The paper argues that apparent capability limits in vision‑language benchmarks often stem from the way answers are presented rather than from the models themselves. By comparing performance on COCO images with answer choices given as English names versus pixel coordinates, the authors show that models like Qwen3‑VL‑4B perform far better when answers are in natural language, and that the choice of answer format can swing model rankings by dozens of points. The study also demonstrates that different conventions (e.g., hue angles vs. pixel coordinates) reveal which formats a model can actually interpret, highlighting that a fixed answer vocabulary is not neutral across models.
arXiv:2606. 07861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding and reasoning, yet their fine-grained visual perception remains underexplored.
Large vision-language models can recognize the objects and attributes in a crowded scene yet assign an attribute to the wrong same-class instance. Generic visual-question-answering accuracy marks the...
The paper introduces a perception interface that separates vision from language in vision‑language models. A frozen perception stack detects objects, a deterministic semantic serializer converts the perceived state into text, and a standard text‑only large language model (LLM) answers questions. Experiments on a campus‑robot benchmark show that this serialized interface outperforms a zero‑shot VLM of the same language‑model size, especially as the language model shrinks, and that the advantage persists under paraphrase and different supervision regimes.
The paper shows that chain‑of‑thought (CoT) instructions can distort evaluation of vision‑language models (VLMs) when a scorer reads answer‑label logits before the model generates a rationale. On ScienceQA, Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B’s accuracy falls from 80.76% to 45.48% under this CoT‑prefix scoring, and most predictions incorrectly pick the first option. Linear probes and free generation recover most of the lost accuracy, indicating that the answer information remains in the hidden states but is missed by the early readout. The authors explain the mismatch with vocabulary and layer diagnostics, noting that probability mass shifts toward continuation tokens while answer information stays linearly accessible in later layers. The effect varies across datasets and models, but the study demonstrates that CoT‑prefix scoring can misrepresent model knowledge unless the requested and scored outputs are aligned.
arXiv:2607. 15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it?
The paper introduces a tool‑augmented framework that enhances a small Vision‑Language Model (Qwen3.5‑4B) with geometric tools—3D object detection, metric depth estimation, and deterministic solvers for distance, size, and bearing—to improve metric spatial reasoning. By moving metric computation from the model’s weights into explicit solvers, the approach achieves significant gains on ReVSI‑Bench tasks, notably increasing absolute distance accuracy from 0.46 to 0.74 MRA and relative direction accuracy from 25.9% to 73.4%. The modular design allows swapping in different detectors, enabling a clear separation between perception and reasoning errors, and the model can autonomously sequence the tools to match a scripted pipeline on most tasks.
arXiv:2609.38777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central goal of vision-language model (VLM) distillation is to transfer both the teacher's language capabilities and its visual understanding. Howeve...
arXiv:2607. 13305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark accuracy in video large language models (LLMs) is often treated as evidence of visual understanding.
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.
arXiv:2608. 16805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models can recognize the objects and attributes in a crowded scene yet assign an attribute to the wrong same-class instance.
arXiv:2608.16081v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open-weight and frontier vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on general image understanding, but their ability to interpret fine-grained han...
arXiv:2609.13308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion evaluation found that naming the target part in a manipulation prompt increased action accuracy by 0.32-0.63 across eight vision-language...