arXiv Computer Vision

V-GIFT: Boosting Visual Instruction Tuning with Self-Supervised Guidance

The paper introduces V‑GIFT, a lightweight method that enhances visual instruction tuning for multimodal large language models by incorporating a small set of visually grounded self‑supervised tasks expressed as natural language instructions. These tasks—such as rotation prediction, color matching, and cross‑view correspondence—are reformulated into image‑instruction‑response triplets, providing supervision that cannot be solved without visual evidence. The approach requires no human annotations, architectural changes, or extra training stages, and consistently improves vision‑centric performance across various models, regimes, and benchmarks when only 3‑10% of the training data is augmented with these instructions.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners

arXiv:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.

By Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng, Paul Voigtlaender, Shuyang Sun, Yanan Bao, Karen Truong, Zhicheng Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Kyle Genova, Nithish Kannen, Sherry Ben, Yandong Li, Mandy Guo, Suhas Yogin, Yiming Gu, Huizhong Chen, Oliver Wang, Saining Xie, Howard Zhou, Kaiming He, Thomas Funkhouser, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Radu Soricut
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

SAVOR: Self-Aware Visual Grounding via Confidence-Calibrated Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Hallucination Mitigation

SAVOR is a training framework for multimodal large language models that adds token and answer confidence to the output schema, optimises a Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective to penalise calibration error and poor abstention, and uses the learned confidence at inference to revisit visual evidence only when uncertain. Experiments on POPE, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MMHal-Bench with InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones show that SAVOR reduces hallucination while maintaining general capability on MME and MMBench, achieving lower Expected Calibration Error than DPO and decoding baselines.

By Zixiu Ding, Zilin Zhao, Yingjie He, Xinlang Kang, Guansu Wang, Wei Zhang
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