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:2608.28707v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in Visual Question Answering (VQA), yet they continue to struggle with quest...
By Anoop Senthil
arXiv:2509.02807v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive generalization across tasks using images and text modalities. While their extension...
By Mennatullah Siam
arXiv:2608. 04726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly reason over screenshots and documents where the task itself may be written in pixels.
By Yongxin Wang, Ruizhe Zhou, Yueling Tang, Yingying Zhu, Xuemin Zhao, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang
arXiv:2607. 11862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding.
By Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Chen Sun, Juan Carlos Niebles
arXiv:2606. 06890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently rely on language priors, producing confident answers that are weakly grounded in visual evidence.
By Runyu Zhou, Qi Zhang, Qixun Wang, Yisen Wang
PANORAMA introduces a new panoptic grounded captioning framework that jointly generates detailed image captions and associates each phrase with precise pixel-level masks. The authors create PanoCaps, a human‑annotated benchmark with dense captions and near‑complete pixel coverage, and propose a phrase‑mask matching protocol with a generalized Panoptic Quality metric. PANORAMA conditions a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations, learns to select appropriate masks, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art grounding performance on PanoCaps and other pixel‑level tasks.
By Sara Pieri, Evangelos Kazakos, Shizhe Chen, Josef Sivic, Cordelia Schmid
arXiv:2607. 05798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have evolved from static perception to interleaved visual-language reasoning, often referred to as ``thinking with images''.
By Yake Wei, Yuan Wang, Fengyun Rao, Jing Lyu, Di Hu
Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions. KI-VQA involves multiple sub-problems -referring expression understanding, visual grounding, object recognition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning-yet existing benchmarks typically report only end-task accuracy, obscuring where failures arise.
arXiv:2610.02117v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has recently emerged as an effective approach for improving language-model reasoning by supervising students with a froze...
By Sophia Sirko-Galouchenko, Monika Wysoczanska, Andrei Bursuc, Nicolas Thome, Spyros Gidaris
The paper investigates whether frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encode grounding information about specific visual instances within the tokens they generate, including modifiers such as attributes, spatial expressions, and relational terms. The authors introduce OTTER, a lightweight supervised probe that applies Optimal Transport to align generated tokens with visual regions, producing compact grounding maps. Experiments demonstrate that modifier tokens, especially spatial terms, carry instance‑discriminative visual information, that object nouns also encode referential cues, and that the recovered grounding remains robust to context changes and generalizes to free generation and cross‑dataset transfer.
By Barbara Toniella Corradini (AI for Good), Caterina Gallegati (University of Siena, Italy), Ludovica Genovese (AI for Good), Vittorio Murino (AI for Good)
The paper introduces a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), examining how varying amounts of initial target information and dialogue affect performance. Experiments across four visual contexts and interaction protocols show that current LVLMs lag behind human baselines, especially when no initial description is given and information must be gathered through questions. The study also finds that LVLMs are poorly calibrated, often overestimating confidence, and that interactive grounding remains a significant challenge requiring visual matching, information seeking, and synthesis.
By Zhengxiang Wang, Owen Rambow