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:2609.00293v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We investigate how vision-language models (VLMs) handle context-memory conflicts; that is, situations in which the model is given information in contex...
By Athulith Paraselli, Etha Tianze Hua, Ellie Pavlick
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
arXiv:2606. 09131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) commonly inherit the deep, symmetric Transformer backbone designed for unimodal text modeling, and apply the same computation uniformly to image and language tokens.
By Siyuan Liu, Jinyang Wu
arXiv:2604. 07753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts.
By Xiangyue Liu, Zijian Zhang, Miles Yang, Zhao Zhong, Liefeng Bo, Ping Tan
ReWEIGH the Evidence is a training‑free decoding technique that calibrates token‑level ordinal visual evidence to reduce hallucinations in large vision‑language models. It aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions, compares candidates to a token‑specific reference derived from unlabeled images, and applies a bounded penalty only when evidence falls below this reference. Experiments on four 7B backbones show up to a 21.3% reduction in hallucinated object mentions while largely preserving or improving descriptive and general performance, with minimal added latency.
By Jihae Jeong, Junha Choi, Hwanjo Yu