Can Vision-Language Models Solve the Shell Game?
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914380038275072 |
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| author | Liu, Tiedong Lee, Wee Sun |
| author_facet | Liu, Tiedong Lee, Wee Sun |
| contents | Visual entity tracking is an innate cognitive ability in humans, yet it remains a critical bottleneck for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This deficit is often obscured in existing video benchmarks by visual shortcuts. We introduce VET-Bench, a synthetic diagnostic testbed featuring visually identical objects that necessitate tracking exclusively through spatiotemporal continuity. Our experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art VLMs perform at or near chance level on VET-Bench, exposing a fundamental limitation: an over-reliance on static frame-level features and a failure to maintain entity representations over time. We provide a theoretical analysis drawing connections to the state-tracking problem, proving that fixed-depth transformer-based VLMs are fundamentally limited in tracking indistinguishable objects without intermediate supervision due to expressivity constraints. To address this, we propose Spatiotemporal Grounded Chain-of-Thought (SGCoT): generating object trajectories as explicit intermediate states. Leveraging Molmo2's object tracking ability, we elicit SGCoT reasoning by fine-tuning on synthesized text-only data for alignment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy exceeding 90% on VET-Bench, demonstrating that VLMs can reliably solve the video shell-game task end-to-end without external tools. Our code and data are available at https://vetbench.github.io . |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08436 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Can Vision-Language Models Solve the Shell Game? Liu, Tiedong Lee, Wee Sun Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Computation and Language Visual entity tracking is an innate cognitive ability in humans, yet it remains a critical bottleneck for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This deficit is often obscured in existing video benchmarks by visual shortcuts. We introduce VET-Bench, a synthetic diagnostic testbed featuring visually identical objects that necessitate tracking exclusively through spatiotemporal continuity. Our experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art VLMs perform at or near chance level on VET-Bench, exposing a fundamental limitation: an over-reliance on static frame-level features and a failure to maintain entity representations over time. We provide a theoretical analysis drawing connections to the state-tracking problem, proving that fixed-depth transformer-based VLMs are fundamentally limited in tracking indistinguishable objects without intermediate supervision due to expressivity constraints. To address this, we propose Spatiotemporal Grounded Chain-of-Thought (SGCoT): generating object trajectories as explicit intermediate states. Leveraging Molmo2's object tracking ability, we elicit SGCoT reasoning by fine-tuning on synthesized text-only data for alignment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy exceeding 90% on VET-Bench, demonstrating that VLMs can reliably solve the video shell-game task end-to-end without external tools. Our code and data are available at https://vetbench.github.io . |
| title | Can Vision-Language Models Solve the Shell Game? |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08436 |