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视觉 / 生成式 RL 进展

Inclusive Interactive Collisions for Multi-View Consistent Compositional 3D Generation

arXiv 2026-06-23

Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have advanced notably with the development of text-to-image diffusion model. However, existing methods remain two practical challenges: (1) They primarily generate single 3D object, but struggle to generate multi-object compositional 3D assets due to the lack of the modeling for Gaussian primitives in reasonable interactions. (2) They often suffer from cross-view inconsistency during 3D optimization, as Score Distillation Sampling inherently performs on each single view, inevitably resulting in cross-view hallucinations. To solve above issues, we propose I2C-3D, a novel optimization-based method to generate multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets with reasonable interactions. Specifically, we propose an Inclusive Interactive Collisions strategy to guide Gaussian primitives appearing in reasonable interaction regions naturally, thereby ensuring objects in the compositional scene interact in a physically plausible and visually coherent way. Additionally, to enhance multi-view consistency, Multi-View Adaptive Score Distillation Sampling is devised to distill multi-view consistency prior and layout prior from pre-trained diffusion model by modulating attention map of instance token and spatial token across viewpoints. Benefiting from above elaborate designs, I2C-3D not only generates high-fidelity multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets but also supports 3D editing flexibly, facilitating complex scene generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our I2C-3D outperforms existing methods in generation quality and multi-view consistency.

UniTranslator: A Unified Multi-modal Framework for End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation

arXiv 2026-06-23

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

Are Text-to-Image Models Inductivist Turkeys? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Causal Reasoning

arXiv 2026-06-23

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell's inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to investigate whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate both open-source and closed-source T2I models using a Vision Language Model (VLM)-based evaluator (CF-Eval). Furthermore, we introduce two metrics: Prior Resistance Rate (PRR), which measures a model's ability to overcome entrenched real-world priors, and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR), which assesses whether models can maintain reasoning-dependent counterfactual generation without explicit visual cues. Experiments show that all models exhibit sharp degradation from factual to counterfactual settings. Further analyses suggest that these failures arise because current T2I models encode world knowledge and visual appearances as tightly coupled patterns. Consequently, their heavy reliance on frequent visual co-occurrences within the training data forces them to default to familiar commonsense priors when tasked with rendering counterfactual worlds.

IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation

arXiv 2026-06-23

Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved. We attribute this limitation in part to the entanglement of structural planning and appearance rendering within a single conditioning stream. To address this issue, we propose Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT), a latent visual reasoning framework for query-conditioned image generation. IV-CoT decomposes the visual conditioning queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade, where structural queries first form a latent visual plan and semantic queries then render appearance conditioned on this plan. To guide the structural queries, we introduce training-only sketch supervision, which encourages them to capture structure from sketches without requiring sketch extraction or intermediate decoding at inference time. IV-CoT performs implicit CoT reasoning in a single forward pass and achieves superior results on GenEval and T2I-CompBench. Visualizations and analyses demonstrate that the learned structural and semantic queries play complementary roles in structure-aware generation.

DiffusionBench: On Holistic Evaluation of Diffusion Transformers

arXiv 2026-06-23

Diffusion transformer (DiT) research on image generation has converged to a single evaluation setup: class-conditional generation on ImageNet. While methods improve the FID and related metrics, it is increasingly unclear whether they reflect real progress in generative modeling. The natural alternative, i.e., text-to-image (T2I) generation, is perceived as too costly or inconvenient to train and evaluate and is often skipped. We argue that this perception no longer holds. We introduce NanoGen, a unified DiT training and evaluation framework. NanoGen matches state-of-the-art DiT baselines on ImageNet and, with 12 lines of configuration change, also trains competitive text-to-image models. It currently supports RAE, VAE, pixel-space, and MeanFlow diffusion methods under both ImageNet and T2I setups. Under NanoGen, training T2I requires comparable compute to ImageNet. After training 21 latent diffusion models with NanoGen, we observe that method ranking shows no strong correlation between ImageNet and T2I generation: Pearson correlation is between -0.377 and -0.580 across three metrics. This suggests that a method which improves class-conditional ImageNet FID may show no corresponding improvement on T2I, clearly indicating the necessity of evaluating DiTs on both tasks. To this end, we summarize ImageNet and text-to-image results, which yields DiffusionBench, a holistic benchmark for DiT research. We recommend reporting DiffusionBench in place of ImageNet alone: methods that improve DiffusionBench are more likely to reflect broader progress.

Accelerating Disaggregated RL for Visual Generative LLMs with Diffusion-Based Parallelism and Trainer-Assisted Generation

arXiv 2026-06-23

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, driving the emergence of high-performance RL systems such as veRL for autoregressive large language models (LLMs). In parallel, diffusion-oriented RL algorithms, e.g., DanceGRPO and FlowGRPO, have rapidly expanded the scope of RL from language reasoning to diffusion-based visual and flow-based generation. However, efficient RL systems for diffusion generative LLMs remain underexplored. Existing implementations, e.g., veRL-Omni, still rely on colocated execution, which simplifies synchronization but couples rollout and training resources, limits heterogeneous deployment, and constrains independent scaling. To this end, we introduce DigenRL, a disaggregated RL framework for diffusion-based generative LLMs that supports flexible resource allocation, accommodates heterogeneous GPUs, and facilitates efficient task scheduling. To maximally reduce the execution bubbles in the disaggregated architecture, we propose: 1) a generation-axis pipeline (GAP) and time-step parallelism (TSP) in the diffusion architecture to enable finer-grained pipelining between rollout and training; 2) an elastic trainer-assisted generation (TAG) approach to enable the trainer GPU resources to dynamically assist in executing rollout generations; and 3) a tightly one-step constrained asynchronous strategy to further utilize the tail bubble in the pipeline. Extensive experiments are conducted on three hardware testbeds with 16-32 GPUs using HunyuanVideo-13B, Wan2.1-14B, FLUX.1-12B, and QwenImage-20B generative models. Experimental results show that DigenRL achieves 1.56-2.10x throughput improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion RL systems, veRL-Omni and GenRL.

video-SALMONN-R\(^3\): Learning to ReWatch, ReAsk, and ReAnswer for Efficient Video Understanding

arXiv 2026-06-23

Video large language models (LLMs) are often constrained by computation and memory budgets, leading them to use reduced frame rates and spatial resolutions, which may cause them to miss critical information for question answering (QA). A practical and efficient solution is a two-stage paradigm: first perform coarse video understanding to localize relevant segments, and then re-watch these segments at higher temporal or spatial fidelity. In this paper, we present video-SALMONN-R\(^3\), the first end-to-end video-LLM that enables re-watch through reinforcement learning without relying on chain-of-thought (CoT) cold-start. This design removes the need for costly CoT data annotations and avoids CoT-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which can otherwise degrade the pretrained video understanding abilities. To address the mismatch between the reasoning-first behavior induced by re-watch and the answer-first tendency of pretrained video-LLMs, we propose a re-answer strategy, in which the model first produces a direct answer in the first watch and then refines it after re-watching. Finally, to improve question adherence during re-watching, we propose a re-ask mechanism that re-injects the query when revisiting localized segments. Experimental results show that video-SALMONN-R\(^3\) consistently outperforms both the base model and the QA-SFT baseline, while surpassing prior re-watch-based approaches with significantly lower computational cost. Code, models, and data will be publicly released upon acceptance.

AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression

arXiv 2026-06-23

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress in short-form audio-video understanding, yet long-form audio-video comprehension remains challenged by limited context windows and severe information redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we propose AVOC, a framework for long-form audio-video understanding in Omni-modal Large Language Models. AVOC introduces a learnable token compression module between the modality encoders and the LLM backbone. We reframe multimodal token compression as a top-\(K\) retrieval problem: given a fixed context budget, the module must retrieve a compact subset of tokens that best supports answering the user query. We draw inspiration from three classical Information Retrieval criteria for selecting informative units from a large candidate pool: relevance, importance, and diversity. AVOC instantiates each criterion as a tailored mechanism for audio-video understanding, and integrates them into a unified retrieval-style compression pipeline. Experiments show that AVOC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form audio-video benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.9 and 5.5 points in average accuracy on OmniVideoBench and LVOmniBench, respectively. Moreover, AVOC maintains robust performance on Audio-Video Needle-in-a-Haystack task at durations up to one hour.

BioMedVR: Confusion-Aware Mixture-of-Prompt Experts for Biomedical Visual Reprogramming

arXiv 2026-06-23

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated strong generalization across natural-image domains. However, adapting these models to biomedical imaging is non-trivial: full-model fine-tuning is computationally expensive, while medical data are often scarce and exhibit subtle, fine-grained inter-class differences, making parameter-efficient adaptation particularly critical. Visual Reprogramming (VR) offers a parameter-efficient alternative by injecting learnable perturbations into the input space, but existing VR approaches for VLMs mainly focus on positive class prompts and overlook confusing negatives, leading to miscalibrated predictions in fine-grained medical scenarios. We present BioMedVR, the first VR-based framework for biomedical imaging, enabling few-shot adaptation of pretrained VLMs through compact learnable VR modules. To mitigate class confusion, we introduce a Confusion Minimization Mechanism that leverages LLM-generated confusion-aware attributes together with a Confusion-Suppression Loss to explicitly reduce false-positive alignment. Moreover, the designed Mixture-of-Prompt Experts combines a positive expert for main-class discrimination and a negative expert for confusion suppression, balanced via adaptive gating. Extensive experiments on 18 datasets, including 11 biomedical datasets and 7 natural image benchmarks, demonstrate that BioMedVR achieves superior accuracy and generalization, effectively bridging VR and VLMs in biomedical domains.

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

arXiv 2026-06-23

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

Towards Fast and Effective Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via Adaptive Quasi-Gaussian Sampling

arXiv 2026-06-23

Long video understanding remains a daunting challenge for \emph{Multimodal Large Language Models} (MLLMs) due to the excessive computation and memory footprint. Thus, \emph{keyframe selection} is often adopted to mitigate this shortcoming, which however still suffers from low flexibility and high noise due to its hard sampling principle. In this paper, we define video frame selection as a problem of \emph{Quasi-Gaussian Sampling}, and propose an adaptive and training-free approach termed \textbf{\emph{AdaQ}}. Inspired by the \(3\)-\(σ\) rule of Gaussian distribution, the objective of AdaQ is to achieve the optimal \(3\)-\(σ\) interval for different examples, \emph{i.e.}, a smaller \(3\)-\(σ\) interval for the local query and a larger one for the global query, thereby facilitating robust and adaptive frame sampling. To validate AdaQ, we apply it to four MLLMs with three embedding models. The extensive experimental results not only show its obvious performance gains over the default MLLMs and the SOTA keyframe selection methods, \emph{e.g.}, helping Qwen3-VL-8B outperform GPT4o by 15.8\% on average by using only 64 frames, but also confirm its superior robustness and high efficiency for long-video understanding, \emph{e.g.}, \textbf{only 1 hyper-parameter} needs to be set. \textbf{Our code project} is given at \href{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}.

Beyond Trajectory Imitation: Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv 2026-06-23

Distilling reasoning capabilities from strong to weak language models typically involves imitating specific solution trajectories, effectively transferring what to answer rather than how to reason. This trajectory-level imitation encourages memorization of instance-specific steps rather than acquisition of transferable problem-solving skills, limiting generalization to novel problems. We propose Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization (SGPO), which replaces instance-level trajectory imitation with reusable strategy distillation. SGPO extracts structured strategy descriptions from strong-model responses and, for each problem, constructs both autonomous and strategy-guided trajectories to enable direct comparison of the model's behavior with and without strategic guidance. The framework then addresses two key questions. For how to distill, a token-level forward-KL objective selectively transfers the distributional shift induced by strategy conditioning into the unguided policy, with proximal constraints ensuring stability. For when to distill, adaptive instance-level weighting strengthens guidance when autonomous exploration falls short and reduces it as the model's own competence grows. Experiments on four mathematical benchmarks across two model families show that SGPO consistently outperforms SFT, on-policy RL, and hybrid-policy baselines, improving the average score by 2.2 points over the strongest baseline on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Analysis reveals that the forward-KL objective provides an inherently selective distillation signal that outperforms direct trajectory imitation, and that strategy distillation exhibits complementary scaling with base model capability.

Spectral Evolution-Guided Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv 2026-06-23

Reducing visual token redundancy is critical for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) without degrading cross-modal reasoning performance. Existing token pruning methods typically rely on single-layer signals, such as attention scores or token similarities, which overlook the cross-layer transformation of visual representations and may exhibit positional bias in multimodal token sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free token pruning framework based on Cross-Layer Spectral Evolution (CLSE). Instead of measuring token importance from single-layer feature magnitudes, CLSE quantifies how token representations evolve across Transformer layers in the frequency domain. This evolution reflects the transition from high-frequency structural details to low-frequency semantic abstractions. We observe that tokens with stronger spectral redistribution across layers are more likely to be semantically active and should therefore be preserved. By modeling cross-layer token dynamics, CLSE provides a stable importance criterion that mitigates positional bias. Extensive experiments on both image and video benchmarks demonstrate that CLSE achieves a superior trade-off between efficiency and accuracy under aggressive token reduction. Across multiple MLLMs, CLSE reduces FLOPs, KV cache memory, and latency while maintaining competitive or improved performance.

Intend, Reflect, Refine: An Adaptive Multimodal Reflection Framework for Autonomous Driving

arXiv 2026-06-22

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced end-to-end autonomous driving by incorporating reasoning for better interpretability and planning quality. However, most existing approaches directly generate the final trajectory without explicitly examining its future consequences, which limits their reliability in complex and dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we propose IRR-Drive (Intend, Reflect, Refine), an adaptive multimodal reflection framework for autonomous driving. Specifically, to tightly couple high-level reasoning with physical constraints, IRR-Drive first generates a preliminary textual intention and anticipates potential interactions by predicting future semantic bird's-eye view (BEV) representations. This dual-modality (Text + BEV) reflection space explicitly models anticipated scene evolution, enabling the model to rigorously self-correct and refine its initial intent before generating the final trajectory. Furthermore, to balance planning performance and computational efficiency, we construct reflection-oriented training data and design an adaptive reflection reward, enabling the model to adaptively select its reasoning mode according to scene complexity. Instead of using reasoning primarily as an auxiliary interpretation, IRR-Drive directly integrates an adaptive reflection mechanism into the planning framework, enabling grounded, decision-aware trajectory correction that is driven by scene complexity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM benchmark in both PDMS and EPDMS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal reflection framework and validate the efficacy of the proposed adaptive reflection strategy.

Rethinking Object-Centric Representations for Video Dynamics Modeling

arXiv 2026-06-22

Unsupervised video object tracking aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-centric entities without manual annotations. Many recent approaches rely on slot-based representations, where a fixed set of latent variables ("slots") represent individual objects across frames. To preserve object identity, these models enforce temporal consistency on slot embeddings. However, when appearance and pose are entangled, this consistency objective conflicts with object motion and viewpoint changes. As a result, slots tend to lock onto static regions (e.g., background) to satisfy the consistency objective, while foreground objects become fragmented across multiple slots or frequently swap identities. To address these limitations, we propose STAITUS, a unified framework that explicitly disentangles each slot into appearance and geometric pose (position/scale). Leveraging this disentanglement, STAITUS enforces within-frame spatial separation and applies temporal alignment only in appearance space, yielding sharper masks and more persistent identities under motion, occlusion, and object entry/exit. Furthermore, to mitigate over-segmentation, we introduce an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically adjusts the number of active slots to match scene complexity. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that STAITUS substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in segmentation quality and tracking stability.

KEMO: Event-Driven Keyframe Memory for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with VLA Policies

arXiv 2026-06-22

Long-horizon robot manipulation remains challenging because similar observations may occur at different execution stages, while the appropriate action depends on previously completed operations. Memory can address this ambiguity by enabling policies to infer task progress from execution history. However, existing memory-augmented approaches often either retain dense histories that require compression or rely primarily on recent context that may discard earlier task-relevant events. In this work, we propose propose KEMO, a lightweight plug-in memory framework that automatically selectively preserves keyframes associated with task-relevant state changes for VLA policies. KEMO combines robot kinematics with visual filtering to detect events, encodes the selected keyframes as compact temporally ordered memory tokens, and integrates them with current visual features through cross-attention and gated residual fusion for VLA training. The detected events also define higher-weight training samples near critical transitions. We evaluate KEMO on various real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks spanning 2 to 6 scored subtasks, and trajectory length ranging from 830 steps to 2846 execution steps (durations from 28 to 95 seconds). Compared with the memory-free baseline (e.g., \(π_{0.5}\)), KEMO improves aggregate Task Success Rate by 23.6\% and Stage Completion Rate by 34.1\%. Ablations show that event-driven keyframe selection outperforms uniform sampling and recent-frame retention, while the proposed gated fusion and keyframe-aligned loss weighting provide complementary gains.

DE-FIVE: Detecting Malicious Image Prompts via Fourier Features and Image Vector Embeddings

arXiv 2026-06-22

Vision language models (VLMs) employ both visual and textual modalities to enable advanced vision-language inference. However, incorporating visual modalities expands the attack surface of VLMs, making them more susceptible to security threats such as adversarial perturbations and indirect prompt injection, wherein crafted malicious image prompts can elicit unintended model outputs. Existing defense methods against malicious image prompts remain insufficient as they typically demand extensive datasets for retraining or the deployment of additional, complex classifiers. Most critically, there is a profound lack of specialized defense mechanisms specifically targeting indirect prompt injections, a gap that serves as a primary motivation for this work. To address these limitations, we introduce DE-FIVE, a novel training-free framework for detecting malicious image prompts by leveraging Fourier features and the hidden state representations of the visual encoder (image vector embeddings) across perturbations. Specifically, we develop a hybrid detection strategy consisting of a black-box detector that operates on Fourier-domain features and a white-box detector that exploits image vector embeddings derived from only a few-shot malicious set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines against malicious image prompts.

SingGuard: A Policy-Adaptive Multimodal LLM Guardrail with Dynamic Reasoning

arXiv 2026-06-22

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages. Most existing guardrails either rely on fixed taxonomies or target only a narrow set of interaction settings, which limits their adaptability when safety rules change at deployment time. We present \textbf{SingGuard}, a policy-adaptive multimodal guardrail model family for safety assessment in multimodal conversations. SingGuard treats the active policy as a runtime input: given natural-language rules, it checks the target content against the active policy rule by rule and predicts both the safety label and the triggered rule. To balance efficiency and interpretability, SingGuard supports fast, hybrid, and slow inference regimes along a fast-to-slow reasoning spectrum, ranging from direct safety judgments to policy-grounded deliberation. We further optimize this behavior with fast--slow decoupled reinforcement learning. We also introduce \textbf{SingGuard-Bench}, a multimodal guardrail benchmark with 56{,}340 examples spanning 80+ fine-grained risk types across multimodal QA, adversarial attack, and dynamic-rule evaluation settings, including cross-modal joint-risk cases where each modality is harmless in isolation but their composition implies unsafe intent. Across six benchmark families (35 datasets), SingGuard achieves state-of-the-art average F1 in every family. Dynamic-rule evaluation further shows improved policy-following accuracy from 0.6465 to 0.7415 under runtime policy shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Sing-Guard.

PIVOTSBench: Evaluating Fine-Grained Interpersonal Relationship Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv 2026-06-22

Humans possess an innate ability to understand fine-grained interpersonal relationships, which is central to everyday social interactions. Although such reasoning is inherently multimodal, it remains largely unexplored by existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address this gap, we introduce PIVOTS, the first benchmark built from Social-IQ 2.0 and YouTube data to evaluate MLLMs' ability to predict bidirectional interpersonal relationship dimensions grounded in established psychology research. In addition, PIVOTS includes auxiliary tasks that assess models' ability to identify and leverage the critical visual cues underlying such predictions. We evaluate both proprietary and open-source MLLMs and conduct detailed ablation studies to analyze the effects of visual modalities and explicit social role information in conversational utterances. We further examine how joint and pairwise prediction settings benefit MLLMs in scoring bidirectional PIVOTS dimensions. Project page and resources: https://flynnzhangsx.github.io/PIVOTSBench/ .

Chains That See, Answers That Don't: A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Recipe for Forced Chain-of-Thought on Video-MME

arXiv 2026-06-22

Forced chain-of-thought (CoT) is widely assumed to make vision-language models more reliable on video question answering. We propose a small three-probe evaluation recipe to test that assumption: paired accuracy across direct, CoT, answer-first, and no-video conditions; a counterfactual video-swap diagnostic over the CoT chains; and a four-rung visual-degradation ladder. Each probe is reported under both a strict and a permissive regex scorer, with multiplicity correction over a manuscript-declared primary family. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL on Video-MME subsets, the recipe returns a two-part finding. The CoT chains are strongly video-conditioned: swapping the input video collapses chain overlap and flips most final letters, the opposite of what a "boilerplate-chain" null would predict. Yet on the same data, forced CoT does not improve MCQ accuracy, and on the smaller 7B model it produces a small but statistically supported drop under a post-hoc primary scorer choice. We do not claim this generalizes beyond the Qwen2.5-VL / Video-MME instantiation; the raw responses and a single recomputation script will be released with the supplementary material so every number can be re-derived.