CrossWordBench: Evaluating the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs with Controllable Puzzle Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Leng, Jixuan, Huang, Chengsong, Huang, Langlin, Lin, Bill Yuchen, Cohen, William W., Wang, Haohan, Huang, Jiaxin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909733097570304
author Leng, Jixuan
Huang, Chengsong
Huang, Langlin
Lin, Bill Yuchen
Cohen, William W.
Wang, Haohan
Huang, Jiaxin
author_facet Leng, Jixuan
Huang, Chengsong
Huang, Langlin
Lin, Bill Yuchen
Cohen, William W.
Wang, Haohan
Huang, Jiaxin
contents Existing reasoning evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) predominantly assess either text-based reasoning or vision-language understanding capabilities, with limited dynamic interplay between textual and visual constraints. To address this limitation, we introduce CrossWordBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of both LLMs and LVLMs through the medium of crossword puzzles -- a task requiring multimodal adherence to semantic constraints from text-based clues and intersectional constraints from visual grid structures. CrossWordBench leverages a controllable puzzle generation framework that produces puzzles in two formats (text and image), supports adjustable difficulty through prefill ratio control, and offers different evaluation strategies, ranging from direct puzzle solving to interactive modes. Our extensive evaluation of over 20 models reveals that reasoning LLMs substantially outperform non-reasoning models by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints. We further demonstrate that LVLMs struggle with the task, showing a strong correlation between their puzzle-solving performance and grid-parsing accuracy. Our findings highlight limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00043
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CrossWordBench: Evaluating the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs with Controllable Puzzle Generation
Leng, Jixuan
Huang, Chengsong
Huang, Langlin
Lin, Bill Yuchen
Cohen, William W.
Wang, Haohan
Huang, Jiaxin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Existing reasoning evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) predominantly assess either text-based reasoning or vision-language understanding capabilities, with limited dynamic interplay between textual and visual constraints. To address this limitation, we introduce CrossWordBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of both LLMs and LVLMs through the medium of crossword puzzles -- a task requiring multimodal adherence to semantic constraints from text-based clues and intersectional constraints from visual grid structures. CrossWordBench leverages a controllable puzzle generation framework that produces puzzles in two formats (text and image), supports adjustable difficulty through prefill ratio control, and offers different evaluation strategies, ranging from direct puzzle solving to interactive modes. Our extensive evaluation of over 20 models reveals that reasoning LLMs substantially outperform non-reasoning models by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints. We further demonstrate that LVLMs struggle with the task, showing a strong correlation between their puzzle-solving performance and grid-parsing accuracy. Our findings highlight limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.
title CrossWordBench: Evaluating the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs with Controllable Puzzle Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00043