arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Do Multimodal LLMs See Before They Read? Diagnosing Contextual Sycophancy

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2609.00067 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Aug 2026]

Title:Do Multimodal LLMs See Before They Read? Diagnosing Contextual Sycophancy

View a PDF of the paper titled Do Multimodal LLMs See Before They Read? Diagnosing Contextual Sycophancy, by Yi-Cheng Lai and Hen-Hsen Huang
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Abstract:External text can override conflicting image evidence in multimodal large language models, a failure we call multimodal contextual sycophancy. We introduce a 998-case diagnostic that independently varies visual evidence, commonsense priors, and external text, and probe when this failure arises by moving the information boundary around a context-blind visual witness. On abnormal images paired with Gemini-generated false text, GPT-5.1 scores 7.9% under joint conditioning, 49.7% when the context-blind witness report is scored directly, 63.7% under a matched two-call witness-arbiter pipeline that exposes the witness to the text, and 84.2% under System-2 Visual Arbitration (S2VA), which withholds the text from the witness. Across six models, S2VA improves over the direct witness report by 19.7 to 44.1 points, with all paired 95% confidence intervals excluding zero. The best information boundary is not uniform: textual context scaffolds some models, and a GPT-4o-regenerated subset changes the relative ordering of joint conditioning, Witness-Only, and S2VA. Contextual sycophancy is therefore sensitive to when text is introduced, as well as to the model and context source.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.00067 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2609.00067v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00067
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Yi-Cheng Lai [view email]
[v1] Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:19:33 UTC (1,991 KB)
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