arXiv AI

Visual Abstention in Unified Multimodal Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

I Don't Miss You, but I Do: Self-Explanation Faithfulness of Modality Missingness in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces an interventional protocol to assess how vision‑language models (VLMs) explain the impact of missing modalities on their predictions. By comparing the models’ self‑explanations with actual changes observed after restoring missing inputs, the study finds that VLMs routinely overstate the sufficiency of available evidence and underestimate the effect of adding back missing modalities. Across eight open‑weight VLMs and four tasks, the discrepancy between predicted and realized changes is substantial, revealing systematic mischaracterization of modality dependence.

By Aydin Javadov, Daniel Schoess, Florian von Wangenheim
arXiv AI
Jun 2

TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images

arXiv:2606. 01213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite tremendous recent progress, current text-guided image editing methods still struggle with many aspects of editing involving instruction following, minimally editing the source image, and ensuring high visual quality.

By Aishwarya Agrawal, Roy Hirsch, Yasumasa Onoe, Sherry Ben, Jason Baldridge
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Aphanta: Diagnosing Task-Aligned Image-Edited Intermediates for Multimodal Reasoning

Aphanta is an automated framework that diagnoses how well image editors can produce task‑aligned visual intermediates for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It evaluates three reasoning conditions—direct, editor‑generated, and idealized intermediate—to distinguish visual potential from practical editor performance across 20 tasks and various editor–MLLM pairs. The study finds that image editing benefits certain tasks like visual cue injection and grounding, but is less reliable for symbol‑sensitive or structural tasks, and demonstrates measurable performance gains with a Qwen pipeline.

By Hengyuan Xu, Wei Cheng, Yumeng Ji, Xuanyang Zhang, Xianfang Zeng, Gang Yu, Xingjun Ma
arXiv AI
Jun 9

IEA: Amateur-Friendly Conversational Image Editing Agent via Three Stages of Multitask Alignment

arXiv:2606. 08016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current image editing software often hinges on fixed filters or expert tuning, leaving a gap between amateur users' intent and outcomes.

By Zichen Zhu, Yuheng Sun, Mingxuan Zhu, Wenjie Ma, Situo Zhang, Zhexiang Wang, Ziyue Yang, Danyang Zhang, Kunyao Lan, Zihan Zhao, Dingye Liu, Siqi Xiang, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ATP-Bench: Towards Agentic Tool Planning for MLLM Interleaved Generation

ATP‑Bench proposes a new benchmark for evaluating agentic tool planning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that generate interleaved text-and-image responses. The benchmark contains 7,702 QA pairs, including 1,592 visual‑question‑answer pairs, across eight categories and 25 visual‑critical intents, all verified by humans. A Multi‑Agent MLLM‑as‑a‑Judge (MAM) system is introduced to assess tool‑call precision, missed opportunities, and overall response quality without relying on ground‑truth references.

By Yinuo Liu, Zi Qian, Heng Zhou, Jiahao Zhang, Yajie Zhang, Zhihang Li, Mengyu Zhou, Erchao Zhao, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv AI
Jul 31

See2Think: Do Multimodal Models Really Use Intermediate Visual States?

arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.

By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Where a New Concept Must Enter: Entry Point Gates Cross-Task Usability in Unified Multimodal Models

The paper investigates how new concepts can be integrated into unified multimodal models (UMMs) by separating generation and understanding objectives through a novel visual entity bound to a single task direction. Experiments show that the effectiveness of cross‑task usability depends on where the concept is injected into the shared computation, with a mid‑stack alignment objective achieving high concept acquisition with minimal loss to overall performance. The study highlights that unified weights alone are insufficient; the two directions must share a semantic format at the entry point for efficient concept integration.

By Zongyang Qiu, Yihan Wu, Kaixuan Fan, Bo Li, Hui Xiong