sunshang Wang, Yan Xiao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 14

MAG: MAnifold Guided Semi-Supervised Multi-modal In-Context Learning

arXiv:2608. 12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Few-shot in-context learning (ICL) with multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) enables task adaptation without parameter updates, but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality and coverage of the selected demonstrations.

By Zirui Cheng, Xun Xu, Tiankai Chen, Fady Rezk, Bowen Zheng, Xiaodong Shi, Shijie Li, Kangkang Lu, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

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 AI
Jul 31

See2Think: Do Multimodal Models Really Use Intermediate Visual States?

arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.

By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang