Visual Attention Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models is Heterogeneous
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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.
arXiv:2606. 17389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical.
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.