True Multimodal In-Context Learning Needs Attention to the Visual
  Context
Authors: name: Shuo Chen; name: Jianzhe Liu; name: Zhen Han; name: Yan Xia; name: Daniel Cremers; name: Philip Torr; name: Volker Tresp; name: Jindong Gu
Published: 2025-07-21 17:08:18

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built on powerful language
backbones, have enabled Multimodal In-Context Learning (MICL)-adapting to new
tasks from a few multimodal demonstrations consisting of images, questions, and
answers. Despite showing noticeable improvement on standard vision-language
datasets, current MLLMs struggle to leverage visual information in the
demonstrations. Specifically, they tend to neglect visual cues and over-rely on
textual patterns, leading to mere text imitation rather than genuine multimodal
adaptation. This behavior makes MICL still unimodal and largely restricts its
practical utility. More importantly, this limitation is often concealed by the
improved performance on tasks that do not require understanding the visual
context. As a result, how to effectively enhance MICL ability and reliably
evaluate the MICL performance remains underexplored. To address these issues,
we first introduce Dynamic Attention Reallocation (DARA), an efficient
fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to attend to the visual context by
rebalancing attention across visual and textual tokens. In addition, we present
TrueMICL, an MICL-dedicated dataset with both support and test sets that
explicitly requires the integration of multimodal information-particularly
visual content-for correct task completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate
the effectiveness of our holistic solution, showcasing substantial improvements
in the true multimodal in-context learning capabilities. Code and datasets are
available at https://chenxshuo.github.io/true-micl-colm .