Pathological Truth Bias in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Thube, Yash
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thube, Yash
author_facet Thube, Yash
contents Vision Language Models (VLMs) are improving quickly, but standard benchmarks can hide systematic failures that reduce real world trust. We introduce MATS (Multimodal Audit for Truthful Spatialization), a compact behavioral audit that measures whether models reject visually contradicted statements, and two metrics Spatial Consistency Score (SCS) and Incorrect Agreement Rate (IAR). Instruction tuned generative VLMs (LLaVA 1.5, QwenVLchat) exhibit very low SCS and high IAR, while contrastive encoders (CLIP, SigLIP) are far more robust. Activation patching causally localizes failure loci (mid to late cross attention for generative models, pooled projection components for contrastive models) and suggests concrete repair paths.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22674
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pathological Truth Bias in Vision-Language Models
Thube, Yash
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are improving quickly, but standard benchmarks can hide systematic failures that reduce real world trust. We introduce MATS (Multimodal Audit for Truthful Spatialization), a compact behavioral audit that measures whether models reject visually contradicted statements, and two metrics Spatial Consistency Score (SCS) and Incorrect Agreement Rate (IAR). Instruction tuned generative VLMs (LLaVA 1.5, QwenVLchat) exhibit very low SCS and high IAR, while contrastive encoders (CLIP, SigLIP) are far more robust. Activation patching causally localizes failure loci (mid to late cross attention for generative models, pooled projection components for contrastive models) and suggests concrete repair paths.
title Pathological Truth Bias in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22674