Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shi, Zeru, Mei, Kai, Quan, Yihao, Metaxas, Dimitris N., Tang, Ruixiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Shi, Zeru
Mei, Kai
Quan, Yihao
Metaxas, Dimitris N.
Tang, Ruixiang
author_facet Shi, Zeru
Mei, Kai
Quan, Yihao
Metaxas, Dimitris N.
Tang, Ruixiang
contents Vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly capable of reasoning over images, but robust visual reasoning often requires re-grounding intermediate steps in the underlying visual evidence. Recent approaches typically rely on external image operations such as zooming or cropping to re-access fine-grained details during inference, which requires additional image re-encoding and can disrupt the reasoning trajectory. We argue that VLMs already provide strong internal signals for identifying and reusing visual evidence, and that these signals can be directly leveraged to support image-grounded reasoning. Motivated by this insight, we propose an end-to-end self-revisit framework, SIEVE, that trains models to re-engage image evidence through internal representations. SIEVE automatically extracts embeddings of salient image regions and injects them into the reasoning chain when additional grounding is needed, enabling later steps to condition on relevant visual cues without external tool calls or re-encoding. We use reinforcement learning to teach the model when to trigger visual revisiting and which region embeddings to retrieve and insert during the reasoning process. Experiments on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks, together with perception, reasoning, and hallucination evaluations, show that SIEVE yields consistent gains, improving performance by 8 percent on average across several benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14117
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement
Shi, Zeru
Mei, Kai
Quan, Yihao
Metaxas, Dimitris N.
Tang, Ruixiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly capable of reasoning over images, but robust visual reasoning often requires re-grounding intermediate steps in the underlying visual evidence. Recent approaches typically rely on external image operations such as zooming or cropping to re-access fine-grained details during inference, which requires additional image re-encoding and can disrupt the reasoning trajectory. We argue that VLMs already provide strong internal signals for identifying and reusing visual evidence, and that these signals can be directly leveraged to support image-grounded reasoning. Motivated by this insight, we propose an end-to-end self-revisit framework, SIEVE, that trains models to re-engage image evidence through internal representations. SIEVE automatically extracts embeddings of salient image regions and injects them into the reasoning chain when additional grounding is needed, enabling later steps to condition on relevant visual cues without external tool calls or re-encoding. We use reinforcement learning to teach the model when to trigger visual revisiting and which region embeddings to retrieve and insert during the reasoning process. Experiments on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks, together with perception, reasoning, and hallucination evaluations, show that SIEVE yields consistent gains, improving performance by 8 percent on average across several benchmarks.
title Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14117