arXiv Machine Learning

Integrating attention into explanation frameworks for language and vision transformers

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

Perception or Reasoning? Diagnosing and Tackling Reinforcement Learning Bottlenecks in VLMs

The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.

By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Visual Attention Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models is Heterogeneous

The study investigates whether attention weights in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) accurately reflect model reasoning for visual inputs. Using causal perturbation analysis, it identifies three distinct processing modes—Faithful‑Sufficient, Faithful‑Distributed, and Non‑Focal—indicating heterogeneous visual attention faithfulness. The research also shows that human‑annotated ground‑truth regions align with model attention in only about 60% of cases, highlighting a systematic divergence between model visual reliance and human intuition across VQA, document, and chart tasks.

By Xurui Song, Weishi Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Kuluhan Binici, Tao Bai, Hongxin Shao, Daniel Dahlmeier, Jun Luo
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

OpenVAM: Open-World Visual Attention Modeling with VLMs

OpenVAM is a new framework for visual attention modeling that combines a dense saliency map with language‑based explanations. It uses a decoupled design: a visual pathway for precise localization and a vision‑language head that generates grounded what/why explanations. The method is trained in three stages to preserve localization while adding language grounding, and a scalable pipeline creates multi‑domain annotations for evaluation.

By Kiana Hooshanfar, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Alireza Hosseini, Michael Brudno, Babak Taati