arXiv AI By Henry Fordjour Ansah (Louisiana State University of New Orleans), Shreya Banerjee (Louisiana State University of New Orleans), Pranish Ghimire (Louisiana State University of New Orleans)

Evaluation of Small Vision-Language Models on Qualitative Mechanical Problems

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arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

MechReason: Benchmarking Multi-Image Multi-Hop Reasoning in Mechanical Engineering

MechReason is a new benchmark for multi-image, multi-hop reasoning in mechanical engineering, featuring 12,000 question-answer pairs with explicit reasoning chains and 21,000 visual items across nine evidence types. It covers eight task types—explanation, prediction, design, and diagnosis—within four reasoning dimensions, and is constructed through a four-stage pipeline that extracts engineering claims, generates verification-masked questions, and validates multimodal quality. Even state‑of‑the‑art models score only 62.89% on this dataset, highlighting its difficulty.

By Tengyue Wang, Kang An, Chenxu Du, Zhongyu Yang, Yuanchi Zhu, Xinqi Yang, Hebao Zhu, Ziliang Wang, FaQiang Qian, Yunli Yang, Qibing Ren
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT): Structured Multimodal Reasoning about Social Situations

The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.

By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap