Nayanika Debnath

SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

Despite recent successes, *test-time scaling* $-$i.e., dynamically expanding the token budget during inference as needed$-$ remains brittle for vision-language models (VLMs): unstructured chains-of-thought about images entangle perception and reasoning, leading to long, disorganized contexts where s…