arXiv Computation and Language

Human-centered evaluation of data visualization understanding in vision-language models

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Humanity's Sixth Sense: Benchmarking Intuitive Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Models

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
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Lexara-RF: Reference-Free Metrics for Evaluating Conversational Visual Analytics Agents

Lexara-RF introduces reference‑free metrics for evaluating conversational visual analytics agents that generate visualizations and natural‑language explanations. The framework uses only the prompt, data, and model response to score outputs, applying 13 metrics derived from visualization design theory and Gricean principles as consistency, intent‑alignment, and design validity checks. In tests against a human‑rated corpus, Lexara‑RF matches reference‑based methods, outperforms surface‑similarity NLG baselines, and accurately identifies structurally grounded failures.

By Srishti Palani, Vidya Setlur
arXiv AI
Jun 11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

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 Computer Vision
Sep 4

VKnowU: Evaluating Visual Knowledge Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.

By Tianxiang Jiang, Sheng Xia, Yicheng Xu, Linquan Wu, Xiangyu Zeng, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao, Yi Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

GraphVerse: A Comprehensive Visual Graph Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

GraphVerse is a new benchmark for multimodal large language models that tests visual graph reasoning by combining perception, graph-based visual inputs, and multi-step reasoning. It introduces Graph-centric Image Editing strategies to actively challenge models while preserving semantics, and offers a VGR-Score metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond simple answer accuracy. Experiments show current models have limitations in VGR and demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphVerse for broader multimodal reasoning tasks.

By Yuanfu Sun, Yuanhang Ren, Kang Li, Chuanhao Ji, Jiaxi Li, Jiajin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Qiaoyu Tan
arXiv AI
Jun 10

ChartAgent: A Multimodal Agent for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Complex Chart Question Answering

arXiv:2510. 04514v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts.

By Rachneet Kaur, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Sumitra Ganesh, Manuela Veloso