From Perception to Integration: Revisiting the Internal Dynamics of Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer simple visual questions, but often struggle when one question requires several visual judgments. We study this gap with controlled tasks for feature binding, numerosity, spatial relations, and amodal completion, together with a Composite task that combines them. Matched counterfactual image pairs isolate changes in the visual evidence needed to answer. Across four models, direct answers, hidden-state readouts, and state interventions show that the individual judgments can be made without explicit reasoning and that intervening on the corresponding states can affect the answer. During reasoning, the Composite answer becomes decodable from hidden sta...
| Authors | Rong Yu Xu, Prayag Tiwari, Shaolei Zhang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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