IC-1355Instruction-tuned VLMs fail to follow multiple-choice format in reasoning questions, with InstructBLIP frequently returning blank responses

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Yuanfeng Ji, Chongjian GE, Weikai Kong, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo

SourceLarge Language Models as Automated Aligners for benchmarking Vision-Language Models

On closed-ended (multiple-choice) reasoning questions, BLIP2 tends to select a particular option as instructed, while instruction-tuned models (InstructBLIP, LLaVA, LLaMA-Adapter v2, mPLUG-Owl, Otter) often ignore the provided options and generate detailed free-form responses. InstructBLIP in particular frequently returns blank responses. The authors attribute this to overfitting during instruction tuning, which causes catastrophic forgetting of generic instruction-following ability, making it difficult for the LLM judge to evaluate their outputs.

Evidence
observational
Caveat
This is an observational note from the authors during evaluation rather than a separately quantified experiment; no dedicated metric isolates format compliance from content accuracy.
Model
InstructBLIP, LLaVA, LLaMA-Adapter v2, mPLUG-Owl, Otter
Concepts
Failure mode
Datasets
Auto-Bench [eval]
Related findings
IC-1356
Extraction
automatic-extraction