arXiv AI

StemBind: When MLLMs Get Lost Between Rules and Instances in Abstract Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 00148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often know the rule but pick the wrong answer: on abstract visual reasoning (AVR) tasks, a model can describe what it sees and name the underlying pattern, yet still fail to choose the matching candidate.

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 Computer Vision
Sep 4

VKnowU: Evaluating Visual Knowledge Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.

By Tianxiang Jiang, Sheng Xia, Yicheng Xu, Linquan Wu, Xiangyu Zeng, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao, Yi Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Is Visual Prompting All You Need? Studying VLM Spatial Reasoning under Progressive Visual Scaffolds

The paper investigates how visual presentation affects vision‑language models (VLMs) on the SPaRC spatial planning benchmark. By adding lightweight input‑side scaffolds that keep the visual modality but make spatial structure clearer, the authors achieve up to a 34.0‑percentage‑point accuracy boost across multiple VLMs, and an additional 4.6 points when combined with GRPO training. Analyses reveal that these improvements stem mainly from reduced grounding errors, while rule‑based reasoning remains difficult, highlighting visual presentation as a key determinant of whether VLM benchmarks test grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or both.

By Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Tianyu Yang, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Terry Ruas, Jan Philip Wahle, Daniel Kurzawe, Bela Gipp
arXiv AI
Jun 12

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

arXiv:2603. 06652v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations--cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence.

By Yantao Li, Qiang Hui, Chenyang Yan, Kanzhi Cheng, Fang Zhao, Chao Tan, Huanling Gao, Jianbing Zhang, Kai Wang, Xinyu Dai, Shiguo Lian
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning

VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.

By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai