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arXiv:2605.27243v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large vision-language models increasingly rely on long-context modeling to reason over documents, hour-level videos, and long-horizon agent traject...
The paper demonstrates that vision‑language models (VLMs) possess a small set of attention heads, called Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), that are causally responsible for linking text prompts to specific image regions. By adapting head‑scoring techniques from language models, the authors identify VRHs as the heads whose attention from output prediction tokens, summed over the ground‑truth referent region, most reliably indicates causal grounding. Experiments across eleven VLMs and five referring‑expression benchmarks show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect, and that VRHs generalize across diverse visual tasks and transfer across models sharing an LLM backbone.
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.
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.
arXiv:2601.19060v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MM-RAG) augments visual question answering (VQA) with external knowledge, but many systems rely on...
The paper investigates how retrieval heads—sparse attention heads that transfer information from context to output—behave when multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are extended to include audio-visual inputs. Across 18 language, vision‑language, and omni‑modal checkpoints, the authors find that retrieval heads remain sparse and largely shared across modalities, with less than 2 % of heads being common to all modalities; ablating these shared heads degrades tasks such as document understanding, spatial perception, and visual mathematics. By training retrieval heads with a ranking objective, they demonstrate a 6.03‑point improvement in Recall@1 on the MMDocIR benchmark for Qwen3‑VL‑8B and improved document retrieval across three model families.