VisLens: Single-Pass Interpretable Visual Search for Multimodal LLMs
Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.
The paper introduces VHOP, a data generation framework and benchmark for visual agentic search, and VHOP-Router, an end‑to‑end training pipeline that turns a standard embedding model into an autoregressive multi‑step retriever operating directly in visual latent space. VHOP-Router eliminates the need for intermediate text queries, boosting retrieval accuracy from under 5% to 76.3% and improving task success rates by 52.7% while dramatically reducing token usage and API payloads. The approach generalizes to unseen difficulty levels and realistic test sets, offering an efficient solution that preserves native LLM capabilities.
CatchUp is a training‑free framework that improves efficiency in large vision‑language models by depth‑aware re‑admission of visual tokens. It repeatedly evaluates query‑conditioned relevance, processes only selected tokens per decoder interval, and preserves deferred tokens for later re‑admission, using reference‑to‑current transition signals to approximate missed representation evolution. Experiments on three referring‑expression grounding datasets and six multimodal benchmarks show that CatchUp retains over 92% of full‑model performance with 88.9% fewer active tokens and reduces end‑to‑end latency by 8.0% at a 64‑token budget.
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2605.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90\% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. How...
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.