Shuochen Chang

Author directory

2026

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual question answering (VQA). To mitigate individual hallucinations and blind spots, aggregating diverse perspectives via multi-agent collaboration has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach has shown great success in textual QA, its potential in the multimodal domain remains under-explored. Existing multi-agent VQA methods predominantly adapt text-centric protocols, focusing on textual discussions while ignoring the alignment of visual information. In this work, we reveal a key insight: answer-level agreement is insufficient for reliable multi-agent VQA; *aligned visual evidence*—shared support from the image regions agents rely on—is essential for trustworthy consensus. To leverage this insight, we propose **EAGLE** (**E**vidence-**A**ligned **G**rounded mu**L**ti-agent r**E**asoning), a training-free evidence-centered framework for coordinating multiple VLM agents. **EAGLE** explicitly exposes each agent’s grounding regions as visual evidence, enables mutual verification over the evidence, and uses evidence consistency to guide final decision-making. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that **EAGLE** achieves best average performance across domains while remaining lightweight, interpretable, and practical for deployment.
Latent reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform multi-step inference within continuous hidden states, offering efficiency gains over explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, the opacity of these continuous thought vectors hinders their reliability and controllability. This paper bridges the gap between mechanistic interpretability and actionable control. We first present a systematic analysis using structural, causal, and geometric probes, revealing that latent vectors encode compressed, faithful representations of reasoning steps, with early vectors acting as critical causal hubs. Building on this, we operationalize these interpretability insights into a suite of training-free, decode-time interventions that refine the latent reasoning process by imposing the identified geometric and semantic priors. Extensive experiments across multiple model scales and diverse task domains demonstrate that our approaches consistently improve reasoning accuracy. Our interpretability-guided interventions consistently unlock latent capabilities and improve reasoning accuracy without any parameter updates.