# Don't Just Look, Intervene: Perturbation Based Region Labeling for VQA Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13228/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 16 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Taking a HINT: Leveraging Explanations to Make Vision and Language Models More Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03751/) (2019)
- [Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03556/) (2016)
- [NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14669/) (2024)
- [Super-CLEVR: A Virtual Benchmark to Diagnose Domain Robustness in Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00259/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Region Guidance: Improving Grounding in Vision-Language Models without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02325/) (2024)
- [Self-Critical Reasoning for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09998/) (2019)
- [VQS: Linking Segmentations to Questions and Answers for Supervised Attention in VQA and Question-Focused Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04686/) (2017)
- [Exploring Human-like Attention Supervision in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06308/) (2017)
- [VisFIS: Visual Feature Importance Supervision with Right-for-the-Right-Reason Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11212/) (2022)
- [Antidote: A Unified Framework for Mitigating LVLM Hallucinations in Counterfactual Presupposition and Object Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20468/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Grounding for VQA in Vision-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02334/) (2022)
- [Measuring Faithful and Plausible Visual Grounding in VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15015/) (2023)
- [Guiding Visual Question Answering with Attention Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12616/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Language Models (VLMs) should rely on visual evidence that directly determines the correct answer, but supervision for grounding visual reasoning is often expensive to obtain manually or tied to dataset-specific annotation primitives. We instead introduce model-causal visual evidence as an annotation target, defined as the set of image regions whose counterfactual intervention changes a model's answer distribution for a given image-question pair. Based on this principle, we introduce Counterfactual Search for Grounding Regions (CSGR). CSGR is a scalable pipeline that proposes candidate regions, perturbs them, measures their effect on answer sensitivity, and aggregates this evidence across multiple judges to approximate answer-critical regions in VQA data. To assess whether CSGR annotations contain a useful supervision signal, we plug them into three existing grounding-aware training routines: attention steering, Visual CoTfinetuning, and latent visual reasoning. These experiments test whether the proposed annotation scheme can provide a useful supervision signal across multiple ways of consuming region labels, rather than introducing a new way of using them. Across competing automatic region-labeling mechanisms, CSGR annotations provide the most consistent gains over Cross Entropy-only finetuning in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations, indicating that the proposed labeling scheme captures useful region-level information.