# Dissecting Dissonance: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models Against Self-Contradictory Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01091 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01091/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 38 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14375/) (2022)
- [Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08998/) (2023)
- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)
- [SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07575/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15895/) (2023)
- [Factuality Enhanced Language Models for Open-Ended Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04624/) (2022)
- [MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07915/) (2023)
- [Rich Knowledge Sources Bring Complex Knowledge Conflicts: Recalibrating Models to Reflect Conflicting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13701/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [NoisyEQA: Benchmarking Embodied Question Answering Against Noisy Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10726/) (2024)
- [REI-Bench: Can Embodied Agents Understand Vague Human Instructions in Task Planning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10872/) (2025)
- [Can Large Multimodal Models Actively Recognize Faulty Inputs? A Systematic Evaluation Framework of Their Input Scrutiny Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04017/) (2025)
- [Separator Injection Attack: Uncovering Dialogue Biases in Large Language Models Caused by Role Separators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05689/) (2025)
- [Causal Evidence for Attention Head Imbalance in Modality Conflict Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19250/) (2026)
- [TALK-Dem: Benchmarking Embodied Task Planning under Dementia-Associated Communication Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38371/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large multimodal models (LMMs) excel in adhering to human instructions. However, self-contradictory instructions may arise due to the increasing trend of multimodal interaction and context length, which is challenging for language beginners and vulnerable populations. We introduce the Self-Contradictory Instructions benchmark to evaluate the capability of LMMs in recognizing conflicting commands. It comprises 20,000 conflicts, evenly distributed between language and vision paradigms. It is constructed by a novel automatic dataset creation framework, which expedites the process and enables us to encompass a wide range of instruction forms. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals current LMMs consistently struggle to identify multimodal instruction discordance due to a lack of self-awareness. Hence, we propose the Cognitive Awakening Prompting to inject cognition from external, largely enhancing dissonance detection. The dataset and code are here: https://selfcontradiction.github.io/.