Beyond Recognition: Evaluating Visual Perspective Taking in Vision Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Góral, Gracjan, Ziarko, Alicja, Miłoś, Piotr, Nauman, Michał, Wołczyk, Maciej, Kosiński, Michał
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Góral, Gracjan
Ziarko, Alicja
Miłoś, Piotr
Nauman, Michał
Wołczyk, Maciej
Kosiński, Michał
author_facet Góral, Gracjan
Ziarko, Alicja
Miłoś, Piotr
Nauman, Michał
Wołczyk, Maciej
Kosiński, Michał
contents We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a new set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations -- such as object position relative to the minifigure and the minifigure's orientation -- and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. We evaluate several high-performing models, including Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, GPT-4, and Qwen3, and find that while they excel at scene understanding, performance declines markedly on spatial reasoning and deteriorates further on perspective taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03821
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Recognition: Evaluating Visual Perspective Taking in Vision Language Models
Góral, Gracjan
Ziarko, Alicja
Miłoś, Piotr
Nauman, Michał
Wołczyk, Maciej
Kosiński, Michał
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a new set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations -- such as object position relative to the minifigure and the minifigure's orientation -- and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. We evaluate several high-performing models, including Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, GPT-4, and Qwen3, and find that while they excel at scene understanding, performance declines markedly on spatial reasoning and deteriorates further on perspective taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.
title Beyond Recognition: Evaluating Visual Perspective Taking in Vision Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03821