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.
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
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.
arXiv:2609.37656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the visual and textual evidence supporting the generated responses rema...
arXiv:2606. 17389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical.
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.
arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.
In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical characterization study revealing that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an analogous property: letter casing modulates internal attention allocation.
The paper investigates how vision‑language models (VLMs) handle negation by comparing their attention patterns to human gaze when processing affirmative versus negated statements. Using synthetic and realistic datasets, the authors find that most VLMs do not mimic human-like attention and rely on mechanisms beyond attention, with PaliGemma2‑3B shifting focus to alternatives under negation and LLaVA‑1.5‑7B showing a left‑side spatial bias. The study highlights a performance gap between affirmative and negated queries across downstream tasks, underscoring the need for better negation processing in VLMs.
arXiv:2608. 03711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text.
arXiv:2609.05517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human observers prioritize visual information according to task goals. Most computational models of naturalistic viewing are gaze-trained for free vi...