arXiv AI
Sep 30

NeuronEye: Query-Guided Visual Concept Activation for Vision-Language Reasoning

NeuronEye is a plug‑in framework that builds a sparse, concept‑level neuron vocabulary from intermediate vision‑language model (VLM) representations and selectively activates query‑relevant visual concepts during inference. It decomposes vision‑token states into an overcomplete sparse basis organized by concept clusters, uses the language query to activate relevant clusters, localizes the corresponding image patches, and injects the focused evidence back into the vision tokens, while a suppression mechanism attenuates dominant perceptual directions. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B and LLaVA‑1.6‑7B show that NeuronEye improves CV‑Bench overall accuracy by +3.1, boosts Distance by +9.5, and raises BLINK Multi‑view by +8.3, indicating that sparse neuron vocabularies can act as active interfaces for concept‑level visual reasoning.

By Ruiyu Yan, Bowen Chen, Shaowen Wan, Lin Zhao