arXiv AI

From Reward Signal to Visual Utility: A Controlled Audit of Medical VLM Post-Training

arXiv:2609. 31450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical vision-language model (VLM) post-training is commonly evaluated through answer accuracy.

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 22

Look Where It Counts: A Free, Label-Free Visual Evidence Signal for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Reasoning

The paper introduces a free, label‑free visual evidence signal that improves fine‑grained vision‑language reasoning. By selecting image crops that maximize the model’s answer distribution peak, the method locates answer‑bearing regions without training or annotations, boosting accuracy from 70 % to 85 %. The evidence gap also complements model confidence, enabling better correctness prediction and error flagging.

By Santi Ram Tiwari, Nihal Naik, Devbrat Pandey, Nishant Sinha
arXiv AI
1d ago

VisionQ: VLM-as-a-Judge Taxonomy, Dataset and Benchmark for Qualitative Analysis in Computer Vision

VisionQ is a new benchmark for qualitative analysis in computer vision that evaluates vision‑language models (VLMs) on criterion‑conditioned visual discrimination. It is built from over 1,800 peer‑reviewed comparison figures in CVPR and ICCV papers, linking each image crop to author‑stated visual claims through 3,911 hand‑annotated data points. The benchmark includes a 51‑leaf taxonomy of visual criteria, a protocol that hides method identities and reports accuracy per criterion, and a DPO‑tuned Gemma‑4‑E4B judge that improves accuracy on a held‑out test set.

By Vu Dinh Xuan, Duc-Hai Nguyen, Minh-Dung Dao, Vu Quynh Giao, Quang Hong Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua, Barry O'Sullivan, David Murphy, Hoang D. Nguyen
arXiv AI
Jun 19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606. 20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact.

By Bo Yin, Xiaobin Hu, Chengming Xu, Ruolin Shen, Mo Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Cheng Tan, Shuicheng YAN
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

SIVA-RL: Sensitivity-Invariance Visual Alignment for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) drives multimodal reasoning, but answer-level correctness does not guarantee that a vision-language model grounds its predictions in visual evidence. Existing visual-intervention methods contrast policy behavior on original and modified images, yet assign supervision by the type of intervention rather than its observed effect.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

HALDETECT at ImageEval 2026 Shared Tasks: Answer-First Contrastive Grounding with QLoRA

HALDETECT is a system developed for the English hallucination-detection track of ImageEval 2026, where the task is to identify the single visually grounded statement among three culturally plausible options. The approach treats the problem as a contrastive decision, outputs the answer before an explanation, and bases reasoning on colour/texture, shape/form, and context. The best model fine‑tunes Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct with 4‑bit QLoRA, freezes the vision encoder, and achieves a Contrastive Instability score of 0.035 on the test set, placing third among eight teams.

By Syed Mohaiminul Hoque, Md Sakhawat Hossain
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

MedQA-MM: Shortcuts Behind Medical Visual Reasoning

The paper introduces MedQA-MM, a benchmark that exposes shortcut reasoning in medical multimodal multiple-choice questions. By auditing prompts, images, and modalities, the authors show that models often rely on textual cues rather than visual evidence, with full-input accuracy at 62.63% but only 5.21% when restricted to text. The study highlights the need for route-level evidence to validate true medical image reasoning.

By Benlu Wang, Yifan Zhang, Jiaqing Yu, Chin Siang Ong, Juncheng Huang, Zhuohao Li, Zhenyu Zhang, Arman Cohan, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao