OccludeBench is a manually curated benchmark that tests vision‑language models (VLMs) on their ability to recover fully occluded objects from remaining visual evidence. The benchmark distinguishes direct cases—requiring recovery from a specific physical cue such as a shadow or reflection—from inferential cases, which rely on broader scene context. Across five VLMs, accuracy averages 42.7 % on direct cases versus 62.7 % on inferential cases, a 20‑point gap, while humans achieve 63.4 % and 68.5 % respectively with no significant gap. The study introduces OccludeTrace, a four‑stage diagnostic that isolates the failure point, revealing that models struggle most when recovering the relevant object from the full image projection. Interventions such as inpaint‑then‑confront reduce the gap to a statistically non‑significant difference for models with image‑generation capabilities.
By Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Ryo Mitsuhashi, Linrong Cai, Xingyu Fu, Zhuang Liu
The paper shows that controlled visual in‑context learning can help vision‑language models (VLMs) overcome errors caused by training priors. By providing demonstrations, the models focus more on visual evidence, yielding significant accuracy gains on counterfactual examples while leaving prior‑aligned performance largely unchanged. This effect is observed across five VLM families and five vision‑centric tasks, indicating that many VLMs possess latent visual grounding abilities that standard tests may miss.
By Kun Wang, Xindi Wu, Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky, Esin Tureci
arXiv:2602.06652v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The robustness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) is commonly assessed through output-level invariance, implicitly assuming that stable predictions r...
By Farooq Ahmad Wani, Alessandro Suglia, Rohit Saxena, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Wai-Chung Kwan, Fazl Barez, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Fabrizio Silvestri, Pasquale Minervini
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.
By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv:2610.03389v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) incur substantial inference cost because every visual token is processed by the attention and MLP projections of every...
By Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Xuan Shen, Shaoyi Huang, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
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:2609.38368v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly reason over visual evidence that is cropped, segmented, retrieved, or revealed over time. Yet most VQA bench...
By L. D. M. S. Sai Teja, Ufaq Khan, N. Siva Gopala Krishna, Satyajit Tourani, Ashshak Sharifdeen, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Bernard Ghanem, Muhammad Haris Khan
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
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.
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. 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
arXiv:2609.00868v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language models are evaluated by aggregate accuracy on multimodal benchmarks, a practice that implicitly assumes the model uses its visual inp...
By Genpei Zhang