arXiv Computation and Language

GAVAGAI: Referential Alignment for Infant-Scale Vision-Language Models via Balanced Optimal Transport

The paper introduces GAVAGAI, a method that adds a referential alignment variable to vision‑language models by solving a small assignment problem via entropic optimal transport. By allowing words to be assigned to a special NOTHING column and enforcing a capacity constraint on regions, the approach improves word‑to‑picture accuracy and localization on the SAYCam infant video corpus. Experiments show that the alignment loss boosts performance over a standard next‑token captioning baseline, especially under high non‑reference rates.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Small yet Assistive: Spatially-Aware Post-Training for Low Vision

The paper introduces Smol‑VL‑BLV, a compact vision‑language model designed for blind and low‑vision users. It employs a 500M decoder transformer with teacher‑student distillation and Group Relative Policy Optimization to add spatial detail, directional cues, and hazard detection to post‑training. After a lightweight finetuning step, the model achieves significant gains on spatial, social, OCR, and VQA benchmarks while remaining under 450 MB and running entirely offline on a mid‑range Android phone.

By Rishabh Choudhary, Shreyansh Raj, Umesh Goyal, Shubh Kashyap, Shrestha Kumar, Sushovan Jena, Komal Kumar, Hisham Cholakkal, Aditya Nigam
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

A Glance Is All You Need: Single-Pass Fine-Grained Image Captioning with SimLoss

arXiv:2609.00591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An image may be worth a thousand words, but most captioning models describe it in only a few. Modern vision-language models produce fluent high-level c...

By Suryaansh Jain, Rahasya Barkur, Vishal G, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Jack Wang, Koustava Goswami, Nedim Lipka, Puneet Mathur, Samyadeep Basu, Seunghyun Yoon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Free the Language Model From the Vision Encoder: Semantic Serialization as a Perception Interface for Small Language Models

The paper introduces a perception interface that separates vision from language in vision‑language models. A frozen perception stack detects objects, a deterministic semantic serializer converts the perceived state into text, and a standard text‑only large language model (LLM) answers questions. Experiments on a campus‑robot benchmark show that this serialized interface outperforms a zero‑shot VLM of the same language‑model size, especially as the language model shrinks, and that the advantage persists under paraphrase and different supervision regimes.

By Cong Xu, Ravi Sankar
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

DEPICT: Scoring Text-to-Image Alignment by Answer Agreement

DEPICT is a new training‑free metric for evaluating text‑to‑image alignment. It replaces fixed reference answers with an agreement rule that compares image‑based and caption‑only responses, weighting questions by how decisively the caption determines them. By merging this agreement score with a holistic score, DEPICT improves negation accuracy dramatically and outperforms existing training‑free metrics while matching or exceeding fine‑tuned evaluators on several benchmarks.

By Vasco Ramos, Sandra Godinho Silva, Joao Magalhaes, Ricardo Rei, Pedro Henrique Martins
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 26

Scaling cross-situational word learning on children's naturalistic experiences

arXiv:2610.31842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How do children learn the meanings of the simple, concrete words that form a majority of their early vocabulary? Statistical information about many wor...

By Michael C. Frank, Alvin W. M. Tan, Khai Loong Aw, Robert Z. Sparks, Victor Moreno, Grace Keene-Lee, Meesha R. Ryan, Tarun Sepuri, Jane Yang, Virginia A. Marchman, Daniel L. K. Yamins, Bria Long