arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

M$^3$R-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Metaphor Understanding

M$^3$R-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 1,000 human‑annotated image‑text pairs that jointly label metaphor occurrence, Target‑Source mapping, and sentiment, and provide step‑by‑step explanations for evidence identification, mapping, and sentiment inference. Existing models often rely on textual shortcuts and produce mappings that conflict with visual evidence, as shown by evaluations on this dataset. To address this, the authors propose M$^3$R‑Reasoner, a model that uses curriculum‑based reasoning supervision and task‑aware reinforcement learning, achieving a 37.90% Joint Label Accuracy and outperforming both proprietary baselines and GPT‑5.5 on evidence and sentiment justification.

By Hong Jiang, Junnan Zhu, Jingwang Huang, Xiao Sun, Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, Ruirui Chen, Jingman Shi, Hao Wu, Nayu Liu, Xinyi Jiang, Kaiwen Wei
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci