The paper investigates whether language prompts selected by zero‑shot accuracy remain effective after visual adaptation in source‑free cross‑domain few‑shot learning. Using a paired protocol, the authors compare generic class‑name templates with detailed class descriptions before and after Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on datasets such as EuroSAT, CropDisease, ISIC, and ChestX. They identify two regimes: semantic saturation, where detailed prompts are already useful before adaptation, and semantic emergence, where detailed prompts become more useful only after visual representation updates, driven by changes in prediction patterns.
By Wei Liu, Xing Deng, Haijian Shao
arXiv:2608. 02830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many-shot in-context learning (ICL) lets vision-language models (VLMs) adapt from image--label demonstrations without weight updates, and is widely assumed to improve as more demonstrations are supplied.
By Mohammad Rostami
arXiv:2608.21819v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reliable image captioning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires captions to be both precise and complete, avoiding unsupported object mentions wh...
By Jihyung Ko, Eunji Jung, Hyeongsub Kim, Ziseok Lee, Jae Won Cho, Sanghyun Jo, Kyungsu Kim
The paper introduces a free, label‑free visual evidence signal that improves fine‑grained vision‑language reasoning. By selecting image crops that maximize the model’s answer distribution peak, the method locates answer‑bearing regions without training or annotations, boosting accuracy from 70 % to 85 %. The evidence gap also complements model confidence, enabling better correctness prediction and error flagging.
By Santi Ram Tiwari, Nihal Naik, Devbrat Pandey, Nishant Sinha
The paper investigates image tokenizers as the visual language of unified multimodal models by creating a controlled autoregressive testbed that tracks task‑specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text‑to‑image, and image‑to‑text predictions. It shows that losses must be analyzed by task, that the loss–performance relationship varies with the token space, and that better reconstruction does not always lead to stronger downstream performance. The study also demonstrates how tokenizer design choices—such as discriminator use, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size—affect joint modeling and downstream results.
The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.
By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv:2606. 29416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a vision model truly see an object, or does it only fit surface-level visual cues?
By Xingyu Peng, Junran Wu, Yue Hou, Zhongliang Qiao, Jiaheng Liu, Shangzhe Li, Jichang Zhao, Wenjun Wu, Xianglong Liu, Yongxin Tong, Li Dong, Ke Xu
ReWEIGH the Evidence is a training‑free decoding technique that calibrates token‑level ordinal visual evidence to reduce hallucinations in large vision‑language models. It aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions, compares candidates to a token‑specific reference derived from unlabeled images, and applies a bounded penalty only when evidence falls below this reference. Experiments on four 7B backbones show up to a 21.3% reduction in hallucinated object mentions while largely preserving or improving descriptive and general performance, with minimal added latency.
By Jihae Jeong, Junha Choi, Hwanjo Yu
The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.
By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2607. 18695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A popular route to interpretable zero-shot classification asks a large language model (LLM) to describe each class name and prompts CLIP with the resulting descriptors.
By Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Jia Shi, Zhiqiu Lin, Deepak Pathak, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan
arXiv:2608. 04496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual inputs in vision-language models (VLMs) are often encoded into substantially longer token sequences than text, making visual tokens a major bottleneck for efficient inference.
By Chen Zhong, Xiao An, Zijie Wang, Jiepan Li, Guangyi Yang, Wei He