SPELUNKA: A Framework for Finding Unanticipated Associations in Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are now foundational to multimodal systems, yet their robustness to spurious correlations remains poorly understood at scale. We present the first large-scale empirical study of 194 publicly available VLMs, including 16 model families, covering a wide range of model sizes, 24 training datasets, and three evaluation benchmarks, namely ImageNet (overall performance), CelebA (typical single-attribute bias), and UrbanCars (complex multi-attribute biases). Across these settings, the Spearman correlation between model scale and performance weakens as evaluation shifts from ImageNet ($ρ{=}0.68$) to single-attribute ($ρ{=}0.48$) and further to multi-attribute ($ρ{=}0.05$) bias benchmarks. In contrast, properties of the training data (size and quality) show more consistent relationships with worst-group accuracy across both bias benchmarks. Notably, curated datasets yield improvements of up to 25% over uncurated alternatives at a comparable scale. Finally, the effect of architectural choices (e.g., patch size, image resolution) is highly context-dependent, varying with the nature of the benchmark, including the type of bias and its spatial distribution within images.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance across many multimodal tasks; however, they often exploit spurious object-background correlations, resulting in predictions driven by contextual shortcuts rather than object-relevant visual evidence. Despite growing interest in hallucination and robustness evaluation, existing benchmarks provide limited control over whether model predictions are grounded in the target object or induced by correlated background cues. In this work, we introduce PURGE (Partition-aware Unlearning for Removing spurious-correlation Generated Errors), a framework for constructing, benchmarking, and mitigating spurious-correlation-induced failures in LVLMs. The framework consists of: -- (1) Structured dataset construction wherein we develop three complementary structured data construction strategies that partition examples by object-relevant evidence and spurious background cues, enabling controlled diagnosis of shortcut reliance; and -- (2) Partition-aware unlearning, which uses these partitions to selectively remove spurious object-background associations while preserving object-based reasoning. We evaluate the \algo~framework across multiple LVLMs, including LLaVA-1.6-7B, Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3.5-9B, together with CLIP as a vision-language encoder, on a diverse suite of benchmarks, including CHAIR, POPE, Causal-HalBench, MM-SpuBench, AMBER, MMHal, and Waterbirds. Our results show that PURGE consistently reduces hallucinations and spurious-correlation-driven errors while maintaining or improving overall performance in most evaluated settings, providing both a reusable evaluation protocol and an effective mitigation framework for more reliable LVLMs.

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on spatial reasoning benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether this reflects structured 3D understanding or reliance on statistical shortcuts in natural images. We introduce a representation-level analysis framework that constructs minimal contrastive pairs to measure how spatial axes are organized and disentangled within VLM embeddings. Our analysis across multiple model families reveals a consistent vertical-distance entanglement: models conflate vertical image position with distance, mirroring the perspective bias of natural photographs. This bias produces a significant accuracy gap between perspective-consistent and counter-heuristic examples, and intensifies under data scaling even as overall benchmark accuracy improves. We further show that models with similar benchmark scores can exhibit different internal representations, and that these differences predict accuracy and robustness across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks. To isolate this bias from evaluation-set skew, we introduce SpatialTunnel, a synthetic benchmark designed to expose spatial shortcut biases by removing common correlations present in natural images. Experiments confirm that the entanglement is model-intrinsic, and that models with well-separated spatial axes exhibit greater robustness, suggesting that well-structured spatial representations lead to more reliable spatial reasoning across diverse benchmarks. Code and benchmark are available on the project page: https://cheolhong0916.github.io/whyfarlooksup.github.io/.