Overview

Visual grounding studies how systems identify the image regions or objects referred to by language, often producing boxes, points, or masks. Common approaches include aligning text and visual features, selecting among detected objects, using attention or high-resolution crops, and training with localization annotations or reinforcement-learning rewards. The field spans referring-expression benchmarks such as RefCOCO, fine-grained spatial reasoning, medical and remote-sensing images, video, and embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. A central challenge is that correct answers do not prove a model used visual evidence: systems still struggle with precise localization, changing scenes, and reliable visual dependence while balancing accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.

Latest papers

155 papers23 papers in the last four weeks, up 28% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

May 6, 2026

From Priors to Perception: Grounding Video-LLMs in Physical Reality

While Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel in general understanding, they exhibit systematic deficits in fine-grained physical reasoning. Existing interventions not only suffer from limited generalization but fundamentally conflate generative artifacts with genuine physical fallacies. Furthermore, we find that models fail systematically not only in anti-physics anomalies but also in counter-intuitive scenarios where visual facts contradict statistical expectations. Accordingly, we propose the Unified Attribution Theory: this dual failure stems not from perception deficiency, but from Semantic Prior Dominance -- the reasoning mechanism is deeply hijacked by internal narrative scripts. To address this, we construct the Programmatic Adversarial Curriculum (PACC), the first high-fidelity adversarial video dataset synthesized based on physical laws, thoroughly decoupling visual artifacts from logical errors. Concurrently, we design the Visual-Anchored Reasoning Chain (VARC) to force models to explicitly ground their judgments in low-level visual facts prior to logical adjudication. Experiments demonstrate that without invasive architectural modifications, standard LoRA fine-tuning with the PACC curriculum effectively neutralizes prior interference in state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, yielding a substantial leap in physical reasoning capabilities.
Apr 29, 2026

DIAGRAMS: A Review Framework for Reasoning-Level Attribution in Diagram QA

Diagram question answering (Diagram QA) requires reasoning-level attribution that links each question-answer pair to all visual regions needed to derive the answer, rather than only the region containing the final response. Creating such structured evidence across diagrams, charts, maps, circuits, and infographics is time-consuming, and existing annotation tools tightly couple their interfaces to dataset-specific formats. We present DIAGRAMS, a lightweight, schema-driven review framework that decouples interface logic from dataset-specific JSON structures through an internal meta-schema and dataset adapters. Given an image and QA pair with optional candidate regions, the system performs QA-conditioned evidence selection and proposes the regions required for reasoning. When QA pairs or candidate regions are missing, it generates them and supports human verification and refinement. Across six Diagram QA datasets, model-suggested evidence achieves 85.39% precision and 75.30% recall against reviewer-final selections (micro-averaged). These results indicate that the review-first framework reduces manual region creation while maintaining high agreement with final reasoning-level attributions. We release a public demo and installable package to support dataset auditing, grounded supervision creation, and grounded evaluation.
Apr 28, 2026

DRAGON: A Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Visual Reasoning over Diagrams

Diagram question answering (DQA) requires models to interpret structured visual representations such as charts, maps, infographics, circuit schematics, and scientific diagrams. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) often achieve high answer accuracy on these tasks, yet correct answers do not guarantee that models ground their reasoning in the diagram regions that support the prediction. Models may instead rely on textual correlations or dataset artifacts without identifying the visual evidence required to verify the answer. This limitation prevents reliable evaluation of diagram reasoning and reduces interpretability. We introduce DRAGON, a benchmark for evaluating evidence-grounded visual reasoning in diagrams. Given a diagram, a question, and the correct answer, a model must predict bounding boxes that correspond to the visual elements required to justify the answer. These evidence regions may include answer-bearing components, textual labels, legends, axes, connectors, and other supporting structures involved in the reasoning process. The DRAGON dataset contains 11,664 annotated question instances from six diagram QA datasets: ChartQA, Circuit-VQA, InfographicsVQA, MapIQ, MapWise, and AI2D, with a 2,445-instance test set carrying human-verified evidence annotations and a standardized evaluation framework. Our evaluation on recent VLMs reveals that even Claude Opus 4.6 achieves a Grounding IoU of only 23.8% on AI2D, showing that faithful visual grounding remains an open challenge. DRAGON supports future research on models that ground their predictions in visual evidence.
Apr 27, 2026

See Further, Think Deeper: Advancing VLM's Reasoning Ability with Low-level Visual Cues and Reflection

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have benefited from Reinforcement Learning (RL) for enhanced reasoning. However, existing methods still face critical limitations, including the lack of low-level visual information and effective visual feedback. To address these problems, this paper proposes a unified multimodal interleaved reasoning framework ForeSight, which enables VLMs to See Further with low-level visual cues and Think Deeper with effective visual feedback. First, it introduces a set of low-level visual tools to integrate essential visual information into the reasoning chain, mitigating the neglect of fine-grained visual features. Second, a mask-based visual feedback mechanism is elaborated to incorporate visual reflection into the thinking process, enabling the model to dynamically re-examine and update its answers. Driven by RL, ForeSight learns to autonomously decide on tool invocation and answer verification, with the final answer accuracy as the reward signal. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we construct a new dataset, Character and Grounding SalBench (CG-SalBench), based on the SalBench dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the ForeSight-7B model significantly outperforms other models with the same parameter scale, and even surpasses the current SOTA closed-source models on certain metrics.
Apr 26, 2026

MIRAGE: A Micro-Interaction Relational Architecture for Grounded Exploration in Multi-Figure Artworks

Appreciating multi-figure paintings requires understanding how characters relate through subtle cues like gaze alignment, gesture, and spatial arrangement. We present MIRAGE, an evidence-centric framework designed to scaffold the exploration of these "micro-interactions" in multi-figure artworks. While such cues are essential for deep narrative appreciation, they are often distributed across complex scenes and difficult for viewers to systematically identify. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) frequently fail to provide reliable assistance, offering ungrounded interpretations that lack traceable visual evidence. MIRAGE addresses this by constructing a structured intermediate representation capturing identities, pose cues, and gaze hypotheses. However, the challenge extends beyond extracting these cues to coordinating them during interpretation. Without an explicit mechanism to organize and reconcile relational evidence, models often collapse multiple interaction hypotheses into a single unstable or weakly grounded narrative, even when low-level signals are available. This representation allows users to verify how high-level interpretations are anchored in low-level visual facts. By separating spatial grounding from narrative generation, MIRAGE enables users to inspect and reason about figure-to-figure relationships through a verifiable evidence layer. We evaluate MIRAGE against painting-only VLM baselines using a blind assessment protocol. Results show that MIRAGE significantly improves identity consistency, reduces relational hallucinations, and increases the coverage of subtle interactions. These findings suggest that structured grounding can serve as a critical interaction control layer, providing the necessary scaffolding for a more reliable, transparent, and human-led understanding of complex visual narratives.
Apr 23, 2026

Grounding Video Reasoning in Physical Signals

Physical video understanding requires more than naming an event correctly. A model can answer a question about pouring, sliding, or collision from textual regularities while still failing to localize the event in time or space. We introduce a grounded benchmark for physical video understanding that extends the what--when--where evaluation structure of V-STaR to four video sources, six physics domains, three prompt families (physics, vstar_like, and neutral_rstr), and four input conditions (original, shuffled, ablated, and frame-masked). The benchmark contains 1,560 base video clips from SSV2, YouCook2, HoloAssist, and Roundabout-TAU. Each clip is first converted into a shared grounded event record, and the three query families are derived from that record. Temporal and spatial targets are shared across prompt families, while the non-physics families use deterministic family-appropriate semantic a_what targets derived from the same record. Across models and prompt families, physics remains the strongest regime overall, vstar_like is the clearest non-physics semantic comparison, and neutral_rstr behaves as a harder templated control. Prompt-family robustness is selective rather than universal, perturbation gains cluster in weak original cases, and spatial grounding is the weakest across settings. These results suggest that video Q&A reasoning benchmarks shall report physically grounded, prompt-aware, and perturbation-aware diagnostics alongside aggregate accuracy.
Apr 14, 2026

PrecisionCUA: Iterative Visual Refinement for Pixel-Precise Cursor Grounding in Code Editors

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) fundamentally rely on graphical user interface (GUI) grounding to translate language instructions into executable screen actions, but editing-level grounding in dense coding interfaces (such as VS Code and Cursor), where sub-pixel accuracy is required to interact with dense IDE elements, remains underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on single-shot coordinate prediction, which lacks a mechanism for error correction and often fails in high-density interfaces. In this technical report, we conduct an empirical study of pixel-precise cursor localization in coding environments. Instead of a single-step execution, our agent engages in an iterative refinement process, utilizing visual feedback from previous attempts to reach the target element. This closed-loop grounding mechanism allows the agent to self-correct displacement errors and adapt to dynamic UI changes. We evaluate our approach across Claude, Qwen, and GPT on a suite of complex coding benchmarks, demonstrating that multi-turn refinement significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-shot models in both click precision and overall task success rate. Our results suggest that iterative visual reasoning is a critical component for the next generation of reliable software engineering agents. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/precision-cua-bench/tree/main.
Apr 13, 2026

TraversalBench: Challenging Paths to Follow for Vision Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on multimodal benchmarks, but their ability to follow complex visual paths remains under-tested. We introduce TraversalBench, a controlled benchmark for exact visual path traversal. Each instance contains a continuous polyline with a unique start marker and labeled vertices; models must recover the ordered sequence encountered from start to finish. The benchmark balances self-intersection count, tortuosity, vertex count, and nearby confounding lines while limiting reliance on OCR, world knowledge, or open-ended planning. We find that self-intersections are the dominant source of difficulty. A first-crossing analysis localizes failures to crossing points: performance is stable before the first crossing, then drops sharply when the model must resolve the correct continuation. Nearby confounders have weaker but compounding effects, and an auxiliary reading-order benchmark reveals a consistent left-to-right bias. Together, these results characterize how VLMs perceive and fail on visual paths. Finally, we position TraversalBench as a new contribution to the growing line of sustained and precise visual grounding benchmarks for VLMs. Code, benchmark data, and rendered examples are available at https://github.com/clarapetrova/traversalbench.
Apr 9, 2026

ParseBench: A Document Parsing Benchmark for AI Agents

AI agents are changing the requirements for document parsing. What matters is semantic correctness: parsed output must preserve the structure and meaning needed for autonomous decisions, including correct table structure, precise chart data, semantically meaningful formatting, and visual grounding. Existing benchmarks do not fully capture this setting for enterprise automation, relying on narrow document distributions and text-similarity metrics that miss agent-critical failures. We introduce ParseBench, a benchmark of ∼2,000{\sim}2{,}000 human-verified pages from enterprise documents spanning insurance, finance, and government, organized around five capability dimensions: tables, charts, content faithfulness, semantic formatting, and visual grounding. Across 14 methods spanning vision-language models, specialized document parsers, and LlamaParse, the benchmark reveals a fragmented capability landscape: no method is consistently strong across all five dimensions. LlamaParse Agentic achieves the highest overall score at 84.9%, and the benchmark highlights the remaining capability gaps across current systems. Dataset and evaluation code are available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/llamaindex/ParseBench and https://github.com/run-llama/ParseBench.
Mar 31, 2026

V-Reflection: Transforming MLLMs from Passive Observers to Active Interrogators

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 Module (BCM) 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.
Mar 27, 2026

Beyond Language: Grounding Referring Expressions with Hand Pointing in Egocentric Vision

Traditional Visual Grounding (VG) predominantly relies on textual descriptions to localize objects, a paradigm that inherently struggles with linguistic ambiguity and often ignores non-verbal deictic cues prevalent in real-world interactions. In natural egocentric engagements, hand-pointing combined with speech forms the most intuitive referring mechanism. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoPoint-Ground, the first large-scale multimodal dataset dedicated to egocentric deictic visual grounding. Comprising over 15k interactive samples in complex scenes, the dataset provides rich, multi-grained annotations including hand-target bounding box pairs and dense semantic captions. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for hand-pointing referring expression resolution, evaluating a wide spectrum of mainstream Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and state-of-the-art VG architectures. Furthermore, we propose SV-CoT, a novel baseline framework that reformulates grounding as a structured inference process, synergizing gestural and linguistic cues through a Visual Chain-of-Thought paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SV-CoT achieves an 11.7%\textbf{11.7\%} absolute improvement over existing methods, effectively mitigating semantic ambiguity and advancing the capability of agents to comprehend multimodal physical intents. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.
Mar 27, 2026

Reflect to Inform: Boosting Multimodal Reasoning via Information-Gain-Driven Verification

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong multimodal reasoning performance, yet we identify a recurring failure mode in long-form generation: as outputs grow longer, models progressively drift away from image evidence and fall back on textual priors, resulting in ungrounded reasoning and hallucinations. Interestingly, Based on attention analysis, we find that MLLMs have a latent capability for late-stage visual verification that is present but not consistently activated. Motivated by this observation, we propose Visual Re-Examination (VRE), a self-evolving training framework that enables MLLMs to autonomously perform visual introspection during reasoning without additional visual inputs. Rather than distilling visual capabilities from a stronger teacher, VRE promotes iterative self-improvement by leveraging the model itself to generate reflection traces, making visual information actionable through information gain. Extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that VRE consistently improves reasoning accuracy and perceptual reliability, while substantially reducing hallucinations, especially in long-chain settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Xiaobu-USTC/VRE.
Mar 26, 2026

LanteRn: Latent Visual Structured Reasoning

While language reasoning models excel in many tasks, visual reasoning remains challenging for current large multimodal models (LMMs). As a result, most LMMs default to verbalizing perceptual content into text, a strong limitation for tasks requiring fine-grained spatial and visual understanding. While recent approaches take steps toward thinking with images by invoking tools or generating intermediate images, they either rely on external modules, or incur unnecessary computation by reasoning directly in pixel space. In this paper, we introduce LanteRn, a framework that enables LMMs to interleave language with compact latent visual representations, allowing visual reasoning to occur directly in latent space. LanteRn augments a vision-language transformer with the ability to generate and attend to continuous visual thought embeddings during inference. We train the model in two stages: supervised fine-tuning to ground visual features in latent states, followed by reinforcement learning to align latent reasoning with task-level utility. We evaluate LanteRn on three perception-centric benchmarks (VisCoT, V*, and Blink), observing consistent improvements in visual grounding and fine-grained reasoning. These results suggest that internal latent representations provide a promising direction for more efficient multimodal reasoning.
Mar 25, 2026

OptiSAR-Net++: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Transformer-Free Framework for Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize specific targets in remote sensing images using natural language expressions. However, existing methods are restricted to single-sensor domains, i.e., either optical or synthetic aperture radar (SAR), limiting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we introduce the Cross-Domain RSVG (CD-RSVG) task and construct OptSAR-RSVG, the first large-scale benchmark dataset for this setting. To tackle the challenges of cross-domain feature modeling, computational inefficiency, and fine-grained semantic discrimination, we propose OptiSAR-Net++. Our framework features a patch-level Low-Rank Adaptation Mixture of Experts (PL-MoE) for efficient cross-domain feature decoupling. To mitigate the substantial computational overhead of Transformer decoding frameworks, we adopt a CLIP-based contrastive paradigm and further incorporate dynamic adversarial negative sampling, thereby transforming generative regression into an efficient cross-modal matching process. Additionally, a text-guided dual-gate fusion module (TGDF-SSA) and a region-aware auxiliary head are introduced to enhance semantic-visual alignment and spatial modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiSAR-Net++ achieves SOTA performance on both OptSAR-RSVG and DIOR-RSVG benchmarks, offering significant advantages in localization accuracy and efficiency. The model and dataset have been made publicly available at https://github.com/JunDong-dev/OptiSAR-Net-PlusPlus.
Mar 24, 2026

Focus, Don't Prune: Identifying Instruction-Relevant Regions for Information-Rich Image Understanding

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across various multimodal tasks by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing visually complex and information-rich images, such as infographics or document layouts, requires these models to generate a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this, we propose PinPoint, a novel two-stage framework that first identifies instruction-relevant image regions and then refines them to extract fine-grained visual features for improved reasoning and efficiency. Central to our approach is the Instruction-Region Alignment, which localizes relevant regions using both visual input and textual instructions. We further introduce new annotations that provide richer ground-truth supervision for instruction-relevant regions across challenging VQA benchmarks: InfographicVQA, MultiPageDocVQA, and SinglePageDocVQA. Experimental results show that PinPoint not only achieves superior accuracy compared to existing methods but also reduces computational overhead by minimizing irrelevant visual tokens.
Mar 23, 2026

VP-VLA: Visual Prompting as an Interface for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically map visual observations and linguistic instructions directly to control signals. This "black-box" mapping forces a single forward pass to simultaneously handle instruction interpretation, spatial grounding, and low-level control, often leading to poor spatial precision and limited robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose VP-VLA, a dual-system framework that decouples high-level reasoning and low-level execution via a structured visual prompting interface. Specifically, a "System 2 Planner" decomposes complex instructions into sub-tasks and identifies relevant target objects and goal locations. These spatial anchors are rendered directly within the native RGB observation space as modality-consistent visual prompts, such as crosshairs and bounding boxes. This avoids the modality mismatch introduced by dense masks, affordance maps, or additional control-specific representations. Guided by these prompts and enhanced by a novel auxiliary visual grounding objective during training, a "System 1 Controller" reliably generates precise low-level execution motions. Extensive experiments in simulation and real world demonstrate that VP-VLA surpasses state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines including QwenOFT and GR00T-N1.6. Project page: https://visualprompt-vla.github.io/
Mar 21, 2026

Clinical Cognition Alignment for Gastrointestinal Diagnosis with Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in medical image analysis. However, their application in gastrointestinal endoscopy is currently hindered by two critical limitations: the misalignment between general model reasoning and standardized clinical cognitive pathways, and the lack of causal association between visual features and diagnostic outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Clinical-Cognitive-Aligned (CogAlign) framework to address these challenges. First, we endow the model with rigorous clinical analytical capabilities by constructing the hierarchical clinical cognition dataset and employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Unlike conventional approaches, this strategy internalizes the hierarchical diagnostic logic of experts, ranging from anatomical localization and morphological evaluation to microvascular analysis, directly into the model. Second, to eliminate visual bias, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that standard supervised tuning inevitably converges to spurious background correlations. Guided by this insight, we propose a counterfactual-driven reinforcement learning strategy to enforce causal rectification. By generating counterfactual normal samples via lesion masking and optimizing through clinical-cognition-centric rewards, we constrain the model to strictly ground its diagnosis in causal lesion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves State-of-the-Art (SoTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy in complex clinical scenarios.
Mar 20, 2026

MedSPOT: A Workflow-Aware Sequential Grounding Benchmark for Clinical GUI

Despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their ability to perform reliable visual grounding in high-stakes clinical software environments remains underexplored. Existing GUI benchmarks largely focus on isolated, single-step grounding queries, overlooking the sequential, workflow-driven reasoning required in real-world medical interfaces, where tasks evolve across independent steps and dynamic interface states. We introduce MedSPOT, a workflow-aware sequential grounding benchmark for clinical GUI environments. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat grounding as a standalone prediction task, MedSPOT models procedural interaction as a sequence of structured spatial decisions. The benchmark comprises 216 task-driven videos with 597 annotated keyframes, in which each task consists of 2 to 3 interdependent grounding steps within realistic medical workflows. This design captures interface hierarchies, contextual dependencies, and fine-grained spatial precision under evolving conditions. To evaluate procedural robustness, we propose a strict sequential evaluation protocol that terminates task assessment upon the first incorrect grounding prediction, explicitly measuring error propagation in multi-step workflows. We further introduce a comprehensive failure taxonomy, including edge bias, small-target errors, no prediction, near miss, far miss, and toolbar confusion, to enable systematic diagnosis of model behavior in clinical GUI settings. By shifting evaluation from isolated grounding to workflow-aware sequential reasoning, MedSPOT establishes a realistic and safety-critical benchmark for assessing multimodal models in medical software environments. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Tajamul21/MedSPOT.
Mar 19, 2026

LoFi: Location-Aware Fine-Grained Representation Learning for Chest X-ray

Fine-grained representation learning is crucial for retrieval and phrase grounding in chest X-rays, where clinically relevant findings are often spatially confined. However, the lack of region-level supervision in contrastive models and the limited ability of large vision language models to capture fine-grained representations in external validation lead to suboptimal performance on these tasks. To address these limitations, we propose Location-aware Fine-grained representation learning (LoFi), which jointly optimizes sigmoid, captioning, and location-aware captioning losses using a lightweight large language model. The location-aware captioning loss enables region-level supervision through grounding and dense captioning objectives, thereby facilitating fine-grained representation learning. Building upon these representations, we integrate a fine-grained encoder into retrieval-based in-context learning to enhance chest X-ray grounding across diverse settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior retrieval and phrase grounding performance on MIMIC-CXR and PadChest-GR.
Mar 19, 2026

MultihopSpatial: Multi-hop Compositional Spatial Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Model

Spatial reasoning is foundational for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), particularly when deployed as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) agents in physical environments. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on elementary, single-hop relations, neglecting the multi-hop compositional reasoning and precise visual grounding essential for real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce MultihopSpatial, offering three key contributions: (1) A comprehensive benchmark designed for multi-hop and compositional spatial reasoning, featuring 1- to 3-hop complex queries across diverse spatial perspectives. (2) Acc@50IoU, a complementary metric that simultaneously evaluates reasoning and visual grounding by requiring both answer selection and precise bounding box prediction - capabilities vital for robust VLA deployment. (3) MultihopSpatial-Train, a dedicated large-scale training corpus to foster spatial intelligence. Extensive evaluation of 37 state-of-the-art VLMs yields eight key insights, revealing that compositional spatial reasoning remains a formidable challenge. Finally, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning post-training on our corpus enhances both intrinsic VLM spatial reasoning and downstream embodied manipulation performance.
Mar 15, 2026

HomeGuard: VLM-based Embodied Safeguard for Identifying Contextual Risk in Household Task

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) empower embodied agents to execute complex instructions, yet they remain vulnerable to contextual safety risks where benign commands become hazardous due to subtle environmental states. Existing safeguards often prove inadequate. Rule-based methods lack scalability in object-dense scenes, whereas model-based approaches relying on prompt engineering suffer from unfocused perception, resulting in missed risks or hallucinations. To address this, we propose an architecture-agnostic safeguard featuring Context-Guided Chain-of-Thought (CG-CoT). This mechanism decomposes risk assessment into active perception that sequentially anchors attention to interaction targets and relevant spatial neighborhoods, followed by semantic judgment based on this visual evidence. We support this approach with a curated grounding dataset and a two-stage training strategy utilizing Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) with process rewards to enforce precise intermediate grounding. Experiments demonstrate that our model HomeGuard significantly enhances safety, improving risk match rates by over 30% compared to base models while reducing oversafety. Beyond hazard detection, the generated visual anchors serve as actionable spatial constraints for downstream planners, facilitating explicit collision avoidance and safety trajectory generation. Code and data are released under https://github.com/AI45Lab/HomeGuard
Mar 15, 2026

Deeper Thought, Weaker Aim: Understanding and Mitigating Perceptual Impairment during Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often suffer from perceptual impairments under extended reasoning modes, particularly in visual question answering (VQA) tasks. We identify attention dispersion as the underlying cause: during multi-step reasoning, the model's visual attention becomes scattered and drifts away from question-relevant regions, effectively "losing focus" on the visual input. To better understand this phenomenon, we analyze the attention maps of MLLMs and observe that reasoning prompts significantly reduce attention to regions critical for answering the question. We further find a strong correlation between the model's overall attention on image tokens and the spatial dispersiveness of its attention within the image. Leveraging this insight, we propose a training-free Visual Region-Guided Attention (VRGA) framework that selects visual heads based on an entropy-focus criterion and reweights their attention, effectively guiding the model to focus on question-relevant regions during reasoning. Extensive experiments on vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively alleviates perceptual degradation, leading to improvements in visual grounding and reasoning accuracy while providing interpretable insights into how MLLMs process visual information.
Mar 13, 2026

Think and Answer ME: Benchmarking and Exploring Multi-Entity Reasoning Grounding in Remote Sensing

Recent advances in reasoning language models and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards have significantly enhanced multi-step reasoning capabilities. This progress motivates the extension of reasoning paradigms to remote sensing visual grounding task. However, existing remote sensing grounding methods remain largely confined to perception-level matching and single-entity formulations, limiting the role of explicit reasoning and inter-entity modeling. To address this challenge, we introduce a new benchmark dataset for Multi-Entity Reasoning Grounding in Remote Sensing (ME-RSRG). Based on ME-RSRG, we reformulate remote sensing grounding as a multi-entity reasoning task and propose an Entity-Aware Reasoning (EAR) framework built upon visual-linguistic foundation models. EAR generates structured reasoning traces and subject-object grounding outputs. It adopts supervised fine-tuning for cold-start initialization and is further optimized via entity-aware reward-driven Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments on ME-RSRG demonstrate the challenges of multi-entity reasoning and verify the effectiveness of our proposed EAR framework. Our dataset, code, and models will be available at https://github.com/CV-ShuchangLyu/ME-RSRG.
Mar 11, 2026

Beyond Sequential Distance: Inter-Modal Distance Invariant Position Encoding

Despite the remarkable capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), they still suffer from visual fading in long-context scenarios. Specifically, the attention to visual tokens diminishes as the text sequence lengthens, leading to text generation detached from visual constraints. We attribute this degradation to the inherent inductive bias of Multimodal RoPE, which penalizes inter-modal attention as the distance between visual and text tokens increases. To address this, we propose inter-modal Distance Invariant Position Encoding (DIPE), a simple but effective mechanism that disentangles position encoding based on modality interactions. DIPE retains the natural relative positioning for intra-modal interactions to preserve local structure, while enforcing an anchored perceptual proximity for inter-modal interactions. This strategy effectively mitigates the inter-modal distance-based penalty, ensuring that visual signals remain perceptually consistent regardless of the context length. Experimental results demonstrate that by integrating DIPE with Multimodal RoPE, the model maintains stable visual grounding in long-context scenarios, significantly alleviating visual fading while preserving performance on standard short-context benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/lchen1019/DIPE.
Mar 7, 2026

Perception-Aware Multimodal Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

Spatial reasoning from monocular images is essential for autonomous driving, yet current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with fine-grained geometric perception, particularly under large scale variation and ambiguous object appearance. We propose a simple yet effective perception-aware multimodal reasoning framework that equips VLMs with explicit object-centric grounding ability. Instead of relying on textual bounding-box outputs, each referred object is represented using all Visual Reference Tokens (VRTs) within its spatial extent, enabling visual evidence and textual reasoning to be processed jointly in a unified token space. To further strengthen cross-modal interaction, we construct a Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MM-CoT) dataset that injects aligned visual and textual reasoning signals. A deterministic ordering strategy is introduced to make supervision over inherently unordered VRT sets fully compatible with the VLM's autoregressive next-token prediction. With only standard supervised fine-tuning, our method achieves substantial improvements on the SURDS benchmark, outperforming previous approaches - including those using RL-based post-training - by a large margin across both single-object and multi-object tasks. These results demonstrate that accurate perception and multimodal reasoning are mutually reinforcing, and together form the key to robust spatial understanding in challenging monocular driving scenarios.
Mar 5, 2026

Multi-label Instance-level Generalised Visual Grounding in Agriculture

Understanding field imagery such as detecting plants and distinguishing individual crop and weed instances is a central challenge in precision agriculture. Despite progress in vision-language tasks like captioning and visual question answering, Visual Grounding (VG), localising language-referred objects, remains unexplored in agriculture. A key reason is the lack of suitable benchmark datasets for evaluating grounding models in field conditions, where many plants look highly similar, appear at multiple scales, and the referred target may be absent from the image. To address these limitations, we introduce gRef-CW, the first dataset designed for generalised visual grounding in agriculture, including negative expressions. Benchmarking current state-of-the-art grounding models on gRef-CW reveals a substantial domain gap, highlighting their inability to ground instances of crops and weeds. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Weed-VG, a modular framework that incorporates multi-label hierarchical relevance scoring and interpolation-driven regression. Weed-VG advances instance-level visual grounding and provides a clear baseline for developing VG methods in precision agriculture. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Mar 3, 2026

Beyond Accuracy: Evaluating Visual Grounding In Multimodal Medical Reasoning

Recent work shows that text-only reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can match or outperform image-text RLVR on multimodal medical VQA benchmarks, suggesting current evaluation protocols may fail to measure causal visual dependence. We introduce a counterfactual evaluation framework using real, blank, and shuffled images across four medical VQA benchmarks: PathVQA, PMC-VQA, SLAKE, and VQA-RAD. Beyond accuracy, we measure Visual Reliance Score (VRS), Image Sensitivity (IS), and introduce Hallucinated Visual Reasoning Rate (HVRR) to detect cases where models generate visual claims despite producing image-invariant answers. Our findings reveal that RLVR improves accuracy while degrading visual grounding: text-only RLVR achieves negative VRS on PathVQA (-0.09), performing better with mismatched images, while image-text RLVR reduces image sensitivity to 39.8% overall despite improving accuracy. On VQA-RAD, both variants achieve 63% accuracy through different mechanisms: text-only RLVR retains 81% performance with blank images, while image-text RLVR shows only 29% image sensitivity. Models generate visual claims in 68-74% of responses, yet 38-43% are ungrounded (HVRR). These findings demonstrate that accuracy-only rewards enable shortcut exploitation, and progress requires grounding-aware evaluation protocols and training objectives that explicitly enforce visual dependence.
Mar 3, 2026

3D-DRES: Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

Current 3D visual grounding tasks only process sentence level detection or segmentation, which critically fails to leverage the rich compositional contextual reasonings within natural language expressions. To address this challenge, we introduce Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-DRES), a new task that provides a phrase to 3D instance mapping, aiming at enhancing fine-grained 3D vision language understanding. To support 3D-DRES, we present DetailRefer, a new dataset comprising 54,432 descriptions spanning 11,054 distinct objects. Unlike previous datasets, DetailRefer implements a pioneering phrase-instance annotation paradigm where each referenced noun phrase is explicitly mapped to its corresponding 3D elements. Additionally, we introduce DetailBase, a purposefully streamlined yet effective baseline architecture that supports dual-mode segmentation at both sentence and phrase levels. Our experimental results demonstrate that models trained on DetailRefer not only excel at phrase-level segmentation but also show surprising improvements on traditional 3D-RES benchmarks.
Feb 27, 2026

HART: High-Resolution Annotation-Free Reasoning Technique through a Closed-loop Framework

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) struggle with high-resolution visual inputs during the reasoning process, as the number of image tokens increases quadratically with resolution, introducing substantial redundancy and irrelevant information. A common practice is to identify key image regions and refer to their high-resolution counterparts during reasoning, typically trained with external visual supervision. However, such visual supervision cues require costly grounding labels from human annotators. Meanwhile, it remains an open question how to enhance a model's grounding abilities to support reasoning without relying on additional annotations. In this paper, we propose High-resolution Annotation-free Reasoning Technique (HART), a closed-loop framework that enables LMMs to focus on and self-verify key regions of high-resolution visual inputs. HART incorporates a post-training paradigm in which we design Advantage Preference Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO) to encourage accurate localization of key regions without external visual annotations. Notably, HART provides explainable reasoning pathways and enables efficient optimization of localization. Extensive experiments on MME-RealWorld-Lite, TreeBench, V* Bench, HR-Bench-4K/8K, and MMStar demonstrate that HART improves performance across a wide range of high-resolution visual tasks, consistently outperforming strong baselines.
Feb 23, 2026

TraceVision: Trajectory-Aware Vision-Language Model for Human-Like Spatial Understanding

Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in image understanding and natural language generation. However, current approaches focus predominantly on global image understanding, struggling to simulate human visual attention trajectories and explain associations between descriptions and specific regions. We propose TraceVision, a unified vision-language model integrating trajectory-aware spatial understanding in an end-to-end framework. TraceVision employs a Trajectory-aware Visual Perception (TVP) module for bidirectional fusion of visual features and trajectory information. We design geometric simplification to extract semantic keypoints from raw trajectories and propose a three-stage training pipeline where trajectories guide description generation and region localization. We extend TraceVision to trajectory-guided segmentation and video scene understanding, enabling cross-frame tracking and temporal attention analysis. We construct the Reasoning-based Interactive Localized Narratives (RILN) dataset to enhance logical reasoning and interpretability. Extensive experiments on trajectory-guided captioning, text-guided trajectory prediction, understanding, and segmentation demonstrate that TraceVision achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a foundation for intuitive spatial interaction and interpretable visual understanding.