How Do VLMs Fail? Vision-Operation Misalignment in Compositional VQA
Compositional visual question answering requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to execute multiple reasoning operations like object selection, spatial relation resolution, and attribute verification. Despite strong aggregate performance, the mechanistic basis of VLM failures on this task remains underexplored. To address this gap, we analyze vision-operation misalignment in VLMs by examining how failures relate to specific reasoning operations and the internal computational pathways through which they arise and propagate. We introduce an Operation-centric mechanistic framework that decomposes VLM failures by both the reasoning operation where they originate and the internal computational ...
| Authors | Navya Gupta, Bingjie Xu, Avinash Anand et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 August 2026 |
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