Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) promise transparent reasoning by predicting through human-interpretable concepts, yet their effectiveness fundamentally depends on how well visual and textual representations are aligned or matched. Existing vision-language CBMs often rely on pre-aligned encoders or global cosine similarity, which obscures fine-grained concept localization and fails to reflect true semantic geometry. In this work, we rethink concept alignment as a dynamic cross-modal transport process instead of static projection and propose the Optimal Transport Flow Concept Bottleneck Model (OTF-CBM). It first learns a data-driven semantic cost via Inverse Optimal Transport to measure cross-modal distances, and then performs unbalanced optimal-transport-based flow matching to model semantic transitions between visual patches and textual concepts. With velocity-based concept activation, OTF-CBM captures interpretable geometric relations without ODE integration. Experiments further show that OTF-CBM achieves superior classification accuracy and concept faithfulness, offering a new geometric and dynamical perspective for interpretable cross-modal reasoning.
Vision-language models can exhibit visual concept-conditioned divergence: given images containing demographic features, corporate logos, or ideological symbols, some models produce unusually uniform responses that differ from what peer models say about the same input. These behav…
Vision-language models can produce confident answers on visually ambiguous inputs, resulting in biased predictions. Common entropy-based methods, such as Semantic Entropy (SE), rely on output diversity. Yet our analysis shows that overconfident visual embeddings suppress output d…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across different tasks, but their computational cost is dominated by the large number of visual tokens fed to the language model. Existing token reduction methods rely on attention-based scores or pairwise si…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models aim to understand natural-language instructions and visual observations, and to generate and execute corresponding actions as embodied agents. Recently, autoregressive token-based action generation has driven the development of many representat…
Infrared vision-language models (IR-VLMs) extend thermal perception to open-vocabulary classification, image captioning, and visual question answering. However, their robustness to structured thermal perturbations and the stability of cross-modal semantic alignment remain insuffi…
Vision-language tracking guided by natural language specifications leverages high-level semantic cues of target objects to substantially boost tracking accuracy and robustness. Existing studies have verified that adaptively optimizing textual descriptions throughout the tracking…