arXiv Machine Learning

GroundBench: A Factorized, Counterfactual Benchmark for Locating VLM Affordance Failures

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

Do Vision Models Learn Physical Constraints or Rendering Shortcuts? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Grounded Physical Consistency

The paper introduces a counterfactual benchmark to evaluate whether vision models understand physical constraints or merely learn rendering shortcuts. Using Mitsuba 3, it generates 5,500 synthetic images across 500 scene families, each with a clean image and ten violations (shadows, reflections, support, surface response, occlusion). Diagnostic baselines (LLaVA‑1.5‑7B, Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, InternVL3.5‑8B) achieve 64.0–67.8 % macro‑F1 on a held‑out synthetic test set, but performance drops to 40.8 % for LLaVA‑1.5‑7B under an intervention shift, indicating reliance on rendering cues rather than true physical reasoning.

By M. Moein Esfahani, Sepehr Salem, Mohammed Alser, Vince Calhoun
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

When Instructions Retrieve Trajectories: Diagnosing and Mitigating Generalization Failures in VLA Models

The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.

By Hung-Jen Chen, Yu-Hsun Hou, Yan-Hong Chen, Yan-Fu Chen, Binghua Cai, Min Sun, Chun-Yi Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 17

AMIGO: Agentic Multi-Image Grounding Oracle Benchmark

AMIGO (Agentic Multi-Image Grounding Oracle Benchmark) is a long-horizon evaluation framework for vision‑language models that tests hidden‑target identification across galleries of visually similar images. The benchmark requires a model to ask a sequence of attribute‑focused Yes/No questions, receiving Yes/No/Unsure feedback and penalizing invalid actions with Skip, thereby stressing question selection under uncertainty, constraint tracking, and fine‑grained discrimination. Using the Guess My Preferred Dress task, the study shows that final‑answer accuracy alone overstates performance, as models may guess correctly without verified evidence, waste turns, or violate the protocol, highlighting the need for combined visual discrimination, informative questioning, and robust protocol adherence.

By Min Wang, Ata Mahjoubfar
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Visual Grounding in Zero-Shot Vision-Language Control

arXiv:2608. 06154v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as zero-shot controllers, but successful trajectories do not necessarily show that decisions are grounded in visual input: simulator dynamics and conservative action priors can produce favourable scores without meaningful perception.

By J. de Curt\`o, Dayani Plasencia, Diego S\'anchez, I. de Zarz\`a
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Why Does Grounding Hurt Medical VQA? Benchmarking, Diagnosis, and Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2604. 27720v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to medical visual question answering (Med-VQA), yet whether they can \emph{localize} the evidence behind their answers---a prerequisite for clinical auditability---is poorly characterized.

By Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le, Qifu Yin, Lang Lin, Haowei Ni, Ran Gong, Panfeng Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

VABench: Measuring Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Visual Demonstrations, Active Perception, and Metric Control

VABench is a benchmark that tests general‑purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on embodied spatial intelligence by requiring them to observe, reason, act, and revise based on visual demonstrations and active perception. The benchmark includes 14 task families, a fixed model‑agnostic controller, and evaluates models on target localization, spatial relations, and long‑horizon composition tracks without providing privileged object poses or learned action heads. Results show that while the best model achieves perfect target localization, overall task success remains modest, and active camera control and geometric transfer significantly influence performance.

By Zhongbo Zhang, Jiayi Jin, Yifan Wang, Zaibin Zhang, Haiwen Diao, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu