arXiv AI
Jul 20
An Exam for Active Observers
arXiv:2607. 16165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human vision is a closed loop: gaze is continuously redirected by intermediate hypotheses rather than a single snapshot.
Human Cognitive Benchmarks Reveal Foundational Visual Gaps in MLLMs
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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9
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
Oct 1
VisualNeedle: Benchmarking Active Visual Search in Information-Dense Scenes
arXiv:2605.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been reported to achieve over 90\% accuracy on fine-grained perception benchmarks. How...
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.
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.
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.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24
PRISM-VLM: A Multi-Axis Discriminative Benchmark for Compact Vision-Language Models
PRISM‑VLM is a new benchmark for compact vision‑language models that evaluates each item across seven axes—task quality, behavioral robustness, and capability bottlenecks—rather than collapsing performance into a single accuracy score. It aggregates these axes into a single PScore while also providing per‑axis profiles, revealing differences that single‑axis benchmarks miss, such as sycophancy. The benchmark draws on items from fifteen public datasets and will be released with its full pipeline, prompts, and annotations.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 23
PRISM-VLM: A Multi-Axis Discriminative Benchmark for Compact Vision-Language Models
Compact vision-language models (VLMs) now power a growing share of multimodal applications. The benchmarks used to compare them, however, inherit a frontier-centric design: each model is reduced to a...
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5
The Percept-V Challenge: Can Multimodal LLMs Crack Simple Perception Problems?
The paper introduces Percept-V, a dataset of 6,000 program-generated images across 30 domains designed to test simple visual perception skills from the TVPS-4 framework. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art multimodal large language models perform poorly compared to humans, especially as image complexity increases, and that fine‑tuning yields only limited generalization to related datasets. The study highlights specific perception skills that remain challenging for current models.
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.
arXiv AI
Jul 31
See2Think: Do Multimodal Models Really Use Intermediate Visual States?
arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15
Pix2Fact: When Vision Is Not Enough -- Benchmarking Fine-Grained VQA with Web Verification on High-Resolution Real-World Scenes
arXiv:2602. 00593v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation.