Visually Prompted Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Fragile

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Feng, Haiwen, Lian, Long, Dunlap, Lisa, Shu, Jiahao, Wang, XuDong, Wang, Renhao, Darrell, Trevor, Suhr, Alane, Kanazawa, Angjoo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Feng, Haiwen
Lian, Long
Dunlap, Lisa
Shu, Jiahao
Wang, XuDong
Wang, Renhao
Darrell, Trevor
Suhr, Alane
Kanazawa, Angjoo
author_facet Feng, Haiwen
Lian, Long
Dunlap, Lisa
Shu, Jiahao
Wang, XuDong
Wang, Renhao
Darrell, Trevor
Suhr, Alane
Kanazawa, Angjoo
contents A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. We open-source VPBench and our analysis framework at: https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visually Prompted Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Fragile
Feng, Haiwen
Lian, Long
Dunlap, Lisa
Shu, Jiahao
Wang, XuDong
Wang, Renhao
Darrell, Trevor
Suhr, Alane
Kanazawa, Angjoo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. We open-source VPBench and our analysis framework at: https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.
title Visually Prompted Benchmarks Are Surprisingly Fragile
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17875