LOC I (Locator‑Critic) is a training‑free framework that separates visual search from evidence verification in Vision‑Language Models. It uses a Locator agent to propose candidate visual evidence and a Critic agent to assess its relevance, engaging in an iterative refinement loop that progressively improves the evidence until it is sufficient to answer a question. The approach yields state‑of‑the‑art results on several complex visual benchmarks, boosting accuracy for both open‑weight models like Qwen3‑VL and proprietary models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro.
By Walid Bousselham, Mathilde Caron, Arsha Nagrani, Cordelia Schmid
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 introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
By Yongqi Yu, Yu Zhang
The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.
arXiv:2608. 08021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) should answer from concrete image evidence rather than language priors, dataset shortcuts, or irrelevant visual context.
By Haojie Huang, Xinlei Yu, Chengming Xu, Zhangquan Chen, Cheng Yang, Qingdong He, Yu Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Xiaobin Hu
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle on tasks requiring complex visual understanding. We argue that the core issue is not high-level reasoning, but instead failing to locate critical details i...
ET‑Prune is a training‑free framework that dynamically allocates visual token budgets in multimodal large language models based on question‑conditioned evidence. It protects text‑like spatial regions, converts evidence uncertainty into a token floor, and progressively prunes concentrated evidence while retaining diffuse or text‑dense tokens. In six backbone‑benchmark comparisons, ET‑Prune matches or outperforms other pruned methods while keeping roughly half the visual tokens, achieving notable gains on OCRBench‑v2 and MMBench v1.1.
By Zizhong Ding, Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Shaoqiu Zhang, Xiao Xiao, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
arXiv:2609.37349v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multi-step visual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answers complex questions by repeatedly retrieving visual evidence, updating an intermediate s...
By Yalun Wu, Bingzhou Wang, Boyang Wang, Peiying Wang, Shaojie He, Yunhan Wang, Shaozu Yuan, Jiawei Wang
arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.
By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2609.36651v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-context reasoning in large language models incurs substantial computation and memory costs. Visual text compression (VTC) reduces input length b...
By FangZhi Zhong, Xuerui Qiu, Yuqi Pan, Ya Liu, Shaowei Gu, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
arXiv:2604. 01280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to identify and combine fine-grained visual cues with retrieved textual evidence.
By Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara