arXiv AI

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

arXiv:2606. 20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

VLM4VLA: Revisiting Vision-Language-Models in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2601. 03309v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLM) into their policy backbone, are gaining significant attention for their promising generalization capabilities.

By Jianke Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Qiuyue Wang, Mingsheng Li, Yanjiang Guo, Yucheng Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Jianyu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Cross-Task Generalization Between Understanding and Generation in Unified Vision-Language Models: A Controlled Study

The study investigates how unified vision‑language models (VLMs) can simultaneously support visual understanding and generation. Using controlled benchmarks (SmartWatch and modified CelebA) that pair VQA, captioning, and text‑to‑image tasks, the authors evaluate several LLM‑based architectures built on SigLIP and VQ‑VAE visual spaces. Results show that mixed training can improve both understanding and generation, but the gains depend on how well the visual input and output spaces are aligned; misaligned or distorted visual spaces can weaken or reverse these benefits. The paper also demonstrates that balancing data across tasks and controlling attribute frequencies can help recover underrepresented visual concepts, and that the transfer is driven more by the base language model’s learned relationships than by visual adapters.

By Jihai Zhang, Tianle Li, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Yu Cheng
arXiv AI
Aug 28

PACE: A Unified Condense-and-Extract Paradigm for Fast VLM Inference

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 AI
Sep 16

Same Answer, Different Representations: Hidden instability in VLMs

arXiv:2602.06652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The robustness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) is commonly assessed through output-level invariance, implicitly assuming that stable predictions r...

By Farooq Ahmad Wani, Alessandro Suglia, Rohit Saxena, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Wai-Chung Kwan, Fazl Barez, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Fabrizio Silvestri, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.

By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

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