GUIDE: Guiding Internal Evidence with Language Instructions

Caren Han, Hyunsuk Chung, Jinwoo Kim, Seungyeon Ji, Kyungreem Han


Abstract
Large multimodal models follow instructions about what to generate, but not necessarily about what evidence to rely on. Hence, models may continue to depend on shortcut-associated cues even when instructions suggest otherwise. We introduce GUIDE, a framework for controlling internal evidence usage through language instructions. GUIDE combines grouped parameter-efficient adaptation with instruction-conditioned gating to modulate multimodal evidence pathways during reasoning and generation. We further introduce a pathway-level evaluation framework that characterizes instruction-conditioned evidence modulation through reliance sensitivity, controlled perturbation analysis, pathway modulation, and autoregressive decoding dynamics. Across multimodal reasoning, classification, and generation, GUIDE induces structured and instruction-aligned redistribution of evidence reliance while largely preserving task behavior. Experiments on GQA, TextVQA, MM-IMDb, CREMA-D, RAVDESS, and Flickr30K show that GUIDE improves robustness under targeted evidence perturbations and enables controllable modulation across diverse multimodal settings. This suggests that multimodal instruction following can extend beyond output control toward regulating how different evidence sources contribute to model predictions.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2440
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
52363–52384
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2440/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Caren Han, Hyunsuk Chung, Jinwoo Kim, Seungyeon Ji, and Kyungreem Han. 2026. GUIDE: Guiding Internal Evidence with Language Instructions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 52363–52384, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GUIDE: Guiding Internal Evidence with Language Instructions (Han et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2440.pdf