arXiv subjects

Aishwarya Agrawal

Publications and source records attributed to Aishwarya Agrawal.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How and What to Imagine? Visual Thinking in Unified Multimodal Models for Cross-View Spatial Reasoning

Cross-view spatial reasoning remains a weak spot for vision-language models (VLMs): they reason in language and discard the fine-grained geometry the task requires. Thinking with images aims to fix this by generating an intermediate thinking-image, but recent work shows the visual evidence in these traces is largely ignored. We therefore ask how to make visual thinking matter, and what kind of visual thinking works best. We ask these questions for unified multimodal models (UMMs) that natively support interleaved image-text generation. For the how, we propose View Dropout (VDrop), a training-time intervention that hides parts of one input view from the answer span while leaving it visible to the thinking-image tokens. This incentivizes the model to make use of the thinking-image when answering, rather than answering based on the input views only. With the thinking-image now being used in answer prediction, we ask which kind of visual thinking works best. We frame this as a Learnability-Informativeness (L-I) tradeoff and compare three thinking-image variants: top-down, panoramic, and point-matching renderings. Trained on synthetic scenes and evaluated on five real-world out-of-domain benchmarks, panoramic visual thinking with VDrop is the only configuration that is simultaneously informative and learnable, and achieves the best out-of-domain generalization.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images

Despite tremendous recent progress, current text-guided image editing methods still struggle with many aspects of editing involving instruction following, minimally editing the source image, and ensuring high visual quality. These problems are especially apparent when the requested edit is challenging, such as those that involve position, motion, viewpoint, scale and creative edits. To systematically test generative image editors, we propose a novel image editing benchmark -- TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images. TECCI consists of a completely new set of images we are releasing. The images in TECCI span 7 image categories. The images and these categories were curated intentionally to target weaknesses of existing methods. The edit instructions in TECCI are automatically generated by Gemini, covering 5 edit types per source image. We also curated a set of 530 images for which we created challenging manually written edit instructions. Overall, TECCI contains 7550 pairs of images and edit instructions. We conduct human evaluations of five leading image editing models on TECCI. Humans judge outputs along three dimensions: 1) instruction following, 2) minimality of the edits, and 3) visual quality. To scale-up the evaluation, we also build an auto-rater using Gemini that achieves 74.7% accuracy in matching human evaluations. Our evaluations reveal that: 1) none of the models exceed a 22% overall success rate, demonstrating the challenging nature of TECCI, 2) Nano Banana Pro is the best performing model overall, 3) models perform significantly better at instruction following compared to minimal edits and visual quality, 4) models struggle with editing architecture and nature images which require strong understanding of spatial layout and intricate visual details. 5) reasoning and creative edits are the most difficult, whereas color and appearance edits are the easiest.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RiT: Vanilla Diffusion Transformers Suffice in Representation Space

Flow matching with $x$-prediction -- regressing the clean data point rather than the ambient velocity -- is known to exploit low-dimensional manifold structure effectively in pixel space \cite{li2025back}. We ask whether a pretrained representation space, while containing a low-dimensional data manifold of comparable intrinsic dimensionality, offers a distribution more favorable for flow-matching learning. Comparing pixel, SD-VAE, and DINOv2 features along four geometric axes, we find that pixel and DINOv2 share nearly identical intrinsic dimensionalities (both $\hat{d}\!\approx\!33$) yet DINOv2 exhibits $7.3\times$ higher effective rank, $35\times$ better covariance conditioning, $11.5\times$ lower excess kurtosis, and $1.7\times$ lower on-manifold interpolation error; SD-VAE latents are consistently intermediate, indicating that the advantage stems from representation-learning objectives rather than mere compression. These statistical properties render the flow-matching regression well-conditioned and remove the need for the specialized prediction heads or Riemannian transport used by prior DINOv2 diffusion methods. We propose the \emph{Representation Image Transformer} (RiT): a vanilla Diffusion Transformer trained by $x$-prediction on frozen DINOv2 features, augmented only by a dimension-aware noise schedule and joint \texttt{[CLS]}-patch modeling. On ImageNet $256{\times}256$, RiT attains FID 1.45 without guidance and 1.14 with classifier-free guidance, outperforming DiT$^\text{DH}$-XL with $19\%$ fewer parameters (676M vs.\ 839M). The resulting ODE is efficiently solvable at coarse discretizations: with classifier-free guidance, $5$ Heun steps already reach FID 2.0 and $10$ steps reach 1.25, without distillation or consistency training. Code at https://github.com/lezhang7/RiT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs

Human-level agentic intelligence extends beyond low-level geometric perception, evolving from recognizing where things are to understanding what they are for. While existing benchmarks effectively evaluate the geometric perception capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), they fall short of probing the higher-order cognitive abilities required for grounded intelligence. To address this gap, we introduce the Spatial-Functional Intelligence Benchmark (SFI-Bench), a video-based benchmark with over 1,500 expert-annotated questions derived from diverse egocentric indoor video scans. SFI-Bench systematically evaluates two complementary dimensions of advanced reasoning: (1) Structured Spatial Reasoning, which requires understanding complex layouts and forming coherent spatial representations, and (2) Functional Reasoning, which involves inferring object affordances and their context-dependent utility. The benchmark includes tasks such as conditional counting, multi-hop relational reasoning, functional pairing, and knowledge-grounded troubleshooting, directly challenging models to integrate perception, memory, and inference. Our experiments reveal that current MLLMs consistently struggle to combine spatial memory with functional reasoning and external knowledge, highlighting a critical bottleneck in achieving grounded intelligence. SFI-Bench therefore provides a diagnostic tool for measuring progress toward more cognitively capable and truly grounded multimodal agents.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Discovering Failure Modes in Vision-Language Models using RL

Vision-language Models (VLMs), despite achieving strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, often misinterpret straightforward visual concepts that humans identify effortlessly, such as counting, spatial reasoning, and viewpoint understanding. Previous studies manually identified these weaknesses and found that they often stem from deficits in specific skills. However, such manual efforts are costly, unscalable, and subject to human bias, which often overlooks subtle details in favour of salient objects, resulting in an incomplete understanding of a model's vulnerabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework to automatically discover the failure modes or blind spots of any ``candidate VLM'' on a given data distribution without human intervention. Our framework trains a questioner agent that adaptively generates queries based on the candidate VLM's responses to elicit incorrect answers. Our approach increases question complexity by focusing on fine-grained visual details and distinct skill compositions as training progresses, consequently identifying novel failure modes in which VLMs struggle. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework by showcasing its generalizability across various model combinations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Communicating about Space: Language-Mediated Spatial Integration Across Partial Views

Humans build shared spatial understanding by communicating partial, viewpoint-dependent observations. We ask whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can do the same, aligning distinct egocentric views through dialogue to form a coherent, allocentric mental model of a shared environment. To study this systematically, we introduce COSMIC, a benchmark for Collaborative Spatial Communication. In this setting, two static MLLM agents observe a 3D indoor environment from different viewpoints and exchange natural-language messages to solve spatial queries. COSMIC contains 899 diverse scenes and 1250 question-answer pairs spanning five tasks. We find a capability hierarchy, MLLMs are most reliable at identifying shared anchor objects across views, perform worse on relational reasoning, and largely fail at building globally consistent maps, performing near chance, even for frontier models. Moreover, we find thinking capability yields gains in anchor grounding, but is insufficient for higher-level spatial communication. To contextualize model behavior, we collect 250 human-human dialogues. Humans achieve 95% aggregate accuracy, while the best model, Gemini-3-Pro-Thinking, reaches 72%, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, human conversations grow more precise as partners align on a shared spatial understanding, whereas MLLMs keep exploring without converging, suggesting limited capacity to form and sustain a robust shared mental model throughout the dialogue. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ankursikarwar/Cosmic.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Gray Swan Factory: Making Extreme Events from Ordinary Cyclones

Gray swans, plausible but unobserved extreme events, broaden our understanding of the range of hazards beyond those observed during the short observational record. They are useful for dynamical studies, synthetic training data, emergency planning, infrastructure design, and insurance hazard assessment. We propose a method to produce gray swans from the observational record using gradient descent on a loss function with a differentiable weather prediction model. Minimizing the loss corresponds to perturbed initial conditions that produce a measurable outcome at a future time, subject to constraints, such as the size of the initial perturbations. We illustrate the method by altering hurricane Fiona (2022), which tracked northward over the Atlantic Ocean, to produce a gray-swan outcome similar to hurricane Sandy (2012), which made landfall on the East Coast of the United States after a unique westward turn. The Fiona gray-swan solution, involving small perturbations to reanalysis initial conditions, produces an extratropical cyclone with a Sandy-like track, a warm core, and a minimum sea-level pressure more than 20 hPa lower than Sandy. Perturbations to the extratropical state are more important than to the hurricane, leading to interactive strengthening, and merger, of an upper-level trough and the hurricane. Similar gray swans are found for four other Atlantic hurricanes. A major weakness of this work is that the hurricane core is not resolved by the model used for optimization, and the impact of this is unknown. Furthermore, although these solutions present plausible outcomes, they do not inform on their probability of occurrence.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

Learning What Matters: Prioritized Concept Learning via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection

Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale datasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CulturalFrames: Assessing Cultural Expectation Alignment in Text-to-Image Models and Evaluation Metrics

The increasing ubiquity of text-to-image (T2I) models as tools for visual content generation raises concerns about their ability to accurately represent diverse cultural contexts -- where missed cues can stereotype communities and undermine usability. In this work, we present the first study to systematically quantify the alignment of T2I models and evaluation metrics with respect to both explicit (stated) as well as implicit (unstated, implied by the prompt's cultural context) cultural expectations. To this end, we introduce CulturalFrames, a novel benchmark designed for rigorous human evaluation of cultural representation in visual generations. Spanning 10 countries and 5 socio-cultural domains, CulturalFrames comprises 983 prompts, 3637 corresponding images generated by 4 state-of-the-art T2I models, and over 10k detailed human annotations. We find that across models and countries, cultural expectations are missed an average of 44% of the time. Among these failures, explicit expectations are missed at a surprisingly high average rate of 68%, while implicit expectation failures are also significant, averaging 49%. Furthermore, we show that existing T2I evaluation metrics correlate poorly with human judgments of cultural alignment, irrespective of their internal reasoning. Collectively, our findings expose critical gaps, provide a concrete testbed, and outline actionable directions for developing culturally informed T2I models and metrics that improve global usability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing

While image generation techniques are now capable of producing high-quality images that respect prompts which span multiple sentences, the task of text-guided image editing remains a challenge. Even edit requests that consist of only a few words often fail to be executed correctly. We explore three strategies to enhance performance on a wide range of image editing tasks: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In order to study all these components in one consistent framework, we adopt an autoregressive multimodal model that processes textual and visual tokens in a unified manner. We find RL combined with a large multi-modal LLM verifier to be the most effective of these strategies. As a result, we release EARL: Editing with Autoregression and RL, a strong RL-based image editing model that performs competitively on a diverse range of edits compared to strong baselines, despite using much less training data. Thus, EARL pushes the frontier of autoregressive multimodal models on image editing. We release our code, training data, and trained models at https://github.com/mair-lab/EARL.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation

We present WebMMU, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates three core web tasks: (1) website visual question answering, (2) code editing involving HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and (3) mockup-to-code generation. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat these tasks separately, WebMMU unifies them using expert-annotated, real-world web data to assess models' abilities in complex multi-step reasoning, precise element grounding, and functional UI comprehension and coding. Our evaluation shows that while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on basic information extraction, they struggle with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. These findings reveal key limitations in current MLLMs and underscore the need for improved multimodal and cross-lingual reasoning to build future web agents capable of automating diverse web development tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Controlling Multimodal LLMs via Reward-guided Decoding

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) gain widespread applicability, it is becoming increasingly desirable to adapt them for diverse user needs. In this paper, we study the adaptation of MLLMs through controlled decoding. To achieve this, we introduce the first method for reward-guided decoding of MLLMs and demonstrate its application in improving their visual grounding. Our method involves building reward models for visual grounding and using them to guide the MLLM's decoding process. Concretely, we build two separate reward models to independently control the degree of object precision and recall in the model's output. Our approach enables on-the-fly controllability of an MLLM's inference process in two ways: first, by giving control over the relative importance of each reward function during decoding, allowing a user to dynamically trade off object precision for recall in image captioning tasks; second, by giving control over the breadth of the search during decoding, allowing the user to control the trade-off between the amount of test-time compute and the degree of visual grounding. We evaluate our method on standard object hallucination benchmarks, showing that it provides significant controllability over MLLM inference, while consistently outperforming existing hallucination mitigation methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

REARANK: Reasoning Re-ranking Agent via Reinforcement Learning

We present REARANK, a large language model (LLM)-based listwise reasoning reranking agent. REARANK explicitly reasons before reranking, significantly improving both performance and interpretability. Leveraging reinforcement learning and data augmentation, REARANK achieves substantial improvements over baseline models across popular information retrieval benchmarks, notably requiring only 179 annotated samples. Built on top of Qwen2.5-7B, our REARANK-7B demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4 on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks and even surpasses GPT-4 on reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmarks. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach and highlight how reinforcement learning can enhance LLM reasoning capabilities in reranking.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction

Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks-Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction-with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents' performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer use agents. By releasing UI-Vision as open-source, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Assessing and Learning Alignment of Unimodal Vision and Language Models

How well are unimodal vision and language models aligned? Although prior work have approached answering this question, their assessment methods do not directly translate to how these models are used in practical vision-language tasks. In this paper, we propose a direct assessment method, inspired by linear probing, to assess vision-language alignment. We identify that the degree of alignment of the SSL vision models depends on their SSL training objective, and we find that the clustering quality of SSL representations has a stronger impact on alignment performance than their linear separability. Next, we introduce Swift Alignment of Image and Language (SAIL), a efficient transfer learning framework that aligns pretrained unimodal vision and language models for downstream vision-language tasks. Since SAIL leverages the strengths of pretrained unimodal models, it requires significantly fewer (6%) paired image-text data for the multimodal alignment compared to models like CLIP which are trained from scratch. SAIL training only requires a single A100 GPU, 5 hours of training and can accommodate a batch size up to 32,768. SAIL achieves 73.4% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet (vs. CLIP's 72.7%) and excels in zero-shot retrieval, complex reasoning, and semantic segmentation. Additionally, SAIL improves the language-compatibility of vision encoders that in turn enhance the performance of multimodal large language models. The entire codebase and model weights are open-source: https://lezhang7.github.io/sail.github.io/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CTRL-O: Language-Controllable Object-Centric Visual Representation Learning

Object-centric representation learning aims to decompose visual scenes into fixed-size vectors called "slots" or "object files", where each slot captures a distinct object. Current state-of-the-art object-centric models have shown remarkable success in object discovery in diverse domains, including complex real-world scenes. However, these models suffer from a key limitation: they lack controllability. Specifically, current object-centric models learn representations based on their preconceived understanding of objects, without allowing user input to guide which objects are represented. Introducing controllability into object-centric models could unlock a range of useful capabilities, such as the ability to extract instance-specific representations from a scene. In this work, we propose a novel approach for user-directed control over slot representations by conditioning slots on language descriptions. The proposed ConTRoLlable Object-centric representation learning approach, which we term CTRL-O, achieves targeted object-language binding in complex real-world scenes without requiring mask supervision. Next, we apply these controllable slot representations on two downstream vision language tasks: text-to-image generation and visual question answering. The proposed approach enables instance-specific text-to-image generation and also achieves strong performance on visual question answering.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we explore effective prompting techniques to enhance zero- and few-shot Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Central to our investigation is the role of question templates in guiding VLMs to generate accurate answers. We identify that specific templates significantly influence VQA outcomes, underscoring the need for strategic template selection. Another pivotal aspect of our study is augmenting VLMs with image captions, providing them with additional visual cues alongside direct image features in VQA tasks. Surprisingly, this augmentation significantly improves the VLMs' performance in many cases, even though VLMs "see" the image directly! We explore chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and find that while standard CoT reasoning causes drops in performance, advanced methods like self-consistency can help recover it. Furthermore, we find that text-only few-shot examples enhance VLMs' alignment with the task format, particularly benefiting models prone to verbose zero-shot answers. Lastly, to mitigate the challenges associated with evaluating free-form open-ended VQA responses using string-matching based VQA metrics, we introduce a straightforward LLM-guided pre-processing technique to adapt the model responses to the expected ground-truth answer distribution. In summary, our research sheds light on the intricacies of prompting strategies in VLMs for VQA, emphasizing the synergistic use of captions, templates, and pre-processing to enhance model efficacy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding

Fine-grained understanding of objects, attributes, and relationships between objects is crucial for visual-language models (VLMs). Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar captions given an image. In this paper, we introduce a new, challenging benchmark termed Visual Minimal-Change Understanding (VisMin), which requires models to predict the correct image-caption match given two images and two captions. The image pair and caption pair contain minimal changes, i.e., only one aspect changes at a time from among the following: object, attribute, count, and spatial relation. These changes test the models' understanding of objects, attributes (such as color, material, shape), counts, and spatial relationships between objects. We built an automatic framework using large language models and diffusion models, followed by a rigorous 4-step verification process by human annotators. Empirical experiments reveal that current VLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in understanding spatial relationships and counting abilities. We also generate a large-scale training dataset to finetune CLIP and Idefics2, showing significant improvements in fine-grained understanding across benchmarks and in CLIP's general image-text alignment. We release all resources, including the benchmark, training data, and finetuned model checkpoints, at https://vismin.net/.

cs.CV↗