Point What You Mean: Visually Grounded Instruction Policy

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models align vision and language with embodied control, but their object referring ability remains limited when relying solely on text prompt, especially in cluttered or out-of-distribution (OOD) scenes. In this study, we introduce the Point-VLA, a plug-and-play policy that augments language instructions with explicit visual cues (e.g., bounding boxes) to resolve referential ambiguity and enable precise object-level grounding. To efficiently scale visually grounded datasets, we further develop an automatic data annotation pipeline requiring minimal human effort. We evaluate Point-VLA on diverse real-world referring tasks and observe consistently stronger performance than text-only instruction VLAs, particularly in cluttered or unseen-object scenarios, with robust generalization. These results demonstrate that Point-VLA effectively resolves object referring ambiguity through pixel-level visual grounding, achieving more generalizable embodied control.

Saying the Unsaid: Revealing the Hidden Language of Multimodal Systems Through Telephone Games

Recent closed-source multimodal systems have made great advances, but their hidden language for understanding the world remains opaque because of their black-box architectures. In this paper, we use the systems' preference bias to study their hidden language: During the process of compressing the input images (typically containing multiple concepts) into texts and then reconstructing them into images, the systems' inherent preference bias introduces specific shifts in the outputs, disrupting the original input concept co-occurrence. We employ the multi-round "telephone game" to strategically leverage this bias. By observing the co-occurrence frequencies of concepts in telephone games, we quantitatively investigate the concept connection strength in the understanding of multimodal systems, i.e., "hidden language." We also contribute Telescope, a dataset of 10,000+ concept pairs, as the database of our telephone game framework. Our telephone game is test-time scalable: By iteratively running telephone games, we can construct a global map of concept connections in multimodal systems' understanding. Here we can identify preference bias inherited from training, assess generalization capability advancement, and discover more stable pathways for fragile concept connections. Furthermore, we use Reasoning-LLMs to uncover unexpected concept relationships that transcend textual and visual similarities, inferring how multimodal systems understand and simulate the world. This study offers a new perspective on the hidden language of multimodal systems and lays the foundation for future research on the interpretability and controllability of multimodal systems.

Lost in Translation: Latent Concept Misalignment in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have broadened extensive downstream practical applications, but such models often encounter misalignment issues between text and image. Taking the generation of a combination of two disentangled concepts as an example, say given the prompt "a tea cup of iced coke", existing models usually generate a glass cup of iced coke because the iced coke usually co-occurs with the glass cup instead of the tea one during model training. The root of such misalignment is attributed to the confusion in the latent semantic space of text-to-image diffusion models, and hence we refer to the "a tea cup of iced coke" phenomenon as Latent Concept Misalignment (LC-Mis). We leverage large language models (LLMs) to thoroughly investigate the scope of LC-Mis, and develop an automated pipeline for aligning the latent semantics of diffusion models to text prompts. Empirical assessments confirm the effectiveness of our approach, substantially reducing LC-Mis errors and enhancing the robustness and versatility of text-to-image diffusion models. The code and dataset are here: https://github.com/RossoneriZhao/iced_coke.