@inproceedings{kawarada-etal-2026-multimodal,
title = "Multimodal Task Interference: A Benchmark and Analysis of History-Target Mismatch in Multimodal {LLM}s",
author = "Kawarada, Masayuki and
Ishigaki, Tatsuya and
Takamura, Hiroya",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.729/",
doi = "10.63317/36ae8bm4re6t",
pages = "9282--9290",
abstract = "Task interference, the performance degradation caused by task switches within a single conversation, has been studied exclusively in text-only settings despite the growing prevalence of multimodal dialogue systems. We introduce a benchmark for evaluating this phenomenon in multimodal LLMs, covering six tasks across text and vision with systematic variation of history-target along three axes: modality mismatch, reasoning mismatch, and answer format mismatch. Experiments on both open-weights and proprietary models reveal that task interference is highly directional: switching from text-only to image-based targets causes severe performance drops, while the reverse transition yields minimal degradation. Interference is further amplified when mismatches co-occur across multiple dimensions, and is driven most strongly by modality differences, followed by answer format, while reasoning requirement shifts cause minimal degradation."
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<abstract>Task interference, the performance degradation caused by task switches within a single conversation, has been studied exclusively in text-only settings despite the growing prevalence of multimodal dialogue systems. We introduce a benchmark for evaluating this phenomenon in multimodal LLMs, covering six tasks across text and vision with systematic variation of history-target along three axes: modality mismatch, reasoning mismatch, and answer format mismatch. Experiments on both open-weights and proprietary models reveal that task interference is highly directional: switching from text-only to image-based targets causes severe performance drops, while the reverse transition yields minimal degradation. Interference is further amplified when mismatches co-occur across multiple dimensions, and is driven most strongly by modality differences, followed by answer format, while reasoning requirement shifts cause minimal degradation.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Multimodal Task Interference: A Benchmark and Analysis of History-Target Mismatch in Multimodal LLMs
%A Kawarada, Masayuki
%A Ishigaki, Tatsuya
%A Takamura, Hiroya
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F kawarada-etal-2026-multimodal
%X Task interference, the performance degradation caused by task switches within a single conversation, has been studied exclusively in text-only settings despite the growing prevalence of multimodal dialogue systems. We introduce a benchmark for evaluating this phenomenon in multimodal LLMs, covering six tasks across text and vision with systematic variation of history-target along three axes: modality mismatch, reasoning mismatch, and answer format mismatch. Experiments on both open-weights and proprietary models reveal that task interference is highly directional: switching from text-only to image-based targets causes severe performance drops, while the reverse transition yields minimal degradation. Interference is further amplified when mismatches co-occur across multiple dimensions, and is driven most strongly by modality differences, followed by answer format, while reasoning requirement shifts cause minimal degradation.
%R 10.63317/36ae8bm4re6t
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.729/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/36ae8bm4re6t
%P 9282-9290
Markdown (Informal)
[Multimodal Task Interference: A Benchmark and Analysis of History-Target Mismatch in Multimodal LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.729/) (Kawarada et al., LREC 2026)
ACL