Vision-Default, Prior-Override: Causal Mechanisms of Perception-Knowledge Conflict in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.28273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models must reconcile visual evidence with memorized world knowledge when the two conflict. How they resolve this conflict shapes the reliability of multimodal systems, yet prior work characterizes it behaviorally without a component-level causal account. We combine activation patching across three granularities (residual stream, attention heads, and MLP sublayers) with model-component ablation studies and mechanistic analysis. Across three VLM families, we find that visual grounding emerges by default, whereas prior grounding dep

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