Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong performance across compositional reasoning benchmarks, which require reasoning over semantic perturbations of objects, attributes, relations, and their interactions. However, our controlled analysis reveals that existing compositionality-aware VLMs exhibit element-specific biases, often underperforming vanilla CLIP on certain compositional elements. To address this, we propose Compositional Scene Graph-guided CLIP (CS-CLIP), which uses scene graphs to identify compositional elements and construct structured negatives via selective masking. We further retain negatives that are most contradictory to the original caption, forcing the model to rely on compositional structure rather than surface cues. CS-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art compositional reasoning with robust performance across compositional elements. It also preserves general vision-language capabilities such as cross-modal retrieval and downstream visual reasoning, while requiring fewer training samples than prior methods.

We propose Confidence-guided Refinement Reasoning (C2R), a novel training-free framework applicable to question-answering (QA) tasks across text, image, and video domains. C2R strategically constructs and refines sub-questions and their answers (sub-QAs), deriving a better confidence score for the target answer. C2R first curates a subset of sub-QAs to explore diverse reasoning paths, then compares the confidence scores of the resulting answer candidates to select the most reliable final answer. Since C2R relies solely on confidence scores derived from the model itself, it can be seamlessly integrated with various existing QA models, demonstrating consistent performance improvements across diverse models and benchmarks. Furthermore, we provide essential yet underexplored insights into how leveraging sub-QAs affects model behavior, specifically analyzing the impact of both the quantity and quality of sub-QAs on achieving robust and reliable reasoning.

Video corpus moment retrieval (VCMR) is the task to retrieve the most relevant video moment from a large video corpus using a natural language query.For narrative videos, e.g., drama or movies, the holistic understanding of temporal dynamics and multimodal reasoning are crucial.Previous works have shown promising results; however, they relied on the expensive query annotations for the VCMR, i.e., the corresponding moment intervals.To overcome this problem, we propose a self-supervised learning framework: Modal-specific Pseudo Query Generation Network (MPGN).First, MPGN selects candidate temporal moments via subtitle-based moment sampling.Then, it generates pseudo queries exploiting both visualand textual information from the selected temporal moments.Through the multimodal information in the pseudo queries, we show that MPGN successfully learns to localize the video corpus moment without any explicit annotation.We validate the effectiveness of MPGN on TVR dataset, showing the competitive results compared with both supervised models and unsupervised setting models.