VQA
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C$^2$-Routing: Complementary Cropping and Compression for Efficient Vision-Language Inference
2026-11-10 18:32:28Guorui Lu, Qinyu ChenAbstract
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14469
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Looking One Step Ahead: An Anticipation-guided Agent for Object State Readout in Videos
2026-11-10 14:05:39Yuanhe Tian, Yan SongAbstract
Understanding the progress of an activity requires tracking how the objects involved change over time. Object state readout provides this information by describing a target object's states and transitions across video frames. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate detailed visual descriptions, these descriptions may leave the attributes needed to distinguish successive states insufficiently specified. In this paper, we propose look-ahead state readout (LASER), an anticipation-guided agent for object state readout that uses possible next-step changes to determine which attributes to inspect in the present. Given temporally ordered frames and a target object, LASER converts anticipated changes into targeted visual questions and inspects the current frame to establish attribute values. It then checks state readouts and forecasts against independent observations of subsequent frames, refining a state record used to generate the final description. Reusable textual observation skills guide this process and are refined by tracing discrepancies with reference captions to the responsible instructions. Candidate revisions are selected on separate videos based on improved caption quality without increased contradictions with reference facts. Model parameters remain frozen throughout adaptation and inference, and the revised skills remain fixed during evaluation. Experiment results and further analysis on OSCaR and PLM RCap show consistent improvements of LASER over strong baselines and existing approaches, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14113
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CoMet: Context and Multiplicity Decomposition for Multimodal Uncertainty Estimation
2026-11-10 04:23:11Sanghyuk Chun, William Yang, Amaya Dharmasiri, Olga RussakovskyAbstract
Uncertainty estimation has been a long-standing challenge in AI models; it amounts to "knowing what you don't know," and metacognition is notoriously difficult even for humans (cf. the Dunning-Kruger effect). Although it is still far from solved even in simpler classification systems, tackling it in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is becoming increasingly important. Within MLLMs, uncertainty can stem from any of the diverse sources as well as from their relationships, and further can stem from the unbounded answers in the open-ended setting. To tackle the issues, we propose CoMet, an MLLM uncertainty estimation method by decomposing uncertainty into a context-specific term and a multiplicity-specific term. The former captures ambiguity induced by the given context (e.g., task or prompt), while the latter captures how many plausible answers determined by the context remain compatible with the given input. We train a lightweight post-hoc uncertainty module to estimate these quantities, which enables efficient uncertainty estimation without autoregressive answer generation or repeated sampling. Experiments on various open-ended multimodal benchmarks, hallucination detection, and multiple-choice visual question answering benchmarks show that CoMet consistently improves uncertainty estimation over existing baselines while remaining efficient in practice. Code is available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.32012
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T2I Models Rarely Invert Negation but Often Fail to Suppress Negated Concepts: Benchmarking Negation Suppression in Text-to-Image Generation
2026-11-06 10:56:01Akansha Gautam, Aparna Bharati, Mayank Vatsa, Richa SinghAbstract
Text-to-image diffusion models often fail to suppress explicitly negated concepts, such as a lamp for "a desk without a lamp." We introduce T2I-NSI, a benchmark and metric for measuring negation sensitivity in text-to-image generation. It pairs each negated prompt with a canonical positive counterpart and factorizes negation by linguistic form (lexical/semantic, morphological, syntactic) and target type (objects, attributes, relations, compositions, and nested cases). The benchmark contains 759,869 paired prompt atoms over a 5,082-object catalog, with 916,272 images (911,982 open-weights, 4,290 closed-source), scored by a Basic CLIP estimator and a Robust ensemble of CLIP, VQA and open-vocabulary detection. Negation sensitivity is low: open-weights generators score NSI <= 0.038, while GPT-Image-1.5 and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image reach about 0.09. The dominant failure is under-suppression rather than misdirection. Inverse interpretation is essentially absent (0.00% across over 450K atom-model evaluations), whereas models render the concept under both prompts on 8-19% of atoms and only partly suppress it on a further 9-25%; most remaining atoms are too weakly rendered to label. A blinded human study (420 atoms, nine annotators) corroborates the near-absence of inversion and the high persistence rate, and a matched-prompt comparison shows the open-versus-closed gap (~3.5x) is not a prompt-generator artifact. Code and data: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09304
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OpenView: Empowering MLLMs with Out-of-view VQA
2026-11-06 06:36:32Qixiang Chen, Cheng Zhang, Chi-Wing Fu, Jingwen Ye, Jianfei CaiAbstract
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show great potential in natural image understanding. Yet, they perform well, mainly on reasoning in-view contents within the image frame. This paper presents the first study on out-of-view (OOV) understanding, i.e., the ability to reason about objects, activities, and scenes beyond the visible frame of a perspective view. Our technical contributions are threefold. First, we design OpenView, a four-stage pipeline that leverages panoramic imagery for large-scale and diverse multi-choice VQA synthesis, where full-scene coverage enables flexible view framing while preserving global scene awareness. Second, we curate OpenView-Dataset, a high-quality synthetic dataset from diverse real-world panoramas to empower MLLMs upon supervised fine-tuning. Third, we build OpenView-Bench, a benchmark that jointly measures choice and rationale accuracy for interpretable and diagnosable evaluation. Experimental results show that despite having a large gap from human performance in OOV VQA answer selection, multiple MLLMs, upon empowered by OpenView, can consistently boost their performance, uplifted from 48.3% to 62.3% on average. Code, benchmark, and data are available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18563
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GeoJeV: Unified Spatial Probability for Training-Free Efficient Evidence Acquisition in Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing
2026-11-06 02:12:39Xinyi Niu, Lingfeng Chen, Jiehua Zhang, Panhe Hu, Li Liu, Zhen Liu, Yongxiang LiuAbstract
Ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing imagery provides rich spatial details but poses challenges for accurate and efficient multimodal understanding. Existing evidence acquisition methods selectively explore relevant image regions, yet largely rely on generative multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for intermediate search control. However, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) primarily aligns these models with human-preferred responses rather than explicitly optimizing region-level relevance judgments, while repeated autoregressive decoding introduces additional computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose GeoJeV, a training-free method that formulates evidence acquisition as spatial probability-driven decision making. At each evaluated region, a frozen JeV model produces a probability distribution over candidate regions. Specifically, Region Rank prioritizes candidate regions, Sparse Branch adaptively determines branching width through sparse probability support, and Depth Gate controls refinement depth based on branch sparsity and distribution concentration. By coordinating search priority, branching width, and refinement depth through a shared distribution, GeoJeV reduces reliance on RLHF-aligned generation and eliminates intermediate decoding. Experiments on LRS-GRO, MME-RealWorld-RS, and LRS-VQA achieve accuracies of 60.59%, 52.79%, and 34.32%, respectively. Across the three benchmarks, GeoJeV improves the average accuracy of Qwen3-VL-8B by +5.32pp with only 1.12 additional seconds per question, while achieving a 7.8-fold inference speedup over the recent method.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08879
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Where Do Reported Long-Video QA Gains Come From? A Controlled Audit of Frame Selection, Evidence Injection, and Expert Routing
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Long-video question answering is usually studied as frame selection: which few frames should a vision-language model see? We introduce VideoRouteAudit, a controlled audit that separates this choice from two alternatives, injecting non-visual evidence and routing to another answering model. It holds the backbone, frame budget, decoding, prompt and grader fixed while varying one decision at a time. On the full Video-MME long bucket (n=900, K=8), no tested selector significantly improves over uniform sampling. The largest selection-only estimate is +1.9 pt (95% CI [-1.2,+5.0]) and our cascade is +1.2 pt [-1.7,+4.1]; all are equivalent to uniform within +/-5 pt. The same contrasts are unstable at the n=200 subset scale commonly used: three of four are up to 3.8x larger, one reverses sign, and resampled 200-item subsets reverse the full-bucket effect's sign in 35.8% of draws. The audit also corrects our own first results. The anomaly-domain "+ASR" arms injected no text, so the pooled +4.7 pt gain was selection plus a development prefix. With transcripts, ASR lowers XD-Violence accuracy by 10.0 pt when appended after the question and not at all when placed before it, and lowers UCF-Crime by 13.0 pt either way; on Video-MME, placing it first adds about 4 pt (7 on Qwen2-VL) to uniform sampling and to the cascade alike (post hoc, unadjusted). Swapping the answering model gives the largest contrast (+15.1 pt on MUSIC-AVQA, +33.3 pt on its worst type), but the same audio-visual expert with its soundtrack silenced keeps 92% of the gain (69% with a mismatched soundtrack), so the contrast is mostly a model swap. Code, per-item predictions and scripts that recompute every statistic are available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07329
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TraCE: Trajectory-Aware Concepts for Explainable Video Understanding
2026-11-04 19:00:01Wooil Lee, Junpyo Hong, Jongseo Lee, Tuomas Oikarinen, Tsui-Wei Weng, Jinwoo ChoiAbstract
Video understanding models often rely on motion, yet their explanations can obscure which motion sources support a prediction. We identify motion-source under-specification as a limitation of existing video XAI: region-centric explanations can be source-ambiguous, while motion vocabularies restricted to single-person pose sequences are source-incomplete. We propose TraCE (Trajectory-Aware Concepts for Explainable Video Understanding), a concept-based framework that discovers source-flexible motion concepts by clustering optical-flow trajectories from training videos. These concepts represent dynamic evidence from people, objects, and interactions, while object and scene concepts account for static context. The resulting typed trajectory/object/scene interface supports class prediction for action recognition and question-conditioned concept matching for video question answering (VQA). We evaluate TraCE across five random seeds on six benchmarks: NTU RGB+D Mutual, Chiral SSv2, UCF-101, KTH, TOMATO, and STAR. Relative to non-interpretable baselines, TraCE maintains competitive task performance, with an average accuracy drop of 1.0 points for action recognition and a nominal gain of 0.4 points for VQA. Motion perturbation and concept-removal tests provide complementary evidence of directional semantic alignment and decision faithfulness, while sample-level interventions illustrate targeted model debugging. Our project page is available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07009
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A 3D foundation model unifying CT interpretation and segmentation
2026-11-04 13:07:27Yulu Xie, Zilong Li, Shen Xu, Yifan Bai, Liuhong Shi, Jiao Chen, Xianglei Kong, Wenchao Zhu, Na Shen, Xianghua Ye, Yang Yan, Jiaju Zheng, Yunsong Peng, Yanzhou Su, Chaohui Yu, Hao Luo, Fan WangAbstract
Radiologists interpret computed tomography (CT) scans by jointly determining what a finding represents and where it lies in three-dimensional (3D) anatomy. However, CT models have treated CT interpretation and 3D segmentation as separate tasks, leaving textual findings spatially unverifiable and overlooking potential synergy between clinical understanding and spatial perception. Here we present HoloCT, a generalist 3D foundation model unifying CT interpretation and voxel-level segmentation by jointly modelling whole-volume context and fine-grained anatomical detail, providing 3D masks as evidence. We curated HoloDATA, comprising 195,921 CT scans from 73 public datasets and six clinical cohorts, with 6.2 million instruction dialogues and 2.8 million CT-mask pairs. Across 346 tasks spanning segmentation, lesion screening, visual question answering, and report generation on 61 internal and 12 external datasets, HoloCT outperformed specialist and foundation models. In multicentre validation across 11,455 clinical CT scans from five hospitals, HoloCT outperformed competing models in lesion segmentation and report generation by 18.2 and 15.3 points. It also achieved 85.1% mean accuracy in screening thyroid tumours and colon lesions, exceeding all four participating radiologists in a retrospective reader study. Further analyses revealed bidirectional semantic-spatial synergy: language-guided segmentation delineated unseen anatomical structures and lesions as well as diffuse free-text findings, outperforming the leading approach by 22.1 points, whereas prompting the model to generate corresponding 3D masks alongside its textual outputs significantly improved interpretation performance. HoloCT shows that clinical understanding and spatial perception can be learned together within a single foundation model and offers a path towards more accurate and reliable CT analysis.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06471
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SVGFaith: A Two-Layer Meta-Evaluation of Faithfulness Metrics for Text-to-SVG Generation
2026-11-04 06:55:22Guotao Liang, Haitao Zhou, Biao Liu, Huanxuan Liao, Lingfeng Qiao, Qian-Wen Zhang, Qian Yu, Di Yin, Xing SunAbstract
Text-to-SVG systems are commonly evaluated by applying raster-image metrics to rasterised outputs, yet whether these scores capture fine-grained prompt faithfulness remains unclear. We introduce SVGFaith, a two-layer meta-evaluation framework in which the more faithful candidate of each pair is determined by construction or by human judgment. SVGFaith-Diagnostic contains 1,842 controlled contrastive pairs across eight capability axes, split evenly between two directions: two renderings compared against one prompt, and two descriptions compared against one rendering. SVGFaith-Arena contains 1,327 human-annotated comparisons of real generator outputs. On SVGFaith-Diagnostic, CLIP and three other image--text embedding metrics reach at least 0.789 pairwise accuracy on object identity but at most 0.672 on spatial relations and attribute binding, where chance is 0.5. We further introduce SVGFaith-Score, an interpretable pointwise metric. A domain-tuned decomposer turns each prompt into a dependency graph of atomic visual requirements, a visual question answering model scores whether each requirement is satisfied, and a requirement's score is discounted when its prerequisites score low. In addition to the overall score, the per-requirement scores show which requirements are judged unsatisfied and which inherit discounts from their prerequisites. SVGFaith-Score significantly outperforms all nine baselines, including a Qwen3.5-122B-A10B judge, on Arena and in both Diagnostic directions. Code and data: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06048
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How Finely Can Vision-Language Models See Biology? Bio-VQA: A Benchmark for Taxonomic, Morphological, Spatial and Individual Reasoning
2026-11-03 19:51:00S M Rayeed, Qian Ma, Charles V. Stewart, Yao MaAbstract
In biodiversity monitoring, a single image raises several questions: which taxon, how many, which trait, and whether the individual has been seen before. Vision-language models (VLMs) could answer all of these from the image, but their ability is largely untested in biology, as existing benchmarks focus mostly on species identification within a few taxonomic groups. We present Bio-VQA, the largest biological visual question answering (VQA) benchmark and the only one to span four aspects of biological visual understanding: hierarchical taxonomic reasoning, fine-grained attribute grounding, quantitative spatial reasoning, and individual re-identification. Bio-VQA contains 1.86M questions over 217K images from 11 public datasets, and extends right-or-wrong scoring to graded scoring, so a near-miss counts for more than a distant one. Evaluating 18 open-weight models from 3.75B to 38.4B parameters, we find that general visual capabilities do not transfer to biological organisms: the best model counts animals exactly on 41.7% of images with 2 to 10 individuals, less than half its accuracy on everyday objects at the same counts. Taxonomic accuracy falls to one sixth, from 0.72 at phylum to 0.12 at scientific name, and scaling helps mostly at coarse ranks. The gap to a domain specialist widens accordingly, from 0.731 against BioCLIP-2's 0.874 at class (1.2x) to 0.269 against 0.544 at scientific name (2x). On trait size measurement, 15 of the 18 models do no better than an image-blind baseline that predicts one fixed number for every specimen, and on re-identification, 17 of the 18 models fall below chance under adversarial conditions. These failures persist across a tenfold range of model size. We hope Bio-VQA becomes a standard test of how well VLM capabilities transfer to the biological domain.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05559
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SMILE: A Structured Multi-Agent Clinical Reasoning for Liver Ultrasound Understanding
2026-11-02 06:05:38Haris Ghafoor, Minjee Seo, Seonaeng cho, Keungmo Yang, Jaejun Lee, Kyungho YoonAbstract
Automated liver ultrasound report generation improves the diagnosis of liver diseases by producing clinically structured descriptions of anatomical and disease-related findings. However, current generative vision-language models (VLMs) often rely on a single reasoning pathway that maps ultrasound appearance directly to textual descriptions. In addition to the inherent vision-language modality gap, this design is limited for liver ultrasound because disease interpretation is constrained by subtle visual evidence, heterogeneous disease patterns, and limited paired supervision. To address these limitations, we propose SMILE, a Structured Multi-agent clInicaL rEasoning framework that uses multiple complementary specialist agents to interpret ultrasound images and consolidates their outputs through a judge-guided consensus mechanism. Our approach employs three specialized agents: an image interpretation agent for morphological descriptions, a clinical-stage reasoning agent, and a visual question answering (VQA) agent for targeted queries. These agent responses are then aggregated and scrutinized by a judge VLM using a consensus filtering prompt to produce a unified, clinically coherent output. Across a public liver ultrasound dataset and an internal clinical dataset, SMILE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art VLMs, achieving up to 19.0\% improvement in ROUGE-1 and 18.8\% improvement in clinical F1-score, while reaching VQA F1-scores of 0.82 and 0.65 on public and internal datasets, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of SMILE for data-scarce and limited-supervision clinical settings. Our models, datasets, and code are available \href{this https URL}{here}.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02581
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Latent-Lens: Visual Perception in Small Language Models Through Latent Communication
2026-10-30 13:53:44Mo Shahdloo, Faegheh Sardari, Mathew SalvarisAbstract
Bridging independent vision-language models (VLMs) and small language models (SLMs) in a modular multi-agent system typically forces them to exchange information as discrete text, which creates a lossy bottleneck for spatial and fine-grained details. This constraint is especially acute for SLMs, whose limited capacity makes them more reliant on the quality of the input signal. Recent latent-communication methods exchange states between language models. How a VLM can pass visual information to a separately pretrained text-only SLM though remains unexplored. We propose \textbf{Latent-Lens}, a lightweight codec that bridges the representation gap between a frozen VLM and a frozen SLM directly in latent space, enabling them to communicate purely through hidden states. The codec consists of a domain encoder that projects hidden states from the VLM into the SLM's embedding space, and an attention decoder formalised as a LoRA that teaches the SLM to attend to these visual prefixes, while training only ${\sim}1.6$M parameters (0.2\% of the combined model size). On visual question answering (CLEVR, GQA), Latent-Lens achieves $81.0\pm7.9$\% and $65.4\pm5.4$\%, compared with $58.3\pm5.7$\% and $61.8\pm1.0$\% for text communication with the same LoRA budget (+30.2--69.8pp relative to frozen text communication), while on image captioning (Flickr8k) it improves over the same baseline by +16.5 (+18.8 frozen). We also evaluate Latent-Lens with TinyLlama-1.1B and InternVL2-1B, which use different architectures, vocabularies, and hidden dimensions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41751
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Efficient Agentic Audio-Visual Question Answering through Toolset Pruning and Modality Consolidation
2026-10-28 21:44:12Yi Wang, Tianzi Wang, Peter BellAbstract
Fine-grained audio-visual question answering (AVQA) requires models to resolve complex cross-modal correspondences and temporally grounding from sparsely distributed evidence. Omni-modal agents, which autonomously orchestrate perception tools to actively collect evidence, achieve strong performance, but it remains unclear whether active perception from both audio and visual modalities depends on broad specialized toolsets, especially audio or visual modality-specific tools. Such systems may also introduce long execution trajectories and substantial inference cost. We investigate whether comparable performance can be retained with a compact workflow exposing only essential perceptual capabilities. Starting from the specialized-tool OmniAgent, we conduct staged controlled experiments that prune the toolset and progressively consolidate modality-specific tools into omni-modal tools, motivating a two-tool agent comprising only Omni-modal captioning and Omni-modal QA. Across three widely used AVQA benchmarks, our compact agent achieves comparable or better accuracy than the specialized-tool agent while reducing inference cost by around 70%.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38960
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Evaluating Visual Realism of AI-Generated Videos with Eye Tracking
2026-10-28 20:20:43Danqing Shi, Lan Jiang, Jake Lyons, Miri ZilkaAbstract
Human evaluation of AI-generated videos has so far relied on explicit human feedback, such as judgments or ratings. While these signals capture the conclusions viewers reach, they fail to offer insights into the perception that leads to them. This paper investigates eye tracking as a complementary human evaluation signal for AI-generated videos. We conducted two Visual Turing Test (VTT) experiments with a total of 90 participants on videos generated by latest generative models, in which participants watched each video twice and then gave their feedback. Across the experiments, we collected 4,286 valid eye-tracking trials on 438 videos. Our analysis indicates that gaze patterns offer informative evaluation signals that align with explicit human feedback. Building on the findings, we propose the first computational method GazeEval to predict the perceived visual realism of AI-generated videos from eye-tracking data. It achieves 71.3% accuracy in prediction, providing evidence that eye tracking data carries informative signals about how people evaluate a video. We release the study data to support further research on eye tracking for evaluating AI-generated video.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38825
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SpaceAct: Benchmarking 3D Spatial and Temporal Reasoning via Closed-Loop Action and Active Perception
2026-10-28 07:51:57Chenglong Shi, Zekai Yuan, Yue Song, Jon Pu, Will WuAbstract
To solve problems in 3D space rather than merely describe images, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) need 3D spatiotemporal reasoning: reconstructing 3D geometry from occluded 2D views, anticipating physical dynamics, and executing precise, closed-loop actions. Prior studies test passive VQA on static images or symbolic planning, requiring no execution or supplying privileged coordinates while ignoring collision, statics, and timing. We introduce SpaceAct, an interactive benchmark evaluating 3D spatiotemporal reasoning via closed-loop physical action and active perception, with SAPA, a Spatiotemporal Active-Probing Agent framework. Built on interlocking bricks and mechanical puzzles, it has 108 verified instances across 36 task families in six categories, without privileged coordinates, and diagnostic modes (+plan, +state, no-camera, blind, L7 levers). In brick-bridging or aperture-threading, models rotate the camera to resolve occlusion, read in-scene rulers, output 6-DoF poses under swept-collision and statics checks, and self-correct via split-screen rollback feedback (dynamic tasks freeze time during deliberation and give five strobe frames). Across 10 frontier MLLMs on the 44 hardest instances, scores span 4.8-79.1 (seven solve at most 27.3% of 6-DoF tasks); for the top three, a reference plan (+plan) closes 44% of the gap while leaving collisions at 5.2 per episode, whereas adding exact 3D state (+state) closes 90% and cuts collisions to 0.5; for four others, +plan lifts the mean score from 10.9 to 35.3 and +state to 81.8; and 46% of failures are collision or observation loops. SpaceAct and SAPA advance evaluation to closed-loop physical interaction, showing that even with a valid plan, MLLMs remain bottlenecked by 3D visual grounding and action refinement, while offering a testbed for active multi-view exploration and explicit 3D grounding.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38405
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Zhengrong-Spatial-Aware 1.0: Advancing 3D Multimodal Intelligence
2026-10-27 13:28:34Yu Zhang, Xiaogang Wang, Yuhang Cheng, Jingrui Li, Wenbo ChenAbstract
This report presents the implementation and validation of two end-to-end multimodal adaptation pipelines for 3D-aware visual question answering on a custom spatial dataset. The first pipeline fine-tunes HiSpatial-3B, which augments RGB observations with metric-scale 3D point maps; the second adapts Qwen3-VL through memory-efficient QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning. The completed engineering stack covers dataset conversion, image-annotation alignment, monocular geometry preprocessing, instruction construction, mixed-domain training, checkpoint management, batch inference, and automated evaluation. On the target spatial benchmark, HiSpatial adaptation increases overall accuracy from 1.73% before fine-tuning to 79.89% at 3,600 steps. On a separately collected styled split, accuracy improves from 14.9% to 55.1%, indicating transfer beyond the original training set. The Qwen3-VL pipeline is likewise implemented end-to-end for both 8B- and 32B-scale models using mixed-domain QLoRA adaptation. The resulting accuracy improves from 20.74% to 45.27% for Qwen3-VL-8B and from 30.79% to 47.60% for Qwen3-VL-32B. Together, these results establish two complementary and reproducible adaptation pipelines for geometry-aware and general-purpose multimodal spatial reasoning. These results establish a reproducible engineering foundation for subsequent work on metric 3D reasoning, spatial grounding, and domain-adapted multimodal systems, while also identifying training-data composition as a central factor in preserving general multimodal capability during specialization.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37216
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Explicit Regional Representations For Video Quality Assessment
2026-10-27 10:31:25Fuyi Yang, Lei Yang, Andrew Liu, Chenyu Wei, Xiaoyi Guo, Ming Kai HsuAbstract
End-to-end video quality assessment (VQA) methods leave the regional evidence underlying their predictions largely implicit. We introduce an explicit pixel-level regional representation for VQA, instantiated as a Quality-Relevance Heatmap (QRH) that combines localized degradation evidence with perceptual priors under vision-language model guidance, without requiring pixel-level annotations. We apply QRH to existing VQA models through two deterministic fragment-sampling strategies: distribution-preserving sampling approximates the original sampler's QRH-score distribution without retraining, while quality-aware sampling prioritizes regions with high QRH scores and is paired with fine-tuning. Experiments with DOVER on multiple benchmarks show that the former closely approximates predictions averaged over random samples, while the latter improves most evaluated metrics across popular VQA benchmarks. These results support explicit regional representations as a useful interface for downstream VQA.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36978
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Latent Visual Contrastive Reasoning with Multi-Branch Exploration
2026-10-27 08:12:07Kegeng Tang, Jingbo Wang, Yangming Zhang, Huanshu Zhang, Shaogang Ren, Zihao WangAbstract
Multimodal large language models have made substantial progress in visual question answering, but complex visual reasoning often requires locating and comparing multiple pieces of question-relevant visual evidence. Existing methods that move intermediate reasoning into the visual latent space usually follow a single linear reasoning trajectory, which can be limiting when multiple visual hypotheses or competing evidence regions are relevant. We propose Latent Visual Contrastive Reasoning, a branch-aware latent reasoning framework that generates multiple question-conditioned latent visual branches as soft hypotheses over image tokens. To train these branches, our method uses bounding-box evidence annotations to build target evidence representations and introduces a soft contrastive branch-evidence alignment objective. This objective encourages evidence-relevant branches to align with annotated visual regions while contrasting them against negative evidence. We instantiate our method on Qwen2.5-VL backbones and train it with standard supervised fine-tuning. Experiments on perception-intensive visual reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves overall improvements over the corresponding backbone and single-path latent reasoning baselines at both 3B and 7B scales.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36809
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AudioRSI: Recursively Self-Improving Audio Reasoners
2026-10-27 03:33:35Jiajun Fan, Roger Ren, Jingyuan Li, Rahul Pandey, Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar, Ankur Gandhe, Yile Gu, Ge Liu, Ivan BulykoAbstract
Reinforcement learning has made Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) better reasoners, but the reward that drives it still comes from outside the model: a final-answer check, a hand-crafted process score, or an external LLM judge that stays fixed while the policy improves. We show that an Audio LLM can supply this reward itself, and can do so recursively: each improved model becomes the critic that trains its successor, so the training signal improves along with the model. We introduce AudioRSI (Recursively Self-Improving Audio Reasoners), a reinforcement learning framework in which a single model plays two roles: as an actor it generates reasoning paths, and as a critic it compares them pairwise, turning its own judgments into a process-level reward. The critic is periodically replaced by the current policy, which closes the recursive loop. Because the critic hears the same recording as the actor, it can reject reasoning that cites acoustic evidence the audio does not contain, rather than reward reasoning that merely sounds plausible. The recursion is what sustains progress: under a frozen external judge, out-of-distribution accuracy plateaus during training, while a critic refreshed from the improving policy keeps it rising. Across four out-of-distribution benchmarks, all disjoint from the AVQA training distribution, AudioRSI outperforms strong baselines including Audio Flamingo 3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on MMAU test-mini, ranks first on MMSU, achieves a clear lead on the challenging Multi-Audio split of MMAU-Pro, and leads the 7B open-source tier on MMAR among methods without external reward models. With no reward specifying how to reason, AudioRSI also develops structured reasoning behaviors (logical reasoning, perception-aware analysis, and reduced hallucination), corroborated by an external LLM-as-Judge evaluation and a keyword-based behavior analysis.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36578
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