This paper describes our submission to the AstroCLIMB shared task, which evaluates whether multimodal models can identify citation relationships among astronomy papers from pairs of figures and captions. We explore an empirical progression spanning frozen embedding baselines, dual encoders, cross-encoders, and generative vision–language models (VLMs) adapted via parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA with 4-bit quantization). Among our evaluated configurations, a fine-tuned Qwen3.8-27B achieves a test Macro-F1 of approximately 0.74. An auxiliary specialist adapter trained to re-rank the frequently confused same paper and related papers classes yields comparable performance within expected run-to-run variance. Across input modalities, Text–Text pairs achieve the highest classification accuracy, followed by Text–Figure pairs, while Figure–Figure pairs prove the most challenging. These findings demonstrate that visual similarity alone remains an insufficient proxy for semantic citation linkage in specialized scientific literature.