Where did the ambiguity go? Examining how multimodal models interpret polysemous words

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.00410v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human language is highly polysemous. Many common words (e.g., "bank" or "palm") carry several distinct meanings that shape what humans communicate and imagine. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to understand this multiplicity of meaning, but much less is known about how polysemy surfaces in other modalities such as images. We study this across 17 text-to-image and 15 text-generation models by giving each a polysemous word with no con