Unveiling the Visual Counting Bottleneck in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605.30170v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at interpolation, they suffer catastrophic failures in systematic generalization, most notably in visual counting. In this work, we investigate this extrapolation bottleneck by deconstructing visual counting into three cognitive stages: visual individuation, magnitude awareness, and symbolic mapping. Using synthetic Go boards and linear probes, we demonstrate that visual backbones maintain robust, linearly separable representations of quantity well into the extrapolation regime, ruling out percept

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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