@article{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",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.729/",
    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."
}