arXiv Machine Learning

Unveiling the Visual Counting Bottleneck in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605. 30170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at interpolation, they suffer catastrophic failures in systematic generalization, most notably in visual counting.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

NumerosityVLM: A Cognitively Inspired Benchmark for Interpreting Numerosity Representations in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608. 15425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on high-level multimodal tasks, yet numerosity perception, a cognitive ability that emerges in human infants before language acquisition, remains poorly understood in current models, as existing counting benchmarks entangle numerosity with correlated visual factors.

By Yiming Fu, Fangjun Li, Xiujin Liu, Ruidong Ma, Hang Yu, Zhichen Lu, Kanwei He, Alessandro Di Nuovo, Angelo Cangelosi, Zhegong Shangguan
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Same Answer, Different Representations: Hidden instability in VLMs

arXiv:2602.06652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The robustness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) is commonly assessed through output-level invariance, implicitly assuming that stable predictions r...

By Farooq Ahmad Wani, Alessandro Suglia, Rohit Saxena, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Wai-Chung Kwan, Fazl Barez, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Fabrizio Silvestri, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv AI
6d ago

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.

By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv AI
Aug 28

GSM8K-V: Can Vision Language Models Solve Grade School Math Word Problems in Visual Contexts

The paper introduces GSM8K‑V, a new benchmark that converts the GSM8K grade‑school math word problems into multi‑image sequences while preserving semantic equivalence. It requires vision‑language models to extract quantities through visual perception and reconstruct reasoning chains by integrating implicit cues across scenes. Evaluation of 34 VLMs shows a large modality gap: most models score above 90 % on text, but the best reaches only 59 % on GSM8K‑V, highlighting a distinct challenge in implicit visual inference.

By Fan Yuan, Yuchen Yan, Yifan Jiang, Haoran Zhao, Tao Feng, Jinyan Chen, Yanwei Lou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
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 AI
Aug 10

Probing Visual Concepts in Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Automated Driving

arXiv:2603. 06054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in automated driving applications is becoming increasingly common, with the aim of leveraging their reasoning and generalisation capabilities to handle long-tail scenarios.

By Nikos Theodoridis, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Anthony Scanlan, Ciar\'an Eising, Tim Brophy