Recompute or Reuse? Diagnosing and Mitigating Textual Shortcuts in VLM Self-Reflection
Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to revise their reasoning when visual evidence changes. Failures to do so are often attributed to insufficient visual attention or contextual inertia, leaving unclear what models reuse instead of recomputing from the current image. We show that evidence-bearing reasoning in a prior chain of thought (CoT) can form a textual shortcut that competes behaviorally with visual recomputation. Across 16 VLMs, a matched counterfactual analysis identifies evidence-bearing content as the most robust carrier of prior-CoT influence. Removing this evidence-bearing content shifts answer preference more than removing length-matched non-evidence context or the fin...
| Authors | Wenxiao Fan, Jingling Fu, Fang Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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