Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs.
arXiv:2605. 18852v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Selecting a final checkpoint for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is challenging when late-stage candidates are closely matched and downstream evaluation signals are noisy.
By Qinwu Xu, Zhuoheng Li, Jessie Salas
We find that vision-language models are sensitive to a specific semantically irrelevant change: the order in which the image and question are presented. Across three models and three benchmarks, image first prompting consistently outperforms question-first prompting, revealing a repeatable modality order failure.
arXiv:2606. 16682v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge.
By Zewen Liu
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.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2606. 22437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We conduct a systematic study of 18 widely used vision-language benchmarks and identify three major issues: 1) many items do not rely on visual cues and therefore fail to effectively measure multimodal understanding; 2) many items are already close to performance saturation for current LVLMs, which limits their discriminative power; 3) a small number of anomalous items affect the reliability of evaluation results.
By Wenzhen Yuan, Jiacheng Ruan, Wutao Xiong, Chengping Zhao, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu