Can Visual Encoder Learn to See Arrows?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Terashita, Naoyuki, Tozaki, Yusuke, Omote, Hideaki, Nguyen, Congkha, Nakamoto, Ryosuke, Koreeda, Yuta, Ozaki, Hiroaki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Terashita, Naoyuki
Tozaki, Yusuke
Omote, Hideaki
Nguyen, Congkha
Nakamoto, Ryosuke
Koreeda, Yuta
Ozaki, Hiroaki
author_facet Terashita, Naoyuki
Tozaki, Yusuke
Omote, Hideaki
Nguyen, Congkha
Nakamoto, Ryosuke
Koreeda, Yuta
Ozaki, Hiroaki
contents The diagram is a visual representation of a relationship illustrated with edges (lines or arrows), which is widely used in industrial and scientific communication. Although recognizing diagrams is essential for vision language models (VLMs) to comprehend domain-specific knowledge, recent studies reveal that many VLMs fail to identify edges in images. We hypothesize that these failures stem from an over-reliance on textual and positional biases, preventing VLMs from learning explicit edge features. Based on this idea, we empirically investigate whether the image encoder in VLMs can learn edge representation through training on a diagram dataset in which edges are biased neither by textual nor positional information. To this end, we conduct contrastive learning on an artificially generated diagram--caption dataset to train an image encoder and evaluate its diagram-related features on three tasks: probing, image retrieval, and captioning. Our results show that the finetuned model outperforms pretrained CLIP in all tasks and surpasses zero-shot GPT-4o and LLaVA-Mistral in the captioning task. These findings confirm that eliminating textual and positional biases fosters accurate edge recognition in VLMs, offering a promising path for advancing diagram understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19944
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Visual Encoder Learn to See Arrows?
Terashita, Naoyuki
Tozaki, Yusuke
Omote, Hideaki
Nguyen, Congkha
Nakamoto, Ryosuke
Koreeda, Yuta
Ozaki, Hiroaki
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The diagram is a visual representation of a relationship illustrated with edges (lines or arrows), which is widely used in industrial and scientific communication. Although recognizing diagrams is essential for vision language models (VLMs) to comprehend domain-specific knowledge, recent studies reveal that many VLMs fail to identify edges in images. We hypothesize that these failures stem from an over-reliance on textual and positional biases, preventing VLMs from learning explicit edge features. Based on this idea, we empirically investigate whether the image encoder in VLMs can learn edge representation through training on a diagram dataset in which edges are biased neither by textual nor positional information. To this end, we conduct contrastive learning on an artificially generated diagram--caption dataset to train an image encoder and evaluate its diagram-related features on three tasks: probing, image retrieval, and captioning. Our results show that the finetuned model outperforms pretrained CLIP in all tasks and surpasses zero-shot GPT-4o and LLaVA-Mistral in the captioning task. These findings confirm that eliminating textual and positional biases fosters accurate edge recognition in VLMs, offering a promising path for advancing diagram understanding.
title Can Visual Encoder Learn to See Arrows?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19944