Draft and Refine with Visual Experts

TL;DR

This paper introduces Draft and Refine (DnR), a framework that quantifies and enhances a vision-language model's reliance on visual evidence, reducing hallucinations and improving accuracy in multimodal reasoning tasks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel question-conditioned utilization metric and a refinement process guided by visual experts, improving visual grounding without retraining or architecture changes.

Findings

Consistent accuracy improvements on VQA and captioning benchmarks.

Significant reduction in hallucinated responses.

Enhanced interpretability of multimodal reasoning processes.

Abstract

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal reasoning abilities, they often produce ungrounded or hallucinated responses because they rely too heavily on linguistic priors instead of visual evidence. This limitation highlights the absence of a quantitative measure of how much these models actually use visual information during reasoning. We propose Draft and Refine (DnR), an agent framework driven by a question-conditioned utilization metric. The metric quantifies the model's reliance on visual evidence by first constructing a query-conditioned relevance map to localize question-specific cues and then measuring dependence through relevance-guided probabilistic masking. Guided by this metric, the DnR agent refines its initial draft using targeted feedback from external visual experts. Each expert's output (such as boxes or masks) is rendered as visual cues on the image, and the model is re-queried to select the response that yields the largest improvement in utilization. This process strengthens visual grounding without retraining or architectural changes. Experiments across VQA and captioning benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains and reduced hallucination, demonstrating that measuring visual utilization provides a principled path toward more interpretable and evidence-driven multimodal agent systems. Code is available at https://github.com/EavnJeong/Draft-and-Refine-with-Visual-Experts.