Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
arXiv:2606. 00435v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question.
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
arXiv:2609.13815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-centric Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires reading and reasoning over text embedded in images, a task made substantially harder when images...
arXiv:2608.21762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) fail many detail-centric questions for a concrete reason: the answer is visible in the image, yet lost after the image...
arXiv:2605.10893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from visual ungroundedness: they can produce a fluent, confident, and even correct response driven enti...
arXiv:2609.38368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly reason over visual evidence that is cropped, segmented, retrieved, or revealed over time. Yet most VQA bench...
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.
arXiv:2607. 21155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions.
The paper introduces SubTTA, a test-time adaptation method for vision‑language models that aligns the semantic subspaces of visual and textual modalities to improve zero‑shot predictions. It addresses two issues: the modality gap caused by distribution shifts and visual nuisance that masks task‑specific semantics. By minimizing chordal distance between principal subspaces and projecting visual features onto a task‑specific textual subspace, SubTTA refines decision boundaries and achieves an average 2.24% improvement over existing TTA methods.
Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions. KI-VQA involves multiple sub-problems -referring expression understanding, visual grounding, object recognition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning-yet existing benchmarks typically report only end-task accuracy, obscuring where failures arise.
The paper investigates how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) often report high confidence even after self‑correcting or arriving at wrong answers, a phenomenon the authors attribute to the verbalized confidence being largely independent of the model’s reasoning trajectory. By analyzing content variation, token masking, and hesitation markers, the authors demonstrate that confidence does not adequately reflect the actual reasoning process and that calibration training can sometimes worsen this disconnect. To address this blind spot, they introduce the Trajectory‑Grounding Score (TGS) in two forms—TGS‑self and TGS‑pair—and propose TGS‑Bench, a suite of 10 benchmarks that reveal divergences between conventional calibration metrics and trajectory‑grounded confidence.
arXiv:2609.22588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on visual question answering benchmarks, yet often make decisions that contradict visual evidence they h...
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.