PRISM-BENCH is a new benchmark comprising 1,000 expert‑curated vision‑language questions across five under‑represented reasoning categories, each paired with an idealized reasoning trace validated by a second annotator. It introduces diagnostics beyond final‑answer accuracy: a perception probe that attributes about 85% of frontier‑model failures to misperception, and trace alignment that predicts answer correctness with a macro AUROC of 0.66. The benchmark also presents CORE, an efficiency‑aware metric that reorders 24.2% of model pairs relative to accuracy while remaining uncorrelated with response length, revealing that recent gains are driven by recognition rather than spatial grounding.
By Vansh Bhatia, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Parsa Ashrafi Fashi, Igor Gilitschenski, Vikram Appia, Emad Barsoum
arXiv:2510.01719v5 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Evaluation of multimodal reasoning models is typically reduced to a single accuracy score, implicitly treating reasoning as a unitary capability. W...
By Jiwan Chung, Neel Joshi, Pratyusha Sharma, Youngjae Yu, Vibhav Vineet
arXiv:2609.12606v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While multimodal reasoning has advanced rapidly, solving complex geometry problems critically hinges on active visual assistance, such as construct...
By Zhitong Dong, Jicai Pan, Yingguo Gao, Jingting Ding, Hao Chen, Jinjie Gu
arXiv:2608.29374v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tool-augmented multimodal reasoning integrates external tools (e.g., object detection, depth estimation) into multimodal large language models (MLLMs)...
By Yu Cheng, Arushi Goel, Hakan Bilen
The paper introduces Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. HSS covers a wide range of image and video inputs, organizes them under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human‑written prompts that probe implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract cues that humans can infer at a glance. Current state‑of‑the‑art models, including GPT‑6‑astra, achieve far lower accuracy than humans (53.6 % vs. 93.1 %), highlighting a significant gap in intuitive visual understanding.
By Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Daniel Quigley, Steven Li, David Yan, Daniel Yue Zhang, Darvin Yi, Forrest Huang, HiJae Kim, Tianyi Zhang, Jared Lichtarge, Jihua Huang, Le Xue, Manan Tomar, Qiuyi Richard Zhang, Ruofei Yu, Seth Neel, Yaning Hu, Marcella Valentine, Xinzhe Jiang, Daniel Evans, Chenguang Wang, Dustin Tran, Tong Zhao, Yinfei Yang, Yunzhong He
The paper introduces a framework that combines a Geometric Vision Parser and a Symbolic Solver to enable a Large Language Model to solve complex plane geometry problems. By translating diagrams into symbolic representations and performing formal deductions, the approach reduces hallucinations and produces interpretable, human-like solutions. Experiments on a new benchmark from 2025 Chinese Zhongkao exams show performance comparable to Gemini 2.5 Pro.
By Weichen Dai, Rafael Medeiros Cabral, Ziyi Shou, Yan Cao, Xin Shen, Dongcai Lu, Yi Zhou
arXiv:2609.13152v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on static science benchmarks, yet their ability to reason about the physical world through active experim...
By Joseph Chan, Utkarsh Jha, Xiyin Yang, Abhinav Jarajapu, Anik Sahai, Eddie Hu, Robin Jeshua Deepak, Stefano Saravalle, Aditya Shah
arXiv:2606. 07861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding and reasoning, yet their fine-grained visual perception remains underexplored.
By Lujun Li, Lama Sleem, Niccolo Gentile, Yangjie Xu, Yewei Song, Wenbo Wu, Radu State
ClueTracer is a training‑free, parameter‑free plugin that suppresses hallucinations in multimodal reasoning models by tracing how visual clues propagate from the question through the model’s reasoning pathway. It localizes task‑relevant image patches while ignoring irrelevant regions, thereby addressing the problem of reasoning drift where models over‑focus on question‑irrelevant entities. The method improves performance across various reasoning architectures by an average of 1.21× on reasoning benchmarks.
By Gongli Xi, Kun Wang, Zeming Gao, Huahui Yi, Haolang Lu, Qianshan Wei, Ye Tian, Wendong Wang
OmniPhys is a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate physics understanding and reasoning in models. It contains 15,246 questions and 19,850 images sourced from Chinese educational materials ranging from middle school to university level, with detailed annotations for fine-grained analysis. The benchmark also tests models’ ability to generate structured physics diagrams, a key component of authentic problem solving, and highlights gaps in current multimodal large language models.
By Hao Chen, Yumin Lin, Nadila Yushanjiang, Xin Lin, Min Zhang
arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.
By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
arXiv:2610. 34855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual counting benchmarks report whether vision-language models produce the correct number, but not whether errors arise from perception or reasoning.
By Qiuyi (Richard), Zhang, Zhen Xu, Jing Gu, Seojin Bang, Arnav Mohanty Das, Yaning Hu, Gautam Kumar, Jared Lichtarge, Le Xue, Bettina Catoto, Akul Datta, Daniel Luo, Farha Khan, Marcella Valentine, Yinfei Yang, Andrew M. Dai