Read or Ignore? A Unified Benchmark for Typographic-Attack Robustness and Text Recognition in Vision-Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Waseda, Futa, Yamabe, Shojiro, Shiono, Daiki, Sasaki, Kento, Takahashi, Tsubasa
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Waseda, Futa
Yamabe, Shojiro
Shiono, Daiki
Sasaki, Kento
Takahashi, Tsubasa
author_facet Waseda, Futa
Yamabe, Shojiro
Shiono, Daiki
Sasaki, Kento
Takahashi, Tsubasa
contents Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to typographic attacks, where misleading text within an image overrides visual understanding. Existing evaluation protocols and defenses, largely focused on object recognition, implicitly encourage ignoring text to achieve robustness; however, real-world scenarios often require joint reasoning over both objects and text (e.g., recognizing pedestrians while reading traffic signs). To address this, we introduce a novel task, Read-or-Ignore VQA (RIO-VQA), which formalizes selective text use in visual question answering (VQA): models must decide, from context, when to read text and when to ignore it. For evaluation, we present the Read-or-Ignore Benchmark (RIO-Bench), a standardized dataset and protocol that, for each real image, provides same-scene counterfactuals (read / ignore) by varying only the textual content and question type. Using RIO-Bench, we show that strong LVLMs and existing defenses fail to balance typographic robustness and text-reading capability, highlighting the need for improved approaches. Finally, RIO-Bench enables a novel data-driven defense that learns adaptive selective text use, moving beyond prior non-adaptive, text-ignoring defenses. Overall, this work reveals a fundamental misalignment between the existing evaluation scope and real-world requirements, providing a principled path toward reliable LVLMs. Our Project Page is at https://turingmotors.github.io/rio-vqa/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11899
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Read or Ignore? A Unified Benchmark for Typographic-Attack Robustness and Text Recognition in Vision-Language Models
Waseda, Futa
Yamabe, Shojiro
Shiono, Daiki
Sasaki, Kento
Takahashi, Tsubasa
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to typographic attacks, where misleading text within an image overrides visual understanding. Existing evaluation protocols and defenses, largely focused on object recognition, implicitly encourage ignoring text to achieve robustness; however, real-world scenarios often require joint reasoning over both objects and text (e.g., recognizing pedestrians while reading traffic signs). To address this, we introduce a novel task, Read-or-Ignore VQA (RIO-VQA), which formalizes selective text use in visual question answering (VQA): models must decide, from context, when to read text and when to ignore it. For evaluation, we present the Read-or-Ignore Benchmark (RIO-Bench), a standardized dataset and protocol that, for each real image, provides same-scene counterfactuals (read / ignore) by varying only the textual content and question type. Using RIO-Bench, we show that strong LVLMs and existing defenses fail to balance typographic robustness and text-reading capability, highlighting the need for improved approaches. Finally, RIO-Bench enables a novel data-driven defense that learns adaptive selective text use, moving beyond prior non-adaptive, text-ignoring defenses. Overall, this work reveals a fundamental misalignment between the existing evaluation scope and real-world requirements, providing a principled path toward reliable LVLMs. Our Project Page is at https://turingmotors.github.io/rio-vqa/.
title Read or Ignore? A Unified Benchmark for Typographic-Attack Robustness and Text Recognition in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11899