arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Reading Right, Answering Wrong: How Visual Configuration Changes Affect Evidence Use in VLMs

Vision‑language models (VLMs) can lose accuracy when images are resized, even with minimal changes. The study shows that such small visual configuration changes—like tiling or token arrangement—cause more correctness flips across multiple checkpoints and benchmarks. Interestingly, in many cases the models still read the correct answer but fail to use it, and attention interventions reveal that configuration shifts weaken the use of readable information. By guiding models with field cues and their own transcriptions, the authors correct 97.2% of these errors.

By Dingyang Lin, Yingfeng Luo, Chenglong Wang, Chenwei Zhu, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao