Uncovering Grounding IDs: How External Cues Shape Multimodal Binding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hasani, Hosein, Izadi, Amirmohammad, Askari, Fatemeh, Bagherian, Mobin, Mohammadian, Sadegh, Izadi, Mohammad, Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hasani, Hosein
Izadi, Amirmohammad
Askari, Fatemeh
Bagherian, Mobin
Mohammadian, Sadegh
Izadi, Mohammad
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
author_facet Hasani, Hosein
Izadi, Amirmohammad
Askari, Fatemeh
Bagherian, Mobin
Mohammadian, Sadegh
Izadi, Mohammad
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
contents Large vision-language models (LVLMs) show strong performance across multimodal benchmarks but remain limited in structured reasoning and precise grounding. Recent work has demonstrated that adding simple visual structures, such as partitions and annotations, improves accuracy, yet the internal mechanisms underlying these gains remain unclear. We investigate this phenomenon and propose the concept of Grounding IDs, latent identifiers induced by external cues that bind objects to their designated partitions across modalities. Through representation analysis, we find that these identifiers emerge as consistent within-partition alignment in embedding space and reduce the modality gap between image and text. Causal interventions further confirm that these identifiers mediate binding between objects and symbolic cues. We show that Grounding IDs strengthen attention between related components, which in turn improves cross-modal grounding and reduces hallucinations. Taken together, our results identify Grounding IDs as a key symbolic mechanism that explains how external cues enhance multimodal binding and offer both interpretability and practical improvements.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24072
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncovering Grounding IDs: How External Cues Shape Multimodal Binding
Hasani, Hosein
Izadi, Amirmohammad
Askari, Fatemeh
Bagherian, Mobin
Mohammadian, Sadegh
Izadi, Mohammad
Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) show strong performance across multimodal benchmarks but remain limited in structured reasoning and precise grounding. Recent work has demonstrated that adding simple visual structures, such as partitions and annotations, improves accuracy, yet the internal mechanisms underlying these gains remain unclear. We investigate this phenomenon and propose the concept of Grounding IDs, latent identifiers induced by external cues that bind objects to their designated partitions across modalities. Through representation analysis, we find that these identifiers emerge as consistent within-partition alignment in embedding space and reduce the modality gap between image and text. Causal interventions further confirm that these identifiers mediate binding between objects and symbolic cues. We show that Grounding IDs strengthen attention between related components, which in turn improves cross-modal grounding and reduces hallucinations. Taken together, our results identify Grounding IDs as a key symbolic mechanism that explains how external cues enhance multimodal binding and offer both interpretability and practical improvements.
title Uncovering Grounding IDs: How External Cues Shape Multimodal Binding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24072