Systems and methods for image understanding can include one or more object recognition systems and one or more vision language models to generate an augmented language output that can be both scene-aware and object-aware. The systems and methods can process an input image with an object recognition model to generate an object recognition output descriptive of identification details for an object depicted in the input image. The systems and methods can include processing the input image with a vision language model to generate a language output descriptive of a predicted scene description. The object recognition output can then be utilized to augment the language output to generate an augmented language output that includes the scene understanding of the language output with the specificity of the object recognition output.