Token Warping Helps MLLMs Look from Nearby Viewpoints

🤗 Upvotes: 23 | cs.CV Authors: Phillip Y. Lee, Chanho Park, Mingue Park, Seungwoo Yoo, Juil Koo, Minhyuk Sung Title: Token Warping Helps MLLMs Look from Nearby Viewpoints Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02870v1 Abstract: Can warping tokens, rather than pixels, help multimodal large language models (MLLMs) understand how a scene appears from a nearby viewpoint? While MLLMs perform well on visual reasoning, they remain fragile to viewpoint changes, as pixel-wise warping is highly sensitive to small depth errors and often introduces geometric distortions. Drawing on theories of mental imagery that posit part-level structural representations as the basis for human perspective transformation, we examine whether image tokens in ViT-based MLLMs serve as an effective substrate for viewpoint changes. We compare forward and backward warping, finding that backward token warping, which defines a dense grid on the target view and retrieves a corresponding source-view token for each grid point, achieves greater stability and better preserves semantic coherence under viewpoint shifts. Experiments on our proposed ViewBench benchmark demonstrate that token-level warping enables MLLMs to reason reliably from nearby viewpoints, consistently outperforming all baselines including pixel-wise warping approaches, spatially fine-tuned MLLMs, and a generative warping method.