DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning
Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure evidence-answer consistency, where correct answers must be supported by correct visual evidence. To address this issue, we propose DeFacto, a counterfactual reasoning framework that explicitly aligns visual evidence with final answers. Our approach integrates three complementary training paradigms: positive, counterfactual, and random-masking. We further develop a language-guided evidence construction pipeline that automatically localizes question-relevant regions and generates counterfactual variants, resulting in DeFacto-100K. Building on this dataset, we train MLLMs with GRPO-based reinforcement learning and design three complementary rewards to promote correct answering, structured reasoning, and consistent evidence selection. Moreover, we introduce DeFacto-1.5K, a human-annotated benchmark for systematically evaluating evidence-grounded consistency beyond answer accuracy. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DeFacto substantially improves both answer accuracy and evidence-answer consistency over strong baselines.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningMultimodal ReasoningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
DeFactoNLP: Fact Verification using Entity Recognition, TFIDF Vector Comparison and Decomposable Attention
In this paper, we describe DeFactoNLP, the system we designed for the FEVER 2018 Shared Task. The aim of this task was to conceive a system that can not only automatically assess the veracity of a claim but also retrieve…
Fact VerificationNatural Language InferenceSentenceSSCR: Iterative Language-Based Image Editing via Self-Supervised Counterfactual Reasoning
Iterative Language-Based Image Editing (IL-BIE) tasks follow iterative instructions to edit images step by step. Data scarcity is a significant issue for ILBIE as it is challenging to collect large-scale examples of imag…
counterfactualCounterfactual ReasoningWhat if...?: Thinking Counterfactual Keywords Helps to Mitigate Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models
This paper presents a way of enhancing the reliability of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) in addressing hallucination, where the models generate cross-modal inconsistent responses. Without additional training, we propose…
counterfactualHallucinationScene UnderstandingCounterfactual thinking in cooperation dynamics
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurr…
counterfactualCounterfactual ReasoningThe Illusion of Visual Tool-Use: A Causal Audit of Thinking with Images
The "thinking-with-images" paradigm equips multimodal LLMs with active visual operations such as crop-and-zoom. However, models using these operations often achieve only marginal or negative gains over direct inference a…