Same Evidence, Different Answer: Auditing Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models
Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs. A Bayesian item-response model separates ordering noise from per-facet bias, and a same-ordering control estimates the decoder-stochastic floor for observed flips. We find that none of the 18 MLLMs we audit are order-invariant: screened per-facet panel-mean flip rates span 24-50%. ...
| Authors | Akshay Paruchuri, Sanmi Koyejo, Ehsan Adeli |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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