What's in Common? Multimodal Models Hallucinate When Reasoning Across Scenes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ross, Candace, Bordes, Florian, Williams, Adina, Kirichenko, Polina, Ibrahim, Mark
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ross, Candace
Bordes, Florian
Williams, Adina
Kirichenko, Polina
Ibrahim, Mark
author_facet Ross, Candace
Bordes, Florian
Williams, Adina
Kirichenko, Polina
Ibrahim, Mark
contents Multimodal language models possess a remarkable ability to handle an open-vocabulary's worth of objects. Yet the best models still suffer from hallucinations when reasoning about scenes in the real world, revealing a gap between their seemingly strong performance on existing perception benchmarks that are saturating and their reasoning in the real world. To address this gap, we build a novel benchmark of in-the-wild scenes that we call Common-O. With more than 10.5k examples using exclusively new images not found in web training data to avoid contamination, Common-O goes beyond just perception, inspired by cognitive tests for humans, to probe reasoning across scenes by asking "what's in common?". We evaluate leading multimodal language models, including models specifically trained to perform chain-of-thought reasoning. We find that perceiving objects in single images is tractable for most models, yet reasoning across scenes is very challenging even for the best models, including reasoning models. Despite saturating many leaderboards focusing on perception, the best performing model only achieves 35% on Common-O -- and on Common-O Complex, consisting of more complex scenes, the best model achieves only 1%. Curiously, we find models are more prone to hallucinate when similar objects are present in the scene, suggesting models may be relying on object co-occurrence seen during training. Among the models we evaluated, we found scale can provide modest improvements while models explicitly trained with multi-image inputs show bigger improvements, suggesting scaled multi-image training may offer promise. We make our benchmark publicly available to spur research into the challenge of hallucination when reasoning across scenes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What's in Common? Multimodal Models Hallucinate When Reasoning Across Scenes
Ross, Candace
Bordes, Florian
Williams, Adina
Kirichenko, Polina
Ibrahim, Mark
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal language models possess a remarkable ability to handle an open-vocabulary's worth of objects. Yet the best models still suffer from hallucinations when reasoning about scenes in the real world, revealing a gap between their seemingly strong performance on existing perception benchmarks that are saturating and their reasoning in the real world. To address this gap, we build a novel benchmark of in-the-wild scenes that we call Common-O. With more than 10.5k examples using exclusively new images not found in web training data to avoid contamination, Common-O goes beyond just perception, inspired by cognitive tests for humans, to probe reasoning across scenes by asking "what's in common?". We evaluate leading multimodal language models, including models specifically trained to perform chain-of-thought reasoning. We find that perceiving objects in single images is tractable for most models, yet reasoning across scenes is very challenging even for the best models, including reasoning models. Despite saturating many leaderboards focusing on perception, the best performing model only achieves 35% on Common-O -- and on Common-O Complex, consisting of more complex scenes, the best model achieves only 1%. Curiously, we find models are more prone to hallucinate when similar objects are present in the scene, suggesting models may be relying on object co-occurrence seen during training. Among the models we evaluated, we found scale can provide modest improvements while models explicitly trained with multi-image inputs show bigger improvements, suggesting scaled multi-image training may offer promise. We make our benchmark publicly available to spur research into the challenge of hallucination when reasoning across scenes.
title What's in Common? Multimodal Models Hallucinate When Reasoning Across Scenes
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03768