AI RESEARCH
Arbitration Failure, Not Perceptual Blindness: How Vision-Language Models Resolve Visual-Linguistic Conflicts
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2604.09364v1 Announce Type: cross When a Vision-Language Model (VLM) sees a blue banana and answers "yellow", is the problem of perception or arbitration? We explore the question in ten VLMs with various sizes and reveal an Encoding--Grounding Dissociation: models that fail to report what they see (and thus provide a wrong answer) still encode the visual evidence as strongly as models that provide the correct answer.