Reliability Challenges in Diffusion Vision-Language Models

The paper presents the first systematic reliability evaluation of diffusion-based Large Vision‑Language Models (dLVLMs), comparing six diffusion models to autoregressive (AR) baselines across four dimensions. Key findings include a reversal of the yes‑bias seen in AR models for binary visual queries, competitive hallucination rates but lower linguistic quality, near‑zero accuracy for underrepresented racial groups with opposite‑polarity gender bias, and accuracy collapse in multiple‑choice tasks when the correct option is shorter than distractors due to a length prior emerging at the first denoising step. Additionally, tokens committed late in denoising with low confidence correlate with hallucinated content, indicating a unique mechanistic signal in diffusion generation.

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• llms
• diffusion
• multimodal
• benchmarks
• safety