arXiv:2609.37096v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) consistently struggle with fine-grained visual counting, yet the underlying causes remain poorly understood. I...
By Liwei Che, Yihao Quan, Sen Fang, Hongyi Wang, Ranjay Krishna, Ruixiang Tang, Vladimir Pavlovic
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.
By Joana Konadu Owusu, Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar
Object-counting methods have rapidly shifted from class-specific density regression to open-vocabulary, foundation-model-backed counters. These methods now enumerate instances from various visual and...
arXiv:2607. 09544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite strong performance on many multimodal tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with basic object counting.
By Ahmed Oumar El-Shangiti, Abzal Nurgazy, Hilal AlQuabeh, Nikolai Rozanov, Kentaro Inui
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.
By Xingzhou Pang, Yifan Hou, Junling Wang, Mrinmaya Sachan
The paper introduces VertiCue-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark designed to test whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perceive, ground, and utilize vertical structure information in remote-sensing natural scenes. It presents a three-stage framework—Perception, Grounding, Utilization—and a Representation Intervention Spectrum across various modalities to evaluate ten state-of-the-art models. The study finds a significant Vertical Structure Utilization Gap: while models show some geometric perception, they struggle to accurately link vertical evidence to spatial entities and incorporate it into semantic decisions.
By Jing Huang, Duanchu Wang, Junjie Yang, Zihang Cheng, Cheng Li, Lin Cui, Zhouyi Wu, Di Wang