arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
By Pengkun Jiao, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-gang Jiang
arXiv:2609.37581v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding and reasoning but often incur substantial inference costs due to the large number of visu...
By Jing Wang, Zhiping Wu, Dongdong Ren, Youfang Han, Wei Zhao, Wenbin Li
OpenVAM is a new framework for visual attention modeling that combines a dense saliency map with language‑based explanations. It uses a decoupled design: a visual pathway for precise localization and a vision‑language head that generates grounded what/why explanations. The method is trained in three stages to preserve localization while adding language grounding, and a scalable pipeline creates multi‑domain annotations for evaluation.
By Kiana Hooshanfar, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Alireza Hosseini, Michael Brudno, Babak Taati
The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.
By Jiaqi Deng, Zonghan Wu, Zhan Heng, Xiaoshui Huang, Huan Huo, Guandong Xu
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang
arXiv:2607. 00434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a paradigm for multimodal learning, yet remain unstable due to object hallucination, weak visual grounding, and catastrophic forgetting after full-parameter instruction tuning.
By Guohao Sun, Xiaofang Wang, Yash Patel, Mengchen Liu, Zhiqiang Tao, Praveen Krishnan
PACE introduces a training‑free Condense‑and‑Extract framework that speeds up Vision‑Language Model inference by first adaptively downsampling visual inputs before encoding and then selectively retaining essential tokens during decoding. The Adaptive Pixel Compressor (APC) reduces encoder workload while preserving global context, and the Dynamic Dual‑Attention Extractor (DDAE) keeps task‑critical details by fusing visual and language signals. Applied to Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, PACE maintains 93.8% of performance using only 10% of visual tokens, achieving a 3.1× speedup in time to first token.
By Junjie Liu, Shengyuan Ye, Xu Chen
arXiv:2603. 00171v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are shifting towards "Thinking with Images" by actively exploring image details.
By Yuxiang Shen, Hailong Huang, Zhenkun Gao, Xueheng Li, Man Zhou, Chengjun Xie, Haoxuan Che, Xuanhua He, Jie Zhang
arXiv:2608.22996v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on diverse vision-language tasks, but transformer-based visual encoders split images into fixed-resolution s...
By Yuanhao Sun, Huawei Ji, Jiaxin Ding, Luoyi Fu, Xinbing Wang
arXiv:2609.05517v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Human observers prioritize visual information according to task goals. Most computational models of naturalistic viewing are gaze-trained for free vi...
By Han Zhang
RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention) is a lightweight pair‑gating mechanism that adds a learned query‑key bias to pre‑softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre‑RoPE query and key features. It requires no architectural changes to the backbone and can be trained end‑to‑end with the rest of the model. Across multiple multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves standard attention by an average of 3 points, especially on perception‑intensive tasks such as multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA.
By Xi Leng, Xinhong Ma, Ziqiang Dong, Feng Zhang, Xiaoying Tang, Yang Yang, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv:2606. 20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals.
By Wish Suharitdamrong, Tony Alex, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito