HandVQA: Diagnosing and Improving Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning about Hands in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sayem, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury, Chowdhury, Mubarrat Tajoar, Tiruneh, Yihalem Yimolal, Khan, Muneeb A., Ali, Muhammad Salman, Bhattarai, Binod, Baek, Seungryul
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sayem, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury
Chowdhury, Mubarrat Tajoar
Tiruneh, Yihalem Yimolal
Khan, Muneeb A.
Ali, Muhammad Salman
Bhattarai, Binod
Baek, Seungryul
author_facet Sayem, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury
Chowdhury, Mubarrat Tajoar
Tiruneh, Yihalem Yimolal
Khan, Muneeb A.
Ali, Muhammad Salman
Bhattarai, Binod
Baek, Seungryul
contents Understanding the fine-grained articulation of human hands is critical in high-stakes settings such as robot-assisted surgery, chip manufacturing, and AR/VR-based human-AI interaction. Despite achieving near-human performance on general vision-language benchmarks, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, especially in interpreting complex and articulated hand poses. We introduce HandVQA, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' understanding of detailed hand anatomy through visual question answering. Built upon high-quality 3D hand datasets (FreiHAND, InterHand2.6M, FPHA), our benchmark includes over 1.6M controlled multiple-choice questions that probe spatial relationships between hand joints, such as angles, distances, and relative positions. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs (LLaVA, DeepSeek and Qwen-VL) in both base and fine-tuned settings, using lightweight fine-tuning via LoRA. Our findings reveal systematic limitations in current models, including hallucinated finger parts, incorrect geometric interpretations, and poor generalization. HandVQA not only exposes these critical reasoning gaps but provides a validated path to improvement. We demonstrate that the 3D-grounded spatial knowledge learned from our benchmark transfers in a zero-shot setting, significantly improving accuracy of model on novel downstream tasks like hand gesture recognition (+10.33%) and hand-object interaction (+2.63%).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HandVQA: Diagnosing and Improving Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning about Hands in Vision-Language Models
Sayem, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury
Chowdhury, Mubarrat Tajoar
Tiruneh, Yihalem Yimolal
Khan, Muneeb A.
Ali, Muhammad Salman
Bhattarai, Binod
Baek, Seungryul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Understanding the fine-grained articulation of human hands is critical in high-stakes settings such as robot-assisted surgery, chip manufacturing, and AR/VR-based human-AI interaction. Despite achieving near-human performance on general vision-language benchmarks, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, especially in interpreting complex and articulated hand poses. We introduce HandVQA, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' understanding of detailed hand anatomy through visual question answering. Built upon high-quality 3D hand datasets (FreiHAND, InterHand2.6M, FPHA), our benchmark includes over 1.6M controlled multiple-choice questions that probe spatial relationships between hand joints, such as angles, distances, and relative positions. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs (LLaVA, DeepSeek and Qwen-VL) in both base and fine-tuned settings, using lightweight fine-tuning via LoRA. Our findings reveal systematic limitations in current models, including hallucinated finger parts, incorrect geometric interpretations, and poor generalization. HandVQA not only exposes these critical reasoning gaps but provides a validated path to improvement. We demonstrate that the 3D-grounded spatial knowledge learned from our benchmark transfers in a zero-shot setting, significantly improving accuracy of model on novel downstream tasks like hand gesture recognition (+10.33%) and hand-object interaction (+2.63%).
title HandVQA: Diagnosing and Improving Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning about Hands in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26362