Telling Is Not Seeing: Textual Personas Rarely Make Vision-Language Models Answer Like the People They Describe
arXiv:2610.39331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly prompted with personas, such as "You have low vision", to stand in for people in user studies. We ask whether a persona makes a model see like the person it describes. We compare persona answers with measured people with low vision, color blindness or hearing loss, and with simple rules that use only the facts the persona states. The persona never beats these rules, and it erases the real difference…