The paper introduces STITCH, a self‑supervised compatibility measure that replaces traditional boundary‑dependent metrics for solving visual puzzles with eroded fragments. By comparing frozen ViT patch tokens from piece interiors using a lightweight cross‑attention head, STITCH can be plugged into existing solvers and achieves near‑perfect reconstruction on the JPwLEG‑5 benchmark, outperforms prior methods on a new ImageNet 7×7 benchmark, and remains robust across varying erosion levels and high missing‑piece scenarios. The authors demonstrate that improving the matching metric, rather than the solver itself, yields significant performance gains across multiple datasets.
arXiv:2607. 27670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jigsaw puzzle solving requires jointly reasoning about visual content and geometric constraints, yet existing benchmarks use rectangular cuts that create ambiguous ground truth in texture-repeated regions.
arXiv:2609.07937v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured visual reasoning, such as image puzzles, demands fine-grained visual perception, an ability current Vision Language Models (VLMs) lack. VL...
arXiv:2609.14473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal AI assistants hold the potential to evolve from digital interfaces into embodied companions capable of guiding users through complex physical...
arXiv:2603. 12433v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model stitching, connecting early layers of one model (source) to later layers of another (target) via a light stitch layer, has served as a probe of representational compatibility.
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
arXiv:2606. 16082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA).
arXiv:2607. 10666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying AI-based visual inspection in manufacturing is hard because requirements change often, new defect types appear, and large labeled datasets are rarely available.
The paper introduces Mosaic, a multi-image visual harness that lets large language‑vision models (MLLMs) construct visual intermediates using ten composable image operations. It evaluates five re‑representation settings on existing multi‑image benchmarks and a new grounding‑focused benchmark, MosaicBench, finding that visual re‑representation benefits tasks requiring precise visual evidence more than those dominated by high‑level semantics. MosaicAgent‑8B is trained via reinforcement learning to compose these operations without demonstration trajectories, demonstrating diverse problem‑solving patterns.
OccludeBench is a manually curated benchmark that tests vision‑language models (VLMs) on their ability to recover fully occluded objects from remaining visual evidence. The benchmark distinguishes direct cases—requiring recovery from a specific physical cue such as a shadow or reflection—from inferential cases, which rely on broader scene context. Across five VLMs, accuracy averages 42.7 % on direct cases versus 62.7 % on inferential cases, a 20‑point gap, while humans achieve 63.4 % and 68.5 % respectively with no significant gap. The study introduces OccludeTrace, a four‑stage diagnostic that isolates the failure point, revealing that models struggle most when recovering the relevant object from the full image projection. Interventions such as inpaint‑then‑confront reduce the gap to a statistically non‑significant difference for models with image‑generation capabilities.
The paper investigates why reasoning‑augmented text‑to‑image models like GoT‑R1 sometimes fail on compositional prompts. By separating the explicit textual plan from the decoder, the authors show that the decoder faithfully executes the plan while the planner often writes incorrect spatial relations, especially for phrasing‑dependent cues. Editing or replacing the plan improves image quality without retraining, demonstrating the viability of modular planner‑decoder architectures.
arXiv:2604.22868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation....
FAVE (Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding) is a lightweight, variable‑resolution Vision Transformer that encodes user‑selected image regions at high acuity while maintaining the image’s native geometry. In controlled experiments on small‑object ImageNet crops, FAVE outperforms a fixed‑resolution ViT by 9.4 top‑1 points while using 12.7× fewer FLOPs. When added as a local branch to FastVLM, FAVE improves TextVQA by 1.60 points and GQA attribute accuracy by 1.31 points, achieving a 3.3× speedup over SmolVLM2-2.2B with only 16 extra local tokens.