Ask Twice, Look Twice: Prompt Echoing Resolves the Question-First Paradox in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2607.15565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it? Intuition says before: knowing what is asked should tell the model where to look. Yet across visual question answering benchmarks, question-first prompting consistently underperforms the image-first ordering recommended for frontier VLMs, a phenomenon we term the question-first paradox. We trace the paradox to a conflict between two stages of VLM com...