Who Is Left of Whom? Tracing Spatial Evidence and Role Binding in Relative-Position Reasoning
High instance-level accuracy can mask inconsistencies in spatial reasoning when objects exchange positions or their roles are reversed in the query. The internal representations supporting relative-position reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate two complementary components of this process: tracking object locations in the input and representing their query roles. Across three VLMs with visual or textual inputs and their language-model backbones, activation patching reveals a staged progression from early-layer source representations through intermediate-layer query-object representations to late-layer answer states. Targeted interventions further establish causal links along ...
| Authors | Yingjin Song, Denis Paperno, Albert Gatt |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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