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Said Aloud, Read Different: Cross-Modal Instability in Multimodal Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

Multimodal foundation models are increasingly used in speech-first assistants that must interpret spoken queries and produce visually grounded decisions. Yet it remains unclear whether semantically equivalent queries yield consistent judgments across modality (text vs. speech) and language (English vs. Arabic). We introduce a speech-augmented visually grounded contrastive triplet benchmark spanning 10,150 culturally grounded images from 18 MENA countries, where each image is paired with one supported statement and two plausible but unsupported alternatives. We define contrastive instability as

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-21T08:32:02.028Z. This is not the publication date.