The paper introduces Rendering-Free Lookahead (RFL), a method for active robot vision that selects camera motions to reveal information needed for viewpoint-dependent question answering. RFL predicts future answerability—how well a view can answer a question—using a student model trained via distillation from a privileged teacher that renders future views with 3D Gaussian Splatting. In deployment, RFL chooses camera motions without rendering, achieving a 43% improvement in mean judge score over a baseline on 377 unseen test episodes.
By Koya Sakamoto, Daichi Azuma, Shuhei Kurita, Naoya Chiba, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Taiki Miyanishi
The paper introduces Vision‑RL2, a region‑level reinforcement learning approach that optimizes a lightweight proposal network for fine‑grained multimodal large language model (MLLM) perception. By treating coherent image regions as actions and scoring them with a frozen MLLM reader, the method selectively focuses visual resolution on evidence, reducing token usage while improving accuracy across multiple benchmarks and backbones. The approach eliminates the need for region annotations, response sampling, or reasoning trajectories, and the refined proposals enable sparse encoding that magnifies relevant evidence.
By Yuheng Shi, Xiaohuan Pei, Minjing Dong, Chang Xu
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
arXiv:2603.16932v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) typically process images at a native high-resolution, forcing a trade-off between accuracy and computational ef...
By Nimrod Shabtay, Moshe Kimhi, Artem Spector, Sivan Haray, Ehud Rivlin, Chaim Baskin, Raja Giryes, Eli Schwartz
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:2610.13790v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: How well can vision-language models (VLMs) reason about what is missing from an image? We study this question with OccludeBench, a manually curated b...
By Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Ryo Mitsuhashi, Linrong Cai, Xingyu Fu, Zhuang Liu
LensVLM is an inference framework and post‑training recipe that lets Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) process compressed images of text by selectively expanding only the relevant parts back to full resolution. Using Qwen3.5‑9B‑Base, LensVLM achieves accuracy comparable to full‑text models at 4.3× compression and outperforms other compression baselines up to 10.1× across seven text QA benchmarks, while also improving performance on multimodal document and code tasks as compression increases.
By Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu, Bowen Pan, Christopher Fifty, Jang-Hyun Kim, Xianzhi Du, Zhe Gan, Vivek Rathod, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv:2609.37002v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: High-resolution visual question answering often fails because a multimodal model does not acquire the small, spatially localized evidence needed to a...
By Xijia Tao, Yihua Teng, Xinyu Fu, Cheng Gong, Ziru Liu, Xudong Xie, Rui Liu, Lingpeng Kong
The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.
By Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Hanqi Feng, Shaojie Zhang, Barnabas Poczos, Chao Jiang, Zhenbo Luo, Lei Jiang, Pei Fu
arXiv:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.
By Ahmadreza Jeddi, Minh Ngoc Le, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Iqbal Mohomed, Michael Brudno, Alex Levinshtein, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk
arXiv:2605.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90\% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. How...
By Jingru Chen, Yiming Liu, Mingtao Chen, Sijie Chen, Richeng Xuan, Liang Yang, Zhichao Hu, Fanyang Lu
The paper introduces EviSpec, a training‑free compiler that generates complementary evidence specifications to improve high‑resolution multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By explicitly guiding visual search with structured evidence specifications, EviSpec achieves significant relative gains—up to 14.8% over random evidence—across five MLLMs and three benchmarks, and also sets new state‑of‑the‑art results on VQA and hallucination‑focused tasks.
By Zhongkuan Mao, Wenzhuo Zhao, Xianjie Liu, Yidong Wang, Zhao Gao, Ronghao Xian, Yao Jiang, Yi Zhang, Liangjian Wen, Keren Fu