CAVE: A Structured Credit Assignment Approach for Fragmented Visual Evidence Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Tengda, Leng, Jie, Li, Hanlei, Liang, Yaoyuan, Zhang, Qingyue, Yang, Dian, Zhang, Mingyu, Fu, Yuhua, Huang, Shao-Lun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Guo, Tengda
Leng, Jie
Li, Hanlei
Liang, Yaoyuan
Zhang, Qingyue
Yang, Dian
Zhang, Mingyu
Fu, Yuhua
Huang, Shao-Lun
author_facet Guo, Tengda
Leng, Jie
Li, Hanlei
Liang, Yaoyuan
Zhang, Qingyue
Yang, Dian
Zhang, Mingyu
Fu, Yuhua
Huang, Shao-Lun
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on general multimodal reasoning, yet remain challenged in integrating nonlocal visual information to support semantically underdetermined visual reasoning. We describe this challenge as Fragmented Visual Reasoning. To this end, we propose Credit Assignment for Visual Evidence (CAVE), a structured process-reward method based on GRPO for interleaved visual reasoning. Specifically, CAVE evaluates the contribution of intermediate steps at the action level via three complementary reasoning process signals: belief update, evidence acquisition, and adaptive focus control, thereby guiding the model to optimize each reasoning action and learn more reliable visual reasoning strategies. Meanwhile, we construct TRACER-Bench, which covers four nonlocal and semantically confusable reasoning dimensions and provides key intermediate evidence to supervise reasoning paths. Experiments demonstrate that CAVE substantially improves performance on tasks requiring fragmented visual evidence integration, covering both public benchmarks and our newly introduced TRACER-Bench, while retaining competitive performance on general multimodal evaluations. Further analyses reveal that CAVE effectively improves the visual reasoning capacity and exhibits stronger robustness under longer-range and deeper cross-region dependencies.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CAVE: A Structured Credit Assignment Approach for Fragmented Visual Evidence Reasoning
Guo, Tengda
Leng, Jie
Li, Hanlei
Liang, Yaoyuan
Zhang, Qingyue
Yang, Dian
Zhang, Mingyu
Fu, Yuhua
Huang, Shao-Lun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on general multimodal reasoning, yet remain challenged in integrating nonlocal visual information to support semantically underdetermined visual reasoning. We describe this challenge as Fragmented Visual Reasoning. To this end, we propose Credit Assignment for Visual Evidence (CAVE), a structured process-reward method based on GRPO for interleaved visual reasoning. Specifically, CAVE evaluates the contribution of intermediate steps at the action level via three complementary reasoning process signals: belief update, evidence acquisition, and adaptive focus control, thereby guiding the model to optimize each reasoning action and learn more reliable visual reasoning strategies. Meanwhile, we construct TRACER-Bench, which covers four nonlocal and semantically confusable reasoning dimensions and provides key intermediate evidence to supervise reasoning paths. Experiments demonstrate that CAVE substantially improves performance on tasks requiring fragmented visual evidence integration, covering both public benchmarks and our newly introduced TRACER-Bench, while retaining competitive performance on general multimodal evaluations. Further analyses reveal that CAVE effectively improves the visual reasoning capacity and exhibits stronger robustness under longer-range and deeper cross-region dependencies.
title CAVE: A Structured Credit Assignment Approach for Fragmented Visual Evidence Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16416