Human Cognitive Benchmarks Reveal Foundational Visual Gaps in MLLMs
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2607. 16165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human vision is a closed loop: gaze is continuously redirected by intermediate hypotheses rather than a single snapshot.
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.
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...
The paper introduces Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. HSS covers a wide range of image and video inputs, organizes them under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human‑written prompts that probe implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract cues that humans can infer at a glance. Current state‑of‑the‑art models, including GPT‑6‑astra, achieve far lower accuracy than humans (53.6 % vs. 93.1 %), highlighting a significant gap in intuitive visual understanding.
VKnowU is a benchmark that tests multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their grasp of visual knowledge—intuitive, human-like understanding of physical and social principles in videos. The benchmark contains 1,680 questions across 1,249 videos, covering eight core types of visual knowledge, and shows that current state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs still lag behind human performance, especially on world‑centric tasks. To address this gap, the authors release VKnowQA and VideoKnow+, a baseline model that incorporates visual knowledge via a See‑Think‑Answer framework and reinforcement learning, improving performance on VKnowU and related datasets.
The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.