arXiv Computation and Language By Jiacheng Ding, Yanliang Qi, Cong Guo, Peihua Mai

See, Think, Use: Diagnosing Perception and Reasoning Failures in VLMs

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The paper introduces the See, Think, Use protocol, which evaluates vision‑language models by tracing each answer back to perception, reasoning, or the use of perception. It employs two additional questions per item—a localization probe for perception and a text‑replacement probe for reasoning—without requiring model weights. The protocol measures how often answers rely on the model’s own perception across counterfactual image pairs, and demonstrates that allocating compute to the failing stage can improve performance at lower cost.

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