Tinted Frames: Question Framing Blinds Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of attention applied to visual inputs based on linguistic framing even when alternative framings demand identical visual reasoning. Using visual attention as a probe, we quantify how framing alters both the amount and distribution of attention over the image. Constrained framings, such as multiple choice and yes/no, induce substantially lower attention to image context compared to open-ended, reduce focus on task-relevant regions, and shift attention towards un...
| Authors | Wan-Cyuan Fan, Jiayun Luo, Declan Kutscher et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 19 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 March 2026 |
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