Beyond Correct Answers: How Compositional Cues Shape Visual Judgments

Overview & Synopsis

Visual question answering requires models to assign attributes and relations to the correct objects, a problem known as visual binding. Structured prompts make these assignments explicit through labeled fields. Yet an improvement from the full prompt does not reveal which labels help or how they interact. First, we isolate field-label effects across ten models and six tasks by holding the image and claim fixed. These comparisons reveal differences that overall accuracy can hide. With a relation label present, adding object-role labels helps Qwen3 but hurts Qwen2 on Spatial. Second, we compare auxiliary hints that preserve or swap the question's role assignments against a no-hint baseline. Across two image sets, Qwen3's advantage with preserving hints mainly reflects errors caused by swapped hints. Preserving hints remain near baseline. Field order further affects the harm. Third, we test clearer hint wording and direct selection of the relation shown in the image. Clearer hints improve text matching but do not consistently improve visual judgments. In contrast, relation selection partly reduces errors for some hints in Qwen3 and GPT-4.1-mini.