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Probing Visual Language Priors in VLMs

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arxiv 2501.00569 v4 pith:R7FWFJ6M submitted 2024-12-31 cs.CV cs.LG

classification cs.CVcs.LG
keywords visualvlmsmodelspriorsvilpdataimageimages
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Despite recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they may over-rely on visual language priors existing in their training data rather than true visual reasoning. To investigate this, we introduce ViLP, a benchmark featuring deliberately out-of-distribution images synthesized via image generation models and out-of-distribution Q&A pairs. Each question in ViLP is coupled with three potential answers and three corresponding images: one that can be resolved by text priors alone and two that demand visual reasoning. Although, humans achieve near-perfect accuracy, modern VLMs falter; for instance, GPT-4 achieves only 66.17% on ViLP. To alleviate this, we propose a self-improving framework in which models generate new VQA data, then apply pixel-level and semantic corruptions to form "good-bad" image pairs for self-training. Our training objectives compel VLMs to focus more on the actual visual inputs, and we demonstrate their effectiveness in boosting the performance of open-source VLMs, including LLaVA-v1.5 and Cambrian.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Prior Bias in Vision Language Models on UML Diagram Interpretation

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    Reversing only the UML relation arrow while keeping class names and layout fixed cuts open-source VLM relation accuracy by about 33%, revealing prior-over-vision bias.

  2. Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes

    cs.CV 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Multimodal pretraining transfers asymmetrically: language boosts vision, understanding boosts generation, generation is mostly neutral, and early unified training prevents vision laziness.

  3. How Do VLMs Fail? Vision-Operation Misalignment in Compositional VQA

    cs.CV 2026-07 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    The paper proposes four operation-level VLM failure modes and a pathway dissociation, but the dissociation is not supported by the paper's own intervention statistics.

  4. Seeing What Is Actually There: PriVE-Bench and PriVE-Tools for Counterfactual Evaluation of Agentic Visual Evidence in VLMs

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new counterfactual benchmark, PriVE-Bench, plus a controlled tool-based extension, PriVE-Tools, shows that VLMs often answer from priors and that tool-derived visual evidence helps some models but does not reliably ...

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