How Far Are We from Intelligent Visual Deductive Reasoning?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated incredible strides on diverse vision language tasks. We dig into vision-based deductive reasoning, a more sophisticated but less explored realm, and find previously unexposed blindspots in the current SOTA VLMs. Specifically, we leverage Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPMs), to assess VLMs' abilities to perform multi-hop relational and deductive reasoning relying solely on visual clues. We perform comprehensive evaluations of several popular VLMs employing standard strategies such as in-context learning, self-consistency, and Chain-of-thoughts (CoT) on three diverse datasets, including the Mensa IQ test, IntelligenceTest, and RAVEN. The results reveal that despite the impressive capabilities of LLMs in text-based reasoning, we are still far from achieving comparable proficiency in visual deductive reasoning. We found that certain standard strategies that are effective when applied to LLMs do not seamlessly translate to the challenges presented by visual reasoning tasks. A detailed analysis reveals that VLMs struggle to solve these tasks mainly because they are unable to perceive and comprehend multiple, confounding abstract patterns in RPM examples.

Paper

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Reviewer 1JTm7/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-10

Summary

This is an analytical study focusing on visual deductive reasoning. The authors utilized RPMs to assess the capabilities of VLMs in multi-hop relationships and deductive reasoning. They conducted comprehensive evaluations on several popular VLMs using standard strategies across three different datasets, resulting in some interesting conclusions.

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

Analyzing visual deductive reasoning can be quite intriguing.

Reasons to reject

1. RPMs problems are similar to multiple-choice questions in NLP and represent some very basic inquiries. Perhaps additional questions beyond RPMs are needed to assess human intelligence or to evaluate VLMs. 2. Since the framework for systematically evaluating VLMs on RPM problems is treated as a contribution, there should be a clear explanation of this framework. However, I can't find any specific descriptions or relevant illustrations in this manuscript.

Questions to authors

1. RPMs problems are similar to multiple-choice questions in NLP and represent some very basic inquiries. Perhaps additional questions beyond RPMs are needed to assess human intelligence or to evaluate VLMs. 2. Since the framework for systematically evaluating VLMs on RPM problems is treated as a contribution, there should be a clear explanation of this framework. However, I can't find any specific descriptions or relevant illustrations in this manuscript.

Reviewer j4Q49/10 · confidence 5/52024-05-12

Summary

This paper probes visual deductive reasoning with Raven's progressive matrices, a widely used set of non-verbal intelligence tests, and shows that even the latest VLM's fail to do well on visual deductive reasoning. The authors perform thorough evaluations of a variety of large visual models and establish a clear gap in VLM performance on visual deductive reasoning. They go on to disentangle the performance into perception, deductive reasoning and hypothesis verification and find that the VLM's fall short on perception. The paper is well written and the insights are valuable to the community at large and are novel.

Rating

9

Confidence

5

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

1. Well motivated paper that situates the proposed work well in the literature through a thorough literature survey. 2. Novel insights stemming from thorough and careful evaluation. 3. Interesting decomposition into perception, deductive reasoning and hypothesis verification.

Reasons to reject

These are minor weaknesses that can be easily addressed in the camera ready and therefore are not true reasons for rejection 1. The authors should look at the following work on natural images. The authors' proposed work with Raven's progressive matrices is quite different but some comments would be good https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03659 2. The authors' insights through the disentangling are consistent with the following (especially on GPT-4 V performance) https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03659 Some comments would be helpful

Questions to authors

Well written paper with interesting insights.

Reviewer Hoxc5/10 · confidence 4/52024-05-25

Summary

This paper evaluates several VLMs on their ability to do visual deductive reasoning, by evaluating on Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) puzzles that involve reasoning about abstract visual patterns. They evaluate VLMs on three RPM datasets: MensaIQ, IntelligenceTest and RAVEN, and find that all VLMs perform poorly on these abstract visual reasoning problems. The authors conduct an in-depth analysis of why VLMs struggle with these tasks and find that the main bottleneck is perception UPDATE 6/6/24: Updated overall score from 4 to 5.

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

- The division of visual deductive reasoning into perception+deductive reasoning+hypothesis verification, and the systematic experiment setups to diagnose these individual capabilities to identify the bottlenecks for VLMs, is well designed.

Reasons to reject

- **Analysis done with only a few examples**: The analysis in Table 3 (second half of Section 4.2) and Section 5 are performed on only 1--3 examples, which makes it hard to take any of the findings at face value. The compounding error and confounding error effects in Table 4 are each observed only once. The analysis of deductive reasoning capabilities in Section 5.2 and hypothesis verification in Section 5.3 are also conducted only on the three curated examples; while annotating oracle descriptions may be expensive, it can surely be done for more than 3 examples. I do not find any of the conclusions from the sections mentioned above to be compelling, given the very minimal amount of evidence to back those conclusions. - **Insufficiently motivated setting**: Why are abstractive visual puzzles a useful testbed to examine VLMs' deductive reasoning capabilities? As the authors note in Section 5.1, these models are primarily trained on naturalistic images, so while these tasks may be useful for diagnosing the reasoning capabilities of humans, it's hard to say they cannot do deductive reasoning if they fail to perform reasoning on these out-of-distribution abstract puzzles. - Writing is unclear at points: often the metrics (such as entropy) are presented after the results, which makes the paper hard to follow.

Questions to authors

- how is the in-context example presented to models that cannot take interleaved visual inputs? - is entropy calculated from the logits, or from multiple samples? It’s very unclear what p_i is in Section 4.1 - how is entropy calculated in the context of self-consistency? - Why do the problems created by the authors in Figure 2 exhibit varying degrees of difficulty for the models?

Reviewer Hoxc2024-06-07

Response to Authors

Thank you for the additional results. What does the first column ("Raven") mean? is that also an accuracy score? I do not personally like the use of RPM-style intelligence tests for evaluating VLM reasoning abilities (including in datasets like MathVista and MMMU). I'll quote [Melanie Mitchell](https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-chatgpt-really-pass-graduate) here about what these intelligence benchmarks like MMLU tell us about ChatGPT: > But does an AI system’s performance on an exam actually predict that it will exhibit skills in the real world? Perhaps there is a correlation between how humans perform on tests and on their future skills in the real world, but that correlation has not been demonstrated for AI systems. > For example, when a human succeeds in answering a test question such as the example on inventory given above, we assume that the human can then generalize this understanding to similar situations—the point of the test, after all, is to evaluate knowledge and skills that go beyond the wording of any specific question. But is the same true for ChatGPT? At the same time, I acknowledge your point that benchmarks like MMMU and MathVista do exist and are generally accepted in the community, so it would be unfair to penalize you too harshly for using similar RPM tests. I will raise my score to a 5, since my other concerns about the paper (especially that most of the qualitative analysis is only done on 3 examples) still stand.

Authorsrebuttal2024-06-07

Thanks for your comment! > What does the first column ("Raven") mean? is that also an accuracy score? We have three datasets in our paper: Raven, IntelligenceTest, and Mensa. The first column in this table is the accuracy of 60 examples from Raven dataset.

Reviewer Hoxc2024-06-04

Response to Authors

**Limited number of examples:** While I understand that the qualitative probes are meant to showcase the specific blindspots in VLMs, the results are hardly compelling if the entire analysis of "what are the blindspots" is only based on these 3 examples. These results would be a lot more compelling if the trends were exhibited on a larger set of images (even 10 examples per difficulty level). For example, in Table 4, you show that getting descriptions of segmented images results in fewer hallucinations. However, this finding is based on only one example (M-Medium). If this trend was shown to hold consistently on even ten examples, I would find the results much more convincing. **Motivation for abstract puzzles:** Based on the stated motivation, it seems like you are using visual IQ tests to jointly combine two evaluation axes (image distribution shift and deductive reasoning abilities). However, these two axes are very different to each other, and combining them into a single task does not make for a controlled test at all. I think my main issue with this paper is that it is using an IQ test to evaluate a model, when I don't think this is an appropriate use case for these tests -- IQ tests were designed for humans, not VLMs, and they tell a very different story for VLMs than they do for humans.

Authorsrebuttal2024-06-06

Thank you for the additional comment. We address them in below. **Limited Number of Examples** Our intention was to highlight specific instances that reveal the models’ deficiencies in handling complex visual deductive reasoning tasks. Table 4 only serves as an illustrative case study, presenting three qualitative examples for demonstrating the blindspot. We agree that a broader set of examples would provide a more robust analysis, we have incorporated new results from the Raven subset (60 examples) to expand our figure 3, which shows the same conclusion that additional segmentation dramatically improve the perception of the VLMs: | | Raven | Manual-easy | Manual-medium | Manual-hard | |-----------|-------|-------------|---------------|-------------| | Before Segmentation | 7.4 | 50 | 20 | 20 | | After Segmentation | 21.2 | 80 | 60 | 30 | We also tested many examples in the Mensa and IT datasets, which shows the same finding as well. We will add the results and additional analysis into our paper. **Motivation for Abstract Visual Puzzles** Your point about the decoupling of image distribution shift and deductive reasoning abilities is well taken. As we mentioned in our last comment, we would investigate these pattern-based reasoning tasks using naturalistic images. This will help us assess their performance with realistic objects which does not have data distribution shift. We will also investigate if instruction fine-tuning can help close the data distribution gap and enhance the VLM performance. These studies will help us gain more insights in whether data distribution shift is the culprit. However, they require more effort, making them beyond the scope of this paper, which focuses on identifying existing issues rather than meticulously tracing their origins. Our goal was to simulate a more holistic challenge that mirrors scenarios where generalist VLMs must navigate through even unseen and unfamiliar scenarios. You questioned whether it is appropriate to use RPMs for VLM evaluation. Although the PRMs were designed for humans as what you pointed out, we think that RPM problems represent a fundamental type of visual-spatial reasoning that artificial intelligence systems, particularly those aimed at achieving general intelligence, should also be able to perform well on. In fact, using RPMs to assess VLM is not rare. For instance, many general VLM benchmarks like MATHVISTA [1] and MMMU [2] uses RPMs problems to probe models’ reasoning and understanding ability of complex patterns. When GPT-4v came out, technical evaluation work like [3] also probed its performance on abstract patterns, especially the RPMs. Different from them, our work dives deep into scrutinizing the blindspot, and the underlying issues when VLMs deals with these abstract patterns, showing some potential directions for future improvement. ``` [1] Lu, Pan, et al. “Mathvista: Evaluating mathematical reasoning of foundation models in visual contexts.” ICLR 2024. [2] Yue, Xiang, et al. “Mmmu: A massive multi-discipline multimodal understanding and reasoning benchmark for expert agi.” CVPR, 2024. [3] Yang, Zhengyuan, et al. “The dawn of lmms: Preliminary explorations with gpt-4v (ision).” arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.17421 9.1 (2023): 1. ```

Reviewer j4Q42024-06-06

Response to rebuttal 1

I am satisfied with your rebuttal. I will maintain my original score. Please do follow through on the promises you have made in the rebuttal.

Program Chairsdecision2024-07-10

Decision

Accept

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