Readout Blindness: VLM Scores Miss the Spatial Direction Their Frozen Encoders Retain
CLIP-like vision-language models remain a cornerstone of multimodal systems, yet their scores stay near chance on directed spatial relations, such as whether one object is left of another. We call this failure readout blindness and analyze, theoretically and empirically, why deployed scores miss the direction: when scoring rules treat the subject and object symmetrically, direction cancels regardless of encoder training. Guided by this analysis, we introduce Antisymmetric Displacement Readout (ADR), which aligns caption words with image patches in the frozen features and scores each relation by the signed displacement between matched object centroids. Notably, ADR succeeds without additio...
| Authors | Guangyuan Li, Tianming Du, Yan Jiang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 5 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 October 2026 |
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