Consistent Yet Wrong: Evidence Insensitivity in Spatial Vision-Language Models

S Divakar Bhat; Toshihiko Yamasaki

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arXiv · 2606.02742

Consistent Yet Wrong: Evidence Insensitivity in Spatial Vision-Language Models

S Divakar Bhat·Toshihiko Yamasaki

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Abstract

Spatial reasoning is fundamental to robotics, autonomy, and embodied AI, yet modern vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on metric distance queries. A common assumption is that consistent predictions across viewpoints reflect geometric grounding. We test this assumption and find the opposite: leading VLMs often produce view-invariant and consistent answers even when those answers are incorrect, indicating weak coupling between predictions and viewpoint-specific visual evidence. We introduce \textbf{ViewDiag}, a controlled multi-view evaluation protocol built from Hypersim, ScanNet, and KITTI360, comprising 176 object-pair tracks across 80 scenes with 2--10 views per track. The protocol evaluates models along three axes: metric accuracy, distributional concentration, and internal collapse, the last of which is assessed using a latent feature probe. Across diverse models, we observe a consistent pattern of high prediction stability paired with substantial error, clustering in a regime characterized by strong consistency but low accuracy. \noindent These results challenge the common use of cross-view consistency as a proxy for geometric understanding. Instead, we show that stable predictions may reflect prior-driven collapse rather than evidence-sensitive reasoning. ViewDiag provides a controlled benchmark and diagnostic framework for evaluating whether spatial VLMs are not only accurate, but also meaningfully coupled to visual evidence.

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BibTeX RIS

S Divakar Bhat, Toshihiko Yamasaki. 2026-06-01. Consistent Yet Wrong: Evidence Insensitivity in Spatial Vision-Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02742

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