Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Yinglun, Zhang, Jiancheng, Tang, Fuzhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhu, Yinglun
Zhang, Jiancheng
Tang, Fuzhi
author_facet Zhu, Yinglun
Zhang, Jiancheng
Tang, Fuzhi
contents Frontier AI models have achieved remarkable progress, yet recent studies suggest they struggle with compositional reasoning, often performing at or below random chance on established benchmarks. We revisit this problem and show that widely used evaluation metrics systematically underestimate model capability. To correct this artifact, we introduce a group matching score that more faithfully evaluates model capability. Moreover, correctness under the new metric can be translated into correctness under existing metrics via a simple overfitting step. This adjustment enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass all previous results and GPT-4.1 to yield the first result surpassing estimated human performance on Winoground. Building on this insight, we propose Test-Time Matching (TTM), an iterative, self-improving algorithm that further bootstraps model performance without any external supervision. TTM delivers additional, non-trivial improvements: for example, TTM enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass GPT-4.1 on MMVP-VLM, establishing a new state of the art. TTM also extends beyond contrastive vision-language models, yielding clear gains on a generative multimodal model across benchmarks. Importantly, TTM remains broadly effective even on benchmarks without metric-induced effects or group structures, achieving relative gains up to 85.7% on challenging datasets such as WhatsUp. Across 16 dataset variants spanning diverse setups, our experiments demonstrate that TTM consistently improves model performance and advances the frontier of compositional reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07632
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Models
Zhu, Yinglun
Zhang, Jiancheng
Tang, Fuzhi
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Frontier AI models have achieved remarkable progress, yet recent studies suggest they struggle with compositional reasoning, often performing at or below random chance on established benchmarks. We revisit this problem and show that widely used evaluation metrics systematically underestimate model capability. To correct this artifact, we introduce a group matching score that more faithfully evaluates model capability. Moreover, correctness under the new metric can be translated into correctness under existing metrics via a simple overfitting step. This adjustment enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass all previous results and GPT-4.1 to yield the first result surpassing estimated human performance on Winoground. Building on this insight, we propose Test-Time Matching (TTM), an iterative, self-improving algorithm that further bootstraps model performance without any external supervision. TTM delivers additional, non-trivial improvements: for example, TTM enables SigLIP-B16 to surpass GPT-4.1 on MMVP-VLM, establishing a new state of the art. TTM also extends beyond contrastive vision-language models, yielding clear gains on a generative multimodal model across benchmarks. Importantly, TTM remains broadly effective even on benchmarks without metric-induced effects or group structures, achieving relative gains up to 85.7% on challenging datasets such as WhatsUp. Across 16 dataset variants spanning diverse setups, our experiments demonstrate that TTM consistently improves model performance and advances the frontier of compositional reasoning.
title Test-Time Matching: Unlocking Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07632