SAVER: Selective Auditing of Verbal Evidence for Error Recovery in VLM Change Reasoning

Vision-language models (VLMs) frequently fail at visual change reasoning, even when their vision encoders contain sufficient information. We observe that correct VLM outputs tend to contain explicit verbal evidence (object names, colors, spatial locations) that supports the claimed change, while incorrect outputs often lack such evidence. We propose SAVER (Selective Auditing of Verbal Evidence for Error Recovery), a lightweight, rule-based method that parses VLM responses for this evidence and triggers structured reprompting only when evidence is missing or inconsistent. Across three change detection benchmarks and four VLMs, SAVER significantly improves accuracy on tasks where errors stem from the model failing to articulate what it saw (expression failures), with gains up to +25.8% on CLEVR-Change. The evidence patterns can also be generated by an LLM in a single call, matching the hand-tuned gate on CLEVR-Change. Ablation experiments confirm that the evidence gate, not reprompting alone, drives the improvement.