Nilay Yilmaz, Naga Sai Abhiram Kusumba, Stella Wenxing Liu +1cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Relational reasoning requires the process of perceptual understanding, comparing, and integrating the underlying relationships between concepts. This ability consists of multiple categories, such as analogical, structural, and cause-effect, each capturing a different aspect of higher-order understanding. To examine the performance of multimodal large language models (MLLM) on these relational inference tasks, we developed SciReC, a model-adaptive multimodal academic dialog benchmark. As the relational reasoning process involves multiple representations and various factors (visual understanding, exhibiting knowledge, and memory recall), we propose DMRA, a deficit-based diagnostic framework that quantifies the contribution of these components to identify the primary cause of unsuccessful cases. Claude 4.6 achieved the best performance on the overall relational score with 73\%, followed by GPT 5.4 with 68\%. Performance trends indicate that open-source models achieve their lowest scores on spatial relations, while proprietary models struggle more with hierarchical and sequential relations. Across domains, model performance is lowest on Astronomy and highest on Psychology. The results of DMRA reveal that relational reasoning is the primary source of error across all models, followed by memory limitations.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit rich relational priors from their language backbones, yet often fail when asked to apply these relationships in visual contexts. We trace this failure to a structural blind spot: projection-based alignment trains each visual token to carry the right semantics, but never asks whether the relationships between concepts survive the crossing from language to vision. To address this, we propose MIRROR (Mapping Inter-concept Relations from language to visual Representation via Optimal-transport-based Regularization), a geometric regularization framework that transfers relational priors from language to vision by exploiting the rich relational structure encoded in language representations. Specifically, we derive a surrogate loss from the proposed Semi-Inverse Gromov-Wasserstein (SI-GW) problem, an inverse geometric problem that aligns visual representations with language-derived relational priors. We show that this formulation admits a unique closed-form solution that prescribes the ideal visual relational structure implied by language geometry and cross-modal coupling. The structure of the formulation also enables efficient computation, making it applicable to long token sequences. Applying SI-GW inside decoder-only Transformers requires careful design. We introduce targeted strategies at the layer, head, and token levels to ensure stable extraction without additional parameters or inference cost. MIRROR improves relational consistency while preserving performance on general vision-language tasks.
Philip Wootaek Shin, Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Sivani Devarapalli +3cs.CV cs.CL
Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but remain prone to relation hallucination, which requires accurate reasoning over inter-object interactions. We study the impact of visual perturbations, specifically rotation and noise, and show that even mild distortions significantly degrade relational reasoning across models and datasets. We further evaluate prompt-based augmentation and preprocessing strategies (orientation correction and denoising), finding that while they offer partial improvements, they do not fully resolve hallucinations. Our results reveal a gap between perceptual robustness and relational understanding, highlighting the need for more robust, geometry-aware VLMs.