InfoCausalQA:Can Models Perform Non-explicit Causal Reasoning Based on Infographic?

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Main Authors: Ka, Keummin, Park, Junhyeong, Jeon, Jaehyun, Yu, Youngjae
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ka, Keummin
Park, Junhyeong
Jeon, Jaehyun
Yu, Youngjae
author_facet Ka, Keummin
Park, Junhyeong
Jeon, Jaehyun
Yu, Youngjae
contents Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in perception and reasoning. However, the ability to perform causal inference -- a core aspect of human cognition -- remains underexplored, particularly in multimodal settings. In this study, we introduce InfoCausalQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning grounded in infographics that combine structured visual data with textual context. The benchmark comprises two tasks: Task 1 focuses on quantitative causal reasoning based on inferred numerical trends, while Task 2 targets semantic causal reasoning involving five types of causal relations: cause, effect, intervention, counterfactual, and temporal. We manually collected 494 infographic-text pairs from four public sources and used GPT-4o to generate 1,482 high-quality multiple-choice QA pairs. These questions were then carefully revised by humans to ensure they cannot be answered based on surface-level cues alone but instead require genuine visual grounding. Our experimental results reveal that current VLMs exhibit limited capability in computational reasoning and even more pronounced limitations in semantic causal reasoning. Their significantly lower performance compared to humans indicates a substantial gap in leveraging infographic-based information for causal inference. Through InfoCausalQA, we highlight the need for advancing the causal reasoning abilities of multimodal AI systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06220
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle InfoCausalQA:Can Models Perform Non-explicit Causal Reasoning Based on Infographic?
Ka, Keummin
Park, Junhyeong
Jeon, Jaehyun
Yu, Youngjae
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in perception and reasoning. However, the ability to perform causal inference -- a core aspect of human cognition -- remains underexplored, particularly in multimodal settings. In this study, we introduce InfoCausalQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning grounded in infographics that combine structured visual data with textual context. The benchmark comprises two tasks: Task 1 focuses on quantitative causal reasoning based on inferred numerical trends, while Task 2 targets semantic causal reasoning involving five types of causal relations: cause, effect, intervention, counterfactual, and temporal. We manually collected 494 infographic-text pairs from four public sources and used GPT-4o to generate 1,482 high-quality multiple-choice QA pairs. These questions were then carefully revised by humans to ensure they cannot be answered based on surface-level cues alone but instead require genuine visual grounding. Our experimental results reveal that current VLMs exhibit limited capability in computational reasoning and even more pronounced limitations in semantic causal reasoning. Their significantly lower performance compared to humans indicates a substantial gap in leveraging infographic-based information for causal inference. Through InfoCausalQA, we highlight the need for advancing the causal reasoning abilities of multimodal AI systems.
title InfoCausalQA:Can Models Perform Non-explicit Causal Reasoning Based on Infographic?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06220