Groundbench is a new benchmark that evaluates vision‑language models on multi‑resolution polygon grounding, using the same 1,500 image‑expression‑referent triples but targeting exact‑N polygons with five different vertex budgets. It audits both filled‑region intersection‑over‑union (IoU) and legal‑polygon completion, revealing that the best models achieve 88.2 box IoU and 97.1 accuracy at IoU ≥ 0.5, while direct polygon predictions lag at 57.7 and 69.2. The study shows performance is non‑monotonic across budgets, collapses at the densest budget due to legality failures, and highlights that false spatial cues hurt more than false colour cues, underscoring an operational geometry gap beyond latent boundary perception.
arXiv:2609.13308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion evaluation found that naming the target part in a manipulation prompt increased action accuracy by 0.32-0.63 across eight vision-language...
The paper introduces a tool‑augmented framework that enhances a small Vision‑Language Model (Qwen3.5‑4B) with geometric tools—3D object detection, metric depth estimation, and deterministic solvers for distance, size, and bearing—to improve metric spatial reasoning. By moving metric computation from the model’s weights into explicit solvers, the approach achieves significant gains on ReVSI‑Bench tasks, notably increasing absolute distance accuracy from 0.46 to 0.74 MRA and relative direction accuracy from 25.9% to 73.4%. The modular design allows swapping in different detectors, enabling a clear separation between perception and reasoning errors, and the model can autonomously sequence the tools to match a scripted pipeline on most tasks.
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.
arXiv:2607. 27670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jigsaw puzzle solving requires jointly reasoning about visual content and geometric constraints, yet existing benchmarks use rectangular cuts that create ambiguous ground truth in texture-repeated regions.
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. 13305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark accuracy in video large language models (LLMs) is often treated as evidence of visual understanding.
arXiv:2608.21832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents ground natural-language instructions in screenshots to locate interface elements, yet existing benchmarks do not isolate whether mo...
FAVE (Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding) is a lightweight, variable‑resolution Vision Transformer that encodes user‑selected image regions at high acuity while maintaining the image’s native geometry. In controlled experiments on small‑object ImageNet crops, FAVE outperforms a fixed‑resolution ViT by 9.4 top‑1 points while using 12.7× fewer FLOPs. When added as a local branch to FastVLM, FAVE improves TextVQA by 1.60 points and GQA attribute accuracy by 1.31 points, achieving a 3.3× speedup over SmolVLM2-2.2B with only 16 extra local tokens.
StateSight is a new benchmark designed to isolate and evaluate the ability of vision‑language models to reconstruct latent spatial structure from a single image. It consists of three procedurally generated task families—cube‑net opposite‑face reasoning, occluded cube‑tower counting, and 4‑neighbor connected‑component counting—each with 300 deterministic prompts and exact‑match scoring. The benchmark also includes a companion dataset, StateSight‑Steps, with 900 image‑text examples and 3,600 intermediate visual states to aid analysis of reconstruction errors.
arXiv:2607. 09825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic manipulation policies rely on pre-trained vision models that give either a global scene embedding or a dense patch grid.
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2603. 14579v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have shown significant promise in visual grounding for images as well as videos.