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Main Authors: Wen, Ximing, Mainali, Mallika, Sen, Anik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22093
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author Wen, Ximing
Mainali, Mallika
Sen, Anik
author_facet Wen, Ximing
Mainali, Mallika
Sen, Anik
contents Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks; however, their ability to perform Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, such as inferring human intentions, beliefs, and mental states, remains underexplored. We propose an open-ended question framework to evaluate VLMs' performance across diverse categories of ToM tasks. We curated and annotated a benchmark dataset of 30 images and evaluated the performance of four VLMs of varying sizes. Our results show that the GPT-4 model outperformed all the others, with only one smaller model, GPT-4o-mini, achieving comparable performance. We observed that VLMs often struggle to infer intentions in complex scenarios such as bullying or cheating. Our findings reveal that smaller models can sometimes infer correct intentions despite relying on incorrect visual cues. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ximingwen/ToM-AAAI25-Multimodal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22093
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Well Can Vison-Language Models Understand Humans' Intention? An Open-ended Theory of Mind Question Evaluation Benchmark
Wen, Ximing
Mainali, Mallika
Sen, Anik
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks; however, their ability to perform Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, such as inferring human intentions, beliefs, and mental states, remains underexplored. We propose an open-ended question framework to evaluate VLMs' performance across diverse categories of ToM tasks. We curated and annotated a benchmark dataset of 30 images and evaluated the performance of four VLMs of varying sizes. Our results show that the GPT-4 model outperformed all the others, with only one smaller model, GPT-4o-mini, achieving comparable performance. We observed that VLMs often struggle to infer intentions in complex scenarios such as bullying or cheating. Our findings reveal that smaller models can sometimes infer correct intentions despite relying on incorrect visual cues. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ximingwen/ToM-AAAI25-Multimodal.
title How Well Can Vison-Language Models Understand Humans' Intention? An Open-ended Theory of Mind Question Evaluation Benchmark
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22093