Ask Twice, Look Twice: Prompt Echoing Resolves the Question-First Paradox in Vision-Language Models
Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it? Intuition says before: knowing what is asked should tell the model where to look. Yet across visual question answering benchmarks, question-first prompting consistently underperforms the image-first ordering recommended for frontier VLMs, a phenomenon we term the question-first paradox. We trace this paradox to a conflict between two stages of VLM computation. Logit-lens and attention probes show that question-first prompting steers perception, shifting image patch representations toward question-relevant concepts. But downstream, stranded behind hundreds of image tokens, the question is ba...
| Authors | Rakshanda Hassan Abhinandan, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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