VQA
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CLIMB: Confidence-Guided Complementary Evidence for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
2026-10-02 15:09:06Hang Gao, Wujiang Xu, Zhixing Zhang, Kai Mei, Jingyi Yang, Dimitris N. MetaxasAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, but knowledge-intensive visual question answering often requires external textual evidence beyond the image and the model's parametric knowledge. Existing multimodal RAG systems commonly rely on Top-$K$ retrieval or reranking, which may return redundant passages and provide limited control over whether an answer update is sufficiently supported by the retrieved evidence. We propose \textit{CLIMB}, a training-free inference-time framework for multimodal RAG. CLIMB first constructs a compact complementary evidence pool using an MMR-style objective that balances query relevance and passage-level redundancy. It then performs confidence-controlled refinement within this fixed pool: an R/E/C critic scores passages by relevance, evidence specificity, and cross-modal alignment, while an evidence-grounded confidence estimator accepts an updated answer only when the estimated confidence increases. This design provides a simple stopping criterion and reduces unnecessary refinement without modifying the underlying retriever or MLLM. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show that CLIMB consistently improves over retrieval-augmented multimodal baselines. Ablations further indicate that complementary pooling, critic-based scoring, and iterative confidence-controlled refinement each contribute to the final performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03421
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Evaluating VQA in Vision Language Models using Cooperative Principles
2026-10-02 06:13:15Monika Shah, Sudarshan Balaji, Somdeb Sarkhel, Sanorita Dey, Deepak VenugopalAbstract
We evaluate the performance of Vision Language Models in Visual Question Answering (VQA) when questions violate Grice's maxims. To do this, we use VLMs to generate question modifiers that add non-essential, ambiguous or false information and show that in the presence of such violations, the VLMs that we evaluate (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llava) show diminished performance. Further, we empirically show the difference between how humans reason pragmatically compared to VLMs, and the difference in VLM reasoning when it resolves violations that are human-induced compared to those that are AI-generated. Finally, we show that human cognitive effort (measured through time-on-task in an experiment) is lower for resolving VLM-induced violations, but VLMs themselves perform less accurately in such cases.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02878
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UniWAM: Unified World-Action Model
2026-10-01 17:01:27Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Jingbo Wang, Shuai Zhou, Xicheng Gong, Zehua Fan, Ziyang Zhou, Junwu E, Haodong Yan, Fuhao Li, Qize Yu, Xu Huang, Pengwei Wang, Wen Chen, Shunbo Zhou, Haoang LiAbstract
Vision-language-action models benefit from the understanding and reasoning capabilities of pretrained vision-language models, but action-only supervision provides limited grounding in world dynamics. Conversely, world-action models inherit spatiotemporal priors from video generation models, yet remain limited in semantic understanding and reasoning under distribution shifts. We introduce UniWAM, a unified architecture that integrates a physical reasoner, a world generator, and an action predictor to jointly learn semantic understanding of the physical world, visual generation, and action prediction. To ensure the quality of the training data, we developed a rigorous data cleaning and annotation pipeline for both human egocentric data and robot data. To adapt the vision-language component to embodied tasks while preserving its inherited language capabilities, we represent low-level actions in natural language and introduce a pre-training recipe that assigns complementary supervision from visual question answering (VQA) data, human egocentric data, and robot demonstrations to the appropriate model components. During post-training, future visual noise augmentation reduces reliance on precise future predictions, while history-conditioned flow matching uses encoded action history to initialize action generation. Together, these designs significantly reduce denoising steps while maintaining performance. UniWAM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple evaluations, including in-distribution performance, robustness, generalization, instruction following, and long-horizon task execution. Furthermore, we uncover a log-linear scaling law of unified human-robot co-training, demonstrating the effectiveness of large-scale pre-training on a mixture of human and robot data.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02054
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Fusing Visual and Textual Representations via Multi-layer Fusing Transformers for Vietnamese Visual Question Answering
2026-10-01 13:04:59Cong Phu Nguyen, Huy Tien Nguyen, Tung LeAbstract
In recent decades, artificial intelligence has made significant progress in understanding and interacting with images. One of the important applications of this technology is Visual Question Answering (VQA), a research field that requires computers to understand and answer questions about images in a natural manner. Despite extensive research and development in VQA for English, there have been very few similar efforts made for other languages, especially Vietnamese. This gap presents a significant challenge and opportunity for the advancement of VQA technology in the Vietnamese language context. By bridging this gap, the field of Vietnamese VQA not only enriches the diversity of research in artificial intelligence but also enables practical applications in various domains, such as education, healthcare, and entertainment, catering to Vietnamese-speaking populations worldwide. Thus, the exploration and development of Vietnamese VQA systems hold immense potential for advancing both research and practical applications in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we propose a Multi-layer Fusing Transformer model utilizing a cross attention module to combine multiple modality features of images and texts from different layers in an aggregated representation. Our architecture allows us extract information from low level to high level. Through detailed experiments and ablation studies, our model achieves promising results against the competitive baselines in ViVQA dataset for Vietnamese language.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01637
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Compressing History into Memory: Distilling Transformers into Recurrent Transformers
2026-10-01 11:52:15Philippe Weinzaepfel, Christian Wolf, Mert B\"ulent Sariyildiz, Guillaume Bono, Gianluca MonaciAbstract
Transformers are AI's workhorse but their computational cost becomes prohibitive when processing long sequences. We target long-horizon streaming vision and robotics applications, where it is particularly impractical to store and maintain a history of observations. Recurrent Transformers address this limitation by maintaining fixed-size memory but their performance lags behind that of transformers operating over the full observation history. We argue that this gap does not stem from architectural limitations, but from differences in how these models learn to compress past information. Without access to an observation history, recurrent models must explicitly decide what to retain in memory at each step, a significantly harder learning problem. In this work, we propose a distillation approach that transfers the compression strategy of a classical full-history transformer to a recurrent variant. We enable this by designing a teacher model that explicitly compresses its observation history into a fixed-size bottleneck representation and directly supervise the student's memory with this bottleneck representation, effectively aligning the two compression mechanisms. We show that this approach allows to train a recurrent latent robotic memory with linear-time complexity on the Mem-RPE task while substantially narrowing the performance gap to full-history transformers. We additionally validate the same principle on streaming visual question answering (VQA) and observe improved recurrent predictions thanks to memory distillation
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21562
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Skeleton-and-Strategy Prompting: Training-Free Negation Understanding for Vision-Language Models
2026-10-01 06:53:45Yuliang Cai, Mohammad Rostami, Jesse ThomasonAbstract
Despite the strong performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on a wide range of visual question answering (VQA) tasks, these models consistently struggle to understand negation and produce incorrect answers when questions involve negated clauses. To address this limitation, we propose Skeleton-and-Strategy Prompting (\textbf{SSP}), a training-free, in-context learning method that improves VLM negation understanding capabilities without any parameter updates. Given a negation question, our method first abstracts the underlying question structure into a skeleton, retrieves a small set of same-skeleton questions from a lightweight question pool, then prompts the VLM to analyze their shared negation pattern and synthesize a single-sentence answering strategy. The skeleton and strategy are prepended to the test sample to guide the model correctly tackle the negation problems. Experiments on multiple negation VQA benchmarks show that SSP achieves state-of-the-art performance on negation-focused VQA tasks while remaining computationally efficient.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01180
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CineMR: Tool-Integrated Vision-Language Reasoning for Quantitative Cardiac MRI Assessment
2026-10-01 06:43:42Kunyang Li, Hai Nguyen, Joshua Lowe, Chenguang Zhao, Peace C. Madueme, Mehdi Hedjazi Moghari, Mubarak Shah, Pegah Khosravi, Yuzhang ZhangAbstract
Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR), including cine imaging, is a reference standard for the noninvasive assessment of cardiac morphology and ventricular function. Cine CMR interpretation integrates qualitative visual assessment with quantitative measurements of ventricular volumes, ejection fraction, myocardial mass, wall thickness, and regional wall motion. Current medical vision-language models (VLMs) cannot reliably derive quantitative measurements from multidimensional cine images without analysis tools. We present CineMR, a tool-augmented VLM that invokes cardiac image-analysis tools and integrates their outputs into interleaved reasoning for quantitative CMR assessment. We also construct a multi-cohort visual question answering benchmark covering quantitative metric extraction, multiclass diagnosis, and differential diagnosis, together with tools for segmentation, phase selection, volumetry, morphometry, and regional wall motion analysis. CineMR is trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on tool-interaction traces followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with conditional tool-use rewards. On the multi-cohort cine CMR benchmark, CineMR achieves 35.9% pass@1 and 58.9% pass@4, compared with 1.5% pass@1 for the Qwen3-VL-8B backbone and 0.0% and 7.0% pass@1 for LLaVA-Med v1.5 and MedGemma-4B, respectively. Correct tool invocation reaches 99.8% after GRPO, up from 78.9% after SFT. Live tool outputs improve ventricular measurement accuracy by 20.4--23.7% over direct model predictions, and removing all tools reduces pass@1 from 35.9% to 27.9%. These results highlight the importance of reliable tool use for quantitative cine CMR reasoning and support CineMR as a promising approach for assistive cardiac image assessment. Code, benchmark resources, and model weights are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01166
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Two Clocks in Diffusion MLLMs: When Answers Stabilize Before Rationales Unfold
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An answer candidate in a masked diffusion MLLM can stabilize while its rationale is still unfolding. We distinguish retrospective stabilization of the logged candidate from token commitment, and examine these two clocks relative to rationale generation. Analyzing our results across three visual question-answering benchmarks, we find that 89.4-98.1% of the rationale-side canvas remains unwritten at stabilization in single-block, EOS-suppressed LaViDa runs. On V*Bench, reducing block length from 128 to 8 changes this fraction from 89.4% to 1.7%, together with answer coverage and the eligible observation window. Under EOS-enabled prompting, direct instructions improve Nemotron's overall accuracy by 15.0 and 19.5 percentage points on M3CoT and ScienceQA, but reduce LaViDa/V*Bench accuracy by 11.0 points. A symmetric decomposition associates the larger absolute component of each change with coverage rather than conditional accuracy. Matched-canvas image ablations measure visual sensitivity alongside answer stabilization, separating the two temporal readouts. Together, these measurements distinguish answer stabilization, rationale unfolding, and visual sensitivity, and identify coverage as the larger component of the prompting differences.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00953
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Video Evidence Indexing: Learning Where to Look from Video Previews for Token-Budgeted Long-Video Question Answering
2026-09-30 21:51:16Haowen Guan, Shengzhi Li, Shichao PeiAbstract
Long-video question answering is limited by the high cost of visual tokens and by the fixed context width of current VLMs. A long-video question may require broad temporal coverage, but the answer is often supported by only a compact set of moments. To locate these moments efficiently, we propose token-budgeted Video Evidence Indexing (VEI): given a dense low-resolution Video Preview, the model constructs a compact high-resolution Evidence Set for final reasoning. We treat VEI as a policy that must jointly solve \textit{evidence localization}, which finds question-relevant moments, and \textit{budget planning}, which decides where to spend the limited high-resolution frame budget. We implement this idea with an inference pipeline: the Video Preview provides cheap global coverage, Video Evidence Indexing constructs the Evidence Set, and Answer Generation combines both inputs for final VQA. To address missing frame-level supervision, we adopt privileged self-distillation, where an answer-aware teacher guides the normal test-time policy on student-generated indexing traces. We explore previews at 1, 6, 12, and 24 visual tokens per frame, training a single policy that supports all four resolutions. Experiments show that Video Evidence Indexing improves accuracy under limited visual budgets, and self-distillation further improves both QA accuracy and temporal evidence localization.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00757
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R-GroundBench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for R-Group Groundingin Markush Molecular Editing
2026-09-30 20:45:31Xin Wang, Zichuan Ying, Xinna Lin, Junqi Zhang, Hanyi Xiong, Tianyu Gao, Hairong Zhang, Qixiang Hua, Botian Shi, Zhenhailong Wang, Kaicheng YuAbstract
Recent advances in AI for scientific discovery enable molecular understandingand design, yet reasoning over incomplete chemical representations this http URL structures, which encode molecular families through variable R-groupplaceholders (\textit{R\textsubscript{1}}, \textit{R\textsubscript{2}}, \textit{X}, etc.), are ubiquitous in pharmaceutical patents and requiregrounding across molecular, textual, and chemical this http URL, existing molecule-language benchmarks focus on fully specifiedmolecules, leaving R-group grounding largely this http URL introduce R-GroundBench:, a diagnostic benchmark built from real patent Markushstructures, featuring a Multiple-Choice (VQA) track with controlled difficultyand modality splits, and an open-ended Generation this http URL results reveal a substantial gap between recognition andmolecular this http URL models achieve over 90\% accuracy on Easy VQA, performance drops to56--66\% on Hard VQA when shortcuts are this http URL-domain VLMs also remain unreliable, achieving only 25.7--46.2\% on HardVQA despite domain-specific this http URL, Generation Exact Match remains below 20\% for most models and below8\% when visual input is this http URL findings reveal that current AI systems lack reliable grounding andexecution for Markush editing, highlighting challenges for AI-drivenscientific discovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00700
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Multimodal Flow: Unified Flow Modeling of Language and Vision in Embedding Spaces
2026-09-30 17:59:57Hongyuan Tao, Xinggang Wang, Lianghui Zhu, Yongkang Li, Yunchao Wei, Bin Feng, Shaoyu Chen, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Kai YuAbstract
We present Multimodal Flow, a fully continuous generative model of language and vision. Most unified multimodal models either model both language and quantized images as discrete tokens or combine discrete language prediction with continuous image generation. The former introduces a visual quantization bottleneck. The latter requires modality-dependent objectives and sampling procedures. Fully continuous modeling avoids these trade-offs and enables a shared generative process, but remains underexplored for multimodal pretraining. Multimodal Flow introduces a unified continuous architecture that integrates multimodal continuous representations with a shared chunk-causal flow backbone. It organizes text blocks and images as ordered continuous hyperchunks, preserving textual token order and visual spatial structure. The backbone learns a single vector field over these hyperchunks through Flow Matching. Joint attention enables cross-modal interaction, while modality-specific feed-forward networks process each modality. The model predicts multiple target chunks in parallel during training and generates hyperchunks sequentially at inference. We instantiate MF-1 and pretrain it on multimodal data. Across 0.6B, 1.2B, and 1.6B scales, continued pretraining consistently improves multimodal modeling. With only 150B pretraining tokens, MF-1 achieves an average score of 82.8 across GenEval and DPG-Bench and 75.3 across VQAv2, MMBench, and POPE, remaining competitive with unified models trained on substantially more data. Under matched data, optimization, and parameter budgets, Multimodal Flow further outperforms representative hybrid and discrete models. These results establish continuous chunk-based embedding flow modeling as a new fully continuous paradigm for unified multimodal modeling. The related code and model are publicly released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40362
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STARS: From Spatiotemporal Dynamics to Social Representations in Human-Robot Interaction
2026-09-30 17:35:08Nathan Tsoi, Michael J. Munje, Tejas Oberoi, Rishab Maheshwari, Pengen Zheng, Tanush Chauhan, Peter Stone, Joydeep BiswasAbstract
Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition, common-sense reasoning, and contextual understanding, capabilities that align with the nuanced requirements of social robot navigation. However, it remains unclear whether VLMs can accurately understand complex social navigation scenes (e.g., inferring the spatial-temporal relations among agents and human intentions), which is essential for safe and socially compliant robot navigation. While some recent works have explored the use of VLMs in social robot navigation, no existing work systematically evaluates their ability to meet these necessary conditions. In this paper, we introduce the Social Navigation Scene Understanding Benchmark (SocialNav-SUB), a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs for scene understanding in real-world social robot navigation scenarios. SocialNav-SUB provides a unified framework for evaluating VLMs against human and rule-based baselines across VQA tasks requiring spatial, spatiotemporal, and social reasoning in social robot navigation. Through experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs, we find that while the best-performing VLM achieves an encouraging probability of agreeing with human answers, it still underperforms simpler rule-based approach and human consensus baselines, indicating critical gaps in social scene understanding of current VLMs. Our benchmark sets the stage for further research on foundation models for social robot navigation, offering a framework to explore how VLMs can be tailored to meet real-world social robot navigation needs. An overview of this paper along with the code and data can be found at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40245
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LEAP: Learned Block-wise Evidence Retrieval for Long Audio-Video Perception
2026-09-30 15:19:12Juyi Lin, Zhiqiang Lao, Jiali Cui, Lin Zhao, Pu Zhao, Dichang Zhang, Arman Akbari, Yu Qi, Xinru Jiang, Yanzhi Wang, Heather Yu, Liang PengAbstract
Hour-scale audio-visual question answering is constrained by a context dilemma: dense whole-recording encoding rapidly exhausts context limits, whereas uniform temporal compression severely dilutes fine-grained acoustic and visual evidence. We introduce LEAP, a framework where the model retrieves its own evidence without placing the whole recording in one context. LEAP divides a recording into fixed-duration blocks, applying a lightweight localization pass to each block to score short candidate windows. The highest-ranked windows are pooled and re-encoded in a single bounded answer pass. Consequently, the answer input and peak context remain independent of the recording duration. By decoupling evidence localization from reasoning, our framework can localize candidate temporal windows over pre-computed transcripts without decoding media frames, while preserving fine-grained visual and non-speech evidence by routing the final answering pass over raw audio-visual streams. LEAP trains both stages: a localization LoRA improves the selected windows, and an answer LoRA improves the answers read from the same windows. The block grid natively supports causal queries, enabling LEAP to support streaming inference without streaming-specific training. Across several AVQA benchmarks, LEAP improves over the Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B baseline by 4.5-16.8%, and transfers to a second omni-modal backbone, MiniCPM-o 4.5, surpassing its published results by 3.1-13.0%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39938
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Learning Where to Look: Anatomical Grounding and Guided Attention for Cardiac MRI Vision-Language Models
2026-09-30 15:00:44Bangwei Guo, Xiao Chen, Boris Mailhe, Jia Yao, Yiqing Wang, Ankush Mukherjee, Yikang Liu, Zheyuan Zhang, Hang Yu, Terrence Chen, Shanhui SunAbstract
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) enables assessment of cardiac anatomy, ventricular function, and myocardial tissue characteristics. Clinicians interpret these images by identifying cardiac structures and focusing on the regions relevant to each clinical question, motivating anatomically guided vision-language models (VLMs). Yet CMR-specific supervision for anatomical localisation and clinical question answering remains limited. To address this gap, we investigate fine-grained CMR visual question answering through anatomical grounding and guided attention. We construct 128,915 anatomical-grounding and 42,799 clinical QA pairs across short-axis cine, late gadolinium enhancement, and long-axis cine. These datasets support anatomical recognition, localisation, and clinical assessment without requiring paired reports for individual training images. To help the model learn where to look, we introduce Cardiac Anatomy-Routed Attention (CARA), which selects predicted anatomical priors according to the question and guides decoder attention with learned task-specific strengths. Combining anatomical grounding pretraining with CARA yields our model, CARA-VL. Experiments demonstrate CARA-VL's strengths in clinical assessment and regional localisation across CMR imaging settings, with promising generalization to an external clinical cohort. Together, our data and method provide a practical framework for studying and advancing cardiac visual understanding in VLMs. We will release the QA data derived from public datasets upon publication.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39899
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Steering Fields: Adaptive Vector Fields for Safe Image Generation and Beyond
2026-09-30 12:06:48Simone Facchiano, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele, Wolfgang Stammer, Fabio Galasso, Jonas FischerAbstract
As state-of-the-art text-to-image flow models achieve near-photorealistic quality, controlling their outputs, e.g., suppressing harmful content while promoting benign alternatives, has become a central challenge. The current steering paradigm consists of adding a global steering vector to selected activations. While functional, a fixed and example-agnostic vector applied uniformly along the entire trajectory cannot adapt to the changing state of the generation and often causes unintended global changes. We introduce Steering Fields, a generalization of steering vectors that adaptively re-estimates the steering direction at each step of the generative process. Steering Fields operate on the noisy states of flow models, expose a continuous trade-off between steering strength and content preservation, and are compositional, enabling the simultaneous induction and inhibition of concepts, setting a new state of the art on safety steering benchmarks. Despite using no explicit spatial masks or object priors, the trajectory-adaptive estimation naturally preserves local structure, in a manner reminiscent of image editing. In fact, Steering Fields can serve as a structure-preserving image-editing technique that achieves state-of-the-art semantic fidelity (CLIP, VQAScore), while remaining model-agnostic and inversion-free.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39573
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HiWE: Hierarchical World Knowledge Model with Visual Keypoint Enhancement for Zero-Shot 3D Path Planning
2026-09-30 09:00:25Guoqing Ma, Mingqi Yuan, Chen Gao, Jiayu Chen, Shan YuAbstract
Robot demonstration generation requires a system to identify where an interaction should occur, plan a feasible motion, and execute the required contact. HiWE connects these decisions through a point-based interface between visual grounding and language-based planning. PointVLM is instruction-tuned to associate task-relevant objects with image coordinates using a mixture of point annotations, segmentation-derived samples, robot observations, and visual question answering data. Depth measurements lift these predictions into a semantic 3D representation. A language planner, 3DLLM, uses this representation to specify end-effector waypoints and gripper commands, while a hybrid grasping module resolves local grasp poses. The evaluation covers 14 simulated manipulation tasks and four physical-robot tasks, together with ablations of the visual training data, spatial inputs, and grasp selection. Here, zero-shot execution refers to deployment without task-specific demonstration training; the visual model uses existing robot data during fine-tuning. This paper describes the original point-based formulation of the framework; its relationship to the subsequent GeneralVLA extension is detailed in the introduction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39323
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ASENA: Self-evolving Agents for Embodied Navigation
2026-09-30 07:53:50An-Chieh Cheng, Isabella Liu, Edmund Bu, Johan Bjorck, Hongxu Yin, Zhengyi Luo, Jan Kautz, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu, Sifei LiuAbstract
We present ASENA, an embodied agent system that connects general-purpose coding agents to robot sensing, computation, supervised execution, and persistent experience. Agents can write and execute programs, inspect recorded outcomes, repair failures, and reuse notes and executable skills while keeping their model weights fixed. We further introduce ASENA-VLN, a 4B monocular navigation policy that serves as an optional tool within this programmable system. ASENA-VLN predicts body-frame trajectories for both extended routes and short-horizon behaviors using a shared vision-language decoder trained on route instructions, visual question answering, and a newly curated dataset of geometry-derived atomic navigation tasks. As a standalone policy, ASENA-VLN achieves state-of-the-art success rates of 68.7% on R2R and 70.2% on RxR. When integrated with a coding agent, learned navigation improves ASENA's success rate by 11 percentage points on both agentic benchmarks while reducing execution time. Through persistent workspace evolution and simulator feedback, ten passes over recurring 100-task subsets further improve success from 72% to 98% on R2R and from 65% to 89% on RxR. On embodied question answering, ASENA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with fewer interaction steps. Finally, real-world demonstrations on a Unitree G1 combine search, visual inspection, spatial reasoning, and synthesized gestures without a pre-built map, illustrating how online programming extends robot behavior beyond route following and predefined skills.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39207
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CRAFT: Causal Responsibility and Failure Tracing in Medical Vision Language Models
2026-09-30 02:41:33Chunzheng Zhu, Jiaqi Zeng, Hongbo Zhao, Yihang Chen, Yijun Wang, Jianxin LinAbstract
As vision language models are increasingly deployed in clinical diagnosis, understanding how they internally resolve competing visual and textual signals becomes a safety imperative. Existing mechanistic analyses remain confined to unimodal text and offer no explanation for why a single misleading sentence can override a correct image based diagnosis, or why a model commits to a confident answer despite insufficient visual evidence. We find that these two safety risks, arbitration failure where textual context overrides visual grounding and brake failure where the model commits without adequate evidence, are mediated by spatially disjoint attention head populations: arbitration heads form a mid-to-deep wideband reflecting cross-layer evidence competition, while brake heads concentrate in a narrow middle-to-late layer band that regulates evidence sufficiency and abstention behavior. To ground these observations in causal circuitry, we introduce CRAFT, which localizes each failure mode to a minimal causal head set via dual criteria and verifies necessity and sufficiency through temporal probes and Tuned Lens trajectory analysis. Excising arbitration heads sharply reduces conflict following with negligible degradation on clean inputs, while excising brake heads restores appropriate abstention under degraded visual evidence. The two interventions target spatially disjoint head sets and produce distinct corrective effects, underscoring the mechanistic separability of the failure modes. Experiments across multiple medical VQA benchmarks and VLM architectures validate both the localization and interventions, demonstrating that the identified heads causally drive each failure mode and that targeted modulation generalises without retraining. The code is available at GitHub repository.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38810
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Composition, Not Conversation: VLMs Lose the Scene, Not the Thread
2026-09-29 18:29:43L. D. M. S. Sai Teja, Ufaq Khan, N. Siva Gopala Krishna, Satyajit Tourani, Ashshak Sharifdeen, Fida Mohammad Thoker, Bernard Ghanem, Muhammad Haris KhanAbstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly reason over visual evidence that is cropped, segmented, retrieved, or revealed over time. Yet most VQA benchmarks present the complete image and question at once. We ask what models lose when the same information is fragmented. We introduce Layered-VQA, with 93 scenes and 300 questions. Each image is decomposed into ordered RGBA layers that exactly recompose the original scene, and each question is annotated with supporting, minimal-sufficient, and distractor layers. We evaluate eleven open-weight VLMs from 3B to 32B parameters and two proprietary models with a scale of 187,200 conversations, graded by 1.74M open-model cross-judgments. We find three consistent failures. Loss in Composition: fragmenting the question has a small effect, but fragmenting the scene substantially reduces accuracy; recomposing the same layers largely restores performance. Oracle Inversion: even oracle-selected sufficient evidence can perform worse than the complete scene. Loss in Grounding: as more evidence is required, grounding degrades much faster than answer accuracy. Together, these results show that having the right visual evidence is not enough. How that evidence is composed and presented determines whether models can use and ground it. The right evidence is not enough: VLMs need the scene it came from.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38368
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DMA$^2$: Pixel-space Distribution Matching with Adversarial and Anchor Losses
2026-09-29 17:59:03Xin Lin, Zhifei Zhang, Yuqian Zhou, Haitian Zheng, Shaoteng Liu, Lehan Yang, Zhe Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Truong NguyenAbstract
Distribution matching distillation (DMD) provides a general framework for few-step diffusion generation, but its modern text-to-image instantiations have been developed primarily around latent diffusion. It therefore overlooks key properties and design opportunities of native RGB. We revisit two DMD interfaces for pixel-space teachers. On the teacher-matching side, diagnostics show low-noise RGB matching is dominated by a local-texture cue, motivating a fixed high-noise matching band. On the real-data side, native clean-RGB outputs allow guidance from an external visual representation without traversing a decoder or sharing the heavy fake-score critic. DINO-Adv removes this critic from the adversarial gradient path and supplies local parametric patch guidance. For distribution-level guidance, we introduce AF-Loss, a parameter-free auxiliary semantic distribution-field objective designed for text-to-image DMD. It operates on detached rolling real and generated supports in the shared DINOv2 space while preserving prompt-conditioned teacher supervision. AF-Loss adds no learnable parameters or inference-time computation. Together these designs form DMA$^2$. Across DPG-Bench, GenEval, VQAScore, and COCO30K, the four-step DMA$^2$ student performs better than the 25-step teacher and evaluated few-step distillers.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38156
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