VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?

Recent extensive works have demonstrated that by introducing long CoT, the capabilities of MLLMs to solve complex problems can be effectively enhanced. However, the reasons for the effectiveness of such paradigms remain unclear. It is challenging to analysis with quantitative results how much the model's specific extraction of visual cues and its subsequent so-called reasoning during inference process contribute to the performance improvements. Therefore, evaluating the faithfulness of MLLMs' reasoning to visual information is crucial. To address this issue, we first present a cue-driven automatic and controllable editing pipeline with the help of GPT-Image-1. It enables the automatic and precise editing of specific visual cues based on the instruction. Furthermore, we introduce VFaith-Bench, the first benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' visual reasoning capabilities and analyze the source of such capabilities with an emphasis on the visual faithfulness. Using the designed pipeline, we constructed comparative question-answer pairs by altering the visual cues in images that are crucial for solving the original reasoning problem, thereby changing the question's answer. By testing similar questions with images that have different details, the average accuracy reflects the model's visual reasoning ability, while the difference in accuracy before and after editing the test set images effectively reveals the relationship between the model's reasoning ability and visual perception. We further designed specific metrics to expose this relationship. VFaith-Bench includes 755 entries divided into five distinct subsets, along with an additional human-labeled perception task. We conducted in-depth testing and analysis of existing mainstream flagship models and prominent open-source model series/reasoning models on VFaith-Bench, further investigating the underlying factors of their reasoning capabilities.

Understand, Think, and Answer: Advancing Visual Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable visual understanding performance on both vision-language and vision-centric tasks. However, they often fall short in integrating advanced, task-specific capabilities for compositional reasoning, which hinders their progress toward truly competent general vision models. To address this, we present a unified visual reasoning mechanism that enables LMMs to solve complicated compositional problems by leveraging their intrinsic capabilities (e.g. grounding and visual understanding capabilities). Different from the previous shortcut learning mechanism, our approach introduces a human-like understanding-thinking-answering process, allowing the model to complete all steps in a single pass forwarding without the need for multiple inferences or external tools. This design bridges the gap between foundational visual capabilities and general question answering, encouraging LMMs to generate faithful and traceable responses for complex visual reasoning. Meanwhile, we curate 334K visual instruction samples covering both general scenes and text-rich scenes and involving multiple foundational visual capabilities. Our trained model, Griffon-R, has the ability of end-to-end automatic understanding, self-thinking, and reasoning answers. Comprehensive experiments show that Griffon-R not only achieves advancing performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks including VSR and CLEVR, but also enhances multimodal capabilities across various benchmarks like MMBench and ScienceQA. Data, models, and codes will be release at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon/tree/master/Griffon-R soon.

MathPhys-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Anomaly Synthesis with SQE-Driven Bi-Level Optimization for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a crucial task in computer vision, yet collecting real-world defect images is inherently difficult due to the rarity and unpredictability of anomalies. Consequently, researchers have turned to synthetic methods for training data augmentation. However, existing synthetic strategies (e.g., naive cut-and-paste or inpainting) overlook the underlying physical causes of defects, leading to inconsistent, low-fidelity anomalies that hamper model generalization to real-world complexities. In this thesis, we introduced a novel pipeline that generates synthetic anomalies through Math-Physics model guidance, refines them via a Coarse-to-Fine approach and employs a bi-level optimization strategy with a Synthesis Quality Estimator(SQE). By incorporating physical modeling of cracks, corrosion, and deformation, our method produces realistic defect masks, which are subsequently enhanced in two phases. The first stage (npcF) enforces a PDE-based consistency to achieve a globally coherent anomaly structure, while the second stage (npcF++) further improves local fidelity using wavelet transforms and boundary synergy blocks. Additionally, we leverage SQE-driven weighting, ensuring that high-quality synthetic samples receive greater emphasis during training. To validate our approach, we conducted comprehensive experiments on three widely adopted industrial anomaly detection benchmarks: MVTec AD, VisA, and BTAD. Across these datasets, the proposed pipeline achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in both image-AUROC and pixel-AUROC, confirming the effectiveness of our MaPhC2F and BiSQAD.

PhysVLM: Enabling Visual Language Models to Understand Robotic Physical Reachability

Understanding the environment and a robot's physical reachability is crucial for task execution. While state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) excel in environmental perception, they often generate inaccurate or impractical responses in embodied visual reasoning tasks due to a lack of understanding of robotic physical reachability. To address this issue, we propose a unified representation of physical reachability across diverse robots, i.e., Space-Physical Reachability Map (S-P Map), and PhysVLM, a vision-language model that integrates this reachability information into visual reasoning. Specifically, the S-P Map abstracts a robot's physical reachability into a generalized spatial representation, independent of specific robot configurations, allowing the model to focus on reachability features rather than robot-specific parameters. Subsequently, PhysVLM extends traditional VLM architectures by incorporating an additional feature encoder to process the S-P Map, enabling the model to reason about physical reachability without compromising its general vision-language capabilities. To train and evaluate PhysVLM, we constructed a large-scale multi-robot dataset, Phys100K, and a challenging benchmark, EQA-phys, which includes tasks for six different robots in both simulated and real-world environments. Experimental results demonstrate that PhysVLM outperforms existing models, achieving a 14\% improvement over GPT-4o on EQA-phys and surpassing advanced embodied VLMs such as RoboMamba and SpatialVLM on the RoboVQA-val and OpenEQA benchmarks. Additionally, the S-P Map shows strong compatibility with various VLMs, and its integration into GPT-4o-mini yields a 7.1\% performance improvement.

LightPlanner: Unleashing the Reasoning Capabilities of Lightweight Large Language Models in Task Planning

In recent years, lightweight large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in the robotics field due to their low computational resource requirements and suitability for edge deployment. However, in task planning -- particularly for complex tasks that involve dynamic semantic logic reasoning -- lightweight LLMs have underperformed. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task planner, LightPlanner, which enhances the performance of lightweight LLMs in complex task planning by fully leveraging their reasoning capabilities. Unlike conventional planners that use fixed skill templates, LightPlanner controls robot actions via parameterized function calls, dynamically generating parameter values. This approach allows for fine-grained skill control and improves task planning success rates in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce hierarchical deep reasoning. Before generating each action decision step, LightPlanner thoroughly considers three levels: action execution (feedback verification), semantic parsing (goal consistency verification), and parameter generation (parameter validity verification). This ensures the correctness of subsequent action controls. Additionally, we incorporate a memory module to store historical actions, thereby reducing context length and enhancing planning efficiency for long-term tasks. We train the LightPlanner-1.5B model on our LightPlan-40k dataset, which comprises 40,000 action controls across tasks with 2 to 13 action steps. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves the highest task success rate despite having the smallest number of parameters. In tasks involving spatial semantic reasoning, the success rate exceeds that of ReAct by 14.9 percent. Moreover, we demonstrate LightPlanner's potential to operate on edge devices.

Synthetic Data is an Elegant GIFT for Continual Vision-Language Models

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) require Continual Learning (CL) to efficiently update their knowledge and adapt to various downstream tasks without retraining from scratch. However, for VLMs, in addition to the loss of knowledge previously learned from downstream tasks, pre-training knowledge is also corrupted during continual fine-tuning. This issue is exacerbated by the unavailability of original pre-training data, leaving VLM's generalization ability degrading. In this paper, we propose GIFT, a novel continual fine-tuning approach that utilizes synthetic data to overcome catastrophic forgetting in VLMs. Taking advantage of recent advances in text-to-image synthesis, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model to recreate both pre-training and learned downstream task data. In this way, the VLM can revisit previous knowledge through distillation on matching diffusion-generated images and corresponding text prompts. Leveraging the broad distribution and high alignment between synthetic image-text pairs in VLM's feature space, we propose a contrastive distillation loss along with an image-text alignment constraint. To further combat in-distribution overfitting and enhance distillation performance with limited amount of generated data, we incorporate adaptive weight consolidation, utilizing Fisher information from these synthetic image-text pairs and achieving a better stability-plasticity balance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches across various settings.

FLARE: A Framework for Stellar Flare Forecasting using Stellar Physical Properties and Historical Records

Stellar flare events are critical observational samples for astronomical research; however, recorded flare events remain limited. Stellar flare forecasting can provide additional flare event samples to support research efforts. Despite this potential, no specialized models for stellar flare forecasting have been proposed to date. In this paper, we present extensive experimental evidence demonstrating that both stellar physical properties and historical flare records are valuable inputs for flare forecasting tasks. We then introduce FLARE (Forecasting Light-curve-based Astronomical Records via features Ensemble), the first-of-its-kind large model specifically designed for stellar flare forecasting. FLARE integrates stellar physical properties and historical flare records through a novel Soft Prompt Module and Residual Record Fusion Module. Our experiments on the publicly available Kepler light curve dataset demonstrate that FLARE achieves superior performance compared to other methods across all evaluation metrics. Finally, we validate the forecast capability of our model through a comprehensive case study.

A Benchmark for Crime Surveillance Video Analysis with Large Models

Anomaly analysis in surveillance videos is a crucial topic in computer vision. In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have outperformed task-specific models in various domains. Although MLLMs are particularly versatile, their abilities to understand anomalous concepts and details are insufficiently studied because of the outdated benchmarks of this field not providing MLLM-style QAs and efficient algorithms to assess the model's open-ended text responses. To fill this gap, we propose a benchmark for crime surveillance video analysis with large models denoted as UCVL, including 1,829 videos and reorganized annotations from the UCF-Crime and UCF-Crime Annotation datasets. We design six types of questions and generate diverse QA pairs. Then we develop detailed instructions and use OpenAI's GPT-4o for accurate assessment. We benchmark eight prevailing MLLMs ranging from 0.5B to 40B parameters, and the results demonstrate the reliability of this bench. Moreover, we finetune LLaVA-OneVision on UCVL's training set. The improvement validates our data's high quality for video anomaly analysis.

Systematic Outliers in Large Language Models

Outliers have been widely observed in Large Language Models (LLMs), significantly impacting model performance and posing challenges for model compression. Understanding the functionality and formation mechanisms of these outliers is critically important. Existing works, however, largely focus on reducing the impact of outliers from an algorithmic perspective, lacking an in-depth investigation into their causes and roles. In this work, we provide a detailed analysis of the formation process, underlying causes, and functions of outliers in LLMs. We define and categorize three types of outliers-activation outliers, weight outliers, and attention outliers-and analyze their distributions across different dimensions, uncovering inherent connections between their occurrences and their ultimate influence on the attention mechanism. Based on these observations, we hypothesize and explore the mechanisms by which these outliers arise and function, demonstrating through theoretical derivations and experiments that they emerge due to the self-attention mechanism's softmax operation. These outliers act as implicit context-aware scaling factors within the attention mechanism. As these outliers stem from systematic influences, we term them systematic outliers. Our study not only enhances the understanding of Transformer-based LLMs but also shows that structurally eliminating outliers can accelerate convergence and improve model compression. The code is avilable at https://github.com/an-yongqi/systematic-outliers.

MME-Industry: A Cross-Industry Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark

With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous evaluation benchmarks have emerged. However, comprehensive assessments of their performance across diverse industrial applications remain limited. In this paper, we introduce MME-Industry, a novel benchmark designed specifically for evaluating MLLMs in industrial settings.The benchmark encompasses 21 distinct domain, comprising 1050 question-answer pairs with 50 questions per domain. To ensure data integrity and prevent potential leakage from public datasets, all question-answer pairs were manually crafted and validated by domain experts. Besides, the benchmark's complexity is effectively enhanced by incorporating non-OCR questions that can be answered directly, along with tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, we provide both Chinese and English versions of the benchmark, enabling comparative analysis of MLLMs' capabilities across these languages. Our findings contribute valuable insights into MLLMs' practical industrial applications and illuminate promising directions for future model optimization research.