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Xiaokun Zhang, Yi Yang, Ziqi Ye, Baiyun Baiyun, Xiaorong Guo, Qingchen Fang, Ruyi Zhang, Xinpeng Zhou, Haipeng Wang

Research on the intelligent interpretation of all-weather, all-time Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is crucial for advancing remote sensing applications. In recent years, although Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong open-world understanding capabilities on RGB images, their performance is severely limited when directly applied to the SAR field due to the complexity of the imaging mechanism, sensitivity to scattering features, and the scarcity of high-quality text corpora. To systematically address this issue, we constructed the inaugural SAR Image-Text-AlphaEarth feature triplet dataset and developed FUSAR-GPT, a VLM specifically for SAR. FUSAR-GPT innovatively introduces a geospatial baseline model as a 'world knowledge' prior and embeds multi-source remote-sensing temporal features into the model's visual backbone via 'spatiotemporal anchors', enabling dynamic compensation for the sparse representation of targets in SAR images. Furthermore, we designed a two-stage SFT strategy to decouple the knowledge injection and task execution of large models. The spatiotemporal feature embedding and the two-stage decoupling paradigm enable FUSAR-GPT to achieve state-of-the-art performance across several typical remote sensing visual-language benchmark tests, significantly outperforming mainstream baseline models by over 10%.

Mario Markov, Stefan Ailuro, Luc Van Gool, Konrad Schindler, Danda Pani Paudel

Predicting wildfire risk is a reasoning-intensive spatial problem that requires the integration of visual, climatic, and geographic factors to infer continuous risk maps. Existing methods lack the causal reasoning and multimodal understanding required for reliable generalization. We introduce FireScope-Bench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark that couples Sentinel-2 imagery and climate data with expert-defined risk rasters across the USA, and real wildfire events in Europe for cross-continental evaluation. Building on this dataset, we propose FireScope, a VLM-based reasoning-to-generation framework that learns from both reinforcement learning and visual supervision to predict risk rasters with complementary reasoning traces. When trained in the USA and tested in Europe, FireScope achieves substantial performance gains, while expert feedback and automated analysis confirm that its reasoning traces are faithful and semantically meaningful. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning can ground raster prediction models, improving both generalization and interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to (1) demonstrate that language-based reasoning can improve generalization in visual generation, (2) propose a high-resolution wildfire risk model that can be applied across continents, and (3) enable systematic studies of robust cross-continental generalization for multimodal fire risk models. We believe that FireScope-Bench has the potential to serve as a foundation for advancing reasoning-driven, interpretable and generalizable spatial modeling. Data and source code are available at github.com/insait-institute/FireScope.

Antonia Wüst, Wolfgang Stammer, Hikaru Shindo, Lukas Helff, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting

Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but often fail at systematic visual reasoning, especially in inductive reasoning problems. Neuro-symbolic methods promise to address this by inducing interpretable logical programs from images, though they usually rely on rigid, domain-specific perception modules for this. We propose Vision-Language Programs (VLP), which combine the perceptual flexibility of VLMs with the systematic reasoning of symbolic program synthesis. Rather than embedding reasoning inside the VLM, VLP leverages the model to produce structured visual descriptions that are compiled into neuro-symbolic programs. The resulting programs execute directly on images, remain consistent with task constraints, and provide human-interpretable explanations that enable easy shortcut mitigation. Our experiments across synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that VLPs outperform both direct and structured prompting of VLMs, particularly on tasks that require complex logical reasoning.

Sudong Cai, Shuai Yuan, Bingzhi Chen, Rui Mao, Bing Wang

Self-attention with separate pre- and post-projections can be a universal approximator (on compact domains) under mild conditions. Yet we observe a striking gap: an attention-only Transformer (w/o FFN layers) exhibits a marked accuracy drop relative to its standard interleaved attention--FFN baseline. We term this the weak-independence challenge of attention. We study this through a new conceptual lens, Selection-as-Nonlinearity (SaN), which interprets effective nonlinearity as directed, cost-constrained selection, offering a coherent account of attention as context-gated activation. In this joint game-decision view, attention performs a resource-constrained cooperative allocation over values: each query distributes a unit-mass weight budget over shared values to optimize representational utility, under a normalizer (e.g., \mathrm softmax ), and guided by context-derived scores (e.g., q-k similarities). SaN interprets weak-independence as a structural tension: the value weights almost cannot simultaneously attain the decoupled per-query (row-wise) and the per-value (column-wise) optimums under shared budgets, thereby limiting attention's stand-alone capacity. Guided by SaN, we introduce CSaN, an interpretable, efficient attention compensation paradigm with two key insights: 1) hierarchical budget calibration, re-allocate row budgets via inter-query correction signals; and 2) public-private cooperation, enhancing the public attention pathway with a per-token private value pathway to decouple conflicting demands. CSaN is evaluated on various vision benchmarks and demonstrates remarkable gains across popular Transformer families (Swin, ViT, Hiera), enabling models to rival much heavier same-family counterparts ~2xas large.

Merve Tapli, Quentin Bouniot, Wolfgang Stammer, Zeynep Akata, Emre Akbas

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) ground predictions in human-understandable concepts but face fundamental limitations: the absence of a metric to pre-evaluate concept relevance, the "linearity problem" causing recent CBMs to bypass the concept bottleneck entirely, an accuracy gap compared to opaque models, and finally the lack of systematic study on the impact of different visual backbones and VLMs. We introduce CBM-Suite, a methodological framework to systematically addresses these challenges. First, we propose an entropy-based metric to quantify the intrinsic suitability of a concept set for a given dataset. Second, we resolve the linearity problem by inserting a non-linear layer between concept activations and the classifier, which ensures that model accuracy faithfully reflects concept relevance. Third, we narrow the accuracy gap by leveraging a distillation loss guided by a linear teacher probe. Finally, we provide comprehensive analyses on how different vision encoders, vision-language models, and concept sets interact to influence accuracy and interpretability in CBMs. Extensive evaluations show that CBM-Suite yields more accurate models and provides insights for improving concept-based interpretability.

Kazuya Nishimura, Ryoma Bise, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Haruka Hirose, Yasuhiro Kojima

Estimating slide- and patch-level gene expression profiles from pathology images enables rapid and low-cost molecular analysis with broad clinical impact. Despite strong results, existing approaches treat gene expression as a mere slide- or spot-level signal and do not incorporate the fact that the measured expression arises from the aggregation of underlying cell-level expression. To explicitly introduce this missing cell-resolved guidance, we propose a Cell-type Prototype-informed Neural Network (CPNN) that leverages publicly available single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets. Since single-cell measurements are noisy and not paired with histology images, we first estimate cell-type prototypes--mean expression profiles that capture stable gene-gene co-variation patterns. CPNN then learns cell-type compositional weights directly from images and models the relationship between prototypes and observed bulk or spatial expression, providing a biologically grounded and structurally regularized prediction framework. We evaluate CPNN on three slide-level datasets and three patch-level spatial transcriptomics datasets. Across all settings, CPNN achieves the highest performance in terms of Spearman correlation. Moreover, by visualizing the inferred compositional weights, our framework provides interpretable insights into which cell types drive the predicted expression.Code is publicly available at https://github.com/naivete5656/CPNN.

Jianfei Zhao, Feng Zhang, Xin Sun, Chong Feng, Zhixing Tan

Visual attention serves as the primary mechanism through which MLLMs interpret visual information; however, its limited localization capability often leads to hallucinations. We observe that although MLLMs can accurately extract visual semantics from visual tokens, they fail to fully leverage this advantage during subsequent inference. To address this limitation, we propose Vision-Guided Attention (VGA), a training-free method that first constructs precise visual grounding by exploiting the semantic content of visual tokens, and then uses this grounding to guide the model's focus toward relevant visual regions. In image captioning, VGA further refines this guidance dynamically during generation by suppressing regions that have already been described. In VGA, each token undergoes only a single forward pass, introducing a negligible latency overhead. In addition, VGA is fully compatible with efficient attention implementations such as FlashAttention. Extensive experiments across diverse MLLMs and multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that VGA achieves state-of-the-art dehallucination performance. Further analysis confirms that explicit visual guidance plays a crucial role in enhancing the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs.

Ruoyu Chen, Xiaoqing Guo, Kangwei Liu, Siyuan Liang, Shiming Liu, Qunli Zhang, Laiyuan Wang, Hua Zhang, Xiaochun Cao

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in aligning visual inputs with natural language outputs. Yet, the extent to which generated tokens depend on visual modalities remains poorly understood, limiting interpretability and reliability. In this work, we present EAGLE, a lightweight black-box framework for explaining autoregressive token generation in MLLMs. EAGLE attributes any selected tokens to compact perceptual regions while quantifying the relative influence of language priors and perceptual evidence. The framework introduces an objective function that unifies sufficiency (insight score) and indispensability (necessity score), optimized via greedy search over sparsified image regions for faithful and efficient attribution. Beyond spatial attribution, EAGLE performs modality-aware analysis that disentangles what tokens rely on, providing fine-grained interpretability of model decisions. Extensive experiments across open-source MLLMs show that EAGLE consistently outperforms existing methods in faithfulness, localization, and hallucination diagnosis, while requiring substantially less GPU memory. These results highlight its effectiveness and practicality for advancing the interpretability of MLLMs.

Yansong Li, Zhongxi Qiu, Yun Tian, Zheng Jinyu, Shuo Li

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is the clinical gold standard for assessing cardiovascular diseases, but its interpretation relies on expert experience and remains challenging, particularly for identifying rare diseases. Existing automated methods lack interpretable reasoning processes, limiting clinical adoption. Although vision-language models (VLMs) possess basic visual understanding and text generation capabilities, they still lack verifiable reasoning chains in medical diagnosis and underperform on minority classes in long-tail distributions. To address these challenges, we propose CMR-RD, to our knowledge the first VLM for interpretable diagnosis in CMR, capable of generating explicit diagnostic chains aligned with imaging evidence. We construct a CMR dataset that reflects real-world clinical distributions, comprising five disease categories (including two rare conditions) plus normal controls. Building on this, the general-purpose VLM is aligned to medical and CMR semantics using large-scale medical vision-text data, and cold-start training is used to enhance its understanding of medical concepts and basic reasoning. To enhance reasoning and performance on rare samples, we propose Group Phase Policy Optimization (GPPO), which combines online multi-stage reinforcement learning (RL) with adaptive sampling. GPPO enables the model to proactively explore rare and underperforming classes, thereby effectively mitigating long-tail bias. Experiments demonstrate that CMR-RD achieves highly competitive accuracy and reasoning-chain correctness compared with medical and general VLMs, shows stronger recognition of rare categories.

Zhongyu Xia, Wenhao Chen, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Visual-language reasoning, driving knowledge, and value alignment are essential for advanced autonomous driving systems. However, existing approaches largely rely on data-driven learning, making it difficult to capture the complex logic underlying decision-making through imitation or limited reinforcement rewards. To address this, we propose KnowVal, a new autonomous driving system that enables visual-language reasoning through the synergistic integration of open-world perception and knowledge retrieval. Specifically, we construct a comprehensive driving knowledge graph that encodes traffic laws, defensive driving principles, and ethical norms, complemented by an efficient LLM-based retrieval mechanism tailored for driving scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a human-preference dataset and train a Value Model to guide interpretable, value-aligned trajectory assessment. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves planning performance while remaining compatible with existing architectures. Notably, KnowVal achieves the lowest collision rate on nuScenes and state-of-the-art results on Bench2Drive and NAVSIM.

Subin Kim, Sangwoo Mo, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Yiran Xu, Difan Liu, Jinwoo Shin, Tobias Hinz

Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because prompt adaptation does not scale along with the increasing population of generated samples. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time.

Qinfu Xu, Liyuan Pan, Yiwei Wei, Shaozu Yuan, Jiaqi Chen, Tianyu Liu

Multimodal Emotion Analysis (MEA) is crucial for human-centric AI, yet current methods struggle with two core challenges: the sparse nature of emotional cues across modalities and their inherent temporal asynchrony. Existing approaches, which often rely on implicit fusion, consequently suffer from diluted salient features and entangled representations. To address this issue, we propose EmoThinker, a new framework that advances MEA through explicit, structured reasoning. Our method introduces a structural token selection mechanism to concentrate on pivotal facial regions while refining background context, enhancing visual saliency and efficiency. For audio, an audio evidence extractor aggregates critical paralinguistic features into compact, emotion-rich tokens. More importantly, we enable step-by-step reasoning by constructing a Chain-of-Emotion-Thought dataset, which provides fine-grained annotations for disentangling asynchronous cues and resolving inter-modal conflicts. By decoupling evidence acquisition from reasoning, EmoThinker achieves a more interpretable and robust emotion analysis. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

Muhammad Atif Butt, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Tao Wu, Javier Vazquez-Corral, Joost Van De Weijer, Kai Wang

Recent years have seen impressive advances in text-to-image generation, with image generative or unified models, generating high-quality images from text. Yet these models still struggle with fine-grained color control, often failing to accurately match colors specified in text prompts. While existing benchmarks evaluate compositional reasoning and prompt adherence, none systematically assess the color precision. Color is fundamental to human visual perception and communication, and critical for applications from art to design workflows requiring brand consistency. However, current benchmarks either neglect color or rely on coarse assessments, missing key capabilities like interpreting RGB values or aligning with human expectations. To this end, we propose GenColorBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for T2I color generation, grounded in color systems like ISCC-NBS and CSS3/X11, including numerical colors which are absent elsewhere. With 44K color-focused prompts covering 400+ colors, it reveals models' true capabilities via perceptual and automated assessments. Evaluations of popular T2I models on GenColorBench reveal significant performance variation, indicating which color conventions models understand the best and exposing their failure modes. Furthermore, GenColorBench provides insights to guide future improvements in precise color generation. The benchmark is available at https://moatifbutt.github.io/gencolorbench/.

Hiran Sarkar, Liming Kuang, Yordanka Velikova, Benjamin Busam

Predicting scene dynamics from visual observations is challenging. Existing methods capture dynamics only within observed boundaries failing to extrapolate far beyond the training sequence. Node-RF (Neural ODE-based NeRF) overcomes this limitation by integrating Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) with dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), enabling a continuous-time, spatiotemporal representation that generalizes beyond observed trajectories at constant memory cost. From visual input, Node-RF learns an implicit scene state that evolves over time via an ODE solver, propagating feature embeddings via differential calculus. A NeRF-based renderer interprets calculated embeddings to synthesize arbitrary views for long-range extrapolation. Training on multiple motion sequences with shared dynamics allows for generalization to unseen conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that Node-RF can characterize abstract system behavior without explicit model to identify critical points for future predictions. Our code will be made publicly available.

Hao Lu, Jiahao Wang, Yaolun Zhang, Ruohui Wang, Xuanyu Zheng, Yepeng Tang, Dahua Lin, Lewei Lu

We revisit video hallucination in multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) from a semantic aggregation perspective. While prior work attributes hallucinations to language priors, missing frames, or visual encoder biases, these explanations overlook errors arising during the aggregation of correct frame-level semantics into event-level interpretations. We term this phenomenon Semantic Aggregation Hallucination (SAH), which becomes increasingly prevalent in complex, multi-event video understanding tasks with rich temporal dependencies. To systematically study SAH, we introduce ELV-Halluc, the first benchmark designed for fine-grained evaluation of semantic aggregation errors. Our experiments reveal that SAH correlates with both semantic complexity and rapid semantic transitions. We further propose mitigation strategies: improved positional encoding preserves temporal structure, and reinforcement learning such as DPO enhances the model's ability to distinguish semantics within and across events. Using a curated 8K adversarial video-text pair dataset, our approach achieves consistent gains across benchmarks, including a 27.7% reduction in SAH rate on ELV-Halluc and Video-MME. Data and code are available at https://github.com/hlsv02/ELV-Halluc.

Jing Zuo, Lingzhou Mu, Fan Jiang, Chengcheng Ma, Mu Xu, Yonggang Qi

Achieving human-level performance in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to understand textual instructions, perceive visual observations, and reason over long action sequences. Recent works, such as NavCoT and NavGPT-2, demonstrate the potential of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for improving interpretability and long-horizon planning. Moreover, multimodal extensions like OctoNav-R1 and CoT-VLA further validate CoT as a promising pathway toward human-like navigation reasoning. However, existing approaches face critical drawbacks: purely textual CoTs lack visual perception and easily overfit to sparse annotated reasoning steps, while multimodal CoTs incur severe token inflation by generating imagined visual observations, making real-time navigation impractical. In this work, we propose FantasyVLN, a unified implicit reasoning framework that preserves the benefits of CoT reasoning without explicit token overhead. Specifically, imagined visual tokens are encoded into a compact latent space using a pretrained Visual AutoRegressor (VAR) during CoT reasoning training, and the model jointly learns from textual, visual, and multimodal CoT modes under a unified multi-CoT strategy. At inference, our model performs direct instruction-to-action mapping while still enjoying reasoning-aware representations. Extensive experiments on LH-VLN show that our approach achieves reasoning-aware yet real-time navigation, improving success rates and efficiency while reducing inference latency by an order of magnitude compared to explicit CoT methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Fantasy-AMAP/fantasy-vln.

Samarth Chopra, Jing Liang, Gershom Seneviratne, Dinesh Manocha

Understanding physical properties such as friction, stiffness, hardness, and material composition is essential for enabling robots to interact safely and effectively with their surroundings. However, existing 3D reconstruction methods focus on geometry and appearance and cannot infer these underlying physical properties. We present PhysGS, a Bayesian-inferred extension of 3D Gaussian Splatting that estimates dense, per-point physical properties from visual cues and vision--language priors. We formulate property estimation as Bayesian inference over Gaussian splats, where material and property beliefs are iteratively refined as new observations arrive. PhysGS also models aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, enabling uncertainty-aware object and scene interpretation. Across object-scale (ABO-500), indoor, and outdoor real-world datasets, PhysGS improves accuracy of the mass estimation by up to 22.8%, reduces Shore hardness error by up to 61.2%, and lowers kinetic friction error by up to 18.1% compared to deterministic baselines. Our results demonstrate that PhysGS unifies 3D reconstruction, uncertainty modeling, and physical reasoning in a single, spatially continuous framework for dense physical property estimation.

Dongsheng Li, Xinyuan Guo, Huijie Zhang, Pingting Hao, Qiushi Xia

The core challenge in Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) lies in establishing fine-grained, many-to-many semantic alignment between textual words and visual regions. Existing methods predominantly rely on pointwise similarity or attention mechanisms, implicitly assuming matches are independent and balanced. Consequently, under conditions of attribute overlap and substantial background noise, these methods often misallocate matching weights to non-discriminative regions or words, resulting in ambiguous matching outcomes. To address this, we propose QC-Align, a quota-calibrated fine-grained alignment framework guided by context-aware marginals. Specifically, we propose a Context-Aware Marginal Estimator (CAME) that dynamically assigns "matching quotas" to each word and visual region, and subsequently employs a Quota-Calibrated Transport (QCT) objective to explicitly constrain the matching quality each word and region can carry, thereby jointly optimizing the many-to-many correspondence between text and vision under these constraints. Notably, QC-Align is a parameter-free, plug-and-play training regularizer that requires no fine-grained annotations and incurs no inference overhead. Experiments on multiple mainstream person retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that QC-Align consistently improves baseline model performance, with greater gains and better interpretability in few-shot and cross-domain scenarios.

Haodong Jing, Dongyao Jiang, Jixin Wang, Junhao Jia, Yanshu Li, Yongqiang Ma, Nanning Zheng

Exploring human visual perception and understanding of the stereoscopic world represents a significant topic in computational neuroscience. Recent studies have provided rich Brain-3D datasets, conducted preliminary explorations into 3D visual reconstruction. However, existing research struggles to capture the differences in dynamic changes of 3D stimulus views, and there remains room for improvement in high-fidelity reconstruction and rendering. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently achieved significant progress in stereoscopic view synthesis. Inspired by it, we propose BrainGS -- an innovative framework for decoding more realistic 3D objects from the brain. BrainGS incorporates a Fusion Time-Spatial Network to achieve comprehensive encoding of the brain, combined with the Multi-Attribute Controller (MAC), it decouples features using visual, semantic, and color as anchors, effectively learning the feature distribution of Brain-3D and providing initial control for 3DGS. The Multi-View Stabilizer (MVS) overcomes the challenge of capturing multi-view changes of 3D objects, creating more robust viewpoint representations. Comprehensive experiments and discussions on fMRI/EEG show the SOTA performance (2.936 FPD, 0.202 LPIPS) of BrainGS, providing reliable neural interpretations, offering new insights into brain stereovision understanding.

Sungheon Jeong, Ryozo Masukawa, Jihong Park, Sanggeon Yun, Wenjun Huang, Hanning Chen, Mahdi Imani, Mohsen Imani

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit impressive multimodal reasoning abilities, they often produce ungrounded, hallucinated responses by over-relying on linguistic priors rather than visual evidence. This critical limitation arises from the lack of a quantitative measure of how much these models actually rely on visual inputs during reasoning. We propose Draft and Refine (DnR), an agent framework driven by a novel question-conditioned utilization metric. This metric quantifies the model's actual reliance on visual evidence by first constructing a query-conditioned relevance map to localize question-specific evidence, and then assessing dependence through relevance-based probabilistic masking. Guided by this metric, the DnR agent refines its initial "draft" through targeted feedback from external visual experts. Each expert's output (e.g., boxes, masks) is rendered as visual cues on the image, and the LVLM is re-queried to select the response that yields the greatest improvement in utilization. This process strengthens visual grounding of predictions without retraining or architectural changes. Experiments across a broad range of VQA and captioning benchmarks demonstrate consistent accuracy gains and reduced hallucination. These results show that quantifying visual utilization provides a principled path for designing more interpretable and evidence-driven multimodal agent systems that effectively leverage visual experts.