NumBench is a large benchmark of 640,000 text‑to‑image prompts that tests how well models count objects, covering 1,600 categories and counts from 1 to 100. It uses a factorial design to vary composition, spatial guidance, and appearance while balancing counts, and introduces a process model that predicts a near‑quadratic collision deficit at low occupancy. The authors also propose the Confidence‑Weighted Numeric Precision Score for scalable evaluation and find that all tested systems perform poorly above 50 objects, with count range, layout, and composition having the largest effects.
arXiv:2607. 06420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual counting is a fundamental pillar of multimodal intelligence, requiring a seamless integration of fine-grained grounding and spatial reasoning.
ABACUS is a 3‑billion‑parameter vision‑language model that simultaneously tackles object counting, crowd counting, referring‑expression counting, and count‑faithful image generation. It introduces density‑aware adaptive zooming with an objectness map, a boundary‑aware count policy trained via GRPO to avoid over‑ or under‑counting at crop edges, and a cycle‑consistent GRPO strategy that scores generated images for count accuracy and aesthetic quality without external critics. The model sets new state‑of‑the‑art performance on seven benchmarks, outperforming both specialized and larger generalist models.
arXiv:2607. 00491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarks for vision-language models (VLMs) mostly test observational spatial reasoning: models describe relations already visible in the input.
arXiv:2608.20621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-guided zero-shot object counters excel at spatial localization but categorize poorly on novel or fine-grained classes: natural language is too coa...
arXiv:2608.21832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents ground natural-language instructions in screenshots to locate interface elements, yet existing benchmarks do not isolate whether mo...
The paper reviews the evolution of object‑counting techniques from class‑specific density regression to open‑vocabulary, foundation‑model‑backed counters that can handle visual and textual prompts. It highlights that current evaluation relies on a few saturated benchmarks, leading to models exploiting statistical regularities rather than true generalization. The authors propose a five‑axis taxonomy and audit the literature across domains such as microscopy, remote sensing, crowd counting, and agriculture, identifying six structural contradictions and outlining a roadmap for robust, multimodal evaluation protocols.
In 2026, the SHROOM-Visions shared task was launched at the UncertaiNLP Workshop co‑located with EMNLP to address hallucinations in large vision‑language models. The task builds on the SHEEP dataset and asks participants to detect and classify fine‑grained hallucination spans in image‑conditioned text generation across four languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian) using a five‑class taxonomy. The competition attracted 27 teams and over 600 system submissions, with top systems achieving character‑level, label‑conditioned, and IoU scores of 0.58, 0.46, and 0.51 respectively, surpassing baselines by 30‑40 points.
In 2026, we held the fourth iteration of the SHROOM Shared Task series: SHROOM-Visions (\textbf{S}hared-task on \textbf{H}allucinations and \textbf{R}elated \textbf{O}bservable \textbf{O}vergeneration...
arXiv:2602. 18094v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID).
arXiv:2607. 06254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deepfake image detection is currently served by three fundamentally different paradigms: commercial APIs, zero-shot vision-language models (LLMs), and open-source detectors.
arXiv:2609.17613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot object counting aims to estimate the number of objects specified by a text query without category-specific training. Recent approaches primar...
arXiv:2609.13308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion evaluation found that naming the target part in a manipulation prompt increased action accuracy by 0.32-0.63 across eight vision-language...