Bridging the Missing-Modality Gap: Improving Text-Only Calibration of Vision Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) are often deployed on text-only inputs, although they are trained with images. We find that removing the vision modality causes large drops in accuracy and severe miscalibration, and the model does not behave like its original language backbone under text-only prompting. This failure is not explained only by missing semantic information. Even when text descriptions preserve key content, confidence becomes unreliable, while adding a visual signal through generated images partially restores accuracy and calibration. We propose the Latent Imagination Module (LIM), a lightweight cross-attention module that predicts imagined latent embeddings from textual input an...
| Authors | Mingyeong Kim, Jungwon Choi, Chaeyun Jang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.