Free the Language Model From the Vision Encoder: Semantic Serialization as a Perception Interface for Small Language Models
End-to-end vision-language models (VLMs) bind visual competence to the scale of their language model: as the language model shrinks, perception and reasoning degrade together. We study an embodied scene question-answering (QA) interface in which vision never enters the language model. A frozen perception stack detects and ranges objects; a deterministic semantic serializer compiles the perceived state, errors included, into decision-aligned text; an unmodified text-only large language model (LLM) answers. On a visible-scope-matched, occlusion-audited campus-robot benchmark, under a prospectively frozen criterion, the serialized interface, using detectors fine-tuned in-domain within each f...
| Authors | Cong Xu, Ravi Sankar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 29 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 August 2026 |
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