#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
The Answer Knows Where to Look: Zooming before MLLMs Answer under Visual-Token Budgets
Zhensheng Hu, Guanglong Xu, Guanqiang Hu
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) read images through visual tokens, and under the small per-image budgets that efficient deployment requires, the fine text of documents, charts and infographics becomes illegible. Zooming in recovers the evidence, but the region must be chosen before the model answers. We find that MLLMs know where the evidence is, but not in a form that can be read before they answer: the answer tokens localize it from the middle layers on, whereas the attention available before answering does so only in the top layers, at a depth that varies across models, and diffusely. Supervising the pre-answer attention to point degrades reading, and the benefit of zooming is governed by each image's information gap. Building on these findings, we introduce ours, which lets an MLLM look where its answer would. A dedicated look token, processed in a single prefill and kept out of the answering pass, learns in hindsight to attend as the model's own correct answers do, extracting this knowledge into a concentrated pointer before any answer exists. Its hidden state then selects how to look, from no zoom to crops, square windows, windows that adapt to the pointer and foveated warps, supervised by the counterfactual outcome of every view. ours needs no box annotations, per-model layer search, external localizers or generation before the answer. On Qwen3-VL at three scales and five text-rich benchmarks, it surpasses the strongest baseline by 4.8-9.1 points at 98 visual tokens per view and attention-guided zooming by 11.1-17.0 points, while running faster than attention-guided and grounding-based zooming.
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
VTRL-Med: Progressive Visual Refinement with Topology-Guided Regularization for Medical Image Clustering
Guangyu Meng, Pengfei Gu, Peixian Liang and 3 more
Deep clustering offers a promising approach for analyzing large unlabeled medical image datasets, yet prevailing methods still face two limitations: they may neglect class-agnostic structural priors that capture object boundaries and regions, and they do not explicitly encode topological patterns (e.g., connectivity and holes). These sources of information play distinct and complementary roles: visual-structural features provide the primary discriminative representation for clustering, while topological features provide additional global geometric cues for residual visual ambiguities. We introduce VTRL-Med, a progressive visual-structural learning framework with topology-guided regularization for medical image clustering. VTRL-Med first adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to extract image features that retain structural cues inherited from mask-supervised pretraining. It then generates reliable pseudo-labels through a two-step filtering process that combines prototype-based selection with k-nearest neighbor consistency validation. Finally, it progressively refines the visual branch while an auxiliary topology branch, constructed from persistent homology (PH) descriptors, provides additional geometric regularization during training. Across 13 medical image benchmarks, VTRL-Med achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance, improving average accuracy by 4.48% over existing methods. On three representative datasets, topology-guided regularization further improves accuracy by 1.3--4.3% over visual refinement alone.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Discrete Tokens: Preserving Numerical Continuity in Medical Vision-Language Models
Dianye Huang, Jiamei Guo, Yue Zhou and 5 more
Objective: To develop a unified vision-language model for prompt-conditioned quantitative ultrasound measurement that addresses the mismatch between continuous measurement targets and discrete token-based numerical prediction. Methods: This article presents HAD-VLM, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion framework that combines autoregressive text generation with continuous measurement prediction within a shared backbone. Visual prompt tuning adapts the vision encoder to ultrasound images. A diffusion process predicts a five-component representation comprising caliper endpoint coordinates and measurement length. A post-processing strategy combining the proposed coordinate-length consistency mechanism with ensemble prediction is introduced to refine measurement estimates. We evaluate four echocardiographic measurement tasks on EchoNet-LVH, with additional assessments of medical question answering and X-ray vertebral measurement. Results: HAD-VLM achieves mean absolute errors of 1.36, 2.77, 3.05, and 1.16 mm for IVSd, LVIDd, LVIDs, and LVPWd, respectively, reducing errors by 21.4-37.6\% relative to the Vicuna-based autoregressive baseline. It also outperforms fine-tuned Qwen3-VL and direct MLP regression across all four tasks. Medical question answering performance is preserved on the evaluated dataset. For X-ray vertebral measurement, HAD-VLM reduces mean absolute error from 11.4 to 6.7 pixels. Conclusion: Integrating autoregressive language generation with diffusion-based continuous prediction improves quantitative medical image measurement while retaining prompt-conditioned task flexibility. Significance: HAD-VLM provides a unified approach to combining language interaction with anatomically grounded numerical prediction for quantitative medical image analysis.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
SPOOK: Sparse Pixel Optimization for Off-Manifold Knowledge in Vision Encoders
Ankit Gupta, Akshat Pandya, Christoph Adami and 1 more
Modern vision encoders are widely used as semantic representations, but the relationship between embedding similarity and human-visible semantics can become unclear far from the natural-image manifold. We probe this regime in a black-box setting by applying sparse pixel edits to blank canvases with a simple pixel-level hill-climbing procedure. Across ImageNet and Flickr30k, we evaluate whether these edited blank canvases can retrieve chosen targets in multimodal contrastive encoders and self-supervised visual encoders. On OpenCLIP, inputs optimized toward class prompts achieve strong top-1 and top-5 targeted retrieval performance; on DINOv3, inputs optimized toward class prototypes achieve high target alignment and near-top prototype ranks. These results show that sparse edits on otherwise blank, visually non-semantic inputs can enter target semantic basins in both language-aligned and self-supervised visual representation spaces. Our findings identify a shared off-manifold failure mode of modern vision encoders and suggest sparse blank-canvas optimization as a simple probe of representation geometry.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
Consommé: Conditioned Token Merging for Split Inference
Man Ngo, Jan S. Rellermeyer
Split inference partitions a Vision Transformer between a resource-constrained edge device and a server. However, transmitting intermediate tokens across the communication channel is costly. Deploying fine-tuned backbones to every endpoint becomes expensive as well. We study token reduction for split inference under a frozen backbone, where only a small adapter is shipped. We observe that the CLS token plays a dual role: it acts as the global summary the receiver needs for classification, and it serves as a signal on which patches to keep. We propose Consommé, a method utilizing both characteristics. There, an information bottleneck compresses the CLS token into a compact latent which is transmitted in place of the full CLS token and conditions a learned patch gate merging patches into exactly $k$ tokens via soft assignment. It reaches any budget in a single step, thus escaping the per-layer cap of bipartite matching (BPM). On DeiT-S/T, it leads all methods at aggressive token budgets and remains operable at shallow splits where BPM cannot operate, while matching fine-tuned methods at gentle budgets at a fraction of their deployment cost.