Ananth K. Suresh

When Visual Evidence Is Insufficient: How Instructions, Post-Training, and Internal Activations Shape Refusal in Multimodal Language Models

For reliable deployment, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) should recognize when an image provides insufficient evidence to answer a question and withhold unsupported answers. Yet refusal alone is not necessarily evidence of such recognition: models may refuse because of unrelated safety constraints or without i...