# Edge Reliability Gap in Vision-Language Models: Quantifying Failure Modes of Compressed VLMs Under Visual Corruption

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26769/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 46 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-PruMerge: Adaptive Token Reduction for Efficient Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15388/) (2024)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [What BERT is not: Lessons from a new suite of psycholinguistic diagnostics for language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13528/) (2019)
- [Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00754/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08298/) (2023)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [DepGraph: Towards Any Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12900/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Phi: Efficient Multi-Modal Assistant with Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02330/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid compression of large vision-language models (VLMs) for edge deployment raises an underexplored question: do compact models fail differently, not merely more often? This study compares a 7-billion-parameter quantised VLM (Qwen2.5-VL-7B, 4-bit NF4) against a 500-million-parameter FP16 model (SmolVLM2-500M) across 4,000 samples from VQAv2 and COCO Captions. A three-category error taxonomy (Object Blindness, Semantic Drift, Prior Bias) is applied as a diagnostic framework. A text-only GPT-4o judge reveals Semantic Drift (B) as the dominant failure mode on VQAv2 and on COCO for Qwen, with a mixed Object Blindness / Semantic Drift profile for SmolVLM2 on COCO; Prior Bias (C) is present on VQAv2 but absent on COCO for both models. Confidence calibration is measured via Expected Calibration Error (ECE) using geometric mean token probability, compositional reasoning is probed with structured negation probes across four templates, and a blur robustness experiment completes the evaluation. For this model pair, the compact model exhibits a qualitatively distinct failure signature: a 12.5pp larger negation collapse (-33.2pp vs. -20.8pp, Wald 95% CI [8.2, 16.8]pp, p < 10^-8), driven almost entirely by COCO while the VQAv2 gap is not statistically significant (4.5pp, p=0.19). The most discriminating template is false_yn: SMOLVLM2-500M responds "Yes" (incorrectly claiming a depicted object is absent) on 100% of COCO trials vs. 14% for Q WEN 2.5-VL-7B. Asymmetric dataset-dependent miscalibration and a blur experiment with two controlled ablations complete the analysis. The fully reproducible pipeline is released for systematic safety auditing of compressed VLMs prior to edge deployment.