arXiv AI
Oct 12

The Evidence Anchoring Boundary: Where Visual Interventions Matter and When They Help in Multimodal LLMs

The paper investigates how visual interventions—training‑free edits applied to multimodal large language models—affect hallucinations and prediction quality. By applying a visual‑residual edit across successive decoder layers and matching its RMS strength, the authors identify an Evidence Anchoring Boundary (EAB) where the intervention’s influence drops sharply; effects before the EAB are 13.78–26.10× larger than after it. They further compare counterfactual subtraction across different question types and introduce calibrated selective routing, which only alters predictions when calibration supports an intervention, improving attribute accuracy by 1.56–1.81 percentage points while avoiding the harms of universal subtraction.

By Qiji Zhou, Junyi Hu, Peiyu Wang, Yue Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

VLMs Read Aloud: The Gap Between Recognizing and Using Visual Text

The paper investigates the disparity between a vision‑language model’s ability to recognize text in compressed images and its ability to use that text for answering questions, a phenomenon termed the read‑use gap. Experiments show that while models can transcribe images accurately, they often fail to answer based on the transcription, and that recognition saturates at lower pixel resolutions than usage. The authors propose ALOUD, a method that allocates visual resolution to evidence detection and language tokens to reasoning, which doubles the accuracy of a frozen Qwen3‑VL‑8B on heavily compressed documents without retaining the original text.

By Zhiyun Shi