arXiv AI

Emergent Goal-Directed Attention in Large Vision-Language Models

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
Oct 5

Gaze Attention: Query-Adaptive Visual Routing for Efficient Multimodal LLMs

Gaze Attention is a new mechanism for multimodal large language models that selectively focuses on relevant visual regions during each generation step, rather than attending to all visual tokens. By grouping tokens into spatial regions and using learnable context tokens to retain global information, it reduces attention computation and visual key‑value entries by up to 90%. Experiments on 13 image and 6 video benchmarks show that Gaze Attention matches or outperforms dense‑attention baselines while using fewer visual resources.

By Junha Song, Byeongho Heo, Geonmo Gu, Jaegul Choo, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Similar Choices, Different Attention: Cross-Modal Associations in Humans and Vision-Language Models

The study compares human and vision‑language model (VLM) responses to cross‑modal association tasks, using identical stimuli (a pseudo‑word and two images) and recording both choices and eye movements. While larger VLMs show some alignment with human choices, their attention patterns correlate poorly with human gaze, performing no better than a simple center‑bias baseline. Fine‑tuning VLMs on human choices improves choice alignment but not attention alignment, and training on human gaze improves attention correlation without affecting choice accuracy.

By Sumin Hong, Katsumi Ibaraki, Renee Shi, David Chiang, Toby Jia-Jun Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

SAGE: Sink-Aware Guided Emphasis for Visual Grounding in Vision-Language Decoders

The paper introduces SAGE, a lightweight method that guides decoder attention in vision-language models away from prompt‑invariant attention sinks (PIS) toward query‑dependent regions of interest (ROIs). By using token‑aligned ROI masks from vision backbones like CLIP, ViT, and DINOv3, SAGE improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations across various VLM families. Experiments show consistent gains on public vision‑language benchmarks, especially in fine‑grained visual discrimination tasks where localized evidence is essential.

By Jeonghyo Song, YoungJoon Yoo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Attend to Evidence: Evidence-Anchored Spatial Attention Supervision for Multimodal RLVR

The paper introduces EASE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by adding visual‑evidence process supervision. EASE transforms annotated evidence regions into smoothed visual‑token targets and uses them to guide attention during RL training, but only on high‑reward trajectories. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, Qwen3‑VL‑4B, and Qwen3‑VL‑8B show that EASE improves average scores over DAPO by 2.5 to 3.1 points across perception, hallucination, visual math, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and diagnostics confirm better alignment of visual attention with annotated evidence.

By Ruina Hu, Chen Wang, Lai Wei, Jionghao Bai, Bin Yu, Weiran Huang, Kai Wang, Yue Wang
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