Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-ended, realworld environments where inputs are messy, underspecified, and not always trustworthy.Unlike curated benchmarks, these settings frequently involve instructions that reference missing objects or contradictory facts, rely on ambiguous cues, or request infeasible actions.In such cases, success hinges not merely on task execution, but on the model's ability to detect when something is silently wrong.This paper presents a systematic analysis of how current MLLMs handle such underspecified and misspecified scenarios: cases where flaws must be inferred from context rather than explicitly stated.Using a curated diagnostic suite spanning four categories of real-world failure modes, we evaluate nine MLLMs, including o3 and GPT-4o, and find that models often fail to surface hidden issues, even when they possess the necessary perceptual and reasoning skills.Explicit prompting reveals that the underlying capabilities exist but are frequently suppressed in favor of user compliance.We further show that simple inference-time interventions, such as cautious persona prompting and, in particular, requiring a clarifying question, can substantially recover performance.Our findings highlight a persistent gap between reasoning competence and behavioral compliance in current MLLMs, and suggest practical strategies for making these systems more trustworthy in underconstrained environments.

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities. All code, data, and checkpoints will be released.

Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices and growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks.However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (ScreenPR) task.Currently, this task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the ScreenPR task.Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree.Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements.Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools.We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed ScreenPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems.Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories.Code and data: https://screen-point-and-read.github.io.Lens 1 with a fine-grained field width Lens 2 with a coarse field width Local region.Global region.