arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan
arXiv:2609.37656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the visual and textual evidence supporting the generated responses rema...
By Bowen Yuan, Danny Wang, Ruihong Qiu, Zijian Wang, Zi Huang
arXiv:2606. 17389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical.
By Logan Mann, Yi Xia, Ajit Saravanan, Ishan Dave, Saadullah Ismail, Shikhar Shiromani, Emily Huang, Ruizhe Li, Kevin Zhu
arXiv:2606. 13870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided.
By Daniel Ben-Levi, Judah Goldfeder, Weiliang Zhao, Raz Lapid, Amit LeVi, Allen G. Roush, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Hod Lipson
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.
By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung