Do VLMs Reason Like Engineers? A Benchmark and a Stage-wise Evaluation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong performance on general multimodal reasoning benchmarks, yet their ability to perform engineering reasoning remains largely unexplored. Unlike general visual question answering, engineering problem solving requires interpreting technical diagrams, selecting governing physical principles, and maintaining physically consistent multi-step reasoning. These capabilities are increasingly important for AI systems used in engineering education, scientific assistance, and technical decision-making, where reasoning failures may produce physically invalid yet superficially plausible solutions. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate final answers and provide limited assessment of intermediate reasoning processes. We introduce EngVQA, a multimodal benchmark for evaluating engineering reasoning across 5 engineering subjects containing 696 problems. We introduce an 8-stage automatic evaluation framework for assessing VLM-generated solutions. The framework independently evaluates each stage of the solution, enabling fine-grained analysis of reasoning failures. We benchmark multiple state-of-the-art open and closed source VLMs on our evaluation framework and demonstrate substantial limitations in current engineering reasoning capabilities. Human evaluation shows strong agreement with our automated framework, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.975 and a mean absolute error of 0.67 on a 10-point grading scale. Our results highlight the importance of process-oriented evaluation for reliable assessment of multimodal engineering reasoning systems.

Improving Temporal Action Segmentation via Constraint-Aware Decoding

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) divides untrimmed videos into labeled action segments. While fully supervised methods have advanced the field, challenges such as action variability, ambiguous boundaries, and high annotation costs remain, especially in new or low-resource domains. Grammar-based approaches improve segmentation with structural priors but rely on complex parsing limiting scalability. In this work, we propose a lightweight, constraint-based refinement framework that enhances TAS predictions by integrating statistical structural priors such as transition confidence, action boundary sets, and per-class duration, that can be directly extracted from annotated data. These constraints are integrated into a modified Viterbi decoding algorithm, allowing inference-time refinement without retraining or added model complexity. Our approach improves both fully and semi-supervised TAS models by correcting structural prediction errors while maintaining high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/CAD

Instruction-Evidence Contrastive Dual-Stream Decoding for Grounded Vision-Language Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong performance in instruction following and open-ended vision-language reasoning, yet they frequently generate fluent outputs that are weakly grounded in visual evidence. Prior works have shown that instruction prompting further worsens this issue by amplifying language priors, especially when the visual signal is uncertain or ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose a decoding framework that explicitly balances linguistic informativeness and visual faithfulness during generation. Our method, Instruction-Evidence Contrastive Dual-Stream Decoding (IECD2), maintains two parallel probability distributions of tokens at each decoding step: an instruction-driven stream that promotes expressive and informative responses, and an evidence-driven stream that enforces strict grounding in the image. These two streams are adaptively fused using a symmetric KL-based contrast-based gate, which suppresses tokens favored by language priors but unsupported by visual evidence, while preserving them when both distributions agree. We evaluate IECD2 on multiple datasets spanning various generative vision-language reasoning tasks such as captioning and visual question answering, including POPE, MME, VQAv2, AMBER, MS-COCO, and LLaVA-Bench. IECD2 demonstrates consistent improvements in task accuracy and reasoning performance, alongside a substantial reduction in hallucination across all evaluation metrics compared to state-of-the-art decoding approaches.

Generating Key Postures of Bharatanatyam Adavus with Pose Estimation

Preserving intangible cultural dances rooted in centuries of tradition and governed by strict structural and symbolic rules presents unique challenges in the digital era. Among these, Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, stands out for its emphasis on codified adavus and precise key postures. Accurately generating these postures is crucial not only for maintaining anatomical and stylistic integrity, but also for enabling effective documentation, analysis, and transmission to broader global audiences through digital means. We propose a pose-aware generative framework integrated with a pose estimation module, guided by keypoint-based loss and pose consistency constraints. These supervisory signals ensure anatomical accuracy and stylistic integrity in the synthesized outputs. We evaluate four configurations: standard conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), cGAN with pose supervision, conditional diffusion, and conditional diffusion with pose supervision. Each model is conditioned on key posture class labels and optimized to maintain geometric structure. In both cGAN and conditional diffusion settings, the integrated pose guidance aligns generated poses with ground-truth keypoint structures, promoting cultural fidelity. Our results demonstrate that incorporating pose supervision significantly enhances the quality, realism, and authenticity of generated Bharatanatyam postures. This framework provides a scalable approach for the digital preservation, education, and dissemination of traditional dance forms, enabling high-fidelity generation without compromising cultural precision. Code is available at https://github.com/jagidsh/Generating-Key-Postures-of-Bharatanatyam-Adavus-with-Pose-Estimation.

Learning to Generate Long-term Future Narrations Describing Activities of Daily Living

Anticipating future events is crucial for various application domains such as healthcare, smart home technology, and surveillance. Narrative event descriptions provide context-rich information, enhancing a system's future planning and decision-making capabilities. We propose a novel task: $\textit{long-term future narration generation}$, which extends beyond traditional action anticipation by generating detailed narrations of future daily activities. We introduce a visual-language model, ViNa, specifically designed to address this challenging task. ViNa integrates long-term videos and corresponding narrations to generate a sequence of future narrations that predict subsequent events and actions over extended time horizons. ViNa extends existing multimodal models that perform only short-term predictions or describe observed videos by generating long-term future narrations for a broader range of daily activities. We also present a novel downstream application that leverages the generated narrations called future video retrieval to help users improve planning for a task by visualizing the future. We evaluate future narration generation on the largest egocentric dataset Ego4D.

Learning to Reason Iteratively and Parallelly for Complex Visual Reasoning Scenarios

Complex visual reasoning and question answering (VQA) is a challenging task that requires compositional multi-step processing and higher-level reasoning capabilities beyond the immediate recognition and localization of objects and events. Here, we introduce a fully neural Iterative and Parallel Reasoning Mechanism (IPRM) that combines two distinct forms of computation -- iterative and parallel -- to better address complex VQA scenarios. Specifically, IPRM's "iterative" computation facilitates compositional step-by-step reasoning for scenarios wherein individual operations need to be computed, stored, and recalled dynamically (e.g. when computing the query "determine the color of pen to the left of the child in red t-shirt sitting at the white table"). Meanwhile, its "parallel" computation allows for the simultaneous exploration of different reasoning paths and benefits more robust and efficient execution of operations that are mutually independent (e.g. when counting individual colors for the query: "determine the maximum occurring color amongst all t-shirts"). We design IPRM as a lightweight and fully-differentiable neural module that can be conveniently applied to both transformer and non-transformer vision-language backbones. It notably outperforms prior task-specific methods and transformer-based attention modules across various image and video VQA benchmarks testing distinct complex reasoning capabilities such as compositional spatiotemporal reasoning (AGQA), situational reasoning (STAR), multi-hop reasoning generalization (CLEVR-Humans) and causal event linking (CLEVRER-Humans). Further, IPRM's internal computations can be visualized across reasoning steps, aiding interpretability and diagnosis of its errors.

Effectively Leveraging CLIP for Generating Situational Summaries of Images and Videos

Situation recognition refers to the ability of an agent to identify and understand various situations or contexts based on available information and sensory inputs. It involves the cognitive process of interpreting data from the environment to determine what is happening, what factors are involved, and what actions caused those situations. This interpretation of situations is formulated as a semantic role labeling problem in computer vision-based situation recognition. Situations depicted in images and videos hold pivotal information, essential for various applications like image and video captioning, multimedia retrieval, autonomous systems and event monitoring. However, existing methods often struggle with ambiguity and lack of context in generating meaningful and accurate predictions. Leveraging multimodal models such as CLIP, we propose ClipSitu, which sidesteps the need for full fine-tuning and achieves state-of-the-art results in situation recognition and localization tasks. ClipSitu harnesses CLIP-based image, verb, and role embeddings to predict nouns fulfilling all the roles associated with a verb, providing a comprehensive understanding of depicted scenarios. Through a cross-attention Transformer, ClipSitu XTF enhances the connection between semantic role queries and visual token representations, leading to superior performance in situation recognition. We also propose a verb-wise role prediction model with near-perfect accuracy to create an end-to-end framework for producing situational summaries for out-of-domain images. We show that situational summaries empower our ClipSitu models to produce structured descriptions with reduced ambiguity compared to generic captions. Finally, we extend ClipSitu to video situation recognition to showcase its versatility and produce comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods.

ClipSitu: Effectively Leveraging CLIP for Conditional Predictions in Situation Recognition

Situation Recognition is the task of generating a structured summary of what is happening in an image using an activity verb and the semantic roles played by actors and objects. In this task, the same activity verb can describe a diverse set of situations as well as the same actor or object category can play a diverse set of semantic roles depending on the situation depicted in the image. Hence model needs to understand the context of the image and the visual-linguistic meaning of semantic roles. Therefore, we leverage the CLIP foundational model that has learned the context of images via language descriptions. We show that deeper-and-wider multi-layer perceptron (MLP) blocks obtain noteworthy results for the situation recognition task by using CLIP image and text embedding features and it even outperforms the state-of-the-art CoFormer, a Transformer-based model, thanks to the external implicit visual-linguistic knowledge encapsulated by CLIP and the expressive power of modern MLP block designs. Motivated by this, we design a cross-attention-based Transformer using CLIP visual tokens that model the relation between textual roles and visual entities. Our cross-attention-based Transformer known as ClipSitu XTF outperforms existing state-of-the-art by a large margin of 14.1% on semantic role labelling (value) for top-1 accuracy using imSitu dataset. We will make the code publicly available.

Modelling Spatio-Temporal Interactions for Compositional Action Recognition

Humans have the natural ability to recognize actions even if the objects involved in the action or the background are changed. Humans can abstract away the action from the appearance of the objects and their context which is referred to as compositionality of actions. Compositional action recognition deals with imparting human-like compositional generalization abilities to action-recognition models. In this regard, extracting the interactions between humans and objects forms the basis of compositional understanding. These interactions are not affected by the appearance biases of the objects or the context. But the context provides additional cues about the interactions between things and stuff. Hence we need to infuse context into the human-object interactions for compositional action recognition. To this end, we first design a spatial-temporal interaction encoder that captures the human-object (things) interactions. The encoder learns the spatio-temporal interaction tokens disentangled from the background context. The interaction tokens are then infused with contextual information from the video tokens to model the interactions between things and stuff. The final context-infused spatio-temporal interaction tokens are used for compositional action recognition. We show the effectiveness of our interaction-centric approach on the compositional Something-Else dataset where we obtain a new state-of-the-art result of 83.8% top-1 accuracy outperforming recent important object-centric methods by a significant margin. Our approach of explicit human-object-stuff interaction modeling is effective even for standard action recognition datasets such as Something-Something-V2 and Epic-Kitchens-100 where we obtain comparable or better performance than state-of-the-art.

Interaction Visual Transformer for Egocentric Action Anticipation

Human-object interaction is one of the most important visual cues that has not been explored for egocentric action anticipation. We propose a novel Transformer variant to model interactions by computing the change in the appearance of objects and human hands due to the execution of the actions and use those changes to refine the video representation. Specifically, we model interactions between hands and objects using Spatial Cross-Attention (SCA) and further infuse contextual information using Trajectory Cross-Attention to obtain environment-refined interaction tokens. Using these tokens, we construct an interaction-centric video representation for action anticipation. We term our model InAViT which achieves state-of-the-art action anticipation performance on large-scale egocentric datasets EPICKTICHENS100 (EK100) and EGTEA Gaze+. InAViT outperforms other visual transformer-based methods including object-centric video representation. On the EK100 evaluation server, InAViT is the top-performing method on the public leaderboard (at the time of submission) where it outperforms the second-best model by 3.3% on mean-top5 recall.