Can you SPLICE it together? A Human Curated Benchmark for Probing Visual Reasoning in VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ballout, Mohamad, Wilfred, Okajevo, Yaghoubi, Seyedalireza, Abdelmoneim, Nohayr Muhammad, Mayer, Julius, Bruni, Elia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911183697608704
author Ballout, Mohamad
Wilfred, Okajevo
Yaghoubi, Seyedalireza
Abdelmoneim, Nohayr Muhammad
Mayer, Julius
Bruni, Elia
author_facet Ballout, Mohamad
Wilfred, Okajevo
Yaghoubi, Seyedalireza
Abdelmoneim, Nohayr Muhammad
Mayer, Julius
Bruni, Elia
contents In this work, we introduce SPLICE, a human-curated benchmark derived from the COIN instructional video dataset, designed to probe event-based reasoning across multiple dimensions: temporal, causal, spatial, contextual, and general knowledge. SPLICE includes 3,381 human-filtered videos spanning 12 categories and 180 sub-categories, such as sports, engineering, and housework. These videos are segmented into a total of 11,423 event clips. We evaluate both human participants and state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) on the task of rearranging these clips into coherent event sequences to assess visual reasoning capabilities. Results reveal a significant gap: VLMs struggle to match human performance. While human-annotated textual descriptions improve model accuracy, they do not affect human performance, suggesting that models rely more on language priors than on visual understanding. Even with annotations, VLMs fall short of human-level reasoning, underscoring persistent challenges in visual reasoning. A deeper analysis across sub-categories shows that VLMs perform relatively better on videos where temporal and causal reasoning are dominant, compared to those where contextual and spatial reasoning are dominant. They also perform better on everyday tasks than on specialized ones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can you SPLICE it together? A Human Curated Benchmark for Probing Visual Reasoning in VLMs
Ballout, Mohamad
Wilfred, Okajevo
Yaghoubi, Seyedalireza
Abdelmoneim, Nohayr Muhammad
Mayer, Julius
Bruni, Elia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
In this work, we introduce SPLICE, a human-curated benchmark derived from the COIN instructional video dataset, designed to probe event-based reasoning across multiple dimensions: temporal, causal, spatial, contextual, and general knowledge. SPLICE includes 3,381 human-filtered videos spanning 12 categories and 180 sub-categories, such as sports, engineering, and housework. These videos are segmented into a total of 11,423 event clips. We evaluate both human participants and state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) on the task of rearranging these clips into coherent event sequences to assess visual reasoning capabilities. Results reveal a significant gap: VLMs struggle to match human performance. While human-annotated textual descriptions improve model accuracy, they do not affect human performance, suggesting that models rely more on language priors than on visual understanding. Even with annotations, VLMs fall short of human-level reasoning, underscoring persistent challenges in visual reasoning. A deeper analysis across sub-categories shows that VLMs perform relatively better on videos where temporal and causal reasoning are dominant, compared to those where contextual and spatial reasoning are dominant. They also perform better on everyday tasks than on specialized ones.
title Can you SPLICE it together? A Human Curated Benchmark for Probing Visual Reasoning in VLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24640