arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 8

Do Vision Models Learn Physical Constraints or Rendering Shortcuts? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Grounded Physical Consistency

The paper introduces a counterfactual benchmark to evaluate whether vision models understand physical constraints or merely learn rendering shortcuts. Using Mitsuba 3, it generates 5,500 synthetic images across 500 scene families, each with a clean image and ten violations (shadows, reflections, support, surface response, occlusion). Diagnostic baselines (LLaVA‑1.5‑7B, Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, InternVL3.5‑8B) achieve 64.0–67.8 % macro‑F1 on a held‑out synthetic test set, but performance drops to 40.8 % for LLaVA‑1.5‑7B under an intervention shift, indicating reliance on rendering cues rather than true physical reasoning.

By M. Moein Esfahani, Sepehr Salem, Mohammed Alser, Vince Calhoun
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

When Instructions Retrieve Trajectories: Diagnosing and Mitigating Generalization Failures in VLA Models

The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.

By Hung-Jen Chen, Yu-Hsun Hou, Yan-Hong Chen, Yan-Fu Chen, Binghua Cai, Min Sun, Chun-Yi Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 17

AMIGO: Agentic Multi-Image Grounding Oracle Benchmark

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