The paper introduces a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), examining how varying amounts of initial target information and dialogue affect performance. Experiments across four visual contexts and interaction protocols show that current LVLMs lag behind human baselines, especially when no initial description is given and information must be gathered through questions. The study also finds that LVLMs are poorly calibrated, often overestimating confidence, and that interactive grounding remains a significant challenge requiring visual matching, information seeking, and synthesis.
By Zhengxiang Wang, Owen Rambow
The paper investigates how vision‑language models (VLMs) perform optical character recognition (OCR) by identifying attention heads that are causally necessary for OCR across four models. These heads are shown to be general‑purpose, producing interpretable semantic features for any image token, such as recognizing the word "bike" or the concept "feathers". By collapsing the heads’ attention weights into a verbalization lens transformation, the authors reveal that image representations align with language from early layers and can even be used to edit non‑word concepts in images, demonstrating the broader utility of this subspace.
By Sheridan Feucht, Benno Krojer, Sarah Wang, Henry Abrahamsen, Byron C. Wallace, David Bau
arXiv:2607. 18695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A popular route to interpretable zero-shot classification asks a large language model (LLM) to describe each class name and prompts CLIP with the resulting descriptors.
By Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Jia Shi, Zhiqiu Lin, Deepak Pathak, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan
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.
By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.
By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy
arXiv:2607. 03358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how visual information is routed in vision-language models (VLMs).
By Israfel Salazar, Stella Frank, Dan Oneata, Desmond Elliott, Constanza Fierro
arXiv:2607. 25537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the age of foundation models, a model is only as good as its prompt.
By Robert Geirhos, Yuxuan Li, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Neha Kalibhat, Zi Wang, Mani Malek, Oyvind Tafjord, Kevin Swersky, Been Kim, Priyank Jaini
arXiv:2606. 20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals.
By Wish Suharitdamrong, Tony Alex, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito
Vision‑language models (VLMs) can lose accuracy when images are resized, even with minimal changes. The study shows that such small visual configuration changes—like tiling or token arrangement—cause more correctness flips across multiple checkpoints and benchmarks. Interestingly, in many cases the models still read the correct answer but fail to use it, and attention interventions reveal that configuration shifts weaken the use of readable information. By guiding models with field cues and their own transcriptions, the authors correct 97.2% of these errors.
By Dingyang Lin, Yingfeng Luo, Chenglong Wang, Chenwei Zhu, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao
arXiv:2606. 23763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work typically assesses vision--language consistency using attention distributions of answer-side tokens.
By Yiyang Chen, Yixin Tan, Binrui Shen
arXiv:2607. 00684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The classification accuracy of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) relies on the quality of the text prompts.
By Seokhee Jin, Changhwan Sung, Sunung Mun, Hoyoung Kim, Jungseul Ok
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.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott