OccludeBench is a manually curated benchmark that tests vision‑language models (VLMs) on their ability to recover fully occluded objects from remaining visual evidence. The benchmark distinguishes direct cases—requiring recovery from a specific physical cue such as a shadow or reflection—from inferential cases, which rely on broader scene context. Across five VLMs, accuracy averages 42.7 % on direct cases versus 62.7 % on inferential cases, a 20‑point gap, while humans achieve 63.4 % and 68.5 % respectively with no significant gap. The study introduces OccludeTrace, a four‑stage diagnostic that isolates the failure point, revealing that models struggle most when recovering the relevant object from the full image projection. Interventions such as inpaint‑then‑confront reduce the gap to a statistically non‑significant difference for models with image‑generation capabilities.
arXiv:2609.38368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly reason over visual evidence that is cropped, segmented, retrieved, or revealed over time. Yet most VQA bench...
arXiv:2608.21762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) fail many detail-centric questions for a concrete reason: the answer is visible in the image, yet lost after the image...
arXiv:2609.00232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-centric document understanding and text-rich visual reasoning benchmar...
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.
The paper shows that controlled visual in‑context learning can help vision‑language models (VLMs) overcome errors caused by training priors. By providing demonstrations, the models focus more on visual evidence, yielding significant accuracy gains on counterfactual examples while leaving prior‑aligned performance largely unchanged. This effect is observed across five VLM families and five vision‑centric tasks, indicating that many VLMs possess latent visual grounding abilities that standard tests may miss.
arXiv:2609.22588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on visual question answering benchmarks, yet often make decisions that contradict visual evidence they h...
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance across many multimodal tasks; however, they often exploit spurious object-background correlations, resulting in predictions driven by co...
arXiv:2608.29996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance across many multimodal tasks; however, they often exploit spurious object-background...
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2607. 16311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer visual questions using learned language and category priors rather than grounding their predictions in the image itself.
The paper introduces visual adaptations of counterfactual tests—vCT and vCCT—to evaluate whether chain-of-thought explanations in vision‑language models faithfully reflect the visual evidence driving predictions. Using these tests, the authors benchmark eight open‑source VLMs on two datasets and find that CoTs often fail to track visual evidence, sometimes omitting removed objects or mentioning them inconsistently. They also release two new datasets, Counter‑SNLI‑VE and Counter‑A‑OKVQA, consisting of image pairs that differ by a single object to facilitate further research.
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...