Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Abstract

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight -- 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation -- while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion -- the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across five evaluator configurations (N=80 total independent repetitions, ~35,000 API calls) with both text-proxy and real-image visual tasks finds: cross-model evaluation produces strong contagion (JSD~0.19-0.34), real-image inputs yield the most directionally consistent signal (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.145, gamma_{V->T}=0.937, 70% T->V, Cohen's d=0.56), and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity -- 97% of runs (N=30) yield zero contagion (JSD=0.003, d=0.07). Three methodological ablations and multi-executor validation confirm the effect is not a structural artifact. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference drift. Code and data: https://github.com/aidless/mm-epc.