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arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 00275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multimodal tasks through scaled architectures and extensive training.
The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.