arXiv Computation and Language

Small yet Assistive: Spatially-Aware Post-Training for Low Vision

arXiv AI
Jul 14

ABot-N1: Toward a General Visual Language Navigation Foundation Model

arXiv:2607. 10383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks.

By Ruiyan Gong, Yingnan Guo, Junjun Hu, Jintao Kong, Xiaoxu Leng, Tianlun Li, Weize Li, Fei Liu, Zhicheng Liu, Jia Lu, Minghua Luo, Chenlin Ming, Yanfen Shen, Jiyue Tao, Zhengbo Wang, Mingyang Yin, Minqi Gu, Zihao Guan, Wei Guo, Guoqing Liu, Huachong Pang, Menglin Yang, Zeqian Ye, Xiaoxiao Geng, Zhining Gu, Honglin Han, Di Jing, Hongyu Pan, Mingchao Sun, Kuan Yang, Jianfang Zhang, Yanghong Chen, Ye He, Wei Mei, Jiahao Shi, Xiangpo Yang, Yanqing Zhu, Zedong Chu, Xiaolong Wu, Mu Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Your Model Already Knows Don't Teach It, Learn to Ask It: Soft Prompting for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

The paper explores soft prompting for few‑shot object detection with vision‑language models, showing that optimizing a small number of continuous prompt tokens—especially when placed at the cross‑modal boundary and initialized from an empty space token—can match LoRA performance while training far fewer parameters. Soft prompting also avoids catastrophic forgetting, transfers to newer models, and can be verbalized into readable prompts. The study extends these findings to manipulation tasks, indicating that VLMs already contain much of the necessary knowledge for specialized domains, and the main challenge is learning how to ask for it.

By Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Siyi Li, Hewei Wang, Cesar Daniel Hernandez, Wei Zhao, Wolfgang M. Pauli, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Pix2Fact: When Vision Is Not Enough -- Benchmarking Fine-Grained VQA with Web Verification on High-Resolution Real-World Scenes

arXiv:2602. 00593v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation.

By Yifan Jiang, Cong Zhang, Bofei Zhang, Qiaofeng Zheng, Yifan Yang, Bingzhang Wang, Yew-Soon Ong
arXiv AI
Jul 9

GemNav: Discrete-Token Visual Robot Navigation using a Multimodal Large Language Model

arXiv:2607. 06882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual navigation policies built on large pretrained models have so far followed a common recipe: a dedicated visual encoder, a bespoke action head, and training on thousands of hours of cross-embodiment datasets.

By Peter Bohm, Saimunur Rahman, Abdelwahed Khamis, Sagun Man Singh Shrestha, Chris McCool, Peyman Moghadam
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Region-Level Policy Optimization for Fine-grained MLLM Perception

The paper introduces Vision‑RL2, a region‑level reinforcement learning approach that optimizes a lightweight proposal network for fine‑grained multimodal large language model (MLLM) perception. By treating coherent image regions as actions and scoring them with a frozen MLLM reader, the method selectively focuses visual resolution on evidence, reducing token usage while improving accuracy across multiple benchmarks and backbones. The approach eliminates the need for region annotations, response sampling, or reasoning trajectories, and the refined proposals enable sparse encoding that magnifies relevant evidence.

By Yuheng Shi, Xiaohuan Pei, Minjing Dong, Chang Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Multilingual OCR-Aware Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2605. 16409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography.

By Qinwu Xu, Yifan Jiang, Haoyu Ren
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.

By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy