arXiv AI

Evaluating Visual Language Models on Visual Grounding for Visually Impaired People

arXiv AI
Aug 26

When Seeing Is Not Enough: Benchmarking Interactive Visual Grounding in LVLMs

The paper introduces a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), examining how varying amounts of initial target information and dialogue affect performance. Experiments across four visual contexts and interaction protocols show that current LVLMs lag behind human baselines, especially when no initial description is given and information must be gathered through questions. The study also finds that LVLMs are poorly calibrated, often overestimating confidence, and that interactive grounding remains a significant challenge requiring visual matching, information seeking, and synthesis.

By Zhengxiang Wang, Owen Rambow
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

MagiC: Evaluating Multimodal Cognition Toward Grounded Visual Reasoning

MagiC is a benchmark for grounded multimodal cognition that evaluates vision‑language models on answer accuracy, step‑by‑step reasoning quality, grounding fidelity, and self‑correction. It contains about 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human‑curated examples with fine‑grained annotations, including rationales and bounding box groundings. The benchmark tests 15 models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters, introduces new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and includes diagnostic settings to probe robustness against adversarial visual cues and introspective error correction.

By Chengfei Wu, Ronald Seoh, Bingxuan Li, Liqiang Zhang, Fengrong Han, Dan Goldwasser
arXiv AI
Jul 10

AUTOPILOT VQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Incident-Centric Dashcam Understanding

arXiv:2607. 08745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering.

By Siddharth Damodharan, Radhika Gupta, Ali Alshami, Ryan Rabinowitz, Jugal Kalita
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Focus Where It Counts: A Salience-Driven Vision-Language Model for Low Vision Assistance

The paper introduces Salience-LLaVA, a vision‑language model that prioritizes scene elements based on their importance for low‑vision users. It presents three new salience‑aware datasets—Salience COCO, Salience Flickr, and Salience VizWiz—annotated with object‑level salience verified by low‑vision participants. The authors also propose the SCMI metric to evaluate caption ordering accuracy and demonstrate the system’s practicality by deploying it on assistive glasses.

By Jiazhao Liang, Hao Huang, Shuaihang Yuan, Congcong Wen, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Yu Hao, John-Ross Rizzo, Mengyu Wang, Anthony Tzes, Yi Fang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Evaluating VQA in Vision Language Models using Cooperative Principles

The paper evaluates Vision Language Models (VLMs) on Visual Question Answering tasks where questions violate Grice's maxims. By generating question modifiers that add non-essential, ambiguous, or false information, the authors show that VLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llava exhibit reduced performance. They also compare human pragmatic reasoning to VLM reasoning, noting differences in how each handles human‑induced versus AI‑generated violations, and find that humans spend less time resolving VLM‑induced violations while VLMs are less accurate in those cases.

By Monika Shah, Sudarshan Balaji, Somdeb Sarkhel, Sanorita Dey, Deepak Venugopal
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

VISTA: A Multimodal Egocentric Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Perception and Assistance to Blind and Low-Vision Users

VISTA (Visually Impaired Scene and Task Annotations) is a multimodal egocentric benchmark designed to evaluate goal‑oriented assistance for blind and low‑vision users. It comprises about 1,000 recordings from Project Aria glasses, each providing six synchronized sensor streams and three types of annotations across ten task categories, from object localization to hazard detection. The benchmark tests vision‑language models in zero‑shot settings and introduces a lightweight multimodal baseline that integrates all six modalities, revealing that current models can describe scenes but struggle to generate effective assistive guidance.

By No\'e Mosca, Mohamed Rayan Barhdadi, Muhammad Hamza, Joshua Yeh, Suryodaya Bikram Shahi, Zhiyan Li, Selim-Antoine Lali, Weiyue Li, Hasan Kurban, Erchin Serpedin, Gang Luo, Yue Zhang, Minghan Li, Mengyu Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Visual Dependence Does Not Imply Answerability: A Systematic Analysis of Answerability Signals in Frozen InstructBLIP

The study evaluates whether signals from a frozen vision‑language model, InstructBLIP, can reliably indicate answerability in visual question answering. Using a 10K subset of UNK‑VQA, the authors test predictive uncertainty, cross‑modal alignment, visual grounding, visual dependence, internal representations, and learned probes, finding that all signals yield weak discrimination (AUROC 0.50‑0.54). Even interventions that remove question‑relevant visual evidence or increase probe capacity do not substantially improve answerability detection, underscoring that visual dependence and related metrics are not robust proxies for answerability.

By Minjun Kim, Hyunmin Song, Changwon Lim