arXiv Machine Learning

ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text

ASCIIBench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on generating and classifying ASCII-text images, using a dataset of 5,315 labeled ASCII images. The authors also release a fine‑tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure for evaluation. Their analysis shows that cosine similarity on CLIP embeddings fails to separate most categories, indicating a representation bottleneck rather than generational variance.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Giraffe: A Mapping Architecture from Hidden Text Representations to Visual Embeddings for Efficient Graphic Design

The paper introduces Giraffe, a new mapping architecture that converts hidden text token representations into visual embeddings for graphic design tasks. It uses a single [IMG] token per image and two shallow MLP blocks—one for training and one for inference—to compress and expand embeddings, trained with six loss functions. The approach achieves strong performance in both image‑to‑design and text‑to‑design generation while remaining lightweight.

By Nejla Ghaboosi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.

By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
arXiv AI
4d ago

Skip the Talk, Re-Focus on Vision: Latent Reasoning for Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.

By Tianhang Guo, Yulin He, Wei Chen, Wenjuan Zhou, Yuhang Li, Xinbiao Gan