Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Zhecheng, Song, Guoxian, Cai, Yujun, Xiong, Zhen, Yuan, Junsong, Wang, Yiwei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Zhecheng
Song, Guoxian
Cai, Yujun
Xiong, Zhen
Yuan, Junsong
Wang, Yiwei
author_facet Li, Zhecheng
Song, Guoxian
Cai, Yujun
Xiong, Zhen
Yuan, Junsong
Wang, Yiwei
contents Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable visual and linguistic capabilities, achieving impressive performance in various tasks such as image recognition and object localization. However, their effectiveness in fine-grained tasks remains an open question. In everyday scenarios, individuals encountering design materials, such as magazines, typography tutorials, research papers, or branding content, may wish to identify aesthetically pleasing fonts used in the text. Given their multimodal capabilities and free accessibility, many VLMs are often considered potential tools for font recognition. This raises a fundamental question: Do VLMs truly possess the capability to recognize fonts? To investigate this, we introduce the Font Recognition Benchmark (FRB), a compact and well-structured dataset comprising 15 commonly used fonts. FRB includes two versions: (i) an easy version, where 10 sentences are rendered in different fonts, and (ii) a hard version, where each text sample consists of the names of the 15 fonts themselves, introducing a stroop effect that challenges model perception. Through extensive evaluation of various VLMs on font recognition tasks, we arrive at the following key findings: (i) Current VLMs exhibit limited font recognition capabilities, with many state-of-the-art models failing to achieve satisfactory performance and being easily affected by the stroop effect introduced by textual information. (ii) Few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting provide minimal benefits in improving font recognition accuracy across different VLMs. (iii) Attention analysis sheds light on the inherent limitations of VLMs in capturing semantic features.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition
Li, Zhecheng
Song, Guoxian
Cai, Yujun
Xiong, Zhen
Yuan, Junsong
Wang, Yiwei
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable visual and linguistic capabilities, achieving impressive performance in various tasks such as image recognition and object localization. However, their effectiveness in fine-grained tasks remains an open question. In everyday scenarios, individuals encountering design materials, such as magazines, typography tutorials, research papers, or branding content, may wish to identify aesthetically pleasing fonts used in the text. Given their multimodal capabilities and free accessibility, many VLMs are often considered potential tools for font recognition. This raises a fundamental question: Do VLMs truly possess the capability to recognize fonts? To investigate this, we introduce the Font Recognition Benchmark (FRB), a compact and well-structured dataset comprising 15 commonly used fonts. FRB includes two versions: (i) an easy version, where 10 sentences are rendered in different fonts, and (ii) a hard version, where each text sample consists of the names of the 15 fonts themselves, introducing a stroop effect that challenges model perception. Through extensive evaluation of various VLMs on font recognition tasks, we arrive at the following key findings: (i) Current VLMs exhibit limited font recognition capabilities, with many state-of-the-art models failing to achieve satisfactory performance and being easily affected by the stroop effect introduced by textual information. (ii) Few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting provide minimal benefits in improving font recognition accuracy across different VLMs. (iii) Attention analysis sheds light on the inherent limitations of VLMs in capturing semantic features.
title Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23768