74.0AIApr 16Code
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability StudyZhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo et al.
Over the past year, spatial intelligence has drawn increasing attention. Many prior works study it from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence, where models have access to visuospatial information from visual inputs. However, in the absence of visual information, whether linguistic intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence, and how models perform relevant tasks with text-only inputs still remain unexplored. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on a fundamental and critical capability in spatial intelligence from a linguistic perspective: viewpoint rotation understanding (VRU). Specifically, LLMs and VLMs are asked to infer their final viewpoint and predict the corresponding observation in an environment given textual description of viewpoint rotation and observation over multiple steps. We find that both LLMs and VLMs perform poorly on our proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy, indicating a substantial gap between current model capabilities and the requirements of spatial intelligence. To uncover the underlying mechanisms, we conduct a layer-wise probing analysis and head-wise causal intervention. Our findings reveal that although models encode viewpoint information in the hidden states, they appear to struggle to bind the viewpoint position with corresponding observation, resulting in a hallucination in final layers. Finally, we selectively fine-tune the key attention heads identified by causal intervention to improve VRU performance. Experimental results demonstrate that such selective fine-tuning achieves improved VRU performance while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of generic abilities. Our dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/Young-Zhen/VRU_Interpret .
CVJan 7Code
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual DescriptionsZhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li et al.
Recent advancements in Spatial Intelligence (SI) have predominantly relied on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders or the fundamental reasoning backbone? Inspired by this question, we introduce SiT-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) without pixel-level input, comprises over 3,800 expert-annotated items across five primary categories and 17 subtasks, ranging from egocentric navigation and perspective transformation to fine-grained robotic manipulation. By converting single/multi-view scenes into high-fidelity, coordinate-aware textual descriptions, we challenge LLMs to perform symbolic textual reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. Evaluation results of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals that while models achieve proficiency in localized semantic tasks, a significant "spatial gap" remains in global consistency. Notably, we find that explicit spatial reasoning significantly boosts performance, suggesting that LLMs possess latent world-modeling potential. Our proposed dataset SiT-Bench serves as a foundational resource to foster the development of spatially-grounded LLM backbones for future VLMs and embodied agents. Our code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/binisalegend/SiT-Bench .
CVNov 30, 2025Code
LISA-3D: Lifting Language-Image Segmentation to 3D via Multi-View ConsistencyZhongbin Guo, Jiahe Liu, Wenyu Gao et al.
Text-driven 3D reconstruction demands a mask generator that simultaneously understands open-vocabulary instructions and remains consistent across viewpoints. We present LISA-3D, a two-stage framework that lifts language-image segmentation into 3D by retrofitting the instruction-following model LISA with geometry-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) layers and reusing a frozen SAM-3D reconstructor. During training we exploit off-the-shelf RGB-D sequences and their camera poses to build a differentiable reprojection loss that enforces cross-view agreement without requiring any additional 3D-text supervision. The resulting masks are concatenated with RGB images to form RGBA prompts for SAM-3D, which outputs Gaussian splats or textured meshes without retraining. Across ScanRefer and Nr3D, LISA-3D improves language-to-3D accuracy by up to +15.6 points over single-view baselines while adapting only 11.6M parameters. The system is modular, data-efficient, and supports zero-shot deployment on unseen categories, providing a practical recipe for language-guided 3D content creation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/binisalegend/LISA-3D.
44.2MMMar 23
Look, Listen and Segment: Towards Weakly Supervised Audio-visual Semantic SegmentationChengzhi Li, Heyan Huang, Ping Jian et al.
Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (AVSS) aligns audio and video at the pixel level but requires costly per-frame annotations. We introduce Weakly Supervised Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (WSAVSS), which uses only video-level labels to generate per-frame semantic masks of sounding objects. We decompose WSAVSS into looking, listening, and segmentation, and propose Progressive Cross-modal Alignment for Semantics (PCAS) with two modules: *Looking-before-Listening* and *Listening-before-Segmentation*. PCAS builds a classification task to train the audio-visual encoder using video labels, injects visual semantic prompts to enhance frame-level audio understanding, and then applies progressive contrastive alignment to map audio categories to image regions without mask annotations. Experiments show PCAS achieves state-of-the-art performance among weakly supervised methods on AVS and remains competitive with fully supervised baselines on AVSS, validating its effectiveness.
CVOct 9, 2025
Improving Temporal Understanding Logic Consistency in Video-Language Models via Attention EnhancementChengzhi Li, Heyan Huang, Ping Jian et al.
Large language models (LLMs) often generate self-contradictory outputs, which severely impacts their reliability and hinders their adoption in practical applications. In video-language models (Video-LLMs), this phenomenon recently draws the attention of researchers. Specifically, these models fail to provide logically consistent responses to rephrased questions based on their grounding outputs. However, the underlying causes of this phenomenon remain underexplored. In this work, we adopt an interpretability-driven approach to analyze, statistically summarize, and intervention the potential factors of the phenomenon. We find that one of the primary reasons for the inconsistency in responses lies in the inability of cross-modal attention heads to effectively distinguish video tokens across different timestamps. To address this, we propose an attention enhancement method called Temporally Conditioned Attention Sharpening (TCAS), which constructs an enhancement objective based on attention distinctions to enhance the model's temporal resolution capability, thereby improving its temporal understanding logic consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the temporal logic consistency of Video-LLMs. Further interpretability analyses reveal that our method indeed improves the temporal discriminability of attention heads, validating our conclusions. Additionally, our method achieves performance improvements in general video temporal grounding tasks, highlighting that temporal logic consistency is a bottleneck in temporal understanding. By enhancing consistency, our method drives significant progress in video temporal understanding.
CVJun 23, 2025
TAMMs: Temporal-Aware Multimodal Model for Satellite Image Change Understanding and ForecastingZhongbin Guo, Yuhao Wang, Ping Jian et al.
Temporal Change Description (TCD) and Future Satellite Image Forecasting (FSIF) are critical, yet historically disjointed tasks in Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) analysis. Both are fundamentally limited by the common challenge of modeling long-range temporal dynamics. To explore how to improve the performance of methods on both tasks simultaneously by enhancing long-range temporal understanding capabilities, we introduce TAMMs, the first unified framework designed to jointly perform TCD and FSIF within a single MLLM-diffusion architecture. TAMMs introduces two key innovations: Temporal Adaptation Modules (TAM) enhance frozen MLLM's ability to comprehend long-range dynamics, and Semantic-Fused Control Injection (SFCI) mechanism translates this change understanding into fine-grained generative control. This synergistic design makes the understanding from the TCD task to directly inform and improve the consistency of the FSIF task. Extensive experiments demonstrate TAMMs significantly outperforms state-of-the-art specialist baselines on both tasks.