{"paper":{"title":"ScAle: Attention Head Scaling as a Minimal Adapter for Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.LG","cs.MM"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Pu Zhao, Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Xuan Shen, Yanzhi Wang","submitted_at":"2026-06-28T19:48:39Z","abstract_excerpt":"Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for many vision language models (VLMs), and improving it typically requires fine-tuning with substantial additional parameters. Our preliminary analysis reveals that rescaling activations in selected transformer layers-without modifying pretrained weights-can significantly influence downstream performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose ScAle, an ultra-lightweight adaptation method that learns a small set of scalar coefficients to modulate last-token attention and MLP activations in a fully frozen backbone. We evaluate our method on t"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.29579","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.29579/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}