Bootstrapping Action-Grounded Visual Dynamics in Unified Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Qiu, Yifu, Ziser, Yftah, Korhonen, Anna, Cohen, Shay B., Ponti, Edoardo M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Qiu, Yifu
Ziser, Yftah
Korhonen, Anna
Cohen, Shay B.
Ponti, Edoardo M.
author_facet Qiu, Yifu
Ziser, Yftah
Korhonen, Anna
Cohen, Shay B.
Ponti, Edoardo M.
contents Can unified vision-language models (VLMs) perform forward dynamics prediction (FDP), i.e., predicting the future state (in image form) given the previous observation and an action (in language form)? We find that VLMs struggle to generate physically plausible transitions between frames from instructions. Nevertheless, we identify a crucial asymmetry in multimodal grounding: fine-tuning a VLM to learn inverse dynamics prediction (IDP), effectively captioning the action between frames, is significantly easier than learning FDP. In turn, IDP can be used to bootstrap FDP through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, IDP can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data scale for FDP. Secondly, IDP can assign rewards to multiple samples of FDP to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the FDP resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench with two families of VLMs. Despite remaining general-purpose, our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin between $7\%$ and $13\%$ according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06006
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bootstrapping Action-Grounded Visual Dynamics in Unified Vision-Language Models
Qiu, Yifu
Ziser, Yftah
Korhonen, Anna
Cohen, Shay B.
Ponti, Edoardo M.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Can unified vision-language models (VLMs) perform forward dynamics prediction (FDP), i.e., predicting the future state (in image form) given the previous observation and an action (in language form)? We find that VLMs struggle to generate physically plausible transitions between frames from instructions. Nevertheless, we identify a crucial asymmetry in multimodal grounding: fine-tuning a VLM to learn inverse dynamics prediction (IDP), effectively captioning the action between frames, is significantly easier than learning FDP. In turn, IDP can be used to bootstrap FDP through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, IDP can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data scale for FDP. Secondly, IDP can assign rewards to multiple samples of FDP to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the FDP resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench with two families of VLMs. Despite remaining general-purpose, our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin between $7\%$ and $13\%$ according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.
title Bootstrapping Action-Grounded Visual Dynamics in Unified Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06006