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Intuition says before: knowing what is asked should tell the model where to look. Yet across visual question answering benchmarks, question-first prompting consistently underperforms the image-first ordering recommended for frontier VLMs, a phenomenon we term the question-first paradox. We trace the paradox to a conflict between two stages of VLM computation. Logit-lens and attention probes show the intuition is half right: a question placed before the image genuinely steers perception, moving image patch representations toward question-relevant concepts. The failure lies downstream. Stranded behind hundreds of image tokens, the question is barely attended by the answer token, which instead commits to image-driven (often wrong) answers; a causal attention knockout confirms that the answer reads the question only when the question follows","title":"Ask Twice, Look Twice: Prompt Echoing Resolves the Question-First Paradox in Vision-Language Models","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15565","vendor":"arxiv_cs_ai"},"summary":"arXiv:2607.15565v1 Announce Type: cross \nAbstract: Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it? Intuition says before: knowing what is asked should tell the model where to look. Yet across visual question answering benchmarks, question-first prompting consistently underperforms the image-first ordering recommended for frontier VLMs, a phenomenon we term the question-first paradox. We trace the paradox to a conflict between two stages of VLM computation. Logit-lens and attention probes show the intuition is half right: a question placed before the image genuinely steers perception, moving image patch representations toward question-relevant concepts. The failure lies downstream. Stranded behind hundreds of image tokens, the question is barely attended by the answer token, which instead commits to image-driven (often wrong) answers; a causal attention knockout confirms that the answer reads the question only when the question follows","title":"Ask Twice, Look Twice: Prompt Echoing Resolves the Question-First Paradox in Vision-Language Models","vendor":"arxiv_cs_ai"},"confidence":{"method":"deterministic"},"decision":"POSITIVE","issued_at":"2026-07-20T04:43:09Z","notes":"Spider vendor_press (news) news.vendor_press.v1","object":{"captured_by":"crovia.spider.vendor_press","primary_source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15565"},"predecessors":[],"schema":"crovia.axiom.v1","signature":"ed25519:530a41013abacda357e4dbfd784a25eb376a0abb0454bcda70f012173035de6f3a4ebfb63f1cae9eea1c63a1a7e26b066b7e16e01b3f9c04830ee8b15a940b0c","signer":"crovia.substrate","subject":{"observed_at":"2026-07-20T04:43:09Z","source_collector":"spider:vendor_press","target_id":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15565"},"tsa":{"authority":"crovia.substrate.bootstrap","rfc3161_token":"{\"kind\":\"crovia.bootstrap.tsa\",\"source_jsonl\":\"/opt/crovia/spider/data/news/vendor_press_v1.jsonl\",\"source_seal_merkle_root\":\"spider_vendor_press_v1\",\"upgrade_path\":\"Sessione H \\u2014 OpenTimestamps weekly anchor\"}"},"zk_mode":"clear","zk_proof":null},"ledger":{"leaf_hash":"48cbc717e69c347c214d4fa905f83aab1f377c99b4663cd2d6fd4fdf16405d53","leaf_index":333276,"ledger_path":"/opt/crovia/substrate/axiom_ledger.jsonl"},"merkle_proof":{"hash_alg":"sha256","leaf_prefix":"0x00","node_prefix":"0x01","odd_leaf_rule":"duplicate_last","path":[{"sibling":"ffe11e0c5507b5e99eaea18ec1989117593fe6f8cdbbc369ba360e7383ac7ee5","side":"right"},{"sibling":"2c73f7f8a97af3645865c0c494c71199666d4516dacd7cb7ba18883a0d2fbfab","side":"right"},{"sibling":"d9e9a64216e4361fc305a6da1a830efdbb52f88993d0129b6c36642936257ae6","side":"left"},{"sibling":"e5cc4fb85921b4e4743980797d5a433d8cbe6e84137ff1c83873d9b7741f162f","side":"left"},{"sibling":"16d1f04aa809a89365e36d82a45301ebe65d517802f2d7a0c2fb8a7c9540ebd6","side":"left"},{"sibling":"a8dc77c640e00bc49c83f5d77a06c176d74fd93fb2d7b210bc761852297a756a","side":"right"},{"sibling":"5dc3f0df8fd6e4cf655b15e7355878576934a564ddee081917870d5b8bcd2ec0","side":"left"},{"sibling":"5e895feb6aeddb3dac892d493e1de271cf5bb255124626b8ae869ebb57ff0c74","side":"left"},{"sibling":"089fcaa13823a284a9c3064c9de337dded31410d6f89ef3761586a5e77c18ff1","side":"left"},{"sibling":"b0d667e95f8746ac275ad4169634f2e9442cd7e445099c6355bed5e0b9e27cbf","side":"right"},{"sibling":"dedd2da92d9447ddf1b1db68fe20109a426ed18359861ed746907ac820021a8d","side":"left"},{"sibling":"a1c43cc7cd9c775fac33940ee5124aece01596733f003fc53743f43483f9f597","side":"right"},{"sibling":"b5ad3eafd7eeb74c063261356fdd9bf6059ee6d0bf1e3c70e60731b394a5536e","side":"left"},{"sibling":"93e399d152203db688c6a5a58d25131205603504f5b79123a1f2b5a5ed9c1e54","side":"right"},{"sibling":"b6e0cad7f6eb9107f0edd276f1a9942635d8cd6d60d2a97e7daac08b110dc209","side":"right"},{"sibling":"80ec062e7e625dc3f9bb5865cb5198696bbec2608e48abae5670677b90695899","side":"right"},{"sibling":"77025bcb374a7ad74f520643e20a8ae1205a7ee78507b0beb93117760f1c29d3","side":"left"},{"sibling":"0aced6f0c9dec3e6cc9e89b68b70f5f8ce7e1eb13606d92db1917b76e57393c7","side":"right"},{"sibling":"1cecb7f447febd025aac272837c80de218aecc6485d2395a509b2a1f1b9c746e","side":"left"}]},"schema":"crovia.axiom_proof.v1","seal":{"first_collector_run_id":"","first_receipt_hash":"","jsonl_path":"/opt/crovia/substrate/axiom_ledger.jsonl","key_id":"430895f101d38164","last_collector_run_id":"","last_receipt_hash":"","leaf_count":333540,"merkle_root":"ee60f62b8a724dd9bde638d638caf32cefec4440f832018b457ff47a0ec56a8c","public_key_hex":"cf742e26f75669dc673cb5c0786a1ae23ae8ca19c347317192ce40c28a7ff25c","run_id":"hourly_json_retrofit_20260720T053701Z","schema":"crovia.seal.v1","seal_family_version":"crovia-seal-family/1","seal_kind":"substrate_batch","sealed_at":"2026-07-20T05:38:36Z","sig_algorithm":"ed25519","signature":"82a3787e628bfab19c377d875220e1aaedfc498736c545f4708a1b887e8398afdf306995994493a36c864ff7139a2d436b905ce7081aaa540789aa4f707dc800","signer_version":"1.1.0"},"trust_root":{"key_id":"430895f101d38164","public_key_hex":"cf742e26f75669dc673cb5c0786a1ae23ae8ca19c347317192ce40c28a7ff25c","signature_algorithm":"ed25519","url":"/registry/canon/TRUST_ROOT.md"},"verifier":{"spec":"/registry/canon/AXIOM_RECEIPT_v1.md","url":"/v/axm_dd655bb239bd4eed3087d9b19a73d64ec680776aae7aa611df67b7808e8fe1c0"}}