A Progressive Training Strategy for Vision-Language Models to Counteract Spatio-Temporal Hallucinations in Embodied Reasoning

arXiv:2604.10506v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in static image understanding but continue to face critical hurdles in spatiotemporal reasoning. A major bottleneck is “multi-image reasoning hallucination”, where a massive performance drop between forward and reverse temporal queries reveals a dependence on superficial shortcuts instead of genuine causal understanding. To mitigate this, we first develop a new Chain-of-Thought (CoT) dataset that decomposes intricate reasoning into detailed spatiotemporal steps and definitive judgments. Building on this, we present a progressive training framework: it initiates with supervised pre-training on our CoT dataset to instill logical structures, followed by fine-tuning with scalable weakly-labeled data for broader generalization. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach not only improves backbone accuracy but also slashes the forward-backward performance gap from over 70% to only 6.53%. This confirms the method’s ability to develop authentic dynamic reasoning and reduce the inherent temporal biases of current VLMs.