arXiv Computer Vision

Don't Just Look, Intervene: Perturbation Based Region Labeling for VQA Images

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

CCRV-Bench: Constraint-Based Evaluation of Causal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

CCRV-Bench is a constraint‑driven benchmark designed to evaluate visual causal reasoning in vision‑language models on single‑image physical scenarios. It assesses four causal task dimensions—causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention—while applying constraints such as entity symbolization, spatial grounding, factual adversarial constraints, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut learning. Experiments on 15 multimodal models reveal that constraint sensitivity varies by task and model, with intervention and spatial grounding having the largest impact and factual adversarial constraints improving causal diagnosis across models.

By Linyuan Gao, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Seeing What Is Actually There: PriVE-Bench and PriVE-Tools for Counterfactual Evaluation of Agentic Visual Evidence in VLMs

arXiv:2607. 16311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer visual questions using learned language and category priors rather than grounding their predictions in the image itself.

By Jingyu Sun, Jiachen Tu, Yuyang Xue, Yaoxin Jiang, Guoyi Xu, Zhengtao Yao, Rui Qian, Yizheng Sun, Hongpeng Zhou, Jingyuan Sun, Yan Lin
arXiv AI
Oct 26

Cycle-of-Thought: Self-Evaluative Iterative Reasoning for Table Visual Question Answering in Document Images

The paper introduces Self-RefineVQA, a training‑free, inference‑time framework that lets a single Vision‑Language Model iteratively generate, critique, and refine its own answers for table visual question answering. By forming a closed self‑feedback loop guided by prompts, the method corrects common reasoning errors such as spatial misalignment and logical hallucinations without requiring additional labeled data or model updates. Experiments on tabular VQA benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains across monolingual and cross‑lingual settings, especially for lightweight models, while keeping inference cost linear and eliminating the need for expensive supervised fine‑tuning.

By Somraj Gautam, Gaurav Harit
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Retrieval Heads Meet Vision: Uncovering How VLMs Locate and Extract Visual Information

The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.

By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models

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