Nodes Are Early, Edges Are Late: Probing Diagram Representations in Large Vision-Language Models
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong performance on diagram understanding benchmarks, yet they still struggle with understanding relationships between elements, particularly those represented by nodes and directed edges (e.g., arrows and lines). To investigate the underlying causes of this limitation, we probe the internal representation of LVLMs using a carefully constructed synthetic diagram dataset based on directed graphs. Our probing experiments reveal that edge information is not linearly separable in the vision encoder and becomes linearly encoded only in the text tokens in the language model. In contrast, node information and global structural features are alrea...
| Authors | Haruto Yoshida, Keito Kudo, Yoichi Aoki et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 March 2026 |
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