CompoSET is a new vision‑language benchmark that tests compositionality by presenting each image‑caption pair with a foil that differs by only a single controlled edit—such as color, count, spatial relation, or object state—while keeping the overall scene largely unchanged. The dataset contains 1,776 instances across 80 scenes, 16 edit types in four semantic categories, and captions at three verbosity levels, with an average of only 8% pixel change between base and foil images. Evaluation of 22 dual‑encoder VLMs shows that all models perform at or below chance on CompoSET, contrasting with their strong performance on prior benchmarks that conflate global image differences with compositional reasoning.
By Laure Delisle, Pietro Perona
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.
By Bayar Menzat, Maximilian S\"uss, Ruizhi Wang, Benno Steinegger, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu
arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.
By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir
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...
By Sarthak Sattigeri
DEPICT is a new training‑free metric for evaluating text‑to‑image alignment. It replaces fixed reference answers with an agreement rule that compares image‑based and caption‑only responses, weighting questions by how decisively the caption determines them. By merging this agreement score with a holistic score, DEPICT improves negation accuracy dramatically and outperforms existing training‑free metrics while matching or exceeding fine‑tuned evaluators on several benchmarks.
By Vasco Ramos, Sandra Godinho Silva, Joao Magalhaes, Ricardo Rei, Pedro Henrique Martins
Label-free reliability for vision-language models rests on invariance: perturb the input and a faithful reader's answer should not change. This has a known blind spot, a systematic misreading survives the perturbation and gets certified wrong, which we show is computable, not just real: an error is invisible to an edit exactly when the two commute, so the errors a suite cannot reach form its joint centralizer, a set that shrinks as edits are added and can be written down rather than guessed at.