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:2606. 05843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency on complex vision-language tasks, the mechanisms by which they extract query-relevant visual features from complex, noisy contexts remain opaque.
By Ruoxi Sun, Quantong Qiu, Juntao Li, Zecheng Tang, Yihang Lou, Min Zhang
Object hallucination in multimodal large language models arises when language priors and corpus co-occurrence bias outweigh the visual evidence, with nothing tying an individual object mention to what the image shows. Most remedies intervene at decoding time without training, yet under a unified protocol their benefit is confined to short captions;supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a detail- rich corpus lengthens captions, but over forty percent still name absent objects.
ReWEIGH the Evidence is a training‑free decoding technique that calibrates token‑level ordinal visual evidence to reduce hallucinations in large vision‑language models. It aggregates vocabulary ranks across visual positions, compares candidates to a token‑specific reference derived from unlabeled images, and applies a bounded penalty only when evidence falls below this reference. Experiments on four 7B backbones show up to a 21.3% reduction in hallucinated object mentions while largely preserving or improving descriptive and general performance, with minimal added latency.
By Jihae Jeong, Junha Choi, Hwanjo Yu
Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions. KI-VQA involves multiple sub-problems -referring expression understanding, visual grounding, object recognition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning-yet existing benchmarks typically report only end-task accuracy, obscuring where failures arise.
arXiv:2607. 03358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how visual information is routed in vision-language models (VLMs).
By Israfel Salazar, Stella Frank, Dan Oneata, Desmond Elliott, Constanza Fierro
arXiv:2606. 06890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently rely on language priors, producing confident answers that are weakly grounded in visual evidence.
By Runyu Zhou, Qi Zhang, Qixun Wang, Yisen Wang
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression.
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.
arXiv:2602. 00344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens.
By Beidi Zhao, Wenlong Deng, Xinting Liao, Yushu Li, Nazim Shaikh, Yao Nie, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv:2607. 07179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) presents a complex multimodal challenge, requiring models to exploit visual, textual, and layout information from documents.
By Miguel Lopez-Duran, Elena Marrero, Julian Fierrez, Marta Robledo-Moreno, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Daniel DeAlcala, Aythami Morales, Ruben Tolosana, Oscar Delgado, Alvaro Ortigosa, Javier Ortega-Garcia