arXiv AI By Bayar Menzat, Maximilian S\"uss, Ruizhi Wang, Benno Steinegger, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu

Counterfactual Tests for Measuring Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness in Visual Language Models

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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.

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