arXiv AI

Answer-Conditioned Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Few-Shot Industrial Vision with Small VLMs

arXiv:2607. 10666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying AI-based visual inspection in manufacturing is hard because requirements change often, new defect types appear, and large labeled datasets are rarely available.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Look Where It Counts: A Free, Label-Free Visual Evidence Signal for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Reasoning

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
arXiv AI
Sep 21

LiteMedCoT-VL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Medical Visual Question Answering

LiteMedCoT-VL is a parameter‑efficient pipeline that transfers chain‑of‑thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to a 2B student model using LoRA fine‑tuning on explanation‑enriched data. The approach enables a compact vision‑language model to perform medical visual question answering without relying on image captions, achieving 64.9% accuracy on the PMC‑VQA benchmark—an 11‑point improvement over the zero‑shot Qwen3‑VL‑4B baseline. Visual grounding analysis confirms that the model bases its predictions on image content rather than textual priors.

By Runze Ma, Shunbo Jia, Haonan Lyu, Guo Liu, Caizhi Liao
arXiv AI
Sep 1

LOCI: A Locator-Critic with Refinement Loop

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

From Evaluation to Enhancement: Benchmarking and Improving Think-with-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Models

The paper introduces VWG-Bench, a benchmark covering nine reasoning dimensions and 38 tasks to evaluate video generative models on symbolic reasoning, physical laws, and goal pursuit. It also presents Vid-PRE, a prompt-rewriting framework that offloads reasoning to a VLM, improving logical performance without changing the generator architecture. Experiments show that current models excel at visual quality but struggle with logic-heavy tasks, while Vid-PRE significantly boosts reasoning across multiple generators.

By Meng Luo, Yicheng Liu, Jiahao Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Hao Fei
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning

VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.

By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai
arXiv AI
Jun 11

OpenMedReason: Scientific Reasoning Supervision for Medical Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 12169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-stakes clinical use of large vision-language models (LVLMs) requires reasoning that is grounded in visual evidence and clinical knowledge, not just correct final answers.

By Negin Baghbanzadeh, Pritam Sarkar, Michael Colacci, Abeer Badawi, Adibvafa Fallahpour, Arash Afkanpour, Leonid Sigal, Ali Etemad, Elham Dolatabadi