Daily Papers

The Instruction Following (IF) ability measures how well Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) understand exactly what users are telling them and whether they are doing it right. Existing multimodal instruction following training data is scarce, the benchmarks are simple with atomic instructions, and the evaluation strategies are imprecise for tasks demanding exact output constraints. To address this, we present MM-IFEngine, an effective pipeline to generate high-quality image-instruction pairs. Our MM-IFEngine pipeline yields large-scale, diverse, and high-quality training data MM-IFInstruct-23k, which is suitable for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and extended as MM-IFDPO-23k for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We further introduce MM-IFEval, a challenging and diverse multi-modal instruction-following benchmark that includes (1) both compose-level constraints for output responses and perception-level constraints tied to the input images, and (2) a comprehensive evaluation pipeline incorporating both rule-based assessment and judge model. We conduct SFT and DPO experiments and demonstrate that fine-tuning MLLMs on MM-IFInstruct-23k and MM-IFDPO-23k achieves notable gains on various IF benchmarks, such as MM-IFEval (+10.2%), MIA (+7.6%), and IFEval (+12.3%). The full data and evaluation code will be released on https://github.com/SYuan03/MM-IFEngine.

The transition from symbolic manipulation to science-grade reasoning represents a pivotal frontier for Large Language Models (LLMs), with physics serving as the critical test anchor for binding abstract logic to physical reality. Physics demands that a model maintain physical consistency with the laws governing the universe, a task that fundamentally requires multimodal perception to ground abstract logic in reality. At the Olympiad level, diagrams are often constitutive rather than illustrative, containing essential constraints, such as boundary conditions and spatial symmetries, that are absent from the text. To bridge this visual-logical gap, we introduce P1-VL, a family of open-source vision-language models engineered for advanced scientific reasoning. Our method harmonizes Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, which employs progressive difficulty expansion to stabilize post-training, with Agentic Augmentation, enabling iterative self-verification at inference. Evaluated on HiPhO, a rigorous benchmark of 13 exams from 2024-2025, our flagship P1-VL-235B-A22B becomes the first open-source Vision-Language Model (VLM) to secure 12 gold medals and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the open-source models. Our agent-augmented system achieves the No.2 overall rank globally, trailing only Gemini-3-Pro. Beyond physics, P1-VL demonstrates remarkable scientific reasoning capacity and generalizability, establishing significant leads over base models in STEM benchmarks. By open-sourcing P1-VL, we provide a foundational step toward general-purpose physical intelligence to better align visual perceptions with abstract physical laws for machine scientific discovery.

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. Our core innovation lies in leveraging a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior to narrowing the matching scope, effectively filtering out irrelevant clutter to prevent it from degrading pose estimation. Firstly, we introduce an object-centric disentanglement preprocessing to isolate the semantic target from environmental noise. Secondly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning. Finally, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

Precise environmental perception is critical for the reliability of autonomous driving systems. While collaborative perception mitigates the limitations of single-agent perception through information sharing, it encounters a fundamental communication-performance trade-off. Existing communication-efficient approaches typically assume MB-level data transmission per collaboration, which may fail due to practical network constraints. To address these issues, we propose InfoCom, an information-aware framework establishing the pioneering theoretical foundation for communication-efficient collaborative perception via extended Information Bottleneck principles. Departing from mainstream feature manipulation, InfoCom introduces a novel information purification paradigm that theoretically optimizes the extraction of minimal sufficient task-critical information under Information Bottleneck constraints. Its core innovations include: i) An Information-Aware Encoding condensing features into minimal messages while preserving perception-relevant information; ii) A Sparse Mask Generation identifying spatial cues with negligible communication cost; and iii) A Multi-Scale Decoding that progressively recovers perceptual information through mask-guided mechanisms rather than simple feature reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that InfoCom achieves near-lossless perception while reducing communication overhead from megabyte to kilobyte-scale, representing 440-fold and 90-fold reductions per agent compared to Where2comm and ERMVP, respectively.

Autonomous space operations such as on-orbit servicing and active debris removal demand robust part-level semantic understanding and precise relative navigation of target spacecraft, yet collecting large-scale real data in orbit remains impractical due to cost and access constraints. Existing synthetic datasets, moreover, suffer from limited target diversity, single-modality sensing, and incomplete ground-truth annotations. We present SpaceSense-Bench, a large-scale multi-modal benchmark for spacecraft perception encompassing 136~satellite models with approximately 70~GB of data. Each frame provides time-synchronized 1024times1024 RGB images, millimeter-precision depth maps, and 256-beam LiDAR point clouds, together with dense 7-class part-level semantic labels at both the pixel and point level as well as accurate 6-DoF pose ground truth. The dataset is generated through a high-fidelity space simulation built in Unreal Engine~5 and a fully automated pipeline covering data acquisition, multi-stage quality control, and conversion to mainstream formats. We benchmark five representative tasks (object detection, 2D semantic segmentation, RGB--LiDAR fusion-based 3D point cloud segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and orientation estimation) and identify two key findings: (i)~perceiving small-scale components (e.g., thrusters and omni-antennas) and generalizing to entirely unseen spacecraft in a zero-shot setting remain critical bottlenecks for current methods, and (ii)~scaling up the number of training satellites yields substantial performance gains on novel targets, underscoring the value of large-scale, diverse datasets for space perception research. The dataset, code, and toolkit are publicly available at https://github.com/wuaodi/SpaceSense-Bench.

Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However, existing works primarily focus on single-object scenarios with homogeneous agents, overlooking the realistic constraints imposed by the environment and the agent's morphology, e.g., occlusions and physical limitations. In this paper, we propose an environment-aware affordance framework that incorporates both object-level actionable priors and environment constraints. Unlike object-centric affordance approaches, learning environment-aware affordance faces the challenge of combinatorial explosion due to the complexity of various occlusions, characterized by their quantities, geometries, positions and poses. To address this and enhance data efficiency, we introduce a novel contrastive affordance learning framework capable of training on scenes containing a single occluder and generalizing to scenes with complex occluder combinations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning affordance considering environment constraints. Project page at https://chengkaiacademycity.github.io/EnvAwareAfford/

Deep networks for computer vision are not reliable when they encounter adversarial examples. In this paper, we introduce a framework that uses the dense intrinsic constraints in natural images to robustify inference. By introducing constraints at inference time, we can shift the burden of robustness from training to the inference algorithm, thereby allowing the model to adjust dynamically to each individual image's unique and potentially novel characteristics at inference time. Among different constraints, we find that equivariance-based constraints are most effective, because they allow dense constraints in the feature space without overly constraining the representation at a fine-grained level. Our theoretical results validate the importance of having such dense constraints at inference time. Our empirical experiments show that restoring feature equivariance at inference time defends against worst-case adversarial perturbations. The method obtains improved adversarial robustness on four datasets (ImageNet, Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, and MS-COCO) on image recognition, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. Project page is available at equi4robust.cs.columbia.edu.

As embodied AI transitions to real-world deployment, the success of the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task tends to evolve from mere reachability to social compliance. However, current agents suffer from a "goal-driven trap", prioritizing physical geometry ("can I go?") over semantic rules ("may I go?"), frequently overlooking subtle regulatory constraints. To bridge this gap, we establish Rule-VLN, the first large-scale urban benchmark for rule-compliant navigation. Spanning a massive 29k-node environment, it injects 177 diverse regulatory categories into 8k constrained nodes across four curriculum levels, challenging agents with fine-grained visual and behavioral constraints. We further propose the Semantic Navigation Rectification Module (SNRM), a universal, zero-shot module designed to equip pre-trained agents with safety awareness. SNRM integrates a coarse-to-fine visual perception VLM framework with an epistemic mental map for dynamic detour planning. Experiments demonstrate that while Rule-VLN challenges state-of-the-art models, SNRM significantly restores navigation capabilities, reducing CVR by 19.26% and boosting TC by 5.97%.

Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in safety-critical applications that require reliable visual grounding. However, these models often hallucinate details that are not present in the image to satisfy user prompts. While recent datasets and benchmarks have been introduced to evaluate systematic hallucinations in VLMs, many hallucination behaviors remain insufficiently characterized. In particular, prior work primarily focuses on object presence or absence, leaving it unclear how prompt phrasing and structural constraints can systematically induce hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how different forms of prompt pressure influence hallucination behavior. We introduce Ghost-100, a procedurally generated dataset of synthetic scenes in which key visual details are deliberately removed, enabling controlled analysis of absence-based hallucinations. Using a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, we vary prompts from neutral queries to toxic demands and rigid formatting constraints. We evaluate three representative open-weight VLMs: MiniCPM-V 2.6-8B, Qwen2-VL-7B, and Qwen3-VL-8B. Across all three models, hallucination rates do not increase monotonically with prompt intensity. All models exhibit reductions at higher intensity levels at different thresholds, though not all show sustained reduction under maximum coercion. These results suggest that current safety alignment is more effective at detecting semantic hostility than structural coercion, revealing model-specific limitations in handling compliance pressure. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/bli1/tone-matters

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to ground reasoning in perceptual evidence. We present a systematic study of perception strategies-explicit, implicit, visual, and textual-across four multimodal benchmarks and two MLLMs. Our findings show that explicit perception, especially when paired with textual cues, consistently yields the best improvements, particularly for smaller models. Based on this insight, we propose VTPerception-R1, a unified two-stage framework that decouples perception from reasoning. Stage 1 introduces perception-augmented fine-tuning, and Stage 2 applies perception-aware reinforcement learning with novel visual, textual, and consistency rewards. Experiments demonstrate that VTPerception-R1 significantly improves reasoning accuracy and robustness across diverse tasks, offering a scalable and auditable solution for perception-grounded multimodal reasoning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yizhuoDi/VTPerceprion-R1.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of attention applied to visual inputs based on linguistic framing even when alternative framings demand identical visual reasoning. Using visual attention as a probe, we quantify how framing alters both the amount and distribution of attention over the image. Constrained framings, such as multiple choice and yes/no, induce substantially lower attention to image context compared to open-ended, reduce focus on task-relevant regions, and shift attention towards uninformative tokens. We further demonstrate that this attention misallocation is the principal cause of degraded accuracy and cross-framing inconsistency. Building on this mechanistic insight, we introduce a lightweight prompt-tuning method using learnable tokens that encourages the robust, visually grounded attention patterns observed in open-ended settings, improving visual grounding and improving performance across framings.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) strive to achieve a profound, human-like understanding of and interaction with the physical world, but often exhibit a shallow and incoherent integration when acquiring information (Perception) and conducting reasoning (Cognition). This disconnect leads to a spectrum of reasoning failures, with hallucination being the most prominent. Collectively, these issues expose a fundamental challenge: the ability to process pixels does not yet confer the ability to construct a coherent, credible internal world model. To systematically dissect and address this challenge, this survey introduces a novel and unified analytical framework: ``From Perception to Cognition." We deconstruct the complex process of vision-language interactive understanding into two interdependent layers: Perception, the foundational ability to accurately extract visual information and achieve fine-grained alignment with textual instructions; and Cognition, the higher-order capability for proactive, multi-step, goal-oriented reasoning built upon this perceptual foundation, the core of which is the formation of a dynamic observe-think-verify reasoning loop. Guided by this framework, this paper systematically analyzes the key bottlenecks of current MLLMs at both layers. It surveys the landscape of cutting-edge methods designed to address these challenges, spanning from techniques that enhance low-level visual representations to those that improve high-level reasoning paradigms. Furthermore, we review critical benchmarks and delineate future research directions. This survey aims to provide the research community with a clear, structured perspective for understanding the intrinsic limitations of current MLLMs and to illuminate the path toward building next-generation models capable of deep reasoning and a genuine understanding of the world.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Yet, the extent to which these models perform visual reasoning as opposed to relying on linguistic priors remains unclear. To address this, we introduce VisRes Bench, a benchmark designed to study visual reasoning in naturalistic settings without contextual language supervision. Analyzing model behavior across three levels of complexity, we uncover clear limitations in perceptual and relational visual reasoning capacities. VisRes isolates distinct reasoning abilities across its levels. Level 1 probes perceptual completion and global image matching under perturbations such as blur, texture changes, occlusion, and rotation; Level 2 tests rule-based inference over a single attribute (e.g., color, count, orientation); and Level 3 targets compositional reasoning that requires integrating multiple visual attributes. Across more than 19,000 controlled task images, we find that state-of-the-art VLMs perform near random under subtle perceptual perturbations, revealing limited abstraction beyond pattern recognition. We conclude by discussing how VisRes provides a unified framework for advancing abstract visual reasoning in multimodal research.

Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in MLLM post-training for perception policy learning. While promising, our initial experiments reveal that incorporating a thinking process through RL does not consistently lead to performance gains across all visual perception tasks. This leads us to delve into the essential role of RL in the context of visual perception. In this work, we return to the fundamentals and explore the effects of RL on different perception tasks. We observe that the perceptual complexity is a major factor in determining the effectiveness of RL. We also observe that reward design plays a crucial role in further approching the upper limit of model perception. To leverage these findings, we propose Perception-R1, a scalable RL framework using GRPO during MLLM post-training. With a standard Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, Perception-R1 achieves +4.2% on RefCOCO+, +17.9% on PixMo-Count, +4.2% on PageOCR, and notably, 31.9% AP on COCO2017 val for the first time, establishing a strong baseline for perception policy learning.

Facilitating an entity's interaction with objects requires accurately identifying parts that afford specific actions. Weakly supervised affordance grounding (WSAG) seeks to imitate human learning from third-person demonstrations, where humans intuitively grasp functional parts without needing pixel-level annotations. To achieve this, grounding is typically learned using a shared classifier across images from different perspectives, along with distillation strategies incorporating part discovery process. However, since affordance-relevant parts are not always easily distinguishable, models primarily rely on classification, often focusing on common class-specific patterns that are unrelated to affordance. To address this limitation, we move beyond isolated part-level learning by introducing selective prototypical and pixel contrastive objectives that adaptively learn affordance-relevant cues at both the part and object levels, depending on the granularity of the available information. Initially, we find the action-associated objects in both egocentric (object-focused) and exocentric (third-person example) images by leveraging CLIP. Then, by cross-referencing the discovered objects of complementary views, we excavate the precise part-level affordance clues in each perspective. By consistently learning to distinguish affordance-relevant regions from affordance-irrelevant background context, our approach effectively shifts activation from irrelevant areas toward meaningful affordance cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at github.com/hynnsk/SelectiveCL.

Every day, humans perceive objects and communicate these perceptions through various channels. In this paper, we present a computational model designed to track and simulate the perception of objects, as well as their representations as conveyed in communication. We delineate two fundamental components of our internal representation, termed "observed" and "seen", which we correlate with established concepts in computer vision, namely encoding and decoding. These components are integrated into semiotic networks, which simulate perceptual inference of object perception and human communication. Our model of object perception by a person allows us to define object perception by {\em a network}. We demonstrate this with an example of an image baseline classifier by constructing a new network that includes the baseline classifier and an additional layer. This layer produces the images "perceived" by the entire network, transforming it into a perceptualized image classifier. This facilitates visualization of the acquired network. Within our network, the image representations become more efficient for classification tasks when they are assembled and randomized. In our experiments, the perceptualized network outperformed the baseline classifier on MNIST training databases consisting of a restricted number of images. Our model is not limited to persons and can be applied to any system featuring a loop involving the processing from "internal" to "external" representations.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have rapidly advanced in perception and reasoning; however, it remains unclear whether these capabilities generalize to discovering visually grounded solutions in open-ended environments, beyond pattern recognition. In such settings, intelligence requires more than answering well-posed questions: it involves identifying how elements in a scene can be repurposed in non-obvious yet physically feasible ways. This form of creative problem-solving is central to human intelligence, but remains largely untested in current benchmarks. To evaluate this ability, we introduce MM-CreativityBench, a benchmark for affordance-grounded creative tool use in visually rich, physically constrained environments. Each instance presents a scenario image with structured views of candidate entities and their parts, enabling fine-grained, interactive evaluation of how models iteratively inspect the scene, identify relevant affordances, and compose visually and physically grounded solutions. Our experiments show that current LMMs often fall short, not due to lack of generative capability, but because they do not sustain grounded exploration. Models often overlook relevant entities, under-examine critical parts, or hallucinate attributes not grounded in the image. Motivated by this failure mode, we propose affordance-grounded alignment, which casts creative tool use as a preference learning problem. Using Direct Preference Optimization, we encourage models to prefer attribute-affordance reasoning grounded in visual evidence over hallucinated alternatives. In addition, we incorporate supervision derived from an affordance knowledge base to guide broader entity exploration and multi-turn planning. Our results show consistent gains in selecting the correct entities and parts, while substantially reducing hallucination and grounding-related errors.

We analyse perception and memory, using mathematical models for knowledge graphs and tensors, to gain insights into the corresponding functionalities of the human mind. Our discussion is based on the concept of propositional sentences consisting of subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples for expressing elementary facts. SPO sentences are the basis for most natural languages but might also be important for explicit perception and declarative memories, as well as intra-brain communication and the ability to argue and reason. A set of SPO sentences can be described as a knowledge graph, which can be transformed into an adjacency tensor. We introduce tensor models, where concepts have dual representations as indices and associated embeddings, two constructs we believe are essential for the understanding of implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain. We argue that a biological realization of perception and memory imposes constraints on information processing. In particular, we propose that explicit perception and declarative memories require a semantic decoder, which, in a simple realization, is based on four layers: First, a sensory memory layer, as a buffer for sensory input, second, an index layer representing concepts, third, a memoryless representation layer for the broadcasting of information ---the "blackboard", or the "canvas" of the brain--- and fourth, a working memory layer as a processing center and data buffer. We discuss the operations of the four layers and relate them to the global workspace theory. In a Bayesian brain interpretation, semantic memory defines the prior for observable triple statements. We propose that ---in evolution and during development--- semantic memory, episodic memory, and natural language evolved as emergent properties in agents' process to gain a deeper understanding of sensory information.

We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100% manual annotation. Human studies show that PerceptionComp requires substantial test-time thinking and repeated perception steps: participants take much longer than on prior benchmarks, and accuracy drops to near chance (18.97%) when rewatching is disallowed. State-of-the-art MLLMs also perform substantially worse on PerceptionComp than on existing benchmarks: the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Flash, reaches only 45.96% accuracy in the five-choice setting, while open-source models remain below 40%. These results suggest that perception-centric long-horizon video reasoning remains a major bottleneck, and we hope PerceptionComp will help drive progress in perceptual reasoning.

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where reliable visual grounding carries operational consequences, yet their behavior under progressively coercive prompt phrasing remains undercharacterized. Existing hallucination benchmarks predominantly rely on neutral prompts and binary detection, leaving open how both the incidence and the intensity of fabrication respond to graded linguistic pressure across structurally distinct task types. We present Ghost-100, a procedurally constructed benchmark of 800 synthetically generated images spanning eight categories across three task families: text-illegibility, time-reading, and object-absence, each designed under a negative-ground-truth principle that guarantees the queried target is absent, illegible, or indeterminate by construction. Every image is paired with five prompts drawn from a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, holding the image and task identity fixed while varying only directive force, so that tone is isolated as the sole independent variable. We adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol: a rule-based H-Rate measuring the proportion of responses in which a model crosses from grounded refusal into unsupported positive commitment, and a GPT-4o-mini-judged H-Score on a 1-5 scale characterizing the confidence and specificity of fabrication once it occurs. We additionally release a three-stage automated validation workflow, which retrospectively confirms 717 of 800 images as strictly compliant. Evaluating nine open-weight VLMs, we find that H-Rate and H-Score dissociate substantially across model families, reading-style and presence-detection subsets respond to prompt pressure in qualitatively different ways, and several models exhibit non-monotonic sensitivity peaking at intermediate tone levels: patterns that aggregate metrics obscure.

Visual search in 3D environments requires embodied agents to actively explore their surroundings and acquire task-relevant evidence. However, existing visual search and embodied AI benchmarks, including EQA, typically rely on static observations or constrained egocentric motion, and thus do not explicitly evaluate fine-grained viewpoint-dependent phenomena that arise under unrestricted 5-DoF viewpoint control in real-world 3D environments, such as visibility changes caused by vertical viewpoint shifts, revealing contents inside containers, and disambiguating object attributes that are only observable from specific angles. To address this limitation, we introduce {E3VS-Bench}, a benchmark for embodied 3D visual search where agents must control their viewpoints in 5-DoF to gather viewpoint-dependent evidence for question answering. E3VS-Bench consists of 99 high-fidelity 3D scenes reconstructed using 3D Gaussian Splatting and 2,014 question-driven episodes. 3D Gaussian Splatting enables photorealistic free-viewpoint rendering that preserves fine-grained visual details (e.g., small text and subtle attributes) often degraded in mesh-based simulators, thereby allowing the construction of questions that cannot be answered from a single view and instead require active inspection across viewpoints in 5-DoF. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art VLMs and compare their performance with humans. Despite strong 2D reasoning ability, all models exhibit a substantial gap from humans, highlighting limitations in active perception and coherent viewpoint planning specifically under full 5-DoF viewpoint changes.

Weakly supervised 3D object detection aims to learn a 3D detector with lower annotation cost, e.g., 2D labels. Unlike prior work which still relies on few accurate 3D annotations, we propose a framework to study how to leverage constraints between 2D and 3D domains without requiring any 3D labels. Specifically, we employ visual data from three perspectives to establish connections between 2D and 3D domains. First, we design a feature-level constraint to align LiDAR and image features based on object-aware regions. Second, the output-level constraint is developed to enforce the overlap between 2D and projected 3D box estimations. Finally, the training-level constraint is utilized by producing accurate and consistent 3D pseudo-labels that align with the visual data. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed three constraints. Without using any 3D labels, our method achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches and is competitive with the method that uses 500-frame 3D annotations. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/VG-W3D.

Recent advancements in multimodal reward models (RMs) have significantly propelled the development of visual generation. Existing frameworks typically adopt Bradley-Terry-style preference modeling or leverage generative VLMs as judges, and subsequently optimize visual generation models via reinforcement learning. However, current RMs suffer from inherent limitations: they often follow a one-size-fits-all paradigm that assumes a monolithic preference distribution or relies on fixed evaluation rubrics. As a result, they are insensitive to content-specific visual cues, leading to systematic misalignment with subjective and context-dependent human preferences. To this end, inspired by human assessment, we propose UnifiedReward-Flex, a unified personalized reward model for vision generation that couples reward modeling with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning. Specifically, given a prompt and the generated visual content, it first interprets the semantic intent and grounds on visual evidence, then dynamically constructs a hierarchical assessment by instantiating fine-grained criteria under both predefined and self-generated high-level dimensions. Our training pipeline follows a two-stage process: (1) we first distill structured, high-quality reasoning traces from advanced closed-source VLMs to bootstrap SFT, equipping the model with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning behaviors; (2) we then perform direct preference optimization (DPO) on carefully curated preference pairs to further strengthen reasoning fidelity and discriminative alignment. To validate the effectiveness, we integrate UnifiedReward-Flex into the GRPO framework for image and video synthesis, and extensive results demonstrate its superiority.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown remarkable perceptual capability in answering visual questions, however, little is known about the limits of their perception. In particular, while prior works have provided anecdotal evidence of MLLMs' sensitivity to object size, this phenomenon and its underlying causes have not been explored comprehensively. In this work, we quantitatively study the perception of small visual objects in several state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal a pervasive limitation in answering questions about small objects in images. Next, we identify four independent factors that can contribute to this limitation -- object quality, size, distractors, and location -- and conduct controlled intervention studies to measure the effect of each factor on MLLMs' perception. In particular, we find that lower object quality and smaller object size can both independently reduce MLLMs' ability to answer visual questions. More surprisingly, we find that the location of the object in the image and the presence of visual distractors can also significantly reduce MLLMs' question answering accuracy. Our study provides a better understanding of the perceptual limitation of MLLMs and contributes new evaluation protocols for analyzing the perception of future MLLMs. To facilitate further investigations, we release our code and data.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from intermediate visual cues, either injected via external tools or generated as latent visual tokens during reasoning, but these mechanisms still overlook fine-grained visual evidence (e.g., polylines in charts), generalize poorly across domains, and incur high inference-time cost. In this paper, we propose Bi-directional Perceptual Shaping (BiPS), which transforms question-conditioned masked views into bidirectional where-to-look signals that shape perception during training. BiPS first applies a KL-consistency constraint between the original image and an evidence-preserving view that keeps only question-relevant regions, encouraging coarse but complete coverage of supporting pixels. It then applies a KL-separation constraint between the original and an evidence-ablated view where critical pixels are masked so the image no longer supports the original answer, discouraging text-only shortcuts (i.e., answering from text alone) and enforcing fine-grained visual reliance. Across eight benchmarks, BiPS boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by 8.2% on average and shows strong out-of-domain generalization to unseen datasets and image types.

Global perception is essential for embodied agents in 360° spaces, yet current affordance grounding remains largely object-centric and restricted to perspective views. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: Holistic Affordance Grounding in 360° Indoor Environments. This task faces unique challenges, including severe geometric distortions from Equirectangular Projection (ERP), semantic dispersion, and cross-scale alignment difficulties. We propose PanoAffordanceNet, an end-to-end framework featuring a Distortion-Aware Spectral Modulator (DASM) for latitude-dependent calibration and an Omni-Spherical Densification Head (OSDH) to restore topological continuity from sparse activations. By integrating multi-level constraints comprising pixel-wise, distributional, and region-text contrastive objectives, our framework effectively suppresses semantic drift under low supervision. Furthermore, we construct 360-AGD, the first high-quality panoramic affordance grounding dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoAffordanceNet significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a solid baseline for scene-level perception in embodied intelligence. The source code and benchmark dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/GL-ZHU925/PanoAffordanceNet.

Biological systems perceive the world by simultaneously processing high-dimensional inputs from modalities as diverse as vision, audition, touch, proprioception, etc. The perception models used in deep learning on the other hand are designed for individual modalities, often relying on domain-specific assumptions such as the local grid structures exploited by virtually all existing vision models. These priors introduce helpful inductive biases, but also lock models to individual modalities. In this paper we introduce the Perceiver - a model that builds upon Transformers and hence makes few architectural assumptions about the relationship between its inputs, but that also scales to hundreds of thousands of inputs, like ConvNets. The model leverages an asymmetric attention mechanism to iteratively distill inputs into a tight latent bottleneck, allowing it to scale to handle very large inputs. We show that this architecture is competitive with or outperforms strong, specialized models on classification tasks across various modalities: images, point clouds, audio, video, and video+audio. The Perceiver obtains performance comparable to ResNet-50 and ViT on ImageNet without 2D convolutions by directly attending to 50,000 pixels. It is also competitive in all modalities in AudioSet.

Starting with early successes in computer vision tasks, deep learning based techniques have since overtaken state of the art approaches in a multitude of domains. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that these techniques fail to capture semantic context and logical constraints, instead often relying on spurious correlations to arrive at the answer. Since application of deep learning techniques to critical scenarios are dependent on adherence to domain specific constraints, several attempts have been made to address this issue. One limitation holding back a thorough exploration of this area, is a lack of suitable datasets which feature a rich set of rules. In order to address this, we present the VALUE (Vision And Logical Understanding Evaluation) Dataset, consisting of 200,000+ annotated images and an associated rule set, based on the popular board game - chess. The curated rule set considerably constrains the set of allowable predictions, and are designed to probe key semantic abilities like localization and enumeration. Alongside standard metrics, additional metrics to measure performance with regards to logical consistency is presented. We analyze several popular and state of the art vision models on this task, and show that, although their performance on standard metrics are laudable, they produce a plethora of incoherent results, indicating that this dataset presents a significant challenge for future works.

We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.

Recent advances in inference-time scaling, particularly those leveraging reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, have substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Inspired by this success, similar strategies have been applied to multimodal reasoning, yet their impact on visual perception remains unclear. To investigate this gap, we introduce DisTANCE, a perception-centric benchmark for visual estimation tasks. Evaluation results show that LVLMs exhibit limited estimation precision, and inference-time scaling offers only marginal gains. We attribute this to the fast perception paradigm of current LVLMs, where visual understanding is treated as a one-shot output without modeling the underlying perceptual process. To address this, we propose Perception-Time Scaling (PTS), a novel paradigm that encourages token-rich perception and decomposes complex perception problems into intermediate tractable sub-problems, thereby enabling perception to align with and benefit from inference-time scaling. Combined with reinforcement learning techniques, PTS significantly improves perception accuracy, raising high-precision performance on DisTANCE from 8.0% to 64.7%, and generalizes well to out-of-domain tasks. Surprisingly, even though PTS data are purely synthetic, combining them with math reasoning data yields consistent gains in both reasoning and real-world perception benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that PTS introduces more perception-related tokens and increases the model's attention to image tokens. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Perception is often viewed as a process that transforms physical variables, external to an observer, into internal psychological variables. Such a process can be modeled by a function coined perceptual scale. The perceptual scale can be deduced from psychophysical measurements that consist in comparing the relative differences between stimuli (i.e. difference scaling experiments). However, this approach is often overlooked by the modeling and experimentation communities. Here, we demonstrate the value of measuring the perceptual scale of classical (spatial frequency, orientation) and less classical physical variables (interpolation between textures) by embedding it in recent probabilistic modeling of perception. First, we show that the assumption that an observer has an internal representation of univariate parameters such as spatial frequency or orientation while stimuli are high-dimensional does not lead to contradictory predictions when following the theoretical framework. Second, we show that the measured perceptual scale corresponds to the transduction function hypothesized in this framework. In particular, we demonstrate that it is related to the Fisher information of the generative model that underlies perception and we test the predictions given by the generative model of different stimuli in a set a of difference scaling experiments. Our main conclusion is that the perceptual scale is mostly driven by the stimulus power spectrum. Finally, we propose that this measure of perceptual scale is a way to push further the notion of perceptual distances by estimating the perceptual geometry of images i.e. the path between images instead of simply the distance between those.

While perspective is a well-studied topic in art, it is generally taken for granted in images. However, for the recent wave of high-quality image synthesis methods such as latent diffusion models, perspective accuracy is not an explicit requirement. Since these methods are capable of outputting a wide gamut of possible images, it is difficult for these synthesized images to adhere to the principles of linear perspective. We introduce a novel geometric constraint in the training process of generative models to enforce perspective accuracy. We show that outputs of models trained with this constraint both appear more realistic and improve performance of downstream models trained on generated images. Subjective human trials show that images generated with latent diffusion models trained with our constraint are preferred over images from the Stable Diffusion V2 model 70% of the time. SOTA monocular depth estimation models such as DPT and PixelFormer, fine-tuned on our images, outperform the original models trained on real images by up to 7.03% in RMSE and 19.3% in SqRel on the KITTI test set for zero-shot transfer.

In this paper, we study depth perception of vision-language models (VLMs) to isolate the effects of pictorial depth cues and disentangle vision and language influences on model performance. To this end, we combine depth-ordering and odd-one-out psychophysical tasks: the VLMs are presented with images where one object is at different depth relative to other, otherwise identical, objects, and must determine whether the odd-one-out target is closer or farther to the observer. To create stimuli, we generate 2D views from simulated and real 3D scenes while controlling the presence of individual pictorial depth cues, enabling a fine-grained analysis of cue-level contributions. Language effects are examined by varying referring expression clarity. We also introduce a novel metric to quantify vision-vs-language sensitivities. Applying this methodology, we create the Odd-One-Out Depth (O3-D) dataset with 37K real and synthetic images and 147K image-question pairs. Evaluation of 12 open-source and commercial models on O3-D shows under-utilization of depth cues and depth-ordering accuracies between 47% and 56%, with no model above chance level. At the same time, our metric reveals strong linguistic bias in the answers. Neither chain-of-thought (CoT) nor in-context learning (ICL) significantly improves performance, suggesting that static image data alone may be insufficient for depth understanding. All code, the image generation pipeline, and the O3-D dataset are publicly released at https://github.com/lyiqian/o3-d.

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain poorly characterized in multi-step visual interactions, particularly in how they integrate perception, memory, and action over long horizons. We introduce VisGym, a gymnasium of 17 environments for evaluating and training VLMs. The suite spans symbolic puzzles, real-image understanding, navigation, and manipulation, and provides flexible controls over difficulty, input representation, planning horizon, and feedback. We also provide multi-step solvers that generate structured demonstrations, enabling supervised finetuning. Our evaluations show that all frontier models struggle in interactive settings, achieving low success rates in both the easy (46.6%) and hard (26.0%) configurations. Our experiments reveal notable limitations: models struggle to effectively leverage long context, performing worse with an unbounded history than with truncated windows. Furthermore, we find that several text-based symbolic tasks become substantially harder once rendered visually. However, explicit goal observations, textual feedback, and exploratory demonstrations in partially observable or unknown-dynamics settings for supervised finetuning yield consistent gains, highlighting concrete failure modes and pathways for improving multi-step visual decision-making. Code, data, and models can be found at: https://visgym.github.io/.

The real world is messy and unstructured. Uncovering critical information often requires active, goal-driven exploration. It remains to be seen whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which recently emerged as a popular zero-shot tool in many difficult tasks, can operate effectively in such conditions. In this paper, we answer this question by introducing FlySearch, a 3D, outdoor, photorealistic environment for searching and navigating to objects in complex scenes. We define three sets of scenarios with varying difficulty and observe that state-of-the-art VLMs cannot reliably solve even the simplest exploration tasks, with the gap to human performance increasing as the tasks get harder. We identify a set of central causes, ranging from vision hallucination, through context misunderstanding, to task planning failures, and we show that some of them can be addressed by finetuning. We publicly release the benchmark, scenarios, and the underlying codebase.

Spatial reasoning, the ability to ground language in 3D understanding, remains a persistent challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We identify two fundamental bottlenecks: inadequate 3D understanding capabilities stemming from 2D-centric pre-training, and reasoning failures induced by redundant 3D information. To address these, we first construct a Minimal Sufficient Set (MSS) of information before answering a given question: a compact selection of 3D perception results from expert models. We introduce MSSR (Minimal Sufficient Spatial Reasoner), a dual-agent framework that implements this principle. A Perception Agent programmatically queries 3D scenes using a versatile perception toolbox to extract sufficient information, including a novel SOG (Situated Orientation Grounding) module that robustly extracts language-grounded directions. A Reasoning Agent then iteratively refines this information to pursue minimality, pruning redundant details and requesting missing ones in a closed loop until the MSS is curated. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, by explicitly pursuing both sufficiency and minimality, significantly improves accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance across two challenging benchmarks. Furthermore, our framework produces interpretable reasoning paths, offering a promising source of high-quality training data for future models. Source code is available at https://github.com/gyj155/mssr.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often suffer from hallucinations, generating descriptions that include visual details absent from the input image. Recent preference alignment methods typically rely on supervision distilled from stronger models such as GPT. However, this offline paradigm introduces a Supervision-Perception Mismatch: the student model is forced to align with fine-grained details beyond its perceptual capacity, learning to guess rather than to see. To obtain reliable self-supervision for online learning, we identify a Generative-Discriminative Gap within LVLMs, where models exhibit higher accuracy on discriminative verification than open-ended generation. Leveraging this capability, we propose Online Self-CAlibRation (OSCAR), a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search with a Dual-Granularity Reward Mechanism to construct preference data and iteratively refines the model via Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OSCAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on hallucination benchmarks while improving general multimodal capabilities.

Humans develop perception through a bottom-up hierarchy: from basic primitives and Gestalt principles to high-level semantics. In contrast, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are trained directly on complex downstream tasks, often bypassing these foundational visual capabilities. To systematically investigate this gap, we introduce VisFactor, a benchmark that digitizes 20 vision-centric subtests from FRCT, a well-established cognitive psychology assessment spanning four domains of human visual cognition. Furthermore, we design algorithms to automatically construct and validate unlimited test cases with controllable difficulty. Using VisFactor, we evaluate 23 frontier MLLMs, including both proprietary (e.g., GPT, Gemini) and open-source (e.g., LLaMA, Qwen) models. The best model achieves a score of only 30.17%. Models consistently fail on tasks such as mental rotation, spatial relation inference, and figure-ground discrimination, regardless of model size or prompting strategy. These findings suggest that performance improvements on existing general benchmarks might represent castles in the air instead of a genuine mastery of human-like visual cognition.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

The Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with extensive world knowledge have revitalized autonomous driving, particularly in reasoning tasks within perceivable regions. However, when faced with perception-limited areas (dynamic or static occlusion regions), MLLMs struggle to effectively integrate perception ability with world knowledge for reasoning. These perception-limited regions can conceal crucial safety information, especially for vulnerable road users. In this paper, we propose a framework, which aims to improve autonomous driving performance under perceptionlimited conditions by enhancing the integration of perception capabilities and world knowledge. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play instruction-guided interaction module that bridges modality gaps and significantly reduces the input sequence length, allowing it to adapt effectively to multi-view video inputs. Furthermore, to better integrate world knowledge with driving-related tasks, we have collected and refined a large-scale multi-modal dataset that includes 2 million natural language QA pairs, 1.7 million grounding task data. To evaluate the model's utilization of world knowledge, we introduce an object-level risk assessment dataset comprising 200K QA pairs, where the questions necessitate multi-step reasoning leveraging world knowledge for resolution. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Continuous perception, the ability to integrate visual observations over time in a continuous stream fashion, is essential for robust real-world understanding, yet remains largely untested in current multimodal models. We introduce CP-Bench, a minimal and fully controlled benchmark designed to isolate this capability using an extremely simple task: counting identical cubes in a synthetic scene while the camera moves and only reveals subsets of objects at any moment. Despite the simplicity of the setting, we find that state-of-the-art open-source and commercial models, including Qwen-3-VL, InternVL3, GPT-5, and Gemini-3-Pro, fail dramatically. A static-camera control variant confirms that the failure arises not from object recognition but from an inability to accumulate evidence across time. Further experiments show that neither higher sampling FPS, perception- or spatial-enhanced models, nor finetuning with additional videos leads to meaningful cross-temporal generalization. Our results reveal a fundamental limitation in modern multimodal architectures and training paradigms. CP-Bench provides a simple yet powerful diagnostic tool and establishes a clean testbed for developing models capable of genuine time-consistent visual reasoning.

Cortical visual prostheses aim to restore sight by electrically stimulating neurons in early visual cortex (V1). With the emergence of high-density and flexible neural interfaces, electrode placement within three-dimensional cortex has become a critical surgical planning problem. Existing strategies emphasize visual field coverage and anatomical heuristics but do not directly optimize predicted perceptual outcomes under safety constraints. We present a percept-aware framework for surgical planning of cortical visual prostheses that formulates electrode placement as a constrained optimization problem in anatomical space. Electrode coordinates are treated as learnable parameters and optimized end-to-end using a differentiable forward model of prosthetic vision. The objective minimizes task-level perceptual error while incorporating vascular avoidance and gray matter feasibility constraints. Evaluated on simulated reading and natural image tasks using realistic folded cortical geometry (FreeSurfer fsaverage), percept-aware optimization consistently improves reconstruction fidelity relative to coverage-based placement strategies. Importantly, vascular safety constraints eliminate margin violations while preserving perceptual performance. The framework further enables co-optimization of multi-electrode thread configurations under fixed insertion budgets. These results demonstrate how differentiable percept models can inform anatomically grounded, safety-aware computer-assisted planning for cortical neural interfaces and provide a foundation for optimizing next-generation visual prostheses.

We consider concept generalization at a large scale in the diverse and natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (i.e., rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated and focus on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the problem space scales up, and the complexity of concepts becomes diverse. Specifically, at the representational level, we seek to answer how the complexity varies when a visual concept is mapped to the representation space. Prior psychology literature has shown that two types of complexities (i.e., subjective complexity and visual complexity) (Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2003) build an inverted-U relation (Donderi, 2006; Sun and Firestone, 2021). Leveraging Representativeness of Attribute (RoA), we computationally confirm the following observation: Models use attributes with high RoA to describe visual concepts, and the description length falls in an inverted-U relation with the increment in visual complexity. At the computational level, we aim to answer how the complexity of representation affects the shift between the rule- and similarity-based generalization. We hypothesize that category-conditioned visual modeling estimates the co-occurrence frequency between visual and categorical attributes, thus potentially serving as the prior for the natural visual world. Experimental results show that representations with relatively high subjective complexity outperform those with relatively low subjective complexity in the rule-based generalization, while the trend is the opposite in the similarity-based generalization.

A first-person camera, placed at a person's head, captures, which objects are important to the camera wearer. Most prior methods for this task learn to detect such important objects from the manually labeled first-person data in a supervised fashion. However, important objects are strongly related to the camera wearer's internal state such as his intentions and attention, and thus, only the person wearing the camera can provide the importance labels. Such a constraint makes the annotation process costly and limited in scalability. In this work, we show that we can detect important objects in first-person images without the supervision by the camera wearer or even third-person labelers. We formulate an important detection problem as an interplay between the 1) segmentation and 2) recognition agents. The segmentation agent first proposes a possible important object segmentation mask for each image, and then feeds it to the recognition agent, which learns to predict an important object mask using visual semantics and spatial features. We implement such an interplay between both agents via an alternating cross-pathway supervision scheme inside our proposed Visual-Spatial Network (VSN). Our VSN consists of spatial ("where") and visual ("what") pathways, one of which learns common visual semantics while the other focuses on the spatial location cues. Our unsupervised learning is accomplished via a cross-pathway supervision, where one pathway feeds its predictions to a segmentation agent, which proposes a candidate important object segmentation mask that is then used by the other pathway as a supervisory signal. We show our method's success on two different important object datasets, where our method achieves similar or better results as the supervised methods.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as embodied planners in egocentric environments, where task success requires not only achieving instructed goals but also acting in socially appropriate ways. While explicit goals may render certain actions optimal, implicit social norms often impose hidden constraints. Existing evaluations typically focus on explicit goal achievement or direct norm knowledge, seldom assessing whether planners can infer and apply these hidden constraints within action sequences. We introduce NormAct, a benchmark for embodied social-norm interactions that evaluates plans on Goal Achievement, Norm Compliance, and overall Task Success. NormAct uniquely embeds hidden norms within ordinary tasks, testing whether models can realize them without explicit instruction. Experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro) reveal a significant gap: models achieve explicit goals in 67.3\% of cases, but comply with hidden norms in only 26.4\%. Cue-condition experiments indicate that this gap stems not from a lack of general social knowledge, but from challenges in activating and grounding relevant norms in context. To address this, we propose NormPerceptor, a context-conditioned cue generator that infers scene-relevant norms prior to planning, increasing Task Success from 24.2\% to 46.7\%. Our results underscore the importance of enabling embodied agents to proactively detect hidden norms, ground them in visual evidence, and integrate them as action-planning constraints. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Caleb196x/NormAct.

Human perception is structured around objects which form the basis for our higher-level cognition and impressive systematic generalization abilities. Yet most work on representation learning focuses on feature learning without even considering multiple objects, or treats segmentation as an (often supervised) preprocessing step. Instead, we argue for the importance of learning to segment and represent objects jointly. We demonstrate that, starting from the simple assumption that a scene is composed of multiple entities, it is possible to learn to segment images into interpretable objects with disentangled representations. Our method learns -- without supervision -- to inpaint occluded parts, and extrapolates to scenes with more objects and to unseen objects with novel feature combinations. We also show that, due to the use of iterative variational inference, our system is able to learn multi-modal posteriors for ambiguous inputs and extends naturally to sequences.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at complex visual tasks such as VQA and chart understanding, yet recent work suggests they struggle with simple perceptual tests. We present an evaluation of vision-language models' capacity for nonlocal visual reasoning: reasoning that requires chaining evidence collected from multiple, possibly distant regions of an image. We isolate three distinct forms of nonlocal vision: comparative perception, which demands holding two images in working memory and comparing them; saccadic search, which requires making discrete, evidence-driven jumps to locate successive targets; and smooth visual search, which involves following a continuous contour. Flagship models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4), even those that perform well on prior primitive-vision benchmarks, fail these tests and barely exceed random accuracy on two variants of our tasks that are trivial for humans. Our structured evaluation suite allows us to test whether VLMs can perform visual algorithms similar to those used by humans. Our findings show that despite gains in raw visual acuity, current models lack core visual reasoning capabilities.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in tackling a variety of visual-language tasks. However, current LVLMs suffer from misalignment between text and image modalities which causes three kinds of hallucination problems, i.e., object existence, object attribute, and object relationship. To tackle this issue, existing methods mainly utilize Reinforcement Learning (RL) to align modalities in LVLMs. However, they still suffer from three main limitations: (1) General feedback can not indicate the hallucination type contained in the response; (2) Sparse rewards only give the sequence-level reward for the whole response; and (3)Annotation cost is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To handle these limitations, we propose an innovative method to align modalities in LVLMs through Fine-Grained Artificial Intelligence Feedback (FGAIF), which mainly consists of three steps: AI-based Feedback Collection, Fine-grained Reward Model Training, and Reinforcement Learning with Fine-grained Reward. Specifically, We first utilize AI tools to predict the types of hallucination for each segment in the response and obtain a collection of fine-grained feedback. Then, based on the collected reward data, three specialized reward models are trained to produce dense rewards. Finally, a novel fine-grained feedback module is integrated into the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on hallucination and general benchmarks, demonstrating the superior performance of our proposed method. Notably, compared with previous models trained with the RL-based aligning method, our proposed method is effective even with fewer parameters.

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show reasoning promise, yet their visual perception is a critical bottleneck. Strikingly, MLLMs can produce correct answers even while misinterpreting crucial visual elements, masking these underlying failures. Our preliminary study on a joint perception-reasoning dataset revealed that for one leading MLLM, 29% of its correct answers to reasoning questions still exhibited visual perception errors. To systematically address this, we introduce "Do You See Me", a scalable benchmark with 1,758 images and 2,612 questions. It spans seven human-psychology inspired subtasks in 2D and 3D, featuring controllable complexity to rigorously evaluate MLLM visual skills. Our findings on 3 leading closed-source and 5 major open-source models reveal a stark deficit: humans achieve 96.49% accuracy, while top MLLMs average below 50%. This performance gap widens rapidly with increased task complexity (e.g., from 12% to 45% in the visual form constancy subtask). Further analysis into the root causes suggests that failures stem from challenges like misallocated visual attention and the instability of internal representations for fine-grained details, especially at or below encoder patch resolution. This underscores an urgent need for MLLMs with truly robust visual perception. The benchmark dataset, source code and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Do-You-See-Me.

Multi-modality foundation models, as represented by GPT-4V, have brought a new paradigm for low-level visual perception and understanding tasks, that can respond to a broad range of natural human instructions in a model. While existing foundation models have shown exciting potentials on low-level visual tasks, their related abilities are still preliminary and need to be improved. In order to enhance these models, we conduct a large-scale subjective experiment collecting a vast number of real human feedbacks on low-level vision. Each feedback follows a pathway that starts with a detailed description on the low-level visual appearance (*e.g. clarity, color, brightness* of an image, and ends with an overall conclusion, with an average length of 45 words. The constructed **Q-Pathway** dataset includes 58K detailed human feedbacks on 18,973 images with diverse low-level appearance. Moreover, to enable foundation models to robustly respond to diverse types of questions, we design a GPT-participated conversion to process these feedbacks into diverse-format 200K instruction-response pairs. Experimental results indicate that the **Q-Instruct** consistently elevates low-level perception and understanding abilities across several foundational models. We anticipate that our datasets can pave the way for a future that general intelligence can perceive, understand low-level visual appearance and evaluate visual quality like a human. Our dataset, model zoo, and demo is published at: https://q-future.github.io/Q-Instruct.

Large-scale pre-trained vision models are becoming increasingly prevalent, offering expressive and generalizable visual representations that benefit various downstream tasks. Recent studies on the emergent properties of these models have revealed their high-level geometric understanding, in particular in the context of depth perception. However, it remains unclear how depth perception arises in these models without explicit depth supervision provided during pre-training. To investigate this, we examine whether the monocular depth cues, similar to those used by the human visual system, emerge in these models. We introduce a new benchmark, DepthCues, designed to evaluate depth cue understanding, and present findings across 20 diverse and representative pre-trained vision models. Our analysis shows that human-like depth cues emerge in more recent larger models. We also explore enhancing depth perception in large vision models by fine-tuning on DepthCues, and find that even without dense depth supervision, this improves depth estimation. To support further research, our benchmark and evaluation code will be made publicly available for studying depth perception in vision models.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold immense promise as assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community. However, we identify a critical failure mode that undermines their trustworthiness in real-world applications. We introduce the Escalator Problem -- the inability of state-of-the-art models to perceive an escalator's direction of travel -- as a canonical example of a deeper limitation we term Implicit Motion Blindness. This blindness stems from the dominant frame-sampling paradigm in video understanding, which, by treating videos as discrete sequences of static images, fundamentally struggles to perceive continuous, low-signal motion. As a position paper, our contribution is not a new model but rather to: (I) formally articulate this blind spot, (II) analyze its implications for user trust, and (III) issue a call to action. We advocate for a paradigm shift from purely semantic recognition towards robust physical perception and urge the development of new, human-centered benchmarks that prioritize safety, reliability, and the genuine needs of users in dynamic environments.

We propose Perceptual Taxonomy, a structured process of scene understanding that first recognizes objects and their spatial configurations, then infers task-relevant properties such as material, affordance, function, and physical attributes to support goal-directed reasoning. While this form of reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, current vision-language benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of this ability and instead focus on surface-level recognition or image-text alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Perceptual Taxonomy, a benchmark for physically grounded visual reasoning. We annotate 3173 objects with four property families covering 84 fine-grained attributes. Using these annotations, we construct a multiple-choice question benchmark with 5802 images across both synthetic and real domains. The benchmark contains 28033 template-based questions spanning four types (object description, spatial reasoning, property matching, and taxonomy reasoning), along with 50 expert-crafted questions designed to evaluate models across the full spectrum of perceptual taxonomy reasoning. Experimental results show that leading vision-language models perform well on recognition tasks but degrade by 10 to 20 percent on property-driven questions, especially those requiring multi-step reasoning over structured attributes. These findings highlight a persistent gap in structured visual understanding and the limitations of current models that rely heavily on pattern matching. We also show that providing in-context reasoning examples from simulated scenes improves performance on real-world and expert-curated questions, demonstrating the effectiveness of perceptual-taxonomy-guided prompting.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency on general-purpose vision-language benchmarks, reaching or even exceeding human-level performance. However, these evaluations typically rely on standard in-distribution data, leaving the robustness of MLLMs largely unexamined when faced with scenarios that defy common-sense priors. To address this gap, we introduce VIA-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to probe model performance on visual illusions and anomalies. It includes six core categories: color illusions, motion illusions, gestalt illusions, geometric and spatial illusions, general visual illusions, and visual anomalies. Through careful human-in-the-loop review, we construct over 1K high-quality question-answer pairs that require nuanced visual reasoning. Extensive evaluation of over 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary, open-source, and reasoning-enhanced models, uncovers significant vulnerabilities. Notably, we find that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning offers negligible robustness, often yielding ``brittle mirages'' where the model's logic collapses under illusory stimuli. Our findings reveal a fundamental divergence between machine and human perception, suggesting that resolving such perceptual bottlenecks is critical for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. The benchmark data and code will be released.

While large multi-modal models (LMMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in segmentation and comprehension, they still struggle with two limitations: inaccurate segmentation and hallucinated comprehension. These challenges stem primarily from constraints in weak visual comprehension and a lack of fine-grained perception. To alleviate these limitations, we propose LIRA, a framework that capitalizes on the complementary relationship between visual comprehension and segmentation via two key components: (1) Semantic-Enhanced Feature Extractor (SEFE) improves object attribute inference by fusing semantic and pixel-level features, leading to more accurate segmentation; (2) Interleaved Local Visual Coupling (ILVC) autoregressively generates local descriptions after extracting local features based on segmentation masks, offering fine-grained supervision to mitigate hallucinations. Furthermore, we find that the precision of object segmentation is positively correlated with the latent related semantics of the <seg> token. To quantify this relationship and the model's potential semantic inferring ability, we introduce the Attributes Evaluation (AttrEval) dataset. Our experiments show that LIRA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both segmentation and comprehension tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/echo840/LIRA.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) combine visual perception with the general capabilities, such as reasoning, of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the mechanisms by which these two abilities can be combined and contribute remain poorly understood. In this work, we explore to compose perception and reasoning through model merging that connects parameters of different models. Unlike previous works that often focus on merging models of the same kind, we propose merging models across modalities, enabling the incorporation of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs into VLMs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that model merging offers a successful pathway to transfer reasoning abilities from LLMs to VLMs in a training-free manner. Moreover, we utilize the merged models to understand the internal mechanism of perception and reasoning and how merging affects it. We find that perception capabilities are predominantly encoded in the early layers of the model, whereas reasoning is largely facilitated by the middle-to-late layers. After merging, we observe that all layers begin to contribute to reasoning, whereas the distribution of perception abilities across layers remains largely unchanged. These observations shed light on the potential of model merging as a tool for multimodal integration and interpretation.

We introduce CPPO, a Contrastive Perception Policy Optimization method for finetuning vision-language models (VLMs). While reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced reasoning in language models, extending it to multimodal reasoning requires improving both the perception and reasoning aspects. Prior works tackle this challenge mainly with explicit perception rewards, but disentangling perception tokens from reasoning tokens is difficult, requiring extra LLMs, ground-truth data, forced separation of perception from reasoning by policy model, or applying rewards indiscriminately to all output tokens. CPPO addresses this problem by detecting perception tokens via entropy shifts in the model outputs under perturbed input images. CPPO then extends the RL objective function with a Contrastive Perception Loss (CPL) that enforces consistency under information-preserving perturbations and sensitivity under information-removing ones. Experiments show that CPPO surpasses previous perception-rewarding methods, while avoiding extra models, making training more efficient and scalable.

When working around other agents such as humans, it is important to model their perception capabilities to predict and make sense of their behavior. In this work, we consider agents whose perception capabilities are determined by their limited field of view, viewing range, and the potential to miss objects within their viewing range. By considering the perception capabilities and observation model of agents independently from their motion policy, we show that we can better predict the agents' behavior; i.e., by reasoning about the perception capabilities of other agents, one can better make sense of their actions. We perform a user study where human operators navigate a cluttered scene while scanning the region for obstacles with a limited field of view and range. We show that by reasoning about the limited observation space of humans, a robot can better learn a human's strategy for navigating an environment and navigate with minimal collision with dynamic and static obstacles. We also show that this learned model helps it successfully navigate a physical hardware vehicle in real-time. Code available at https://github.com/labicon/HRMotion-RestrictedView.

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

Multimodal AI agents are increasingly automating complex real-world workflows that involve online web execution. However, current web-agent benchmarks suffer from a critical limitation: they focus entirely on web-based interaction and perception, lacking grounding in the user's real-world physical surroundings. This limitation prevents evaluation in crucial scenarios, such as when an agent must use egocentric visual perception (e.g., via AR glasses) to recognize an object in the user's surroundings and then complete a related task online. To address this gap, we introduce Ego2Web, the first benchmark designed to bridge egocentric video perception and web agent execution. Ego2Web pairs real-world first-person video recordings with web tasks that require visual understanding, web task planning, and interaction in an online environment for successful completion. We utilize an automatic data-generation pipeline combined with human verification and refinement to curate well-constructed, high-quality video-task pairs across diverse web task types, including e-commerce, media retrieval, knowledge lookup, etc. To facilitate accurate and scalable evaluation for our benchmark, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method, Ego2WebJudge, which achieves approximately 84% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing evaluation methods. Experiments with diverse SoTA agents on our Ego2Web show that their performance is weak, with substantial headroom across all task categories. We also conduct a comprehensive ablation study on task design, highlighting the necessity of accurate video understanding in the proposed task and the limitations of current agents. We hope Ego2Web can be a critical new resource for developing truly capable AI assistants that can seamlessly see, understand, and act across the physical and digital worlds.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception, yet remain limited in reasoning about space under changing viewpoints. We study this challenge as Perspective-Conditioned Spatial Reasoning (PCSR) in 360-degree omnidirectional images, where broad scene coverage reduces ambiguity from partial observations without eliminating the need for viewpoint-dependent inference. To assess this capability, we introduce PCSR-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 84,373 question-answer pairs from 2,600 omnidirectional images across 26 indoor environments. PCSR-Bench contains eight tasks spanning foundational perception (e.g., object counting, relative distance, and relative direction) and advanced PCSR, including compositional chains, egocentric rotation, perspective re-anchoring, ego-distortion, and limited-FOV visibility. We evaluate 14 representative MLLMs and observe a substantial perception-reasoning gap: accuracy reaches 57.59% on foundational relative direction, but drops to 13.49% on egocentric rotation, 7.13% on egocentric distortion, and 0.64% on open-ended compositional reasoning. To probe the plasticity of this gap, we conduct an RL-based diagnostic study on a 7B-scale model. Reward shaping improves a matched 7B baseline from 31.10% to 60.06% under a controlled setting, suggesting that PCSR is partial plasticity rather than being fully immutable. Still, the gains are task-selective, sensitive to reward design including both weight allocation and reward formulation, and partially dependent on the evaluation protocol. These results position PCSR as a key bottleneck in current MLLMs and highlight limited but meaningful room for recovery under targeted optimization.

While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints. This creates dual bottlenecks in visual state recovery and multi-step planning. To address this, we propose MGSD, a two-stage modality-gap-aware self-distillation framework. First, a cold-start grounding stage equips the visual student with reliable state representations, minimizing early perception noise. Second, a privileged teacher transfers planning capabilities via on-policy distillation, using explicit symbolic states to supervise the student's own visual rollout prefixes. Crucially, symbolic data is used strictly during training, leaving inference purely visual. Experiments on visual planning benchmarks show that MGSD consistently improves visual planning across both 4B and 8B backbones, raising the macro average by 19.3% and 18.4%, respectively. The resulting models narrow the gap to symbolic-input upper bounds, while ablations and diagnostics confirm that the improvement comes from both visual state recovery and optimal-path reasoning. These results suggest that modality-gap-aware self-distillation improves not only how models perceive actionable states, but also how they plan over the inferred structure. Code is available at https://github.com/Oranger-l/MGSD.

Large multimodal models are increasingly used as the reasoning core of embodied agents operating in 3D environments, yet they remain prone to hallucinations that can produce unsafe and ungrounded decisions. Existing inference-time hallucination mitigation methods largely target 2D vision-language settings and do not transfer to embodied 3D reasoning, where failures arise from object presence, spatial layout, and geometric grounding rather than pixel-level inconsistencies. We introduce 3D-VCD, the first inference-time visual contrastive decoding framework for hallucination mitigation in 3D embodied agents. 3D-VCD constructs a distorted 3D scene graph by applying semantic and geometric perturbations to object-centric representations, such as category substitutions and coordinate or extent corruption. By contrasting predictions under the original and distorted 3D contexts, our method suppresses tokens that are insensitive to grounded scene evidence and are therefore likely driven by language priors. We evaluate 3D-VCD on the 3D-POPE and HEAL benchmarks and show that it consistently improves grounded reasoning without any retraining, establishing inference-time contrastive decoding over structured 3D representations as an effective and practical route to more reliable embodied intelligence.

Current vision-language models may incorporate single-dimensional spatial cues, such as depth, object boundary, and basic spatial directions (e.g. left, right, front, back), yet often lack the multi-dimensional spatial reasoning necessary for human-like understanding and real-world applications. To address this gap, we develop SPHERE (Spatial Perception and Hierarchical Evaluation of REasoning), a hierarchical evaluation framework with a new human-annotated dataset to pinpoint model strengths and weaknesses, advancing from single-skill tasks to multi-skill tasks, and ultimately to complex reasoning tasks that require the integration of multiple spatial and visual cues with logical reasoning. Benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art open-source models reveal significant shortcomings, especially in the abilities to understand distance and proximity, to reason from both allocentric and egocentric viewpoints, and to perform complex reasoning in a physical context. This work underscores the need for more advanced approaches to spatial understanding and reasoning, paving the way for improvements in vision-language models and their alignment with human-like spatial capabilities. The dataset will be open-sourced upon publication.

Vision-language process reward models (VL-PRMs) are increasingly used to score intermediate reasoning steps and rerank candidates under test-time scaling. However, they often function as black-box judges: a low step score may reflect a genuine reasoning mistake or simply the verifier's misperception of the image. This entanglement between perception and reasoning leads to systematic false positives (rewarding hallucinated visual premises) and false negatives (penalizing correct grounded statements), undermining both reranking and error localization. We introduce Explicit Visual Premise Verification (EVPV), a lightweight verification interface that conditions step scoring on the reliability of the visual premises a step depends on. The policy is prompted to produce a step-wise visual checklist that makes required visual facts explicit, while a constraint extractor independently derives structured visual constraints from the input image. EVPV matches checklist claims against these constraints to compute a scalar visual reliability signal, and calibrates PRM step rewards via reliability gating: rewards for visually dependent steps are attenuated when reliability is low and preserved when reliability is high. This decouples perceptual uncertainty from logical evaluation without per-step tool calls. Experiments on VisualProcessBench and six multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that EVPV improves step-level verification and consistently boosts Best-of-N reranking accuracy over strong baselines. Furthermore, injecting controlled corruption into the extracted constraints produces monotonic performance degradation, providing causal evidence that the gains arise from constraint fidelity and explicit premise verification rather than incidental prompt effects. Code is available at: https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/EVPV-PRM

Regardless of the particular task we want them to perform in an environment, there are often shared safety constraints we want our agents to respect. For example, regardless of whether it is making a sandwich or clearing the table, a kitchen robot should not break a plate. Manually specifying such a constraint can be both time-consuming and error-prone. We show how to learn constraints from expert demonstrations of safe task completion by extending inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) techniques to the space of constraints. Intuitively, we learn constraints that forbid highly rewarding behavior that the expert could have taken but chose not to. Unfortunately, the constraint learning problem is rather ill-posed and typically leads to overly conservative constraints that forbid all behavior that the expert did not take. We counter this by leveraging diverse demonstrations that naturally occur in multi-task settings to learn a tighter set of constraints. We validate our method with simulation experiments on high-dimensional continuous control tasks.

Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture relational information. In this paper, we present Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR), a dataset containing more than 10k natural text-image pairs with 65 types of spatial relations in English (such as: under, in front of, and facing). While using a seemingly simple annotation format, we show how the dataset includes challenging linguistic phenomena, such as varying reference frames. We demonstrate a large gap between human and model performance: the human ceiling is above 95%, while state-of-the-art models only achieve around 70%. We observe that VLMs' by-relation performances have little correlation with the number of training examples and the tested models are in general incapable of recognising relations concerning the orientations of objects.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) emphasize long chain-of-thought reasoning; yet, we find that their performance on visual tasks is primarily limited by a lack of visual perception as opposed to reasoning itself. In this work, we systematically study the interplay between perception and reasoning in VLM post-training by decomposing their capabilities into three separate training stages: visual perception, visual reasoning, and textual reasoning, incorporating specialized training data. We demonstrate that visual perception (a) requires targeted optimization with specialized data; (b) serves as a fundamental scaffold that should be solidified through staged training before refining visual reasoning; and (c) is more effectively learned via RL than caption-based SFT. Our experiments across multiple VLMs demonstrate that staged training consistently improves both visual perception and reasoning performance over merged training. Notably, models trained with our approach achieve 1.5% higher reasoning accuracy with 20.8% shorter reasoning traces, suggesting that superior perception reduces the need for excessive reasoning. Furthermore, we show that this capability-based staging represents a new curriculum dimension orthogonal to traditional difficulty-based curricula, and combining both yields further additive gains. Our staged-training models achieve superior performance among open-weight VLMs, establishing advanced results on several visual math and perception (e.g., +5.2% on WeMath and +3.7% on RealWorldQA) tasks compared with the base counterpart.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet they remain prone to perception-related hallucinations in fine-grained tasks. This vulnerability arises from a fundamental limitation: their reasoning is largely restricted to the language domain, treating visual input as a static, reasoning-agnostic preamble rather than a dynamic participant. Consequently, current models act as passive observers, unable to re-examine visual details to ground their evolving reasoning states. To overcome this, we propose V-Reflection, a framework that transforms the MLLM into an active interrogator through a "think-then-look" visual reflection mechanism. During reasoning, latent states function as dynamic probes that actively interrogate the visual feature space, grounding each reasoning step for task-critical evidence. Our approach employs a two-stage distillation strategy. First, the Box-Guided Compression (BCM) module establishes stable pixel-to-latent targets through explicit spatial grounding. Next, a Dynamic Autoregressive Compression (DAC) module maps the model's hidden states into dynamic probes that interrogate the global visual feature map. By distilling the spatial expertise of the BCM teacher into the DAC student, V-Reflection internalizes the ability to localize task-critical evidence. During inference, both modules remain entirely inactive, maintaining a purely end-to-end autoregressive decoding in the latent space with optimal efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our V-Reflection across six perception-intensive benchmarks, significantly narrowing the fine-grained perception gap. Visualizations confirm that latent reasoning autonomously localizes task-critical visual evidence.

Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly with diffusion models, progressing from CLIP and T5 conditioning to unified systems where a single LLM backbone handles both visual understanding and generation. Despite the architectural unification, these systems frequently fail to faithfully align complex prompts during synthesis, even though they remain highly accurate at verifying whether an image satisfies those same prompts. We formalize this as the understanding-generation gap and propose UniReasoner, a framework that leverages the LLM as a universal reasoner to convert its understanding strength into direct generation guidance. Given a prompt, the LLM first produces a coarse visual draft composed of discrete vision tokens. It then performs a self-critique by evaluating the draft for prompt consistency, producing a grounded textual evaluation that pinpoints what needs to be corrected. Finally, a diffusion model is conditioned jointly on the prompt, the visual draft, and the evaluation, ensuring that generation is guided by explicit corrective signals. Each signal addresses a limitation of the other: the draft provides a concrete, scene-level anchor that reduces under-specification in text-only conditioning, while the evaluation turns verification into grounded, actionable constraints that correct omissions, hallucinations, and relational errors. Experiments show that UniReasoner improves compositional alignment and semantic faithfulness under the same diffusion backbone while maintaining image quality, demonstrating a practical way to exploit LLM reasoning to close the understanding-generation gap.

Humans show an innate capability to identify tools to support specific actions. The association between objects parts and the actions they facilitate is usually named affordance. Being able to segment objects parts depending on the tasks they afford is crucial to enable intelligent robots to use objects of daily living. Traditional supervised learning methods for affordance segmentation require costly pixel-level annotations, while weakly supervised approaches, though less demanding, still rely on object-interaction examples and support a closed set of actions. These limitations hinder scalability, may introduce biases, and usually restrict models to a limited set of predefined actions. This paper proposes AffordanceCLIP, to overcome these limitations by leveraging the implicit affordance knowledge embedded within large pre-trained Vision-Language models like CLIP. We experimentally demonstrate that CLIP, although not explicitly trained for affordances detection, retains valuable information for the task. Our AffordanceCLIP achieves competitive zero-shot performance compared to methods with specialized training, while offering several advantages: i) it works with any action prompt, not just a predefined set; ii) it requires training only a small number of additional parameters compared to existing solutions and iii) eliminates the need for direct supervision on action-object pairs, opening new perspectives for functionality-based reasoning of models.

Visual understanding is inherently intention-driven - humans selectively focus on different regions of a scene based on their goals. Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) enable flexible expression of such intentions through natural language, allowing queries to guide visual reasoning processes. Frameworks like Visual Chain-of-Thought have demonstrated the benefit of incorporating explicit reasoning steps, where the model predicts a focus region before answering a query. However, existing approaches rely heavily on supervised training with annotated intermediate bounding boxes, which severely limits scalability due to the combinatorial explosion of intention-region pairs. To overcome this limitation, we propose VisRL, the first framework that applies reinforcement learning (RL) to the problem of intention-driven visual perception. VisRL optimizes the entire visual reasoning process using only reward signals. By treating intermediate focus selection as an internal decision optimized through trial-and-error, our method eliminates the need for costly region annotations while aligning more closely with how humans learn to perceive the world. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that VisRL consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating both its effectiveness and its strong generalization across different LMMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/VisRL.

Large language models often produce hallucinated answers that violate prompt-level constraints. A key diagnostic question is whether these failures reflect missing knowledge, or whether the model has the relevant information but follows the wrong inference path. We study this phenomenon as inference misalignment: a mismatch between the answer supported by the prompt and the answer favored by statistically salient latent associations. We formalize this view with a latent key-task model, in which pretraining-frequency imbalance can cause a shortcut path to dominate the constraint-sensitive path and induce positive inference loss. The framework predicts two failure modes: task-retrieval bias in entity disambiguation and key-selection bias in action choice. We introduce TrapQA, a controlled diagnostic testbed with two components. ScientistQA tests disambiguation among similar scientists with supplementary factual probes, while Real-Life Constrained QA tests everyday constraint following under salient shortcuts. Our results show that hallucination can arise from biased latent inference rather than absent knowledge alone.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically align visual features from an encoder with a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM). However, this makes the visual perception module a bottleneck, which constrains the overall capabilities of LVLMs. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, while rich in visual semantics, often contain unavoidable local shortcuts that can lead to an overestimation of models' perceptual abilities. Here, we introduce TopoPerception, a benchmark that leverages topological properties to rigorously evaluate the global visual perception capabilities of LVLMs across various granularities. Since topology depends on the global structure of an image and is invariant to local features, TopoPerception enables a shortcut-free assessment of global perception, fundamentally distinguishing it from semantically rich tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on TopoPerception and find that even at the coarsest perceptual granularity, all models perform no better than random chance, indicating a profound inability to perceive global visual features. Notably, a consistent trend emerge within model families: more powerful models with stronger reasoning capabilities exhibit lower accuracy. This suggests that merely scaling up models is insufficient to address this deficit and may even exacerbate it. Progress may require new training paradigms or architectures. TopoPerception not only exposes a critical bottleneck in current LVLMs but also offers a lens and direction for improving their global visual perception. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Wenhao-Zhou/TopoPerception.

We introduce PerceptionRubrics, a rubric-based evaluation framework that addresses the gap between saturated benchmark scores and real-world brittleness. Shifting evaluation from holistic semantic matching to rigorous atomic auditing, PerceptionRubrics pairs 1,038 information-dense images with over 12,000 instance-specific rubrics. These criteria are derived from golden captions constructed via a novel Circular Peer-Review consensus pipeline and then distilled into a dual-stream system of Must-Right (essential facts) and Easy-Wrong (fine-grained details) rubrics. Crucially, PerceptionRubrics implements a Gated Scoring mechanism: unlike linear averages, failure on mandatory visual facts triggers sharp binary penalties. Extensive evaluation yields critical insights: (1) The Reliability Gap: models often verify fragmented elements correctly yet fail strict conjunctive constraints, exposing brittleness in dense domains; (2) Open-Closed Stratification: contrary to reasoning trends, we reveal a persistent 8% perception deficit between open-source and proprietary frontiers; and (3) Human-Aligned Rigor: our gated metrics substantially out-align conventional benchmarks, validating that strict perceptual fidelity is the prerequisite for reliable generation.

Large language models systematically fail when a salient surface cue conflicts with an unstated feasibility constraint. We study this through a diagnose-measure-bridge-treat framework. Causal-behavioral analysis of the ``car wash problem'' across six models reveals approximately context-independent sigmoid heuristics: the distance cue exerts 8.7 to 38 times more influence than the goal, and token-level attribution shows patterns more consistent with keyword associations than compositional inference. The Heuristic Override Benchmark (HOB) -- 500 instances spanning 4 heuristic by 5 constraint families with minimal pairs and explicitness gradients -- demonstrates generality across 14 models: under strict evaluation (10/10 correct), no model exceeds 75%, and presence constraints are hardest (44%). A minimal hint (e.g., emphasizing the key object) recovers +15 pp on average, suggesting the failure lies in constraint inference rather than missing knowledge; 12/14 models perform worse when the constraint is removed (up to -39 pp), revealing conservative bias. Parametric probes confirm that the sigmoid pattern generalizes to cost, efficiency, and semantic-similarity heuristics; goal-decomposition prompting recovers +6 to 9 pp by forcing models to enumerate preconditions before answering. Together, these results characterize heuristic override as a systematic reasoning vulnerability and provide a benchmark for measuring progress toward resolving it.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive advances, yet object hallucination remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods, based on the flawed assumption that omission and fabrication hallucinations share a common cause, often reduce omissions only to trigger more fabrications. In this work, we overturn this view by demonstrating that omission hallucinations arise from insufficient confidence when mapping perceived visual features to linguistic expressions, whereas fabrication hallucinations result from spurious associations within the cross-modal representation space due to statistical biases in the training corpus. Building on findings from visual attention intervention experiments, we propose the Visual-Semantic Attention Potential Field, a conceptual framework that reveals how the model constructs visual evidence to infer the presence or absence of objects. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Visual Potential Field Calibration (VPFC), a plug-and-play hallucination mitigation method that effectively reduces omission hallucinations without introducing additional fabrication hallucinations. Our findings reveal a critical oversight in current object hallucination research and chart new directions for developing more robust and balanced hallucination mitigation strategies.

Recent reinforcement-learning frameworks for visual perception policy have begun to incorporate intermediate reasoning chains expressed in natural language. Empirical observations indicate that such purely linguistic intermediate reasoning often reduces performance on perception tasks. We argue that the core issue lies not in reasoning per se but in the form of reasoning: while these chains perform semantic reasoning in an unstructured linguistic space, visual perception requires reasoning in a spatial and object-centric space. In response, we introduce Artemis, a perception-policy learning framework that performs structured proposal-based reasoning, where each intermediate step is represented as a (label, bounding-box) pair capturing a verifiable visual state. This design enables explicit tracking of intermediate states, direct supervision for proposal quality, and avoids ambiguity introduced by language-based reasoning. Artemis is built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B, achieves strong performance on grounding and detection task and exhibits substantial generalization to counting and geometric-perception tasks. The consistent improvements across these diverse settings confirm that aligning reasoning with spatial representations enhances perception-policy learning. Owing to its strengthened visual reasoning, Artemis also achieves competitive performance on general MLLM benchmarks, illustrating that spatially grounded reasoning provides a principled route toward scalable and general perception policies.

Human vision organizes local cues into coherent global forms using Gestalt principles like closure, proximity, and figure-ground assignment -- functions reliant on global spatial structure. We investigate whether modern vision models show similar behaviors, and under what training conditions these emerge. We find that Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained with Masked Autoencoding (MAE) exhibit activation patterns consistent with Gestalt laws, including illusory contour completion, convexity preference, and dynamic figure-ground segregation. To probe the computational basis, we hypothesize that modeling global dependencies is necessary for Gestalt-like organization. We introduce the Distorted Spatial Relationship Testbench (DiSRT), which evaluates sensitivity to global spatial perturbations while preserving local textures. Using DiSRT, we show that self-supervised models (e.g., MAE, CLIP) outperform supervised baselines and sometimes even exceed human performance. ConvNeXt models trained with MAE also exhibit Gestalt-compatible representations, suggesting such sensitivity can arise without attention architectures. However, classification finetuning degrades this ability. Inspired by biological vision, we show that a Top-K activation sparsity mechanism can restore global sensitivity. Our findings identify training conditions that promote or suppress Gestalt-like perception and establish DiSRT as a diagnostic for global structure sensitivity across models.

Recent advancements in multimodal reward models (RMs) have substantially improved post-training for visual generative models. However, current RMs face inherent limitations: (1) visual inputs consume large context budgets, forcing fewer frames and causing loss of fine-grained details; and (2) all visual information is packed into the initial prompt, exacerbating hallucination and forgetting during chain-of-thought reasoning. To overcome these issues, we introduce VideoReward Thinker (VR-Thinker), a thinking-with-image framework that equips the RM with visual reasoning operations (e.g., select frame) and a configurable visual memory window. This allows the RM to actively acquire and update visual evidence within context limits, improving reasoning fidelity and reliability. We activate visual reasoning via a reinforcement fine-tuning pipeline: (i) Cold Start with curated visual chain-of-thought data to distill basic reasoning skills and operation formatting; (ii) select samples whose per-dimension and overall judgments are all correct, then conduct Rejection sampling Fine-Tuning on these high-quality traces to further enhance reasoning; and (iii) apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to strengthen reasoning. Our approach delivers state-of-the-art accuracy among open-source models on video preference benchmarks, especially for longer videos: a 7B VR-Thinker achieves 80.5% on VideoGen Reward, 82.3% on GenAI-Bench, and 75.6% on MJ-Bench-Video. These results validate the effectiveness and promise of thinking-with-image multimodal reward modeling.

Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understanding of perspective through 10 carefully crafted tasks across three complementary dimensions: Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness. Our benchmark comprises 2,711 real-world and synthetic image instances with 5,083 question-answer pairs that probe key capabilities, such as vanishing point perception and counting, perspective type reasoning, line relationship understanding in 3D space, invariance to perspective-preserving transformations, etc. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 43 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover significant limitations: while models demonstrate competence on surface-level perceptual tasks, they struggle with compositional reasoning and maintaining spatial consistency under perturbations. Our analysis further reveals intriguing patterns between model architecture, scale, and perspective capabilities, highlighting both robustness bottlenecks and the benefits of chain-of-thought prompting. MMPerspective establishes a valuable testbed for diagnosing and advancing spatial understanding in vision-language systems. Resources available at: https://yunlong10.github.io/MMPerspective/

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs. KiloGram is available at https://lil.nlp.cornell.edu/kilogram .

Recently, Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) have sparked a new wave of research, achieving impressive results in tasks such as audio-video understanding and real-time environment perception. However, hallucination issues still persist. Similar to the bimodal setting, the priors from the text modality tend to dominate, leading OLLMs to rely more heavily on textual cues while neglecting visual and audio information. In addition, fully multimodal scenarios introduce new challenges. Most existing models align visual or auditory modalities with text independently during training, while ignoring the intrinsic correlations between video and its corresponding audio. This oversight results in hallucinations when reasoning requires interpreting hidden audio cues embedded in video content. To address these challenges, we propose OmniDPO, a preference-alignment framework designed to mitigate hallucinations in OLLMs. Specifically, OmniDPO incorporates two strategies: (1) constructing text-preference sample pairs to enhance the model's understanding of audio-video interactions; and (2) constructing multimodal-preference sample pairs to strengthen the model's attention to visual and auditory information. By tackling both challenges, OmniDPO effectively improves multimodal grounding and reduces hallucination. Experiments conducted on two OLLMs demonstrate that OmniDPO not only effectively mitigates multimodal hallucinations but also significantly enhances the models' reasoning capabilities across modalities. All code and datasets will be released upon paper acceptance.

Despite their great success across various multimodal tasks, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are facing a prevalent problem with object hallucinations, where the generated textual responses are inconsistent with ground-truth objects in the given image. This paper investigates various LVLMs and pinpoints attention deficiency toward discriminative local image features as one root cause of object hallucinations. Specifically, LVLMs predominantly attend to prompt-independent global image features, while failing to capture prompt-relevant local features, consequently undermining the visual grounding capacity of LVLMs and leading to hallucinations. To this end, we propose Assembly of Global and Local Attention (AGLA), a training-free and plug-and-play approach that mitigates object hallucinations by exploring an ensemble of global features for response generation and local features for visual discrimination simultaneously. Our approach exhibits an image-prompt matching scheme that captures prompt-relevant local features from images, leading to an augmented view of the input image where prompt-relevant content is reserved while irrelevant distractions are masked. With the augmented view, a calibrated decoding distribution can be derived by integrating generative global features from the original image and discriminative local features from the augmented image. Extensive experiments show that AGLA consistently mitigates object hallucinations and enhances general perception capability for LVLMs across various discriminative and generative benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Lackel/AGLA.

Training vision-language models on cognitively-plausible amounts of data requires rethinking how models integrate multimodal information. Within the constraints of the Vision track for the BabyLM Challenge 2025, we propose a lightweight decoder-based architecture with (1) token-wise dynamic gating for adaptive fusion of linguistic and visual cues, (2) feature modulation and channel attention to maximise the utility of limited visual information and (3) auxiliary contrastive objectives for visual grounding. Evaluation on five benchmarks (BLiMP, BLiMP Supplement, EWoK, Winoground and VQA) shows competitive or superior performance to multimodal baselines. More notably, our dynamic gate discovers interpretable patterns without explicit supervision, favouring visual cues for content words and linguistic cues for function words. While we identify limitations in the Challenge constraints, such as the information bottleneck created by global image embeddings and training instability from the dataset split, our findings establish dynamic gating as a powerful tool for efficient multimodal learning, offering both interpretability and performance even under severe constraints.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

Despite significant advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks, existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are prone to producing visually ungrounded responses when interpreting associated images. In contrast, when humans embark on learning new knowledge, they often rely on a set of fundamental pre-study principles: reviewing outlines to grasp core concepts, summarizing key points to guide their focus and enhance understanding. However, such preparatory actions are notably absent in the current instruction tuning processes. This paper presents Re-Critic, an easily scalable rationale-augmented framework designed to incorporate fundamental rules and chain-of-thought (CoT) as a bridge to enhance reasoning abilities. Specifically, Re-Critic develops a visual rationale synthesizer that scalably augments raw instructions with rationale explanation. To probe more contextually grounded responses, Re-Critic employs an in-context self-critic mechanism to select response pairs for preference tuning. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned with our rationale-augmented dataset yield gains that extend beyond hallucination-specific tasks to broader multimodal reasoning tasks.

Inspired by the superior language abilities of large language models (LLM), large vision-language models (LVLM) have been recently explored by integrating powerful LLMs for improving the performance on complex multimodal tasks. Despite the promising progress on LVLMs, we find that LVLMs suffer from the hallucination problem, i.e. they tend to generate objects that are inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. To investigate it, this work presents the first systematic study on object hallucination of LVLMs. We conduct the evaluation experiments on several representative LVLMs, and show that they mostly suffer from severe object hallucination issue. We further discuss that the visual instructions may influence the hallucination, and find that: objects that frequently occur in the visual instructions or co-occur with the image objects, are obviously prone to be hallucinated by LVLMs. Besides, we find that existing evaluation methods might be affected by the input instructions and generation styles of LVLMs. Thus, we further design an improved evaluation method for object hallucination by proposing a polling-based query method called POPE. Experiment results demonstrate that our POPE can evaluate the object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/POPE.

We find that current emotion-oriented Omni-MLLMs still lack reliable omni-modal perception: they (i) underutilize multimodal cues in their reasoning trajectories and (ii) exhibit unfaithful behavior, often hallucinating modality-specific statements from other modalities. Building on these insights, we propose OPPO (Omni-Perception Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes multimodal perception. First, an Omni-Perception Reward decomposes ground-truth reasoning into fine-grained visual, acoustic, and emotion cues and rewards trajectories that semantically recover these cues. Second, an Omni-Perception Loss compares the policy under full and unimodally masked inputs, applying a KL penalty only to modality-specific evidence tokens to suppress cross-modal hallucination. We further introduce MEP-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark that quantifies utilization and faithfulness. Experiments show that OPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on MER-UniBench and MME-Emotion, while substantially improving utilization and faithfulness scores on MEP-Bench, highlighting the importance of sufficient and faithful omni perception for multimodal emotion reasoning.

Recent strides in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced their performance in many reasoning tasks. However, Abstract Visual Reasoning (AVR) remains a critical challenge, primarily due to limitations in perceiving abstract graphics. To tackle this issue, we investigate the bottlenecks in current MLLMs and synthesize training data to improve their abstract visual perception. First, we propose VisuRiddles, a benchmark for AVR, featuring tasks meticulously constructed to assess models' reasoning capacities across five core dimensions and two high-level reasoning categories. Second, we introduce the Perceptual Riddle Synthesizer (PRS), an automated framework for generating riddles with fine-grained perceptual descriptions. PRS not only generates valuable training data for abstract graphics but also provides fine-grained perceptual description, crucially allowing for supervision over intermediate reasoning stages and thereby improving both training efficacy and model interpretability. Our extensive experimental results on VisuRiddles empirically validate that fine-grained visual perception is the principal bottleneck and our synthesis framework markedly enhances the performance of contemporary MLLMs on these challenging tasks. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/VisuRiddles

Multimodal language models possess a remarkable ability to handle an open-vocabulary's worth of objects. Yet the best models still suffer from hallucinations when reasoning about scenes in the real world, revealing a gap between their seemingly strong performance on existing perception benchmarks that are saturating and their reasoning in the real world. To address this gap, we build a novel benchmark of in-the-wild scenes that we call Common-O. With more than 10.5k examples using exclusively new images not found in web training data to avoid contamination, Common-O goes beyond just perception, inspired by cognitive tests for humans, to probe reasoning across scenes by asking "what's in common?". We evaluate leading multimodal language models, including models specifically trained to perform chain-of-thought reasoning. We find that perceiving objects in single images is tractable for most models, yet reasoning across scenes is very challenging even for the best models, including reasoning models. Despite saturating many leaderboards focusing on perception, the best performing model only achieves 35% on Common-O -- and on Common-O Complex, consisting of more complex scenes, the best model achieves only 1%. Curiously, we find models are more prone to hallucinate when similar objects are present in the scene, suggesting models may be relying on object co-occurrence seen during training. Among the models we evaluated, we found scale can provide modest improvements while models explicitly trained with multi-image inputs show bigger improvements, suggesting scaled multi-image training may offer promise. We make our benchmark publicly available to spur research into the challenge of hallucination when reasoning across scenes.

Large language models (LLMs) trained purely on text ostensibly lack any direct perceptual experience, yet their internal representations are implicitly shaped by multimodal regularities encoded in language. We test the hypothesis that explicit sensory prompting can surface this latent structure, bringing a text-only LLM into closer representational alignment with specialist vision and audio encoders. When a sensory prompt tells the model to 'see' or 'hear', it cues the model to resolve its next-token predictions as if they were conditioned on latent visual or auditory evidence that is never actually supplied. Our findings reveal that lightweight prompt engineering can reliably activate modality-appropriate representations in purely text-trained LLMs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

Recent advances in large-scale pretraining have yielded visual foundation models with strong capabilities. Not only can recent models generalize to arbitrary images for their training task, their intermediate representations are useful for other visual tasks such as detection and segmentation. Given that such models can classify, delineate, and localize objects in 2D, we ask whether they also represent their 3D structure? In this work, we analyze the 3D awareness of visual foundation models. We posit that 3D awareness implies that representations (1) encode the 3D structure of the scene and (2) consistently represent the surface across views. We conduct a series of experiments using task-specific probes and zero-shot inference procedures on frozen features. Our experiments reveal several limitations of the current models. Our code and analysis can be found at https://github.com/mbanani/probe3d.

To accurately process a visual scene, observers must bind features together to represent individual objects. This capacity is necessary, for instance, to distinguish an image containing a red square and a blue circle from an image containing a blue square and a red circle. Recent work has found that language models solve this 'binding problem' via a set of symbol-like, content-independent indices, but it is unclear whether similar mechanisms are employed by Vision Language Models (VLMs). This question is especially relevant, given the persistent failures of VLMs on tasks that require binding. Here, we identify a previously unknown set of emergent symbolic mechanisms that support binding specifically in VLMs, via a content-independent, spatial indexing scheme. Moreover, we find that binding errors, when they occur, can be traced directly to failures in these mechanisms. Taken together, these results shed light on the mechanisms that support symbol-like processing in VLMs, and suggest possible avenues for reducing the number of binding failures exhibited by these models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination, resulting in misalignment between the output textual response and the input visual content. Recent research indicates that the over-reliance on the Large Language Model (LLM) backbone, as one cause of the LVLM hallucination, inherently introduces bias from language priors, leading to insufficient context attention to the visual inputs. We tackle this issue of hallucination by mitigating such over-reliance through preference learning. We propose Vision-guided Direct Preference Optimization (V-DPO) to enhance visual context learning at training time. To interpret the effectiveness and generalizability of V-DPO on different types of training data, we construct a synthetic dataset containing both response- and image-contrast preference pairs, compared against existing human-annotated hallucination samples. Our approach achieves significant improvements compared with baseline methods across various hallucination benchmarks. Our analysis indicates that V-DPO excels in learning from image-contrast preference data, demonstrating its superior ability to elicit and understand nuances of visual context. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/V-DPO.

Despite the remarkable advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), the mechanistic interpretability remains underexplored. Existing analyses are insufficiently comprehensive and lack examination covering visual and textual tokens, model components, and the full range of layers. This limitation restricts actionable insights to improve the faithfulness of model output and the development of downstream tasks, such as hallucination mitigation. To address this limitation, we introduce Fine-grained Cross-modal Causal Tracing (FCCT) framework, which systematically quantifies the causal effects on visual object perception. FCCT conducts fine-grained analysis covering the full range of visual and textual tokens, three core model components including multi-head self-attention (MHSA), feed-forward networks (FFNs), and hidden states, across all decoder layers. Our analysis is the first to demonstrate that MHSAs of the last token in middle layers play a critical role in aggregating cross-modal information, while FFNs exhibit a three-stage hierarchical progression for the storage and transfer of visual object representations. Building on these insights, we propose Intermediate Representation Injection (IRI), a training-free inference-time technique that reinforces visual object information flow by precisely intervening on cross-modal representations at specific components and layers, thereby enhancing perception and mitigating hallucination. Consistent improvements across five widely used benchmarks and LVLMs demonstrate IRI achieves state-of-the-art performance, while preserving inference speed and other foundational performance.

The field of psychology has long recognized a basic level of categorization that humans use when labeling visual stimuli, a term coined by Rosch in 1976. This level of categorization has been found to be used most frequently, to have higher information density, and to aid in visual language tasks with priming in humans. Here, we investigate basic level categorization in two recently released, open-source vision-language models (VLMs). This paper demonstrates that Llama 3.2 Vision Instruct (11B) and Molmo 7B-D both prefer basic level categorization consistent with human behavior. Moreover, the models' preferences are consistent with nuanced human behaviors like the biological versus non-biological basic level effects and the well established expert basic level shift, further suggesting that VLMs acquire cognitive categorization behaviors from the human data on which they are trained.

While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress on many popular visual reasoning benchmarks, whether they possess abstract visual reasoning abilities remains an open question. Similar to the Sudoku puzzles, abstract visual reasoning (AVR) problems require finding high-level patterns (e.g., repetition constraints) that control the input shapes (e.g., digits) in a specific task configuration (e.g., matrix). However, existing AVR benchmarks only considered a limited set of patterns (addition, conjunction), input shapes (rectangle, square), and task configurations (3 by 3 matrices). To evaluate MLLMs' reasoning abilities comprehensively, we introduce MARVEL, a multidimensional AVR benchmark with 770 puzzles composed of six core knowledge patterns, geometric and abstract shapes, and five different task configurations. To inspect whether the model accuracy is grounded in perception and reasoning, MARVEL complements the general AVR question with perception questions in a hierarchical evaluation framework. We conduct comprehensive experiments on MARVEL with nine representative MLLMs in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our experiments reveal that all models show near-random performance on the AVR question, with significant performance gaps (40%) compared to humans across all patterns and task configurations. Further analysis of perception questions reveals that MLLMs struggle to comprehend the visual features (near-random performance) and even count the panels in the puzzle ( <45%), hindering their ability for abstract reasoning. We release our entire code and dataset.

Recent work suggests that representations learned by adversarially robust networks are more human perceptually-aligned than non-robust networks via image manipulations. Despite appearing closer to human visual perception, it is unclear if the constraints in robust DNN representations match biological constraints found in human vision. Human vision seems to rely on texture-based/summary statistic representations in the periphery, which have been shown to explain phenomena such as crowding and performance on visual search tasks. To understand how adversarially robust optimizations/representations compare to human vision, we performed a psychophysics experiment using a set of metameric discrimination tasks where we evaluated how well human observers could distinguish between images synthesized to match adversarially robust representations compared to non-robust representations and a texture synthesis model of peripheral vision (Texforms). We found that the discriminability of robust representation and texture model images decreased to near chance performance as stimuli were presented farther in the periphery. Moreover, performance on robust and texture-model images showed similar trends within participants, while performance on non-robust representations changed minimally across the visual field. These results together suggest that (1) adversarially robust representations capture peripheral computation better than non-robust representations and (2) robust representations capture peripheral computation similar to current state-of-the-art texture peripheral vision models. More broadly, our findings support the idea that localized texture summary statistic representations may drive human invariance to adversarial perturbations and that the incorporation of such representations in DNNs could give rise to useful properties like adversarial robustness.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced considerably, intertwining visual recognition and language understanding to generate content that is not only coherent but also contextually attuned. Despite their success, LVLMs still suffer from the issue of object hallucinations, where models generate plausible yet incorrect outputs that include objects that do not exist in the images. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Visual Contrastive Decoding (VCD), a simple and training-free method that contrasts output distributions derived from original and distorted visual inputs. The proposed VCD effectively reduces the over-reliance on statistical bias and unimodal priors, two essential causes of object hallucinations. This adjustment ensures the generated content is closely grounded to visual inputs, resulting in contextually accurate outputs. Our experiments show that VCD, without either additional training or the usage of external tools, significantly mitigates the object hallucination issue across different LVLM families. Beyond mitigating object hallucinations, VCD also excels in general LVLM benchmarks, highlighting its wide-ranging applicability.

We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a novel set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes, in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations - such as object position relative to the humanoid minifigure and the humanoid minifigure's orientation - and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each visual task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, reveals that while they excel in scene understanding, the performance declines significantly on spatial reasoning and further deteriorates on perspective-taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant progress, they remain largely text-centric, relying on language as their core reasoning modality. As a result, they are limited in their ability to handle reasoning tasks that are predominantly visual. Recent approaches have sought to address this by supervising intermediate visual steps with helper images, depth maps, or image crops. However, these strategies impose restrictive priors on what "useful" visual abstractions look like, add heavy annotation costs, and struggle to generalize across tasks. To address this critical limitation, we propose a task-agnostic mechanism that trains LMMs to discover and use visual reasoning tokens without explicit supervision. These tokens attend globally and re-encode the image in a task-adaptive way, enabling the model to extract relevant visual information without hand-crafted supervision. Our approach outperforms direct fine-tuning and achieves state-of-the-art results on a diverse range of vision-centric tasks -- including those where intermediate abstractions are hard to specify -- while also generalizing to multi-task instruction tuning.

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

Can our brain signals faithfully reflect the original visual stimuli, even including high-frequency details? Although human perceptual and cognitive capacities enable us to process and remember visual information, these abilities are constrained by several factors, such as limited attentional resources and the finite capacity of visual memory. When visual stimuli are processed by human visual system into brain signals, some information is inevitably lost, leading to a discrepancy known as the System GAP. Additionally, perceptual and cognitive dynamics, along with technical noise in signal acquisition, degrade the fidelity of brain signals relative to the visual stimuli, known as the Random GAP. When encoded brain representations are directly aligned with the corresponding pretrained image features, the System GAP and Random GAP between paired data challenge the model, requiring it to bridge these gaps. However, in the context of limited paired data, these gaps are difficult for the model to learn, leading to overfitting and poor generalization to new data. To address these GAPs, we propose a simple yet effective approach called the Uncertainty-aware Blur Prior (UBP). It estimates the uncertainty within the paired data, reflecting the mismatch between brain signals and visual stimuli. Based on this uncertainty, UBP dynamically blurs the high-frequency details of the original images, reducing the impact of the mismatch and improving alignment. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 50.9\% and a top-5 accuracy of 79.7\% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 13.7\% and 9.8\%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/Uncertainty-aware-Blur-Prior{GitHub}.

Recent development of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has attracted growing attention within the AI landscape for its practical implementation potential. However, ``hallucination'', or more specifically, the misalignment between factual visual content and corresponding textual generation, poses a significant challenge of utilizing LVLMs. In this comprehensive survey, we dissect LVLM-related hallucinations in an attempt to establish an overview and facilitate future mitigation. Our scrutiny starts with a clarification of the concept of hallucinations in LVLMs, presenting a variety of hallucination symptoms and highlighting the unique challenges inherent in LVLM hallucinations. Subsequently, we outline the benchmarks and methodologies tailored specifically for evaluating hallucinations unique to LVLMs. Additionally, we delve into an investigation of the root causes of these hallucinations, encompassing insights from the training data and model components. We also critically review existing methods for mitigating hallucinations. The open questions and future directions pertaining to hallucinations within LVLMs are discussed to conclude this survey.

Achieving human-like perception and reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence. While recent research has primarily focused on enhancing reasoning capabilities in MLLMs, a fundamental question persists: Can Multimodal Large Language Models truly perceive the world as humans do? This paper shifts focus from reasoning to perception. Rather than constructing benchmarks specifically for reasoning, we introduce the Turing Eye Test (TET), a challenging perception-oriented benchmark comprising four diagnostic tasks that evaluate MLLMs' performance on synthetic images that humans process intuitively. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit catastrophic failures on our perceptual tasks trivial for humans. Both in-context learning and training on language backbone-effective for previous benchmarks-fail to improve performance on our tasks, while fine-tuning the vision tower enables rapid adaptation, suggesting that our benchmark poses challenges for vision tower generalization rather than for the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the language backbone-a key gap between current MLLMs and human perception. We release a representative subset of TET tasks in this version, and will introduce more diverse tasks and methods to enhance visual generalization in future work.

Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly leverage diverse knowledge sources to address complex tasks, often encountering conflicts between their internal parametric knowledge and external information. Knowledge conflicts can result in hallucinations and unreliable responses, but the mechanisms governing such interactions remain unknown. To address this gap, we analyze the mechanisms that VLMs use to resolve cross-modal conflicts by introducing a dataset of multimodal counterfactual queries that deliberately contradict internal commonsense knowledge. We localize with logit inspection a small set of heads that control the conflict. Moreover, by modifying these heads, we can steer the model towards its internal knowledge or the visual inputs. Finally, we show that attention from such heads pinpoints localized image regions driving visual overrides, outperforming gradient-based attribution in precision.

Despite impressive progress in video generation, existing models remain limited to surface-level plausibility, lacking a coherent and unified understanding of the world. Prior approaches typically incorporate only a single form of world-related knowledge or rely on rigid alignment strategies to introduce additional knowledge. However, aligning the single world knowledge is insufficient to constitute a world model that requires jointly modeling multiple heterogeneous dimensions (e.g., physical commonsense, 3D and temporal consistency). To address this limitation, we introduce DreamWorld, a unified framework that integrates complementary world knowledge into video generators via a Joint World Modeling Paradigm, jointly predicting video pixels and features from foundation models to capture temporal dynamics, spatial geometry, and semantic consistency. However, naively optimizing these heterogeneous objectives can lead to visual instability and temporal flickering. To mitigate this issue, we propose Consistent Constraint Annealing (CCA) to progressively regulate world-level constraints during training, and Multi-Source Inner-Guidance to enforce learned world priors at inference. Extensive evaluations show that DreamWorld improves world consistency, outperforming Wan2.1 by 2.26 points on VBench. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ABU121111/DreamWorld{mypink{Github}}.

Evaluating whether vision-language models (VLMs) reason consistently across representations is challenging because modality comparisons are typically confounded by task differences and asymmetric information. We introduce SEAM, a benchmark that pairs semantically equivalent inputs across four domains that have existing standardized textual and visual notations. By employing distinct notation systems across modalities, in contrast to OCR-based image-text pairing, SEAM provides a rigorous comparative assessment of the textual-symbolic and visual-spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Across 21 contemporary models, we observe systematic modality imbalance: vision frequently lags language in overall performance, despite the problems containing semantically equivalent information, and cross-modal agreement is relatively low. Our error analysis reveals two main drivers: textual perception failures from tokenization in domain notation and visual perception failures that induce hallucinations. We also show that our results are largely robust to visual transformations. SEAM establishes a controlled, semantically equivalent setting for measuring and improving modality-agnostic reasoning.