IQBench: How "Smart'' Are Vision-Language Models? A Study with Human IQ Tests

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Main Authors: Pham, Tan-Hanh, Nguyen, Phu-Vinh, Hung, Dang The, Duong, Bui Trong, Thanh, Vu Nguyen, Ngo, Chris, Truong, Tri Quang, Hy, Truong-Son
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pham, Tan-Hanh
Nguyen, Phu-Vinh
Hung, Dang The
Duong, Bui Trong
Thanh, Vu Nguyen
Ngo, Chris
Truong, Tri Quang
Hy, Truong-Son
author_facet Pham, Tan-Hanh
Nguyen, Phu-Vinh
Hung, Dang The
Duong, Bui Trong
Thanh, Vu Nguyen
Ngo, Chris
Truong, Tri Quang
Hy, Truong-Son
contents Although large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of multimodal tasks, their true reasoning capabilities on human IQ tests remain underexplored. To advance research on the fluid intelligence of VLMs, we introduce **IQBench**, a new benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs on standardized visual IQ tests. We focus on evaluating the reasoning capabilities of VLMs, which we argue are more important than the accuracy of the final prediction. **Our benchmark is visually centric, minimizing the dependence on unnecessary textual content**, thus encouraging models to derive answers primarily from image-based information rather than learned textual knowledge. To this end, we manually collected and annotated 500 visual IQ questions to **prevent unintentional data leakage during training**. Unlike prior work that focuses primarily on the accuracy of the final answer, we evaluate the reasoning ability of the models by assessing their explanations and the patterns used to solve each problem, along with the accuracy of the final prediction and human evaluation. Our experiments show that there are substantial performance disparities between tasks, with models such as `o4-mini`, `gemini-2.5-flash`, and `claude-3.7-sonnet` achieving the highest average accuracies of 0.615, 0.578, and 0.548, respectively. However, all models struggle with 3D spatial and anagram reasoning tasks, highlighting significant limitations in current VLMs' general reasoning abilities. In terms of reasoning scores, `o4-mini`, `gemini-2.5-flash`, and `claude-3.7-sonnet` achieved top averages of 0.696, 0.586, and 0.516, respectively. These results highlight inconsistencies between the reasoning processes of the models and their final answers, emphasizing the importance of evaluating the accuracy of the reasoning in addition to the final predictions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12000
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IQBench: How "Smart'' Are Vision-Language Models? A Study with Human IQ Tests
Pham, Tan-Hanh
Nguyen, Phu-Vinh
Hung, Dang The
Duong, Bui Trong
Thanh, Vu Nguyen
Ngo, Chris
Truong, Tri Quang
Hy, Truong-Son
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Although large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of multimodal tasks, their true reasoning capabilities on human IQ tests remain underexplored. To advance research on the fluid intelligence of VLMs, we introduce **IQBench**, a new benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs on standardized visual IQ tests. We focus on evaluating the reasoning capabilities of VLMs, which we argue are more important than the accuracy of the final prediction. **Our benchmark is visually centric, minimizing the dependence on unnecessary textual content**, thus encouraging models to derive answers primarily from image-based information rather than learned textual knowledge. To this end, we manually collected and annotated 500 visual IQ questions to **prevent unintentional data leakage during training**. Unlike prior work that focuses primarily on the accuracy of the final answer, we evaluate the reasoning ability of the models by assessing their explanations and the patterns used to solve each problem, along with the accuracy of the final prediction and human evaluation. Our experiments show that there are substantial performance disparities between tasks, with models such as `o4-mini`, `gemini-2.5-flash`, and `claude-3.7-sonnet` achieving the highest average accuracies of 0.615, 0.578, and 0.548, respectively. However, all models struggle with 3D spatial and anagram reasoning tasks, highlighting significant limitations in current VLMs' general reasoning abilities. In terms of reasoning scores, `o4-mini`, `gemini-2.5-flash`, and `claude-3.7-sonnet` achieved top averages of 0.696, 0.586, and 0.516, respectively. These results highlight inconsistencies between the reasoning processes of the models and their final answers, emphasizing the importance of evaluating the accuracy of the reasoning in addition to the final predictions.
title IQBench: How "Smart'' Are Vision-Language Models? A Study with Human IQ Tests
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12000