arXiv AI July 13, 2026 By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal

GrAInS: Gradient-based Attribution for Inference-Time Steering of LLMs and VLMs

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.

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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

llms fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 9

Steer Where It Matters: Token-Level Visual-Sensitivity Steering for LVLMs Hallucination Mitigation

arXiv:2606. 07647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision language models (LVLMs) have made rapid advancements and are deployed across various applications, yet hallucinations remain a major challenge.

By Ruipeng Zhang, Zhihao Li, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Computer Vision

Sep 22

Look Where It Counts: A Free, Label-Free Visual Evidence Signal for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Reasoning

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.

By Santi Ram Tiwari, Nihal Naik, Devbrat Pandey, Nishant Sinha

llms fine-tuning efficiency multimodal

arXiv AI

Aug 5

Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs

arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.

By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 11

When is Your LLM Steerable?

arXiv:2606. 11599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration.

By Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou

llms

arXiv AI

Aug 6

Reasoning Dynamics and the Limits of Monitoring Modality Reliance in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.

By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott

llms multimodal safety