CF-VLM:CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Jusheng, Cai, Kaitong, Fan, Yijia, Wang, Jian, Wang, Keze
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909654470098944
author Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Fan, Yijia
Wang, Jian
Wang, Keze
author_facet Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Fan, Yijia
Wang, Jian
Wang, Keze
contents Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have greatly improved cross-modal semantic understanding, yet significant limitations remain in fine-grained discrimination and deep causal reasoning tasks. Existing VLMs often rely on superficial statistical correlations, lacking the ability to capture the underlying causal logic between visual and textual content. To address this, we propose CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning (CF-VLM), a novel framework that enhances the causal reasoning capabilities of VLMs through the targeted use of counterfactual samples. CF-VLM introduces three complementary training objectives: maintaining foundational cross-modal alignment, reinforcing the uniqueness and stability of factual scene representations against coherent counterfactuals, and sharpening the model's sensitivity to minimal but critical causal edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CF-VLM consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods on compositional reasoning and generalization benchmarks. Furthermore, it shows promise in mitigating visual hallucinations, indicating improved factual consistency. Our CF-VLM provides a robust foundation for deploying VLMs in high-stakes, real-world scenarios requiring reliable reasoning and interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CF-VLM:CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning
Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Fan, Yijia
Wang, Jian
Wang, Keze
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have greatly improved cross-modal semantic understanding, yet significant limitations remain in fine-grained discrimination and deep causal reasoning tasks. Existing VLMs often rely on superficial statistical correlations, lacking the ability to capture the underlying causal logic between visual and textual content. To address this, we propose CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning (CF-VLM), a novel framework that enhances the causal reasoning capabilities of VLMs through the targeted use of counterfactual samples. CF-VLM introduces three complementary training objectives: maintaining foundational cross-modal alignment, reinforcing the uniqueness and stability of factual scene representations against coherent counterfactuals, and sharpening the model's sensitivity to minimal but critical causal edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CF-VLM consistently outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods on compositional reasoning and generalization benchmarks. Furthermore, it shows promise in mitigating visual hallucinations, indicating improved factual consistency. Our CF-VLM provides a robust foundation for deploying VLMs in high-stakes, real-world scenarios requiring reliable reasoning and interpretability.
title CF-VLM:CounterFactual Vision-Language Fine-tuning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17267