Did I See It or Think It? Probing Reality Monitoring in Vision-Language Models with Concept Injection

Tina Khezresmaeilzadeh, Seyedarmin Azizi, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram

Recent work tests whether language models can introspect by injecting a concept direction into their activations and asking whether they notice it and can name it. These studies are text-only. Vision-language models (VLMs) face an additional problem, known in cognitive psychology as reality monitoring: they must keep internally generated content separate from what they actually see. We therefore ask: can VLMs distinguish injected concepts from image content? We introduce a paradigm that varies the image and the injected concept independently. On each trial, the model reports what it sees, whether a thought was injected, and what that thought is. This design scores both whether the model identifies the concept and which source it assigns to it. Across six VLMs, only Gemma-3-27B reliably identifies injected concepts (35% vs. 3% for steering alone), with almost no false alarms. Even then, the source it reports is fragile. Strong or visual-pathway injections are reported as seen, and a visible object nearly eliminates correct thought reports. The same failure appears in ordinary captioning, where injected objects appear in up to 87% of captions of real photographs. Evaluating…