论文检索

输入标题、作者或关键词,从 1,526 篇学术成果中精准定位

会议来源 全部会议

机器学习与综合 AI

自然语言处理

计算机视觉

数据挖掘与 Web

多媒体与图形学

未选择时检索全部会议
支持跨会议组合检索,PDF 均跳转至官方来源
1,526篇论文匹配“Interpretability and Visualization”
第 8 / 77 页

SangEun Lee, Yubeen Lee, Eunil Park, Wonseok Chae

Understanding human emotions from images is a challenging yet essential task for vision-language models. While recent efforts have fine-tuned vision-language models to enhance emotional awareness, most approaches rely on global visual representations and fail to capture the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of emotional cues. Furthermore, most existing approaches adopt instruction tuning, which requires costly dataset construction and involves training a large number of parameters, thereby limiting their scalability and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose MASP, a novel framework for Multi-Aspect guided emotion reasoning with Soft Prompt tuning in vision-language models. MASP explicitly separates emotion-relevant visual cues via multi-aspect cross-attention modules and guides the language model using soft prompts, enabling efficient and scalable task adaptation without modifying the base model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various emotion recognition benchmarks, demonstrating that the explicit modeling of multi-aspect emotional cues with soft prompt tuning leads to more accurate and interpretable emotion reasoning in vision-language models.

Jiancong Xie, Wentao Wei, Chi Zhang, Jiahua Rao, Yuedong Yang

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is pivotal for drug safety and clinical decision-making. Recently, subgraph-based methods utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs) and domain information have achieved promising results by extracting informative subgraphs for DDI prediction. However, existing subgraph extraction methods are typically coarse-grained and nonspecific, facing two key limitations: First, they are constrained by the vast and noisy nature of real-world KGs, making it challenging to identify the most informative substructures from the massive space of candidate subgraphs. Second, current methods often fail to exploit the molecular structural specificity of drugs to selectively extract relevant subgraphs, lacking effective integration of molecular structure information with knowledge graph context. To address these challenges, we propose RISE-DDI, a novel framework for Reinforced-based Informative Subgraph Extraction approach for drug-drug interaction prediction. Specifically, RISE-DDI formulates the subgraph extraction as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverages a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent to dynamically and adaptively extract the most informative and context-specific subgraphs for each drug pair. The agent is guided by a learnable structure-aware reward model that considers both the topological context from the knowledge graph and the molecular features of the drug pairs, thereby encouraging the selection of subgraphs that are both structurally relevant and biologically informative. Extensive experiments on DDI benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both transductive and inductive scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 20%. Furthermore, visualization analyses of the extracted subgraphs highlight the interpretability of our model, providing insights into the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions.

Ziqing Qian, Jiaying Lei, Shengqi Dang, Nan Cao

Social media has fundamentally transformed how people access information and form social connections, with content expression playing a critical role in driving information diffusion. While prior research has focused largely on network structures and tipping point identification, it provides limited tools for automatically generating content tailored for virality within a specific audience. To fill this gap, we propose the novel task of Diffusion-Oriented Content Generation (DOCG) and introduce an information enhancement algorithm for generating content optimized for diffusion. Our method includes an influence indicator that enables content-level diffusion assessment without requiring access to network topology, and an information editor that employs reinforcement learning to explore interpretable editing strategies. The editor leverages generative models to produce semantically faithful, audience-aware textual or visual content. Experiments on real-world social media datasets and user study demonstrate that our approach significantly improves diffusion effectiveness while preserving the core semantics of the original content.

Yingxin Lai, Yufei Liu, Guoqing Yang, Jiaxing Chai, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li

Despite recent advancements in font generation, practitioners still grapple with a laborious trial-and-error workflow. To streamline this, we propose OneFont, an end-to-end framework that interprets user intents via free-form dialogue, seamlessly integrating both glyph synthesis and refinement modules. We introduce the Font with Thought (FwT) paradigm, reframing font design as a reasoning task where the model plans actions and articulates design rationales. OneFont’s core planner is trained via a two-stage regimen to master this paradigm. First, we instill reasoning abilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a new, comprehensive benchmark of 1,500 font families we built. Second, we refine the model's policy with a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a hybrid reward that assesses visual fidelity, rationale coherence, and transformation correctness. Extensive experiments show OneFont significantly surpasses existing methods in design quality and stroke precision across diverse scripts, validated on our new benchmark. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

Yihong Tang, Haicheng Liao, Tong Nie, Junlin He, Ao Qu, Kehua Chen, Wei Ma, Zhenning Li, Lijun Sun, Chengzhong Xu

End-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems increasingly adopt vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet they ignore the passenger's emotional state, which is central to comfort and AD acceptance. We introduce Open-Domain End-to-End (OD-E2E) AD, where an autonomous vehicle must interpret free-form natural-language commands, infer the emotion, and plan a physically feasible trajectory. We propose E3AD, an emotion-aware VLA framework that augments semantic understanding with two cognitively inspired components: a continuous Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) emotion model that captures tone and urgency from language, and a dual-pathway spatial reasoning module that fuses egocentric and allocentric views for human-like spatial cognition. A consistency-oriented training scheme, combining modality pretraining with preference-based alignment, further enforces coherence between emotional intent and driving actions. Across real-world datasets, E3AD improves visual grounding and waypoint planning and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) VAD correlation for emotion estimation. These results show that injecting emotion into VLA-style driving yields more human-aligned grounding, planning, and feedback.

Xingyu Zhu, Beier Zhu, Shuo Wang, Junfeng Fang, Kesen Zhao, Hanwang Zhang, Xiangnan He

As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world scenarios, they can be easily induced by visual jailbreak attacks to generate harmful content, posing serious risks to model safety and trustworthy usage.Recent activation steering methods inject directional vectors into model activations during inference to induce refusal behaviors and have demonstrated effectiveness.However, a steering vector may both enhance refusal ability and cause over-refusal, thereby degrading model performance on benign inputs.Moreover, due to the lack of theoretical interpretability, these methods still suffer from limited robustness and effectiveness.To better balance safety and utility, we propose \texttt NullSteer , a null-space projected activation defense framework.Our method constructs refusal directions within model activations through a linear transformation: it maintains zero perturbation within the benign subspace while dynamically inducing refusal along potentially harmful directions, thereby theoretically achieving safety enhancement without impairing the model's general capabilities.Extensive experiments show that \texttt NullSteer significantly reduces harmful outputs under various jailbreak attacks (average ASR reduction over 15% on MiniGPT-4) while maintaining comparable performance to the original model on general benchmarks.

Hao Zhou, Tiru Wu, Yan Jiang, Wanqi Zhou, Junxing Hu, Ai Han

Multi-modal multi-agent systems (MM-MAS) have gained increasing attention for their capacity to enable complex reasoning and coordination across diverse modalities. As these systems continue to expand in scale and functionality, investigating their potential vulnerabilities has become increasingly important.However, existing studies on adversarial attacks in multi-agent systems primarily focus on isolated agents or unimodal settings, leaving the vulnerabilities of MM-MAS largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce HAM\textsuperscript 3 , a Hierarchical Attack framework for multi-modal multi-agent systems that decomposes attacks into three interconnected layers. Specifically, at the perception layer, HAM\textsuperscript 3 mounts attacks by perturbing visual inputs, textual inputs, and their fused visual-textual representations. At the communication layer, it performs communication-level attacks that corrupt message content and interaction topology, such as manipulating shared context or communication links to distort collective information flow. At the reasoning layer, it conducts reasoning-level attacks that interfere with each agent's cognitive pipeline, biasing reasoning trajectories and ultimately compromising final decisions. We evaluate HAM\textsuperscript 3 on the GQA benchmark through multi-agent systems built on distinct reasoning paradigms including ReAct, Plan-and-Solve, and Reflexion. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves an Attack Success Rate of up to 78.3%, with reasoning-layer attacks being the most effective. More than half of the successful attacks lead multiple agents to produce consistent errors. These findings offer valuable insights for building more robust and interpretable multi-agent intelligence.

Qi Song, Honglin Li, Yingchen Yu, Haoyi Zhou, Lin Yang, Song Bai, Qi She, Zilong Huang, Yunqing Zhao

Recent releases such as o3 highlight human-like "thinking with images" reasoning that combines tool use with stepwise verification, yet most open-source approaches still rely on text-only chains, rigid visual schemas, or single-step pipelines, limiting flexibility, interpretability, and transferability on complex tasks. We introduce CodeDance, which explores executable code as a general solver for visual reasoning. Unlike fixed-schema calls (e.g., only predicting bounding-box coordinates), CodeDance defines, composes, and executes code to orchestrate multiple tools, compute intermediate results, and render visual artifacts (e.g., boxes, lines, plots) that support transparent, self-checkable reasoning. To guide this process, we introduce a reward for balanced and adaptive tool calling, which balances exploration with efficiency and mitigates tool overuse. Interestingly, beyond the expected capabilities taught by atomic supervision, we empirically observe novel emergent behaviors during RL training: CodeDance demonstrates novel tool invocations, unseen compositions, and cross-task transfer. These behaviors arise without task-specific fine-tuning, suggesting a general and scalable mechanism for executable visual reasoning. Extensive experiments across reasoning benchmarks (e.g., visual search, math, chart QA) show that CodeDance not only consistently outperforms schema-driven and text-only baselines, but also surpasses closed models such as GPT-4o and larger open-source models.

Zheng Wang, Haoran Chen, Haoxuan Qin, Zhipeng Wei, Tianwen Qian, Cong Bai

Long video understanding is challenging due to dense visual redundancy, long-range temporal dependencies, and the tendency of chain-of-thought and retrieval-based agents to accumulate semantic drift and correlation-driven errors. We argue that long-video reasoning should begin not with reactive retrieval, but with deliberate task formulation: the model must first articulate what must be true in the video for each candidate answer to hold. This thinking-before-finding principle motivates VideoHV-Agent, a framework that reformulates video question answering as a structured hypothesis-verification process.Based on video summaries, a Thinker rewrites answer candidates into testable hypotheses, a Judge derives a discriminative clue specifying what evidence must be checked, a Verifier grounds and tests the clue using localized, fine-grained video content, and an Answer agent integrates validated evidence to produce the final answer.Experiments on three long-video understanding benchmarks show that VideoHV-Agent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while providing enhanced interpretability, improved logical soundness, and lower computational cost.

Rohit Kundu, Vishal Mohanty, Hao Xiong, Shan Jia, Athula Balachandran, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

The proliferation of generative AI has led to hyper-realistic synthetic videos, escalating misuse risks and outstripping binary real/fake detectors. We introduce \texttt SAGA (\underline S ource \underline A ttribution of \underline G enerative \underline A I videos), the first comprehensive framework to address the urgent need for AI-generated video source attribution at a large scale. Unlike traditional detection, \texttt SAGA identifies the specific generative model used. It uniquely provides multi-granular attribution across five levels: authenticity, generation task (e.g., T2V/I2V), model version, development team, and the precise generator, offering far richer forensic insights. Our novel video transformer architecture, leveraging features from a robust vision foundation model, effectively captures spatio-temporal artifacts. Critically, we introduce a data-efficient pretrain-and-attribute strategy, enabling \texttt SAGA to achieve state-of-the-art attribution using only 0.5% of source-labeled data per class, matching fully supervised performance. Furthermore, we propose Temporal Attention Signatures (\texttt T-Sig ), a novel interpretability method that visualizes learned temporal differences, offering the first explanation for why different video generators are distinguishable. Extensive experiments on public datasets, including cross-domain scenarios, demonstrate that \texttt SAGA sets a new benchmark for synthetic video provenance, providing crucial, interpretable insights for forensic and regulatory applications.

Jingjing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Zheren Fu, Bo Hu, Zhendong Mao

Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve target images using a composed query of a reference image and a textual modification, without relying on triplet-based supervision. As the two inputs describe related but semantically unaligned information, the key challenge lies in interpreting their cross-modal discrepancy to infer the user's intended semantic modification. Existing ZS-CIR methods mainly adopt a consistency-driven paradigm, training on semantically aligned image-text pairs with alignment or reconstruction objectives. This paradigm enforces cross-modal agreement but overlooks the semantic discrepancies between modalities that naturally arise during inference. To address this issue, we propose DiffComp (Differentiate-then-Compose), a difference-driven self-supervised framework that actively induces and exploits cross-modal discrepancies during training. It stimulates the model to perceive and reconcile semantic differences across visual and textual modalities, thereby improving consistency between training and inference. The framework consists of three components: Contextual Semantic Super-patches that provide localized and coherent visual representations for downstream perception and composition; Phrase-guided Masking that selectively removes text-aligned visual cues to induce controlled cross-modal discrepancies; and Difference-aware Composition that adaptively integrates visual and textual features according to their degree of semantic difference. Extensive experiments on four ZS-CIR benchmarks show that DiffComp achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Orange1999/DiffComp.

Alexandros Stergiou

How do video understanding models acquire their answers? Although current Vision Language Models (VLMs) reason over complex scenes with diverse objects, action performances, and scene dynamics, understanding and controlling their internal processes remains an open challenge. Motivated by recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generative models, this paper introduces a logits-to-video (L2V) task alongside a model-independent approach, TRANSPORTER, to generate videos that capture the underlying rules behind VLMs' predictions. Given the high-visual-fidelity produced by T2V models, TRANSPORTER learns an optimal transport coupling to VLM's high-semantic embedding spaces. In turn, logit scores define embedding directions for conditional video generation. TRANSPORTER generates videos that reflect caption changes over diverse object attributes, action adverbs, and scene context. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across VLMs demonstrate that L2V can provide a fidelity-rich, novel direction for model interpretability that has not been previously explored.

Shubham Kumar, Narendra Ahuja

Deep vision models perform input-output computations that are hard to interpret. Concept-based explanation methods (CBEMs) increase interpretability by re-expressing parts of the model with human-understandable semantic units, or concepts. Checking if the derived explanations are faithful--that is, they represent the model's internal computation--requires a surrogate that combines concepts to compute the output. Simplifications made for interpretability inevitably reduce faithfulness, resulting in a tradeoff between the two. State-of-the-art unsupervised CBEMs (U-CBEMs) are seemingly more interpretable, while also being more faithful to the model. However, we observe that the reported improvement in faithfulness artificially results from either (1) using overly complex surrogates, which introduces an unmeasured cost to the explanation's interpretability, or (2) relying on deletion-based approaches that, as we demonstrate, do not properly measure faithfulness. We propose Surrogate Faithfulness (SURF), which (1) replaces prior complex surrogates with a simple, linear surrogate that measures faithfulness without changing the explanation's interpretability and (2) introduces well-motivated metrics that assess loss across all output classes, not just the predicted class. We validate SURF with a measure-over-measure study by proposing a simple sanity check--explanations with random concepts should be less faithful-which prior surrogates fail. SURF enables the first reliable faithfulness benchmark of U-CBEMs, revealing that many visually compelling U-CBEMs are not faithful. Code is released.

Camile Lendering, Erkut Akdag, Egor Bondarau

Detecting visual anomalies in industrial inspection often requires training with only a few normal images per category. Recent few-shot methods achieve strong results employing foundation-model features, but typically rely on memory banks, auxiliary datasets, or multi-modal tuning of vision-language models. We therefore question whether such complexity is necessary given the feature representations of vision foundation models. To answer this question, we introduce SubspaceAD, a training-free method, that operates in two simple stages. First, patch-level features are extracted from a small set of normal images by a frozen DINOv2 backbone. Second, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model is fit to these features to estimate the low-dimensional subspace of normal variations. At inference, anomalies are detected via the reconstruction residual with respect to this subspace, producing interpretable and statistically grounded anomaly scores. Despite its simplicity, SubspaceAD achieves state-of-the-art performance across one-shot and few-shot settings without training, prompt tuning, or memory banks. In the one-shot anomaly detection setting, SubspaceAD achieves image-level and pixel-level AUROC of 98.0% and 97.6% on the MVTec-AD dataset, and 93.3% and 98.3% on the VisA dataset, respectively, surpassing prior state-of-the-art results.

Jialei Zhan, Li Liu, Jiehua Zhang, Yuhang Xie, Yongxiang Liu, Jiangming Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng

Recent advancements in remote sensing object detection have predominantly focused on oriented bounding box design and small object feature enhancement, while often overlooking the intrinsic geometric properties of remote sensing images, such as rotation invariance and structural symmetry. Many aerial objects appear in multiple orientations and exhibit clear symmetrical patterns, which, if not explicitly modeled, can lead to detection failures and inaccurate localization under geometric variation or partial occlusion. To address this, we propose the Rotation Invariant and Symmetry Aware Pixel Difference Network (RIS-PiDiNet), which introduces a novel convolutional operator called Rotation Invariant and Symmetry Aware Pixel Difference Convolution (RIS-PDC). This operator replaces traditional convolution with a mathematically grounded formulation that encodes rotation group priors and symmetrical constraints. RIS-PDC utilizes pixel differences and symmetry-guided aggregation in the polar harmonic space, enabling the network to infer partially visible structures and deduce occluded symmetrical parts. Besides improving detection accuracy, RIS-PDC enhances model interpretability by embedding geometric principles into the network design. Feature visualizations demonstrate rotation-consistent activations and symmetry-complete responses, revealing how the network captures underlying object structure even under partial visibility or orientation changes. This yields geometrically interpretable detection decisions. To our knowledge, RIS-PiDiNet is the first remote sensing object detection framework that jointly incorporates rotation invariance and symmetry modeling within a unified architecture. Extensive evaluations on standard benchmarks validate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance on DOTA-v1.0 (78.53% mAP single-scale, 81.81% multi-scale), HRSC2016 (98.60% mAP), and DIOR-R (67.28% mAP), all with acceptable computational overhead and no increase in parameter count.

Xihang Qiu, Yuhao Fang, Qing Zhou, Bin Zhai, Jialong Hong, Wanpeng Zhang, Yao Lu, Ye Zhang, Chun Li

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) aims to understand emotions expressed in each utterance by effectively integrating audio, text, and visual modalities. However, in real-world scenarios, unavoidable missing modalities often degrade multimodal interpretation performance. To address this, we propose Hypergraph Diffusion and Evidence Fusion based Emotion Recognition (HyperEF), a novel framework designed to mitigate challenges arising from incomplete modalities in MERC. Specifically, to mitigate performance degradation caused by modality absence, we propose Masked Hypergraph Attention (MHGAT) conditioned diffusion model to recover latent features of missing modalities in the latent space. To ensure semantic consistency between recovered and available modalities within the same utterance, we introduce MHGAT that captures high-order semantic information from available modalities to guide the diffusion model's denoising process. Furthermore, to disentangle and model the complex uncertainties inherent in MERC, we propose Dual Channel Evidence Fusion (DCEF), which estimates uncertainty at both feature source level and discriminative level, thereby achieving adaptive evidence fusion. Extensive comparative experiments and interpretability demonstrate the superior performance of our model in emotion recognition, as well as the contribution of each module within the model.

Jovana Kondic, Pengyuan Li, Dhiraj Joshi, Isaac Sanchez, Ben Wiesel, Shafiq Abedin, Amit Alfassy, Eli Schwartz, Daniel Caraballo, Yagmur Gizem Cinar 等

Understanding charts requires models to jointly reason over geometric visual patterns, structured numerical data, and natural language -- a capability where current vision-language models (VLMs) remain limited. We introduce ChartNet, a high-quality, million-scale multimodal dataset designed to advance chart interpretation and reasoning. ChartNet leverages a novel code-guided synthesis pipeline to generate 1.5 million diverse chart samples spanning 24 chart types and 6 plotting libraries. Each sample consists of five aligned components: plotting code, rendered chart image, data table, natural language summary, and question-answering with reasoning, providing fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To capture the full spectrum of chart comprehension, ChartNet additionally includes specialized subsets encompassing human annotated data, real-world data, safety, and grounding. Moreover, a rigorous quality-filtering pipeline ensures visual fidelity, semantic accuracy, and diversity across chart representations. Fine-tuning on ChartNet consistently improves results across benchmarks, demonstrating its utility as large-scale supervision for multimodal models. As the largest open-source dataset of its kind, ChartNet aims to support the development of foundation models with robust and generalizable capabilities for data visualization understanding. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-granite/ChartNet

Abdul Rehman, Iqra Rasool, Ayisha Imran, Mohsen Ali, Waqas Sultani

Digital hematopathology requires cell-level analysis across diverse disease categories, including malignant disorders (e.g., leukemia), infectious conditions (e.g., malaria), and non-malignant red blood cell disorders (e.g., sickle cell disease). Whether single-task, vision-language, WSI- optimized, or single-cell hematology models, these approaches share a key limitation: they cannot provide unified, multi-task, multi-modal reasoning across the complexities of digital hematopathology. To overcome these limitations, we propose Uni-Hema, a multi-task, unified model for digital hematopathology integrating detection, classification, segmentation, morphology prediction, and reasoning across multiple diseases. Uni-Hema leverages 46 publicly available datasets, encompassing over 700K images and 21K question-answer pairs, and is built upon Hema-Former, a multimodal module that bridges visual and linguistic representations at the hierarchy level for the different tasks (detection, classification, segmentation, morphology, mask language modeling, and visual question answering) at different granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Uni-Hema achieves comparable or superior performance compared to training on a single task and single-dataset models, across diverse hematological tasks, while providing interpretable, morphologically relevant insights at the single-cell level. Our framework establishes a new standard for multi-task and multi-modal digital hematopathology. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligentMachines-ITU/Uni-Hema

Zhiyu Xu, Weilong Yan, Yufei Shi, Xin Meng, Tao He, Huiping Zhuang, Ming Li, Hehe Fan

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video agent systems have significantly improved general video understanding. However, when applied to scientific video understanding and educating--a domain that demands external professional knowledge integration and rigorous step-wise reasoning--existing approaches often struggle. To bridge this gap, we propose SciEducator, an iterative self-evolving multi-agent system for scientific video comprehension and education. Rooted in the classical Deming Cycle from management science, our design reformulates its Plan-Do-Study-Act philosophy into a self-evolving reasoning and feedback mechanism, which facilitates the interpretation of intricate scientific activities in videos. Moreover, SciEducator can produce multimodal educational content tailored to specific scientific processes, including textual instructions, visual guides, audio narrations, and interactive references. To support evaluation, we construct SciVBench, a benchmark consisting of 500 expert-verified and literature-grounded science QA pairs across five categories, covering physical, chemical, and everyday phenomena. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SciEducator substantially outperforms leading closed-source MLLMs (e.g., Gemini, GPT-4o) and state-of-the-art video agents on the benchmark, establishing a new paradigm for the community.

Yuzhi Huang, Kairun Wen, Rongxin Gao, Dongxuan Liu, Yibin Lou, Jie Wu, Jing Xu, Jian Zhang, Zheng Yang, Yunlong Lin 等

Humans inhabit a physical 4D world, where spatial geometry and semantic content evolve over time, forming a dynamic reality. While current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in understanding static visual inputs, it remains unclear whether they can effectively "think in dynamics," i.e., perceive, track, and reason about spatio-temporal evolution in complex scenes.To systematically evaluate these abilities, we introduce \texttt Dyn-Bench , a large-scale benchmark designed to assess spatio-temporal reasoning and localized dynamics perception. Constructed through multi-stage filtering over massive 2D and 4D data sources, \texttt Dyn-Bench provides a high-quality collection of diverse dynamic scenes, consisting of 1k videos, 7k visual question answering (VQA) pairs, and 3k dynamic object grounding samples.We comprehensively study general-purpose, spatial-aware, and region-level MLLMs to understand how they "think in dynamics" from both linguistic and visual perspectives. Our results reveal that existing models struggle to jointly excel in both spatio-temporal reasoning and dynamic object grounding, often producing inconsistent interpretations of motion and interaction. Conventional prompting strategies i.e., chain-of-thought or caption-based hints) provide only limited improvements.In contrast, structured integration approaches, including Mask-Guided Fusion and the Spatio-Temporal Textual Cognitive Map (ST-TCM), substantially enhance MLLMs' dynamic perception and spatio-temporal reasoning in an evolving 4D world. These findings underscore the importance of explicit spatio-temporal structural cues to bridge the gap between static perception and dynamic reasoning in MLLMs.