Portrait of Parisa Kordjamshidi

Parisa Kordjamshidi

Independent visiting researcher - Michigan State University
Supervisor
Aishwarya Agrawal
Research Topics
Natural Language Processing
Website
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

Discovering Failure Modes in Vision-Language Models using RL
Kanishk Jain
Qian Yang
Shravan Nayak
Parisa Kordjamshidi
Nishanth Anand
Aishwarya Agrawal
Vision-language Models (VLMs), despite achieving strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, often misinterpret straightforward visual conc… (see more)epts that humans identify effortlessly, such as counting, spatial reasoning, and viewpoint understanding. Previous studies manually identified these weaknesses and found that they often stem from deficits in specific skills. However, such manual efforts are costly, unscalable, and subject to human bias, which often overlooks subtle details in favor of salient objects, resulting in an incomplete understanding of a model's vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework to automatically discover the failure modes or blind spots of any candidate VLM on a given data distribution without human intervention. Our framework trains a questioner agent that adaptively generates queries based on the candidate VLM's responses to elicit incorrect answers. Our approach increases question complexity by focusing on fine-grained visual details and distinct skill compositions as training progresses, consequently identifying 36 novel failure modes in which VLMs struggle. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework by showcasing its generalizability across various model combinations.
2026-04-05
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org