What Breaks in Multi-Image Schema Application? Factorial Oracle Interventions Reveal an Instance-Information Bottleneck

Abstract

Modern vision-language models can accept multi-image contexts, but aggregate accuracy rarely reveals where a multi-image reasoning pipeline fails. We study a controlled schema-application task in which a model must locate two target characters in a 16-image sequence, identify their visual attributes, consult an item-specific visual codebook, and compose two ordered nonce code names. We introduce a within-item 2-by-2 factorial Oracle design: Oracle-A supplies a verified textual schema, Oracle-B supplies a verified ordered target-appearance representation, and both interventions retain the original images and final question. Across 72 new items and 1,188 analyzed model responses, Oracle-B increased strict exact accuracy by 54.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval: 46.3 to 63.0) and outperformed Oracle-A by 60.6 points (Holm-adjusted p-value no greater than .0002). An auxiliary retrieval diagnostic reached only 49.1% ordered-appearance accuracy even after removing code-name generation. Providing both Oracle sources yielded 100% accuracy across all models. These results localize the dominant recoverable deficit to upstream ordered instance recovery rather than primarily to downstream schema use and composition.