arXiv:2610.12517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing visual question answering (RS-VQA) requires answers that truly depend on image evidence, yet current remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS MLLMs) are still evaluated mainly by accuracy, which cannot reveal whether a correct answer was produced without using the image. This setting introduces three challenges: demonstrations retrieved across different ground sample distances (GSD), sensors, and city textures may be poorly matched; real queries often involve long visual contexts from multi-scale tiles, multi-temporal frames, and retrieved knowledge, where evidence can be diluted and errors can propagate through multi-step reasoning; and prior-only answering remains invisible to standard metrics. We present AVA, a training-free framework that wraps a frozen RS MLLM with three modules. GDR performs GSD-bucketed, scene-graph-based demonstration retrieval and filters demonstrations whose answers are unsupported by their images. MACE decomposes each query into an evidence-typed sub-question DAG, routes sub-questions to suitable perception tools, and records verified provenance in a shared evidence ledger with bounded re-perception. CVA audits the final answer through counterfactual perturbations of cited evidence, including ablation and swap, and computes a visual-dependency score for confidence calibration and evidence-forcing re-query. On RSVQA-LR/HR, VRSBench, and LHRS-Bench, AVA improves average accuracy by up to 2.40 points over the strongest same-setting baselines, raises the visual-dependency score from 0.28 to 0.49, reduces the prior-only answer rate from 46.2 percent to 21.7 percent, and lowers the hallucination rate from 17.1 percent to 9.8 percent, with 2.6x the cost of a single backbone forward pass and no fine-tuning.
Sample-Adaptive Zeroth-Order Post-Training