arXiv:2608. 08021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) should answer from concrete image evidence rather than language priors, dataset shortcuts, or irrelevant visual context.
By Haojie Huang, Xinlei Yu, Chengming Xu, Zhangquan Chen, Cheng Yang, Qingdong He, Yu Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Xiaobin Hu
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:2609.22588v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on visual question answering benchmarks, yet often make decisions that contradict visual evidence they h...
By Yuyang Dai, Bofei Huang, Hongbo Zhang, Haoran Xie
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:2606. 11745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects.
By Haoping Yu, Yuanxi Li, Jing Ma
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Peng, Lee, Yin Zhang, Yanglin Zhang, Haonan Wu, Zishan Liu, Ruoxi Zang, Xin Zhu, Jiayin Zheng, Jian Yao, Zefeng Ji, Fei Ma
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
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
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
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:2610.16977v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual in-context learning (ICL) enables vision-language models (VLMs) to adapt at test time via demonstration examples, but its effectiveness depend...
By Shu Zhao, Tan Yu
arXiv:2608.28707v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in Visual Question Answering (VQA), yet they continue to struggle with quest...
By Anoop Senthil