The paper investigates how frozen vision‑language models (VLMs) respond to edits made directly to their internal object‑token representations, bypassing the image input. It introduces an answer‑key‑free protocol that evaluates edits by logical consistency and self‑audit, revealing that responses depend on explicit edit teaching, token cleanliness, density, and a separable reading axis. The study demonstrates that image‑free token edits can preserve most free‑text VQA performance and even outperform oracle methods on remote‑sensing benchmarks, with findings consistent across multiple datasets and model backbones.
arXiv:2608.21762v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) fail many detail-centric questions for a concrete reason: the answer is visible in the image, yet lost after the image...
By Jinchang Zhu, Rong Fu, Yi Ding, Chenghao Wu, Ying Liu, Menglin Yang
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.
By Hiroto Osaka, Shohei Taniguchi, Gouki Minegishi, Kai Yamashita, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo
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. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
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: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
Semantically Aligned Gradient-Driven Context-Preserving Image Editing (IABEdit) is a model‑agnostic framework that embeds differentiable semantic verification into the training of generative image editors. By using a frozen vision‑language model to extract spatially‑aware descriptors from ground‑truth edits and a trainable aligner to reproduce them from generated outputs, the residual becomes a gradient that teaches the generator both what to edit and where, without adding inference‑time VLM cost. IABEdit is compatible with various backbones (e.g., U‑Net in Stable Diffusion and MMDiT in FLUX) and improves structural fidelity on MagicBrush, achieves state‑of‑the‑art instruction adherence on RealEdit and EMU Edit, and outperforms the proprietary Gemini agent on the D‑LORD surveillance benchmark under heavy occlusion.
"whyItMatters":"IABEdit demonstrates that incorporating semantic verification during training can produce more accurate, well‑localized edits and outperform existing methods even in challenging surveillance scenarios, as shown by its superior metrics and human/GPT‑4o evaluations."
By Chiranjeev Chiranjeev, Muskan Dosi, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
arXiv:2605. 01733v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hallucinate objects that are not present, and a growing line of work tries to curb this by feeding the model its own generated caption as auxiliary evidence -- assuming that a caption, once available, is something to consume.
By Zeshang Li, Shuoyang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 06445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly utilized as the conditioning backbone for diffusion-based image editing due to their remarkable multimodal reasoning capabilities.
By Yoav Baron, Sara Dorfman, Roni Paiss, Daniel Cohen-Or, Or Patashnik
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.
By Cong Xu, Ravi Sankar
arXiv:2609.24362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sandboxed computer environments support multi-step reasoning with tools, executable programs, and persistent files, yet their extension from language m...
By Hexiong Yang, Mingrui Chen, Jie Cao, Ran He