ResearchResearch paperMultimodal Models · Large Language Models1 source · Oct 18, 2026

From Seeing to Reporting: A Theory of Reliable Visual Set Generation in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are asked to report what they see: to count objects, box them, parse a screen or pick a click target (GUI grounding).

Key points

  • We argue that reporting is part of the visual task, not merely its formatting.
  • In a dense scene with 173 shapes, GPT-6.1 lists 173 records that match every shape, yet the counts it states in the same response sum to 188.
  • From Seeing to Reporting (FSR) is a theory of visual reporting and a set of inference-time procedures that improve the reports of frozen VLMs. It models reporting as a chain from responses to decoded records, constructed sets and task answers, linked by task-compatible matching.
  • On 50 dense synthetic scenes, a one-call reporting-and-decoding protocol cuts per-type count error by 85.2% for GPT-6.1 and 98.8% for Claude Sonnet 5.5.

Sources (1)

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