Daily Papers

What is the current state-of-the-art for image restoration and enhancement applied to degraded images acquired under less than ideal circumstances? Can the application of such algorithms as a pre-processing step to improve image interpretability for manual analysis or automatic visual recognition to classify scene content? While there have been important advances in the area of computational photography to restore or enhance the visual quality of an image, the capabilities of such techniques have not always translated in a useful way to visual recognition tasks. Consequently, there is a pressing need for the development of algorithms that are designed for the joint problem of improving visual appearance and recognition, which will be an enabling factor for the deployment of visual recognition tools in many real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce the UG^2 dataset as a large-scale benchmark composed of video imagery captured under challenging conditions, and two enhancement tasks designed to test algorithmic impact on visual quality and automatic object recognition. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the joint improvement of such tasks as well as individual algorithmic advances, including a novel psychophysics-based evaluation regime for human assessment and a realistic set of quantitative measures for object recognition performance. We introduce six new algorithms for image restoration or enhancement, which were created as part of the IARPA sponsored UG^2 Challenge workshop held at CVPR 2018. Under the proposed evaluation regime, we present an in-depth analysis of these algorithms and a host of deep learning-based and classic baseline approaches. From the observed results, it is evident that we are in the early days of building a bridge between computational photography and visual recognition, leaving many opportunities for innovation in this area.

Video generation models are increasingly used as world simulators for storytelling, simulation, and embodied AI. As these models advance, a key question arises: do generated videos obey the physical laws of the real world? Existing evaluations largely rely on automated metrics or coarse human judgments such as preferences or rubric-based checks. While useful for assessing perceptual quality, these methods provide limited insight into when and why generated dynamics violate real-world physical constraints. We introduce Physion-Eval, a large-scale benchmark of expert human reasoning for diagnosing physical realism failures in videos generated by five state-of-the-art models across egocentric and exocentric views, containing 10,990 expert reasoning traces spanning 22 fine-grained physical categories. Each generated video is derived from a corresponding real-world reference video depicting a clear physical process, and annotated with temporally localized glitches, structured failure categories, and natural-language explanations of the violated physical behavior. Using this dataset, we reveal a striking limitation of current video generation models: in physics-critical scenarios, 83.3% of exocentric and 93.5% of egocentric generated videos exhibit at least one human-identifiable physical glitch. We hope Physion-Eval will set a new standard for physical realism evaluation and guide the development of physics-grounded video generation. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PhysionLabs/Physion-Eval.

We systematically study a wide variety of image-based generative models spanning semantically-diverse datasets to understand and improve the feature extractors and metrics used to evaluate them. Using best practices in psychophysics, we measure human perception of image realism for generated samples by conducting the largest experiment evaluating generative models to date, and find that no existing metric strongly correlates with human evaluations. Comparing to 16 modern metrics for evaluating the overall performance, fidelity, diversity, and memorization of generative models, we find that the state-of-the-art perceptual realism of diffusion models as judged by humans is not reflected in commonly reported metrics such as FID. This discrepancy is not explained by diversity in generated samples, though one cause is over-reliance on Inception-V3. We address these flaws through a study of alternative self-supervised feature extractors, find that the semantic information encoded by individual networks strongly depends on their training procedure, and show that DINOv2-ViT-L/14 allows for much richer evaluation of generative models. Next, we investigate data memorization, and find that generative models do memorize training examples on simple, smaller datasets like CIFAR10, but not necessarily on more complex datasets like ImageNet. However, our experiments show that current metrics do not properly detect memorization; none in the literature is able to separate memorization from other phenomena such as underfitting or mode shrinkage. To facilitate further development of generative models and their evaluation we release all generated image datasets, human evaluation data, and a modular library to compute 16 common metrics for 8 different encoders at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/dgm-eval.

Perception is often viewed as a process that transforms physical variables, external to an observer, into internal psychological variables. Such a process can be modeled by a function coined perceptual scale. The perceptual scale can be deduced from psychophysical measurements that consist in comparing the relative differences between stimuli (i.e. difference scaling experiments). However, this approach is often overlooked by the modeling and experimentation communities. Here, we demonstrate the value of measuring the perceptual scale of classical (spatial frequency, orientation) and less classical physical variables (interpolation between textures) by embedding it in recent probabilistic modeling of perception. First, we show that the assumption that an observer has an internal representation of univariate parameters such as spatial frequency or orientation while stimuli are high-dimensional does not lead to contradictory predictions when following the theoretical framework. Second, we show that the measured perceptual scale corresponds to the transduction function hypothesized in this framework. In particular, we demonstrate that it is related to the Fisher information of the generative model that underlies perception and we test the predictions given by the generative model of different stimuli in a set a of difference scaling experiments. Our main conclusion is that the perceptual scale is mostly driven by the stimulus power spectrum. Finally, we propose that this measure of perceptual scale is a way to push further the notion of perceptual distances by estimating the perceptual geometry of images i.e. the path between images instead of simply the distance between those.

In this work, we propose an evaluation protocol for examining the performance of robotic manipulation policies in cluttered scenes. Contrary to prior works, we approach evaluation from a psychophysical perspective, therefore we use a unified measure of clutter that accounts for environmental factors as well as the distractors quantity, characteristics, and arrangement. Using this measure, we systematically construct evaluation scenarios in both hyper-realistic simulation and real-world and conduct extensive experimentation on manipulation policies, in particular vision-language-action (VLA) models. Our experiments highlight the significant impact of scene clutter, lowering the performance of the policies, by as much as 34% and show that despite achieving similar average performance across the tasks, different VLA policies have unique vulnerabilities and a relatively low agreement on success scenarios. We further show that our clutter measure is an effective indicator of performance degradation and analyze the impact of distractors in terms of their quantity and occluding influence. At the end, we show that finetuning on enhanced data, although effective, does not equally remedy all negative impacts of clutter on performance.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet whether they truly capture the physical consistency underlying real-world dynamics remains unclear. Existing benchmark paradigms often suffer from fragmented evaluation, focusing on isolated cognitive stages while overlooking the inherent synergy between perception, reasoning, and physical judgment. The lack of a holistic perspective limits the ability to diagnose whether VLMs can reliably evaluate the physical authenticity of emerging generative models. To address these issues, we introduce PhysVista, a benchmark designed to evaluate physical intelligence in VLMs through a closed cognitive loop framework inspired by the human seeing-reasoning-assessment process. PhysVista restores this loop by jointly evaluating physical state perception, physical dynamics reasoning, and physical plausibility assessment. It further distinguishes event-level reasoning and scale-level reasoning to enable fine-grained analysis of physical understanding. In addition, PhysVista incorporates both real-world and AI-generated videos, allowing evaluation across diverse domains and emerging generative scenarios. Extensive experiments across a diverse set of VLMs reveal substantial limitations in physical reasoning and plausibility assessment, highlighting a persistent gap between visual recognition and genuine physical understanding, and pointing toward more principled designs for physically grounded multimodal intelligence.

As large language models are increasingly deployed to simulate diverse human characters, ensuring persona fidelity, defined as the extent to which an agent's behavior consistently reflects the psychological and stylistic characteristics of a target persona, has become a critical requirement. However, existing evaluation paradigms primarily rely on either holistic LLM-based judges, which are prone to "holistic appraisal hallucination'', or static psychometric inventories, which fail to capture the context-dependent fidelity required in dynamic dialogue. To address these limitations, we propose PRISM (Persona Reasoning with Inverse SFL-based Modeling), a psycholinguistically grounded framework that reformulates persona fidelity evaluation as a structured inverse inference task. Inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), PRISM decomposes persona fidelity into three functional dimensions: Task Framing, Interpersonal Stance, and Linguistic Style. It estimates dimension-specific evidence over a persona-conditioned label space and aggregates these signals into an interpretable and auditable evaluation process. Experiments show that PRISM yields more accurate and stable judgements than traditional holistic judging, providing a more reliable framework for persona fidelity evaluation.

Video world models can produce visually convincing yet physically inconsistent sequences, raising concerns about their reliability for prediction and planning in embodied AI systems. Existing evaluations often rely on model-based judgments or reference videos, while direct physical tests largely focus on mechanics. We introduce World Models' Last Exam in Physics, a measurement-based benchmark for evaluating physical consistency in video world models. The benchmark comprises 40 controlled tasks spanning mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal and phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension. Each task pairs an initial image and a generation prompt with predefined physical criteria, enabling interpretable tests of observable physical relationships without requiring reference videos. Its evaluator combines task-observability screening with task-specific quantitative physical measurements. Experiments on eight video generation models across 1,280 videos reveal persistent physical inconsistencies and substantial variation across tasks, with the best model achieving an overall score of 57.76 out of 100. Evaluation on synthetic videos with known physical relationships provides evidence for the validity of the measurement module under controlled conditions. The evaluator also achieves higher agreement with human judgments than a direct vision-language model baseline in both within-task rankings and pairwise comparisons. By combining coverage across physical domains with scores grounded in measurable evidence and explicit measurement limitations, the benchmark provides an interpretable basis for diagnosing physical inconsistencies and tracking progress toward physically consistent video world models.

Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation is central to applications such as filmmaking and world modeling. However, current models often fail to produce physically plausible sounds. Previous benchmarks primarily focus on audio-video temporal synchronization, while largely overlooking explicit evaluation of audio-physics grounding, thereby limiting the study of physically plausible audio-visual generation. To address this issue, we present PhyAVBench, the first benchmark that systematically evaluates the audio-physics grounding capabilities of T2AV, image-to-audio-video (I2AV), and video-to-audio (V2A) models. PhyAVBench offers PhyAV-Sound-11K, a new dataset of 25.5 hours of 11,605 audible videos collected from 184 participants to ensure diversity and avoid data leakage. It contains 337 paired-prompt groups with controlled physical variations that drive sound differences, each grounded with an average of 17 videos and spanning 6 audio-physics dimensions and 41 fine-grained test points. Each prompt pair is annotated with the physical factors underlying their acoustic differences. Importantly, PhyAVBench leverages paired text prompts to evaluate this capability. We term this evaluation paradigm the Audio-Physics Sensitivity Test (APST) and introduce a novel metric, the Contrastive Physical Response Score (CPRS), which quantifies the acoustic consistency between generated videos and their real-world counterparts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art models. Our results reveal that even leading commercial models struggle with fundamental audio-physical phenomena, exposing a critical gap beyond audio-visual synchronization and pointing to future research directions. We hope PhyAVBench will serve as a foundation for advancing physically grounded audio-visual generation. Prompts, ground-truth, and generated video samples are available at https://github.com/imxtx/PhyAVBench.

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a significant gap in performance (91.4% vs 43.6%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test

Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/.

Recent advancements in audio-visual generative modeling have been propelled by progress in deep learning and the availability of data-rich benchmarks. However, the growth is not attributed solely to models and benchmarks. Universally accepted evaluation metrics also play an important role in advancing the field. While there are many metrics available to evaluate audio and visual content separately, there is a lack of metrics that offer a quantitative and interpretable measure of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild". To address this gap, we first created a large scale human annotated dataset (100+ hrs) representing nine types of synchronization errors in audio-visual content and how human perceive them. We then developed a PEAVS (Perceptual Evaluation of Audio-Visual Synchrony) score, a novel automatic metric with a 5-point scale that evaluates the quality of audio-visual synchronization. We validate PEAVS using a newly generated dataset, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.79 at the set level and 0.54 at the clip level when compared to human labels. In our experiments, we observe a relative gain 50% over a natural extension of Fr\'echet based metrics for Audio-Visual synchrony, confirming PEAVS efficacy in objectively modeling subjective perceptions of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild".

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) excel at semantic and paralinguistic tasks, yet their ability to perceive the fundamental physical attributes of audio such as pitch, loudness, and spatial location remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SonicBench, a psychophysically grounded benchmark that systematically evaluates 12 core physical attributes across five perceptual dimensions. Unlike previous datasets, SonicBench uses a controllable generation toolbox to construct stimuli for two complementary paradigms: recognition (absolute judgment) and comparison (relative judgment). This design allows us to probe not only sensory precision but also relational reasoning capabilities, a domain where humans typically exhibit greater proficiency. Our evaluation reveals a substantial deficiency in LALMs' foundational auditory understanding; most models perform near random guessing and, contrary to human patterns, fail to show the expected advantage on comparison tasks. Furthermore, explicit reasoning yields minimal gains. However, our linear probing analysis demonstrates crucially that frozen audio encoders do successfully capture these physical cues (accuracy at least 60%), suggesting that the primary bottleneck lies in the alignment and decoding stages, where models fail to leverage the sensory signals they have already captured.

Evaluating the physical consistency of generated videos remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches rely on off-the-shelf vision-language models, which can often be myopic to physical dynamics, or fine-tuned evaluators trained on human annotations, which overfit to dataset-specific cues and fail to generalize. A key challenge is that existing supervision sources provide either relative ordering or absolute scores, but not both reliably and consistently across varied settings. To this end, we introduce PhyProbe, an evaluator that extracts features from a frozen pretrained spatio-temporal encoder and maps them to a scalar physical consistency violation score via a lightweight scoring head. PhyProbe is trained through a unified objective combining pairwise ranking, regression on noisy scalar annotations, and anchor-based calibration over a curated set of heterogeneous supervision sources. Experiments show that PhyProbe outperforms prior methods on most pairwise benchmarks spanning real-generated and generated-generated pairs under varying correspondence, with the largest gains in no-correspondence and generated-generated settings where existing fine-tuned evaluators degrade sharply. PhyProbe achieves strong correlation with human judgments, with close agreement between rank-based and linear metrics, indicating that scores are both well ordered and anchored to a stable [0, 1] scale. Further, despite being trained on supervision indicative of physical consistency, without explicit general-preference labels, PhyProbe also performs competitively on human preference benchmarks: consistent with the observation that physics violations are entangled with broader quality degradations.

Recent advances have made long-form report-generating systems widely available. This has prompted evaluation frameworks that use LLM-as-judge protocols and claim verification, along with meta-evaluation frameworks that seek to validate these methods. Many of the meta-evaluations estimate an evaluation quality's by comparing its assessments against human pairwise preferences. Prior work, however, suggests that human pairwise preference may be overly simplistic and can fail to capture nuances of expert expectations. We conduct a case study in meta-evaluation for long-form QA benchmarks using ScholarQA-CS2, a benchmark designed for assessing retrieval-augmented deep-research QA in the scientific domain. We comprehensively validate the benchmark through human pairwise preference judgments, then critically examine the strengths, weaknesses, and confounders of this approach. We show that pairwise preference rankings are best suited for system-level evaluation, while explicit metric-wise annotations and expert annotators are critical for reliable metric-level assessment, with subjectivity remaining a key challenge. Based on our findings, we offer practical guidelines for designing future meta-evaluations that better align evaluation methods, annotator expertise, and reporting practices. By surfacing these methodological challenges, we aim to advance evaluation standards for deep-research systems.

Human evaluation is critical for validating the performance of text-to-image generative models, as this highly cognitive process requires deep comprehension of text and images. However, our survey of 37 recent papers reveals that many works rely solely on automatic measures (e.g., FID) or perform poorly described human evaluations that are not reliable or repeatable. This paper proposes a standardized and well-defined human evaluation protocol to facilitate verifiable and reproducible human evaluation in future works. In our pilot data collection, we experimentally show that the current automatic measures are incompatible with human perception in evaluating the performance of the text-to-image generation results. Furthermore, we provide insights for designing human evaluation experiments reliably and conclusively. Finally, we make several resources publicly available to the community to facilitate easy and fast implementations.

A robust decision-making process must take into account uncertainty, especially when the choice involves inherent risks. Because artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly integrated into decision-making workflows, managing uncertainty relies more and more on the metacognitive capabilities of these systems; i.e, their ability to assess the reliability of and regulate their own decisions. Hence, it is crucial to employ robust methods to measure the metacognitive abilities of AI. This paper is primarily a methodological contribution arguing for the adoption of the meta-d' framework as the gold standard for assessing the metacognitive sensitivity of AIs--the ability to generate confidence ratings that distinguish correct from incorrect responses. Moreover, we propose to leverage signal detection theory (SDT) to measure the ability of AIs to spontaneously regulate their decisions based on uncertainty and risk. To demonstrate the practical utility of these psychophysical frameworks, we conduct two series of experiments on three large language models (LLMs)--GPT-5, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, and Mistral-Medium-2508.

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in creating high-quality, photorealistic content. However, their ability to accurately simulate physical phenomena remains a critical and unresolved challenge. This paper presents PhyWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate video generation models based on their adherence to the laws of physics. The benchmark covers multiple levels of physical phenomena, ranging from fundamental principles like object motion and energy conservation to more complex scenarios involving rigid body interactions and human or animal motion. Additionally, we introduce a novel ""Anti-Physics"" category, where prompts intentionally violate real-world physics, enabling the assessment of whether models can follow such instructions while maintaining logical consistency. Besides large-scale human evaluation, we also design a simple yet effective method that could utilize current MLLM to evaluate the physics realism in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art text-to-video generation models, including five open-source and five proprietary models, with a detailed comparison and analysis. we identify pivotal challenges models face in adhering to real-world physics. Through systematic testing of their outputs across 1,050 curated prompts-spanning fundamental, composite, and anti-physics scenarios-we identify pivotal challenges these models face in adhering to real-world physics. We then rigorously examine their performance on diverse physical phenomena with varying prompt types, deriving targeted recommendations for crafting prompts that enhance fidelity to physical principles.

This paper introduces a novel double stimulus subjective assessment methodology for the evaluation of high quality images to address the limitations of existing protocols in detecting subtle perceptual differences. The In-place Double Stimulus Quality Scale (IDSQS) allows subjects to alternately view a reference and a distorted image at the same spatial location, facilitating a more intuitive detection of differences in quality, especially at high to visually lossless quality levels. A large-scale crowdsourcing study employing this methodology was conducted, generating a comprehensive public dataset to evaluate perceived image quality across several compression algorithms and distortion levels. An additional contribution is the modeling of quality scores using a Beta distribution, allowing for the assessment of variability and subject consistency. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the IDSQS methodology in achieving high correlation with more precise subjective evaluation benchmarks. The dataset, subjective data, and graphical user interface developed for this study are publicly available at https://github.com/shimamohammadi/IDSQS

Joint audio-video generation models are rapidly approaching professional production quality, raising a central question: do they understand audio-visual physics, or merely generate plausible sounds and frames that violate real-world consistency? We introduce AV-Phys Bench, a benchmark for evaluating physical commonsense in joint audio-video generation. AV-Phys Bench tests models across three scene categories: Steady State, Event Transition, and Environment Transition. It covers physics-grounded subcategories drawn from real-world scenes, plus Anti-AV-Physics prompts that deliberately request physically inconsistent audio-video behavior. Each generation is evaluated along five dimensions: visual semantic adherence, audio semantic adherence, visual physical commonsense, audio physical commonsense, and cross-modal physical commonsense. Across three proprietary and four open-source models, we find that Seedance 2.0 performs best overall, but all models remain far from robust physical understanding. Performance drops sharply on event-driven and environment-driven transitions, and even strong proprietary systems collapse on Anti-AV-Physics prompts. We further introduce AV-Phys Agent, a ReAct-style evaluator that combines a multimodal language model with deterministic acoustic measurement tools, producing rankings that closely align with human ratings. Our results identify cross-modal physical consistency and transition-driven scene dynamics as key open challenges for joint audio-video generation.

Video generation is rapidly evolving from single-shot clips to multi-shot narratives, where the human character serves as the core narrative anchor. However, existing benchmarks mainly assess character appearance or individual-shot quality, without measuring whether physical and emotional states remain coherent across cuts. They also rarely provide criterion-specific evaluation methods, although physical continuity, facial dynamics, and cinematic relations require different visual, temporal, and relational evidence. To address these limitations, we introduce PersonaShot, the first person-centric benchmark for narrative continuity in multi-shot video generation. PersonaShot contains approximately 1,000 multi-shot segments and 16 metrics spanning physical continuity, affective dynamics, and cinematic grammar. \textit{1) Narrative Continuity Benchmark:} We evaluate character coherence across three temporal levels: within-shot states, cross-shot transitions, and sequence-level trajectories. \textit{2) Human-Aligned Specialist Evaluators:} We distill reasoning from a large multimodal teacher into lightweight criterion-specific evaluators, each grounded in the visual, temporal, or relational evidence required by its metric, and align them with expert human judgments. \textit{3) Systematic Evaluation and Insights:} Our evaluation reveals distinct capability profiles across state-of-the-art models and a clear gap between perceptual quality and cross-shot narrative continuity. Even visually compelling videos frequently exhibit physical-state resets, abrupt affective shifts, and broken cinematic relations across shots. Human studies further demonstrate strong agreement between our evaluators and expert judgments.

Human values and their measurement are long-standing interdisciplinary inquiry. Recent advances in AI have sparked renewed interest in this area, with large language models (LLMs) emerging as both tools and subjects of value measurement. This work introduces Generative Psychometrics for Values (GPV), an LLM-based, data-driven value measurement paradigm, theoretically grounded in text-revealed selective perceptions. We begin by fine-tuning an LLM for accurate perception-level value measurement and verifying the capability of LLMs to parse texts into perceptions, forming the core of the GPV pipeline. Applying GPV to human-authored blogs, we demonstrate its stability, validity, and superiority over prior psychological tools. Then, extending GPV to LLM value measurement, we advance the current art with 1) a psychometric methodology that measures LLM values based on their scalable and free-form outputs, enabling context-specific measurement; 2) a comparative analysis of measurement paradigms, indicating response biases of prior methods; and 3) an attempt to bridge LLM values and their safety, revealing the predictive power of different value systems and the impacts of various values on LLM safety. Through interdisciplinary efforts, we aim to leverage AI for next-generation psychometrics and psychometrics for value-aligned AI.

We introduce PerceptionBench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the atomic visual perception capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing benchmarks often fail to isolate perception: holistic evaluations conflate perceptual errors with failures in reasoning or domain knowledge, while application-driven benchmarks only cover narrow, fragmented domains shaped by heuristic designs. To address these limitations, PerceptionBench adopts a bottom-up approach: by diagnosing the earliest failure points in the responses of frontier MLLMs across 42 existing benchmarks, we construct an error taxonomy whose perception branch defines ten atomic perceptual capabilities. Guided by this taxonomy, we construct 3,000 verified questions with short, unambiguous answers, each isolating a single capability, with difficulty stemming from perception rather than reasoning or knowledge. Benchmark results across sixteen frontier MLLMs reveal that atomic perception remains largely unsolved---no model reaches 60\% accuracy, perception-related hallucination is the weakest capability on average, and similar overall scores conceal sharply divergent capability profiles. PerceptionBench thus provides a capability-level standard for measuring and diagnosing the visual perception boundaries of MLLMs.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancement in visual understanding and reasoning, their potential to serve as powerful, flexible, interpretable, and text-driven models for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of prompting MLLMs for IQA. We first investigate nine prompting systems for MLLMs as the combinations of three standardized testing procedures in psychophysics (i.e., the single-stimulus, double-stimulus, and multiple-stimulus methods) and three popular prompting strategies in natural language processing (i.e., the standard, in-context, and chain-of-thought prompting). We then present a difficult sample selection procedure, taking into account sample diversity and uncertainty, to further challenge MLLMs equipped with the respective optimal prompting systems. We assess three open-source and one closed-source MLLMs on several visual attributes of image quality (e.g., structural and textural distortions, geometric transformations, and color differences) in both full-reference and no-reference scenarios. Experimental results show that only the closed-source GPT-4V provides a reasonable account for human perception of image quality, but is weak at discriminating fine-grained quality variations (e.g., color differences) and at comparing visual quality of multiple images, tasks humans can perform effortlessly.

Translation of perceptual soundscape attributes from one language to another remains a challenging task that requires a high degree of fidelity in both psychoacoustic and psycholinguistic senses across the target population. Due to the inherently subjective nature of human perception, translating soundscape attributes using only small focus group discussion or expert panels could lead to translations with psycholinguistic meanings that, in a non-expert setting, deviate or distort from that of the source language. In this work, we present a quantitative evaluation method based on the circumplex model of soundscape perception to assess the overall translation quality across a set of criteria. As an initial application domain, we demonstrated the use of the quantitative evaluation framework in the context of an English-to-Thai translation of soundscape attributes.

Intuitive physics understanding in video diffusion models plays an essential role in building general-purpose physically plausible world simulators, yet accurately evaluating such capacity remains a challenging task due to the difficulty in disentangling physics correctness from visual appearance in generation. To the end, we introduce LikePhys, a training-free method that evaluates intuitive physics in video diffusion models by distinguishing physically valid and impossible videos using the denoising objective as an ELBO-based likelihood surrogate on a curated dataset of valid-invalid pairs. By testing on our constructed benchmark of twelve scenarios spanning over four physics domains, we show that our evaluation metric, Plausibility Preference Error (PPE), demonstrates strong alignment with human preference, outperforming state-of-the-art evaluator baselines. We then systematically benchmark intuitive physics understanding in current video diffusion models. Our study further analyses how model design and inference settings affect intuitive physics understanding and highlights domain-specific capacity variations across physical laws. Empirical results show that, despite current models struggling with complex and chaotic dynamics, there is a clear trend of improvement in physics understanding as model capacity and inference settings scale.

Context-grounded hallucinations are cases where model outputs contain information not verifiable against the source text. We study the applicability of LLMs for localizing such hallucinations, as a more practical alternative to existing complex evaluation pipelines. In the absence of established benchmarks for meta-evaluation of hallucinations localization, we construct one tailored to LLMs, involving a challenging human annotation of over 1,000 examples. We complement the benchmark with an LLM-based evaluation protocol, verifying its quality in a human evaluation. Since existing representations of hallucinations limit the types of errors that can be expressed, we propose a new representation based on free-form textual descriptions, capturing the full range of possible errors. We conduct a comprehensive study, evaluating four large-scale LLMs, which highlights the benchmark's difficulty, as the best model achieves an F1 score of only 0.67. Through careful analysis, we offer insights into optimal prompting strategies for the task and identify the main factors that make it challenging for LLMs: (1) a tendency to incorrectly flag missing details as inconsistent, despite being instructed to check only facts in the output; and (2) difficulty with outputs containing factually correct information absent from the source - and thus not verifiable - due to alignment with the model's parametric knowledge.

The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is black{generally} better in the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a potential limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.

We introduce PerceptionRubrics, a rubric-based evaluation framework that addresses the gap between saturated benchmark scores and real-world brittleness. Shifting evaluation from holistic semantic matching to rigorous atomic auditing, PerceptionRubrics pairs 1,038 information-dense images with over 12,000 instance-specific rubrics. These criteria are derived from golden captions constructed via a novel Circular Peer-Review consensus pipeline and then distilled into a dual-stream system of Must-Right (essential facts) and Easy-Wrong (fine-grained details) rubrics. Crucially, PerceptionRubrics implements a Gated Scoring mechanism: unlike linear averages, failure on mandatory visual facts triggers sharp binary penalties. Extensive evaluation yields critical insights: (1) The Reliability Gap: models often verify fragmented elements correctly yet fail strict conjunctive constraints, exposing brittleness in dense domains; (2) Open-Closed Stratification: contrary to reasoning trends, we reveal a persistent 8% perception deficit between open-source and proprietary frontiers; and (3) Human-Aligned Rigor: our gated metrics substantially out-align conventional benchmarks, validating that strict perceptual fidelity is the prerequisite for reliable generation.

Understanding affect is central to anticipating human behavior, yet current egocentric vision benchmarks largely ignore the person's emotional states that shape their decisions and actions. Existing tasks in egocentric perception focus on physical activities, hand-object interactions, and attention modeling - assuming neutral affect and uniform personality. This limits the ability of vision systems to capture key internal drivers of behavior. In this paper, we present egoEMOTION, the first dataset that couples egocentric visual and physiological signals with dense self-reports of emotion and personality across controlled and real-world scenarios. Our dataset includes over 50 hours of recordings from 43 participants, captured using Meta's Project Aria glasses. Each session provides synchronized eye-tracking video, headmounted photoplethysmography, inertial motion data, and physiological baselines for reference. Participants completed emotion-elicitation tasks and naturalistic activities while self-reporting their affective state using the Circumplex Model and Mikels' Wheel as well as their personality via the Big Five model. We define three benchmark tasks: (1) continuous affect classification (valence, arousal, dominance); (2) discrete emotion classification; and (3) trait-level personality inference. We show that a classical learning-based method, as a simple baseline in real-world affect prediction, produces better estimates from signals captured on egocentric vision systems than processing physiological signals. Our dataset establishes emotion and personality as core dimensions in egocentric perception and opens new directions in affect-driven modeling of behavior, intent, and interaction.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have great potential for medical image understanding, particularly in Visual Report Generation (VRG) and Visual Question Answering (VQA), but they may generate hallucinated responses that contradict visual evidence, limiting clinical deployment. Although uncertainty-based hallucination detection methods are intuitive and effective, they are limited in medical VLMs. Specifically, Semantic Entropy (SE), effective in text-only LLMs, becomes less reliable in medical VLMs due to their overconfidence from strong language priors. To address this challenge, we propose UniVRSE, a Unified Vision-conditioned Response Semantic Entropy framework for hallucination detection in medical VLMs. UniVRSE strengthens visual guidance during uncertainty estimation by contrasting the semantic predictive distributions derived from an original image-text pair and a visually distorted counterpart, with higher entropy indicating hallucination risk. For VQA, UniVRSE works on the image-question pair, while for VRG, it decomposes the report into claims, generates verification questions, and applies vision-conditioned entropy estimation at the claim level. To evaluate hallucination detection, we propose a unified pipeline that generates responses on medical datasets and derives hallucination labels via factual consistency assessment. However, current evaluation methods rely on subjective criteria or modality-specific rules. To improve reliability, we introduce Alignment Ratio of Atomic Facts (ALFA), a novel method that quantifies fine-grained factual consistency. ALFA-derived labels provide ground truth for robust benchmarking. Experiments on six medical VQA/VRG datasets and three VLMs show UniVRSE significantly outperforms existing methods with strong cross-modal generalization.

Modern foundational Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and video world models have advanced significantly in mathematical, common-sense, and visual reasoning, but their grasp of the underlying physics remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks attempting to measure this matter rely on synthetic, Visual Question Answer templates or focus on perceptual video quality that is tangential to measuring how well the video abides by physical laws. To address this fragmentation, we introduce PhysicsMind, a unified benchmark with both real and simulation environments that evaluates law-consistent reasoning and generation over three canonical principles: Center of Mass, Lever Equilibrium, and Newton's First Law. PhysicsMind comprises two main tasks: i) VQA tasks, testing whether models can reason and determine physical quantities and values from images or short videos, and ii) Video Generation(VG) tasks, evaluating if predicted motion trajectories obey the same center-of-mass, torque, and inertial constraints as the ground truth. A broad range of recent models and video generation models is evaluated on PhysicsMind and found to rely on appearance heuristics while often violating basic mechanics. These gaps indicate that current scaling and training are still insufficient for robust physical understanding, underscoring PhysicsMind as a focused testbed for physics-aware multimodal models. Our data will be released upon acceptance.

Virtual try-on has garnered interest as a neural rendering benchmark task to evaluate complex object transfer and scene composition. Recent works in virtual clothing try-on feature a plethora of possible architectural and data representation choices. However, they present little clarity on quantifying the isolated visual effect of each choice, nor do they specify the hyperparameter details that are key to experimental reproduction. Our work, ShineOn, approaches the try-on task from a bottom-up approach and aims to shine light on the visual and quantitative effects of each experiment. We build a series of scientific experiments to isolate effective design choices in video synthesis for virtual clothing try-on. Specifically, we investigate the effect of different pose annotations, self-attention layer placement, and activation functions on the quantitative and qualitative performance of video virtual try-on. We find that DensePose annotations not only enhance face details but also decrease memory usage and training time. Next, we find that attention layers improve face and neck quality. Finally, we show that GELU and ReLU activation functions are the most effective in our experiments despite the appeal of newer activations such as Swish and Sine. We will release a well-organized code base, hyperparameters, and model checkpoints to support the reproducibility of our results. We expect our extensive experiments and code to greatly inform future design choices in video virtual try-on. Our code may be accessed at https://github.com/andrewjong/ShineOn-Virtual-Tryon.

Established channel effectiveness rankings primarily assess magnitude estimation accuracy in complete chart contexts, often neglecting other perceptual tasks such as discriminability, separability, and pop-out. To address this gap, we conducted crowdsourced experiments on seven core visual channels (position, length, tilt, area, curvature, luminance, and saturation) using primitive visual stimuli, a set of visual marks without chart-specific scaffolding to isolate channel-level variation. We evaluated these channels across four perceptual tasks (accuracy, discriminability, separability, and pop-out) and found that channel effectiveness is fundamentally multi-dimensional, with rankings shifting substantially across tasks. For instance, while spatial channels maintain an overall advantage, accuracy depends strongly on whether a fixed spatial anchor is available. Discriminability varies dramatically across channels and value ranges, a pattern we formalized with a novel Anchored Harmonic Weber model. Pairwise channel interactions are often strongly asymmetric. Finally, we identify a dissociation between estimation accuracy and preattentive detection: length shows only moderate detection effectiveness despite top-tier accuracy, while area achieves the highest detection rates despite poor quantitative accuracy, though the latter advantage may partly reflect stimulus-level cues. We synthesize these findings into a scenario-driven perspective for context-sensitive channel selection.

Despite impressive visual fidelity, modern video generative models frequently produce sequences that violate intuitive physical laws, such as objects floating, teleporting, or morphing in ways that defy causality. While humans can easily detect such implausibilities, there remains no robust method for quantitatively assessing physical realism in video. In this work, we explore whether Video-Language Models (VLMs) can be trained to serve as reliable judges of physical plausibility. We find that existing VLMs struggle to identify physics violations, exposing fundamental limitations in their temporal and causal reasoning. To address this, we introduce TRAVL, a fine-tuning recipe that combines a balanced training dataset with a trajectory-aware attention module to improve motion encoding and discrimination in VLMs. To evaluate physical reasoning more rigorously, we propose ImplausiBench, a benchmark of 300 videos (150 real, 150 generated) that removes linguistic biases and isolates visual-temporal understanding. Performance is reported both with gold-standard human judgments and stricter LLM-as-judge metrics. Together, TRAVL and ImplausiBench offer a unified framework for probing and improving physical plausibility in multimodal models, shedding light on a challenging and underexplored aspect of visual-temporal understanding.

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel object and their configurations. Developmental psychology has shown that such skills are acquired by infants from observations at a very early stage. In this paper, we contrast a more traditional approach of taking a model-based route with explicit 3D representations and physical simulation by an end-to-end approach that directly predicts stability and related quantities from appearance. We ask the question if and to what extent and quality such a skill can directly be acquired in a data-driven way bypassing the need for an explicit simulation. We present a learning-based approach based on simulated data that predicts stability of towers comprised of wooden blocks under different conditions and quantities related to the potential fall of the towers. The evaluation is carried out on synthetic data and compared to human judgments on the same stimuli.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved exceptional performance across diverse tasks, continually surpassing previous expectations regarding their capabilities. Nevertheless, their proficiency in perceiving emotions from images remains debated, with studies yielding divergent results in zero-shot scenarios. We argue that this inconsistency stems partly from constraints in existing evaluation methods, including the oversight of plausible responses, limited emotional taxonomies, neglect of contextual factors, and labor-intensive annotations. To facilitate customized visual emotion evaluation for MLLMs, we propose an Emotion Statement Judgment task that overcomes these constraints. Complementing this task, we devise an automated pipeline that efficiently constructs emotion-centric statements with minimal human effort. Through systematically evaluating prevailing MLLMs, our study showcases their stronger performance in emotion interpretation and context-based emotion judgment, while revealing relative limitations in comprehending perception subjectivity. When compared to humans, even top-performing MLLMs like GPT4o demonstrate remarkable performance gaps, underscoring key areas for future improvement. By developing a fundamental evaluation framework and conducting a comprehensive MLLM assessment, we hope this work contributes to advancing emotional intelligence in MLLMs. Project page: https://github.com/wdqqdw/MVEI.

Evaluating generative video models remains an open problem. Reference-based metrics such as Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) reward pixel fidelity over semantic correctness, while Frechet Video Distance (FVD) favors distributional textures over physical plausibility. Binary Visual Question Answering (VQA) based benchmarks like VBench~2.0 are prone to yes-bias and rely on low-resolution auditors that miss temporal failures. Moreover, their prompts target a single dimension at a time, multiplying the number of videos required while still not guaranteeing reliable results. WorldJen addresses these limitations directly. Binary VQA is replaced with Likert-scale questionnaires graded by a VLM that receives frames at native video resolution. Video generation costs are addressed by using adversarially curated prompts that are designed to exercise up to 16 quality dimensions simultaneously. The framework is built around two interlocking contributions. First, A blind human preference study is conducted, accumulating (2,696 pairwise annotations from 7 annotators with 100% pair coverage over 50 of the curated prompts times 6 state-of-the-art video models. A mean inter-annotator agreement of 66.9% is achieved and the study establishes a human ground-truth Bradley-Terry (BT) rating with a three-tier structure. Second, A VLM-as-a-judge evaluation engine using prompt-specific, dimension-specific Likert questionnaires (10 questions per dimension, 47,160 scored responses) judges the videos and reproduces the human-established three-tier BT rating structure independently. The VLM achieves a Spearman hatρ=1.000,~p=0.0014 that is interpreted as tier agreement with the human results. Six focused ablation studies validate the robustness of the VLM evaluation framework.

The rise of machine-learning systems that process sensory input has brought with it a rise in comparisons between human and machine perception. But such comparisons face a challenge: Whereas machine perception of some stimulus can often be probed through direct and explicit measures, much of human perceptual knowledge is latent, incomplete, or unavailable for explicit report. Here, we explore how this asymmetry can cause such comparisons to misestimate the overlap in human and machine perception. As a case study, we consider human perception of adversarial speech -- synthetic audio commands that are recognized as valid messages by automated speech-recognition systems but that human listeners reportedly hear as meaningless noise. In five experiments, we adapt task designs from the human psychophysics literature to show that even when subjects cannot freely transcribe such speech commands (the previous benchmark for human understanding), they often can demonstrate other forms of understanding, including discriminating adversarial speech from closely matched non-speech (Experiments 1--2), finishing common phrases begun in adversarial speech (Experiments 3--4), and solving simple math problems posed in adversarial speech (Experiment 5) -- even for stimuli previously described as unintelligible to human listeners. We recommend the adoption of such "sensitive tests" when comparing human and machine perception, and we discuss the broader consequences of such approaches for assessing the overlap between systems.

We introduce Sci-VBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating knowledge- and reasoning-intensive video generation across scientific domains. It contains 1,253 expert-annotated examples spanning 60 subjects across four core disciplines: Natural Science, Healthcare, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Engineering. Each example requires models to generate temporally rich videos that demand scientific reasoning and knowledge-grounded synthesis, going beyond surface-level visual plausibility. We further establish a rubric-based evaluation protocol. Our analysis shows that, under this protocol, both non-expert human evaluators and MLLM-as-Judge systems can achieve relatively high agreement with expert judgments, supporting reproducible evaluation at scale. We benchmark 16 frontier proprietary and open-source models and find that, while automatic perceptual-quality scores cluster tightly across systems, performance on Prompt Grounding and Scientific and Causal Correctness varies substantially, with a pronounced proprietary-open-source gap. These findings show that advances in visual realism have not yet translated into reliable modeling of scientific and causal dynamics.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in human-facing roles where personality perception is critical, yet existing benchmarks evaluate this capability solely on numerical Big Five score prediction, leaving open whether models truly perceive personality through behavioral understanding or merely prejudge through superficial pattern matching. We address this gap with three contributions. (i) A new task: we formalize Grounded Personality Reasoning (GPR), which requires MLLMs to anchor each Big Five rating in observable evidence through a chain of rating, reasoning, and grounding. (ii) A new dataset: we release MM-OCEAN (1,104 videos, 5,320 MCQs), produced by a multi-agent pipeline with human verification, with timestamped behavioral observations, evidence-grounded trait analyses, and seven categories of cue-grounding MCQs. (iii) Benchmark and analysis: we design a three-tier evaluation (rating, reasoning, grounding) plus four sample-level failure-mode metrics: Prejudice Rate (PR), Confabulation Rate (CR), Integration-failure Rate (IR), and Holistic-grounding Rate (HR), and benchmark 27 MLLMs (13 closed, 14 open). The analysis uncovers a striking Prejudice Gap: across the field, 51% of correct ratings are not grounded in retrieved cues, and the Holistic-Grounding Rate spans only 0-33.5%. These findings expose a disconnect between getting the right score and reasoning for the right reason, charting a roadmap for grounded social cognition in MLLMs.

Evaluating user interface (UI) design effectiveness extends beyond aesthetics to influencing user behavior, a principle central to Design Persuasiveness. A/B testing is the predominant method for determining which UI variations drive higher user engagement, but it is costly and time-consuming. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can process automated UI analysis, current approaches focus on isolated design attributes rather than comparative persuasiveness-the key factor in optimizing user interactions. To address this, we introduce WiserUI-Bench, a benchmark designed for Pairwise UI Design Persuasiveness Assessment task, featuring 300 real-world UI image pairs labeled with A/B test results and expert rationales. Additionally, we propose G-FOCUS, a novel inference-time reasoning strategy that enhances VLM-based persuasiveness assessment by reducing position bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Experimental results show that G-FOCUS surpasses existing inference strategies in consistency and accuracy for pairwise UI evaluation. Through promoting VLM-driven evaluation of UI persuasiveness, our work offers an approach to complement A/B testing, propelling progress in scalable UI preference modeling and design optimization. Code and data will be released publicly.

Evaluations of image compression performance which include human preferences have generally found that naive distortion functions such as MSE are insufficiently aligned to human perception. In order to align compression models to human perception, prior work has employed differentiable perceptual losses consisting of neural networks calibrated on large-scale datasets of human psycho-visual judgments. We show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) can replicate binary human two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) judgments zero-shot when asked to reason about the differences between pairs of images. Motivated to exploit the powerful zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs, we propose Vision-Language Models for Image Compression (VLIC), a diffusion-based image compression system designed to be post-trained with binary VLM judgments. VLIC leverages existing techniques for diffusion model post-training with preferences, rather than distilling the VLM judgments into a separate perceptual loss network. We show that calibrating this system on VLM judgments produces competitive or state-of-the-art performance on human-aligned visual compression depending on the dataset, according to perceptual metrics and large-scale user studies. We additionally conduct an extensive analysis of the VLM-based reward design and training procedure and share important insights. More visuals are available at https://kylesargent.github.io/vlic

The explosion of visual content available online underscores the requirement for an accurate machine assessor to robustly evaluate scores across diverse types of visual contents. While recent studies have demonstrated the exceptional potentials of large multi-modality models (LMMs) on a wide range of related fields, in this work, we explore how to teach them for visual rating aligned with human opinions. Observing that human raters only learn and judge discrete text-defined levels in subjective studies, we propose to emulate this subjective process and teach LMMs with text-defined rating levels instead of scores. The proposed Q-Align achieves state-of-the-art performance on image quality assessment (IQA), image aesthetic assessment (IAA), as well as video quality assessment (VQA) tasks under the original LMM structure. With the syllabus, we further unify the three tasks into one model, termed the OneAlign. In our experiments, we demonstrate the advantage of the discrete-level-based syllabus over direct-score-based variants for LMMs. Our code and the pre-trained weights are released at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Align.

Human subjective evaluation is the gold standard to evaluate speech quality optimized for human perception. Perceptual objective metrics serve as a proxy for subjective scores. The conventional and widely used metrics require a reference clean speech signal, which is unavailable in real recordings. The no-reference approaches correlate poorly with human ratings and are not widely adopted in the research community. One of the biggest use cases of these perceptual objective metrics is to evaluate noise suppression algorithms. This paper introduces a multi-stage self-teaching based perceptual objective metric that is designed to evaluate noise suppressors. The proposed method generalizes well in challenging test conditions with a high correlation to human ratings.

Electroencephalography (EEG) analysis extends beyond assigning predefined labels to recordings; it requires workflows connecting natural-language instructions, signal processing, quantitative evidence, and scientific interpretation. We term this capability comprehensive EEG understanding. Existing evaluations, however, primarily target isolated decoding tasks or system-specific demonstrations, leaving the competence of large language models (LLMs) insufficiently quantified. We introduce , a unified benchmark for comprehensive, instruction-conditioned EEG understanding. It comprises four subsets---Foundational Analysis, Sleep Assessment, Neurocognitive Assessment, and Physiological Integration---covering 17 datasets, tasks, and over real-data instances. Given an instruction and EEG recordings with optional physiological signals, a system must perform the analysis and produce a scientifically grounded report and, when required, artifacts. Outputs are assessed through numerical, categorical, set, sequence, semantic, and artifact validation. We evaluate representative LLMs across more than 100K executions under two paradigms: autonomous code execution with CodeAct and structured agentic analysis with BrainAgent. Results vary substantially across models, subsets, difficulty levels, and execution paradigms, showing that EEG competence depends on the model and its operationalization. provides a reproducible testbed for advancing LLM-based EEG understanding. The code and benchmark will be released soon, with evaluation results continuously updated.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly thought to recognise objects by learning increasingly complex representations of object shapes. Some recent studies suggest a more important role of image textures. We here put these conflicting hypotheses to a quantitative test by evaluating CNNs and human observers on images with a texture-shape cue conflict. We show that ImageNet-trained CNNs are strongly biased towards recognising textures rather than shapes, which is in stark contrast to human behavioural evidence and reveals fundamentally different classification strategies. We then demonstrate that the same standard architecture (ResNet-50) that learns a texture-based representation on ImageNet is able to learn a shape-based representation instead when trained on "Stylized-ImageNet", a stylized version of ImageNet. This provides a much better fit for human behavioural performance in our well-controlled psychophysical lab setting (nine experiments totalling 48,560 psychophysical trials across 97 observers) and comes with a number of unexpected emergent benefits such as improved object detection performance and previously unseen robustness towards a wide range of image distortions, highlighting advantages of a shape-based representation.

Automatic evaluation metrics are crucial for advancing sign language translation (SLT). Current SLT evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, are only text-based, and it remains unclear to what extent text-based metrics can reliably capture the quality of SLT outputs. To address this gap, we investigate the limitations of text-based SLT evaluation metrics by analyzing six metrics, including BLEU, chrF, and ROUGE, as well as BLEURT on the one hand, and large language model (LLM)-based evaluators such as G-Eval and GEMBA zero-shot direct assessment on the other hand. Specifically, we assess the consistency and robustness of these metrics under three controlled conditions: paraphrasing, hallucinations in model outputs, and variations in sentence length. Our analysis highlights the limitations of lexical overlap metrics and demonstrates that while LLM-based evaluators better capture semantic equivalence often missed by conventional metrics, they can also exhibit bias toward LLM-paraphrased translations. Moreover, although all metrics are able to detect hallucinations, BLEU tends to be overly sensitive, whereas BLEURT and LLM-based evaluators are comparatively lenient toward subtle cases. This motivates the need for multimodal evaluation frameworks that extend beyond text-based metrics to enable a more holistic assessment of SLT outputs.

Evaluating generative foundation models on open-ended multimodal understanding (MMU) and generation (MMG) tasks across diverse modalities (e.g., images, audio, video) poses significant challenges due to the complexity of cross-modal interactions. To this end, the idea of utilizing Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) as automated judges has emerged, with encouraging results in assessing vision-language understanding tasks. Moving further, this paper extends MLLM-as-a-Judge across modalities to a unified manner by introducing two benchmarks, TaskAnything and JudgeAnything, to respectively evaluate the overall performance and judging capabilities of MLLMs across any-to-any modality tasks. Specifically, TaskAnything evaluates the MMU and MMG capabilities across 15 any-to-any modality categories, employing 1,500 queries curated from well-established benchmarks. Furthermore, JudgeAnything evaluates the judging capabilities of 5 advanced (e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash) from the perspectives of Pair Comparison and Score Evaluation, providing a standardized testbed that incorporates human judgments and detailed rubrics. Our extensive experiments reveal that while these MLLMs show promise in assessing MMU (i.e., achieving an average of 66.55% in Pair Comparison setting and 42.79% in Score Evaluation setting), they encounter significant challenges with MMG tasks (i.e., averaging only 53.37% in Pair Comparison setting and 30.05% in Score Evaluation setting), exposing cross-modality biases and hallucination issues. To address this, we present OmniArena, an automated platform for evaluating omni-models and multimodal reward models. Our work highlights the need for fairer evaluation protocols and stronger alignment with human preferences. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://urrealhero.github.io/judgeanythingweb/.

Rubric-based evaluation has become a prevailing paradigm for evaluating instruction following in large language models (LLMs). Despite its widespread use, the reliability of these rubric-level evaluations remains unclear, calling for meta-evaluation. However, prior meta-evaluation efforts largely focus on the response level, failing to assess the fine-grained judgment accuracy that rubric-based evaluation relies on. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricEval. Our benchmark features: (1) the first rubric-level meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction following, (2) diverse instructions and responses spanning multiple categories and model sources, and (3) a substantial set of 3,486 quality-controlled instances, along with Easy/Hard subsets that better differentiates judge performance. Our experiments reveal that rubric-level judging remains far from solved: even GPT-4o, a widely adopted judge in instruction-following benchmarks, achieves only 55.97% on Hard subset. Considering evaluation paradigm, rubric-level evaluation outperforms checklist-level, explicit reasoning improves accuracy, and both together reduce inter-judge variance. Through our established rubric taxonomy, we further identify common failure modes and offer actionable insights for reliable instruction-following evaluation.

Generative diffusion models are developing rapidly and attracting increasing attention due to their wide range of applications. Image-to-Video (I2V) generation has become a major focus in the field of video synthesis. However, existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on aspects such as video quality and temporal consistency, while largely overlooking the model's ability to understand the semantics of specific subjects in the input image or to ensure that the generated video aligns with physical laws and human commonsense. To address this gap, we propose UI2V-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating I2V models with a focus on semantic understanding and reasoning. It introduces four primary evaluation dimensions: spatial understanding, attribute binding, category understanding, and reasoning. To assess these dimensions, we design two evaluation methods based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): an instance-level pipeline for fine-grained semantic understanding, and a feedback-based reasoning pipeline that enables step-by-step causal assessment for more accurate evaluation. UI2V-Bench includes approximately 500 carefully constructed text-image pairs and evaluates a range of both open source and closed-source I2V models across all defined dimensions. We further incorporate human evaluations, which show strong alignment with the proposed MLLM-based metrics. Overall, UI2V-Bench fills a critical gap in I2V evaluation by emphasizing semantic comprehension and reasoning ability, offering a robust framework and dataset to support future research and model development in the field.

Vision-language models (VLMs) show promise as tools for inferring affect from visual stimuli at scale; it is not yet clear how closely their outputs align with human affective ratings. We benchmarked nine VLMs, ranging from state-of-the-art proprietary models to open-source models, on three psycho-metrically validated affective image datasets: the International Affective Picture System, the Nencki Affective Picture System, and the Library of AI-Generated Affective Images. The models performed two tasks in the zero-shot setting: (i) top-emotion classification (selecting the strongest discrete emotion elicited by an image) and (ii) continuous prediction of human ratings on 1-7/9 Likert scales for discrete emotion categories and affective dimensions. We also evaluated the impact of rater-conditioned prompting on the LAI-GAI dataset using de-identified participant metadata. The results show good performance in discrete emotion classification, with accuracies typically ranging from 60% to 80% on six-emotion labels and from 60% to 75% on a more challenging 12-category task. The predictions of anger and surprise had the lowest accuracy in all datasets. For continuous rating prediction, models showed moderate to strong alignment with humans (r > 0.75) but also exhibited consistent biases, notably weaker performance on arousal, and a tendency to overestimate response strength. Rater-conditioned prompting resulted in only small, inconsistent changes in predictions. Overall, VLMs capture broad affective trends but lack the nuance found in validated psychological ratings, highlighting their potential and current limitations for affective computing and mental health-related applications.

Rubric-based reward models (RMs) evaluate responses against explicit criteria. However, existing methods often derive criteria from observed response candidates, introducing response-induced bias that may limit rubric generalizability. Their judges also struggle with mechanical constraints when relying on reading alone, and commonly used pairwise judges provide only relative preferences, complicating their direct use for policy optimization. We propose ReVeR, a pointwise rubric RM that derives hard rules and graded principles by reasoning about the instruction alone and evaluates responses independently through tool-augmented judging. Both components are trained through label-blind distillation, in which preference labels only filter a teacher's outputs, yielding ReVeR-Traces, a large-scale dataset of rubric-reasoning and judging trajectories. Experiments demonstrate that ReVeR outperforms pairwise rubric RMs in average preference accuracy, most clearly on instruction following, as well as in test-time scaling and downstream policy optimization. We further find that generator RL improves preference accuracy while reducing rubric fidelity, and that higher preference accuracy does not necessarily translate into better downstream policies. These findings highlight that rubric fidelity, preference accuracy, and downstream utility are distinct properties, shedding light on future RM research.

Image editing has achieved remarkable progress recently. Modern editing models could already follow complex instructions to manipulate the original content. However, beyond completing the editing instructions, the accompanying physical effects are the key to the generation realism. For example, removing an object should also remove its shadow, reflections, and interactions with nearby objects. Unfortunately, existing models and benchmarks mainly focus on instruction completion but overlook these physical effects. So, at this moment, how far are we from physically realistic image editing? To answer this, we introduce PICABench, which systematically evaluates physical realism across eight sub-dimension (spanning optics, mechanics, and state transitions) for most of the common editing operations (add, remove, attribute change, etc). We further propose the PICAEval, a reliable evaluation protocol that uses VLM-as-a-judge with per-case, region-level human annotations and questions. Beyond benchmarking, we also explore effective solutions by learning physics from videos and construct a training dataset PICA-100K. After evaluating most of the mainstream models, we observe that physical realism remains a challenging problem with large rooms to explore. We hope that our benchmark and proposed solutions can serve as a foundation for future work moving from naive content editing toward physically consistent realism.

Recent advancements in multimodal reward models (RMs) have significantly propelled the development of visual generation. Existing frameworks typically adopt Bradley-Terry-style preference modeling or leverage generative VLMs as judges, and subsequently optimize visual generation models via reinforcement learning. However, current RMs suffer from inherent limitations: they often follow a one-size-fits-all paradigm that assumes a monolithic preference distribution or relies on fixed evaluation rubrics. As a result, they are insensitive to content-specific visual cues, leading to systematic misalignment with subjective and context-dependent human preferences. To this end, inspired by human assessment, we propose UnifiedReward-Flex, a unified personalized reward model for vision generation that couples reward modeling with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning. Specifically, given a prompt and the generated visual content, it first interprets the semantic intent and grounds on visual evidence, then dynamically constructs a hierarchical assessment by instantiating fine-grained criteria under both predefined and self-generated high-level dimensions. Our training pipeline follows a two-stage process: (1) we first distill structured, high-quality reasoning traces from advanced closed-source VLMs to bootstrap SFT, equipping the model with flexible and context-adaptive reasoning behaviors; (2) we then perform direct preference optimization (DPO) on carefully curated preference pairs to further strengthen reasoning fidelity and discriminative alignment. To validate the effectiveness, we integrate UnifiedReward-Flex into the GRPO framework for image and video synthesis, and extensive results demonstrate its superiority.

Text-to-video (T2V) models like Sora have made significant strides in visualizing complex prompts, which is increasingly viewed as a promising path towards constructing the universal world simulator. Cognitive psychologists believe that the foundation for achieving this goal is the ability to understand intuitive physics. However, the capacity of these models to accurately represent intuitive physics remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyGenBench, a comprehensive Physics Generation Benchmark designed to evaluate physical commonsense correctness in T2V generation. PhyGenBench comprises 160 carefully crafted prompts across 27 distinct physical laws, spanning four fundamental domains, which could comprehensively assesses models' understanding of physical commonsense. Alongside PhyGenBench, we propose a novel evaluation framework called PhyGenEval. This framework employs a hierarchical evaluation structure utilizing appropriate advanced vision-language models and large language models to assess physical commonsense. Through PhyGenBench and PhyGenEval, we can conduct large-scale automated assessments of T2V models' understanding of physical commonsense, which align closely with human feedback. Our evaluation results and in-depth analysis demonstrate that current models struggle to generate videos that comply with physical commonsense. Moreover, simply scaling up models or employing prompt engineering techniques is insufficient to fully address the challenges presented by PhyGenBench (e.g., dynamic scenarios). We hope this study will inspire the community to prioritize the learning of physical commonsense in these models beyond entertainment applications. We will release the data and codes at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PhyGenBench

Reference-based image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aim to reflect how humans perceive the perceptual distance between a pair of images. To learn how the human visual system (HVS) operates, recent reference-based IQA metrics heavily rely on human-annotated data. Mean opinion score (MOS)-based pointwise scoring, which assigns a scalar quality value per image, is preferable for annotation but is prohibitively expensive to collect at scale and is known to be noisy due to inconsistent human judgments. As an alternative, two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) pairwise labels have gained popularity due to their reliability and efficiency, but they capture only relative comparisons between pairs. In this paper, we propose a fully automated data generation pipeline that generates pointwise perceptual distance labels between image pairs without any human annotation. Our approach exploits the generative dynamics of diffusion models as a perceptual distance proxy, where the coarse structure of an image is generated in the early timesteps and the fine details are generated in the later timesteps. Images that fork early in the generation process share only coarse structure and are perceptually far apart; images that fork late differ only in fine detail. We demonstrate that the diffusion trajectory aligns well with the human visual system, and use this forking moment, FoMo, as a reference-grounded distance label to supervise the training of a reference-based IQA metric. The pointwise labels, which support universal comparison between arbitrary image pairs, enable an information-rich training objective. Extensive experiments across diverse backbone architectures confirm the effectiveness of our generation pipeline, outperforming human-annotated datasets in multiple benchmarks.

Modern video generative models produce visually impressive results, yet frequently violate basic physical principles. We propose Proprio, a training-free framework that enables a frozen video generator to assess and improve the physical plausibility of its own outputs. Inspired by proprioception, the biological sense of one's own movement, Proprio treats the model's flow residual under controlled latent perturbations as a self-scoring signal. Samples that are better explained by the generator's learned dynamics induce smaller and more stable residuals. We aggregate this signal across timesteps and perturbations, focus it on motion-relevant regions with a dynamic spatiotemporal mask, and use it for best-of-N search, gradient-based self-refinement, or both. Across text-to-video and image-to-video benchmarks, Proprio consistently improves physical plausibility, outperforming VLM-based scoring, and external world-model baselines in several settings. With TurboWan2.2, Proprio improves Physics-IQ from 32.2 to 37.5 (+16.5%) and VideoPhy2-hard physical commonsense from 45.6 to 55.0 (+20.6%). Human evaluation further shows that raters prefer Proprio-selected or refined videos for physical plausibility in roughly two-thirds of comparisons. These results suggest that frozen video generators contain actionable internal signals for evaluating and improving the physical plausibility of their own outputs.

Verbal confidence elicitation is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from LLMs. We tested whether seven instruction-tuned open-weight models (3-9B parameters, four families) produce verbalised confidence that meets minimal validity criteria for item-level Type-2 discrimination under minimal numeric elicitation with greedy decoding. In a pre-registered study (OSF: osf.io/azbvx), 524 TriviaQA items were administered under numeric (0-100) and categorical (10-class) elicitation to eight models at Q5_K_M quantisation on consumer hardware, yielding 8,384 deterministic trials. A psychometric validity screen was applied to each model-format cell. All seven instruct models were classified Invalid on numeric confidence (H2 confirmed, 7/7 vs. predicted >=4/7), with a mean ceiling rate of 91.7% (H1 confirmed). Categorical elicitation did not rescue validity. Instead, it disrupted task performance in six of seven models, producing accuracy below 5% (H4 not confirmed). Token-level logprobability did not usefully predict verbalised confidence under the observed variance regime (H5 confirmed, mean cross-validated R^2 < 0.01). Within the reasoning-distilled model, reasoning-trace length showed a strong negative partial correlation with confidence (rho = -0.36, p < .001), consistent with the Reasoning Contamination Effect. These results do not imply that internal uncertainty representations are absent. They show that minimal verbal elicitation fails to preserve internal signals at the output interface in this model-size regime. Psychometric screening should precede any downstream use of such signals.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where reliable visual grounding carries operational consequences, yet their behavior under progressively coercive prompt phrasing remains undercharacterized. Existing hallucination benchmarks predominantly rely on neutral prompts and binary detection, leaving open how both the incidence and the intensity of fabrication respond to graded linguistic pressure across structurally distinct task types. We present Ghost-100, a procedurally constructed benchmark of 800 synthetically generated images spanning eight categories across three task families: text-illegibility, time-reading, and object-absence, each designed under a negative-ground-truth principle that guarantees the queried target is absent, illegible, or indeterminate by construction. Every image is paired with five prompts drawn from a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, holding the image and task identity fixed while varying only directive force, so that tone is isolated as the sole independent variable. We adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol: a rule-based H-Rate measuring the proportion of responses in which a model crosses from grounded refusal into unsupported positive commitment, and a GPT-4o-mini-judged H-Score on a 1-5 scale characterizing the confidence and specificity of fabrication once it occurs. We additionally release a three-stage automated validation workflow, which retrospectively confirms 717 of 800 images as strictly compliant. Evaluating nine open-weight VLMs, we find that H-Rate and H-Score dissociate substantially across model families, reading-style and presence-detection subsets respond to prompt pressure in qualitatively different ways, and several models exhibit non-monotonic sensitivity peaking at intermediate tone levels: patterns that aggregate metrics obscure.

The furnishing of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has led to the emergence of numerous benchmark studies, particularly those evaluating their perception and understanding capabilities. Among these, understanding image-evoked emotions aims to enhance MLLMs' empathy, with significant applications such as human-machine interaction and advertising recommendations. However, current evaluations of this MLLM capability remain coarse-grained, and a systematic and comprehensive assessment is still lacking. To this end, we introduce EEmo-Bench, a novel benchmark dedicated to the analysis of the evoked emotions in images across diverse content categories. Our core contributions include: 1) Regarding the diversity of the evoked emotions, we adopt an emotion ranking strategy and employ the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) as emotional attributes for emotional assessment. In line with this methodology, 1,960 images are collected and manually annotated. 2) We design four tasks to evaluate MLLMs' ability to capture the evoked emotions by single images and their associated attributes: Perception, Ranking, Description, and Assessment. Additionally, image-pairwise analysis is introduced to investigate the model's proficiency in performing joint and comparative analysis. In total, we collect 6,773 question-answer pairs and perform a thorough assessment on 19 commonly-used MLLMs. The results indicate that while some proprietary and large-scale open-source MLLMs achieve promising overall performance, the analytical capabilities in certain evaluation dimensions remain suboptimal. Our EEmo-Bench paves the path for further research aimed at enhancing the comprehensive perceiving and understanding capabilities of MLLMs concerning image-evoked emotions, which is crucial for machine-centric emotion perception and understanding.

Recent advancements in predictive models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in predicting the future state of objects and scenes. However, the lack of categorization based on inherent characteristics continues to hinder the progress of predictive model development. Additionally, existing benchmarks are unable to effectively evaluate higher-capability, highly embodied predictive models from an embodied perspective. In this work, we classify the functionalities of predictive models into a hierarchy and take the first step in evaluating World Simulators by proposing a dual evaluation framework called WorldSimBench. WorldSimBench includes Explicit Perceptual Evaluation and Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, encompassing human preference assessments from the visual perspective and action-level evaluations in embodied tasks, covering three representative embodied scenarios: Open-Ended Embodied Environment, Autonomous, Driving, and Robot Manipulation. In the Explicit Perceptual Evaluation, we introduce the HF-Embodied Dataset, a video assessment dataset based on fine-grained human feedback, which we use to train a Human Preference Evaluator that aligns with human perception and explicitly assesses the visual fidelity of World Simulators. In the Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, we assess the video-action consistency of World Simulators by evaluating whether the generated situation-aware video can be accurately translated into the correct control signals in dynamic environments. Our comprehensive evaluation offers key insights that can drive further innovation in video generation models, positioning World Simulators as a pivotal advancement toward embodied artificial intelligence.

Multi-modality foundation models, as represented by GPT-4V, have brought a new paradigm for low-level visual perception and understanding tasks, that can respond to a broad range of natural human instructions in a model. While existing foundation models have shown exciting potentials on low-level visual tasks, their related abilities are still preliminary and need to be improved. In order to enhance these models, we conduct a large-scale subjective experiment collecting a vast number of real human feedbacks on low-level vision. Each feedback follows a pathway that starts with a detailed description on the low-level visual appearance (*e.g. clarity, color, brightness* of an image, and ends with an overall conclusion, with an average length of 45 words. The constructed **Q-Pathway** dataset includes 58K detailed human feedbacks on 18,973 images with diverse low-level appearance. Moreover, to enable foundation models to robustly respond to diverse types of questions, we design a GPT-participated conversion to process these feedbacks into diverse-format 200K instruction-response pairs. Experimental results indicate that the **Q-Instruct** consistently elevates low-level perception and understanding abilities across several foundational models. We anticipate that our datasets can pave the way for a future that general intelligence can perceive, understand low-level visual appearance and evaluate visual quality like a human. Our dataset, model zoo, and demo is published at: https://q-future.github.io/Q-Instruct.

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance rapidly, rigorous evaluation has become essential, providing further guidance for their development. In this work, we focus on a unified and robust evaluation of vision perception abilities, the foundational skill of MLLMs. We find that existing perception benchmarks, each focusing on different question types, domains, and evaluation metrics, introduce significant evaluation variance, complicating comprehensive assessments of perception abilities when relying on any single benchmark. To address this, we introduce AbilityLens, a unified benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs across six key perception abilities, focusing on both accuracy and stability, with each ability encompassing diverse question types, domains, and metrics. With the assistance of AbilityLens, we: (1) identify the strengths and weaknesses of current models, highlighting stability patterns and revealing a notable performance gap between open-source and closed-source models; (2) introduce an online evaluation mode, which uncovers interesting ability conflict and early convergence phenomena during MLLM training; and (3) design a simple ability-specific model merging method that combines the best ability checkpoint from early training stages, effectively mitigating performance decline due to ability conflict. The benchmark and online leaderboard will be released soon.

Qualitative comparison figures are central evidence in computer vision papers, and vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to judge them. Yet existing benchmarks score only scalar quality or overall preference, so a judge can be rewarded for picking the preferred image for the wrong visual reason. We introduce VisionQ, the first benchmark built from peer-reviewed CV comparison figures that grounds every judgment in a named visual criterion: each question states the criterion, and a judge is credited only when it selects the output the authors identify as best on that criterion. We call this task criterion-conditioned visual discrimination. VisionQ comprises (1) a corpus of 1,409 CVPR and ICCV papers with 1,800+ validated comparison figures and 3,911 hand-annotated data points linking method crops to author-stated visual claims; (2) a six-axis, 51-leaf taxonomy of the visual criteria behind qualitative judgment; (3) a criterion-conditioned evaluation protocol that hides method names, captions, and paper identity and reports accuracy per criterion; and (4) VisionQ-Judge, a DPO-tuned Gemma-4-E4B judge trained on symmetric evidence pairs, which reduces last-option predictions by 7.0pp and improves accuracy by 2.5pp on a held-out test set. Evaluating 20 open- and closed-source VLM judges, we find that the strongest reach only 63.1% accuracy (chance 32.2%) and that reliability varies sharply across criteria. Code: https://github.com/ReML-AI/visionq. Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/visionq-anon-2026/VisionQ-1k.

Assessing long-form responses generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is challenging. It not only requires checking whether the VLM follows the given instruction but also verifying whether the text output is properly grounded on the given image. Inspired by the recent approach of evaluating LMs with LMs, in this work, we propose to evaluate VLMs with VLMs. For this purpose, we present a new feedback dataset called the Perception Collection, encompassing 15K customized score rubrics that users might care about during assessment. Using the Perception Collection, we train Prometheus-Vision, the first open-source VLM evaluator model that can understand the user-defined score criteria during evaluation. Prometheus-Vision shows the highest Pearson correlation with human evaluators and GPT-4V among open-source models, showing its effectiveness for transparent and accessible evaluation of VLMs. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/kaistAI/prometheus-vision

Language model (LM) benchmarking faces several challenges: comprehensive evaluations are costly, benchmarks often fail to measure the intended capabilities, and evaluation quality can degrade due to labeling errors and benchmark saturation. Although various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these issues, they tend to address individual aspects in isolation, neglecting broader questions about overall evaluation quality. Here, we introduce Fluid Benchmarking, a new evaluation approach that advances LM benchmarking across multiple dimensions. Inspired by psychometrics, Fluid Benchmarking is based on the insight that the relative value of benchmark items depends on an LM's capability level, suggesting that evaluation should adapt to each LM. Methodologically, Fluid Benchmarking estimates an item response model based on existing LM evaluation results and uses the inferred quantities to select evaluation items dynamically, similar to computerized adaptive testing in education. In our experiments, we compare Fluid Benchmarking against the common practice of random item sampling as well as more sophisticated baselines, including alternative methods grounded in item response theory. We examine four dimensions -- efficiency, validity, variance, and saturation -- and find that Fluid Benchmarking achieves superior performance in all of them (e.g., higher validity and less variance on MMLU with fifty times fewer items). Our analysis shows that the two components of Fluid Benchmarking have distinct effects: item response theory, used to map performance into a latent ability space, increases validity, while dynamic item selection reduces variance. Overall, our results suggest that LM benchmarking can be substantially improved by moving beyond static evaluation.

Humans continuously infer the states, goals, and behaviors of others by perceiving their surroundings in dynamic, real-world social interactions. However, most Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks only evaluate static, text-based scenarios, which have a significant gap compared to real interactions. We propose the SoMi-ToM benchmark, designed to evaluate multi-perspective ToM in embodied multi-agent complex social interactions. This benchmark is based on rich multimodal interaction data generated by the interaction environment SoMi, covering diverse crafting goals and social relationships. Our framework supports multi-level evaluation: (1) first-person evaluation provides multimodal (visual, dialogue, action, etc.) input from a first-person perspective during a task for real-time state inference, (2) third-person evaluation provides complete third-person perspective video and text records after a task for goal and behavior inference. This evaluation method allows for a more comprehensive examination of a model's ToM capabilities from both the subjective immediate experience and the objective global observation. We constructed a challenging dataset containing 35 third-person perspective videos, 363 first-person perspective images, and 1225 expert-annotated multiple-choice questions (three options). On this dataset, we systematically evaluated the performance of human subjects and several state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs). The results show that LVLMs perform significantly worse than humans on SoMi-ToM: the average accuracy gap between humans and models is 40.1% in first-person evaluation and 26.4% in third-person evaluation. This indicates that future LVLMs need to further improve their ToM capabilities in embodied, complex social interactions.

Humans demonstrate remarkable abilities to predict physical events in complex scenes. Two classes of models for physical scene understanding have recently been proposed: "Intuitive Physics Engines", or IPEs, which posit that people make predictions by running approximate probabilistic simulations in causal mental models similar in nature to video-game physics engines, and memory-based models, which make judgments based on analogies to stored experiences of previously encountered scenes and physical outcomes. Versions of the latter have recently been instantiated in convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. Here we report four experiments that, to our knowledge, are the first rigorous comparisons of simulation-based and CNN-based models, where both approaches are concretely instantiated in algorithms that can run on raw image inputs and produce as outputs physical judgments such as whether a stack of blocks will fall. Both approaches can achieve super-human accuracy levels and can quantitatively predict human judgments to a similar degree, but only the simulation-based models generalize to novel situations in ways that people do, and are qualitatively consistent with systematic perceptual illusions and judgment asymmetries that people show.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as proxies for human labelers in both training (Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback) and large-scale response evaluation (LLM-as-a-judge). Alignment and evaluation are critical components in the development of reliable LLMs, and the choice of feedback protocol plays a central role in both but remains understudied. In this work, we show that the choice of feedback protocol for evaluation (absolute scores versus relative preferences) can significantly affect evaluation reliability and induce systematic biases. In the context of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, we show that pairwise protocols are more vulnerable to distracted evaluation. Generator models can exploit spurious attributes (or distractor features) favored by the LLM judge, resulting in inflated scores for lower-quality outputs. We find that absolute scoring is more robust to such manipulation, producing judgments that better reflect response quality and are less influenced by distractor features. Our results demonstrate that generator models can flip preferences by embedding distractor features, skewing LLM-as-a-judge comparisons and leading to inaccurate conclusions about model quality in benchmark evaluations. Pairwise preferences flip in about 35% of the cases, compared to only 9% for absolute scores. We offer recommendations for choosing feedback protocols based on dataset characteristics and evaluation objectives.

The intersection of physics-based vision and deep learning presents an exciting frontier for advancing computer vision technologies. By leveraging the principles of physics to inform and enhance deep learning models, we can develop more robust and accurate vision systems. Physics-based vision aims to invert the processes to recover scene properties such as shape, reflectance, light distribution, and medium properties from images. In recent years, deep learning has shown promising improvements for various vision tasks, and when combined with physics-based vision, these approaches can enhance the robustness and accuracy of vision systems. This technical report summarizes the outcomes of the Physics-Based Vision Meets Deep Learning (PBDL) 2024 challenge, held in CVPR 2024 workshop. The challenge consisted of eight tracks, focusing on Low-Light Enhancement and Detection as well as High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging. This report details the objectives, methodologies, and results of each track, highlighting the top-performing solutions and their innovative approaches.

Video Multimodal Large Language Models (VideoMLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in both Video-to-Text and Text-to-Video tasks. However, they often suffer fro hallucinations, generating content that contradicts the visual input. Existing evaluation methods are limited to one task (e.g., V2T) and also fail to assess hallucinations in open-ended, free-form responses. To address this gap, we propose FIFA, a unified FaIthFulness evAluation framework that extracts comprehensive descriptive facts, models their semantic dependencies via a Spatio-Temporal Semantic Dependency Graph, and verifies them using VideoQA models. We further introduce Post-Correction, a tool-based correction framework that revises hallucinated content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FIFA aligns more closely with human judgment than existing evaluation methods, and that Post-Correction effectively improves factual consistency in both text and video generation.

EEG-to-image evaluation should distinguish visual fidelity from recoverable meaning. Yet EEG-derived reconstructions are blurry, distorted, and low-detail, causing SSIM, LPIPS, and CLIP to penalize semantically recoverable outputs or reward plausible but incorrect ones. We analyze 6,855 ground-truth/reconstruction pairs from ATM, ENIGMA, BrainVis, and DreamDiffusion using semantic probes, caption harshness and blind-spot rates, and controlled degradations. Pixel metrics show near-zero correlation with semantic consistency, while representation metrics conflate perceptual and semantic errors. We therefore introduce a BCI-aware framework in which four VLMs assess image pairs through structured questions, producing Tolerant Perceptual Alignment Scores (T-PAS) and Tolerant Semantic Alignment Scores (T-SAS). Their consensus is distilled into the BCI-Coherence Score (BCS), a compact evaluator achieving a T-PAS MAE of 0.079 (r = 0.700) and a T-SAS MAE of 0.082 (r = 0.850) on our data. Human validation shows highly reliable joint coherence judgments, with Cohen's kappa = 0.882 +/- 0.174 and Krippendorff's alpha = 0.882, supporting perceptual-semantic recoverability over generic visual similarity. Code and resources are available at https://sukt03.github.io/BCS/.

As NLP evaluation shifts from static benchmarks to multi-turn interactive settings, LLM-based simulators have become widely used as user proxies, serving two roles: generating user turns and providing evaluation signals. Yet, these simulations are frequently assumed to be faithful to real human behaviors, often without rigorous verification. We formalize the Sim2Real gap in user simulation and present the first study running the full τ-bench protocol with real humans (451 participants, 165 tasks), benchmarking 31 LLM simulators across proprietary, open-source, and specialized families using the User-Sim Index (USI), a metric we introduce to quantify how well LLM simulators resemble real user interactive behaviors and feedback. Behaviorally, LLM simulators are excessively cooperative, stylistically uniform, and lack realistic frustration or ambiguity, creating an "easy mode" that inflates agent success rates above the human baseline. In evaluations, real humans provide nuanced judgments across eight quality dimensions while simulated users produce uniformly more positive feedback; rule-based rewards are failing to capture rich feedback signals generated by human users. Overall, higher general model capability does not necessarily yield more faithful user simulation. These findings highlight the importance of human validation when using LLM-based user simulators in the agent development cycle and motivate improved models for user simulation.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate outputs of other models, for image-to-text (I2T) tasks such as visual question answering, and text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. Despite this growing reliance, the reliability of these Evaluator VLMs remains under explored. In this work, we systematically evaluate the reliability of Evaluator VLMs across both I2T and T2I tasks. We introduce targeted perturbations that degrade output quality along key error dimensions, including object hallucinations, spatial reasoning, factual grounding, and visual fidelity. These perturbations test whether Evaluator VLMs can reliably account for these quality degrading errors in their evaluations. Using a comprehensive benchmark of over 4000 perturbed instances spanning 40 perturbation dimensions, we evaluate 4 prominent VLMs using single-answer scoring, pairwise comparison, and reference-guided paradigms. Our findings reveal that current VLM evaluators exhibit substantial blind spots: they often fail to detect perturbed outputs - in some cases exceeding 50%, struggle particularly with fine-grained compositional and spatial errors, and are often insensitive to hallucinated content that contradicts the input image. Pairwise comparison proves more reliable, though failure rates persist. These results highlight the unreliable nature of current Evaluator VLMs and urge caution in their deployment for benchmarking and development decisions. Code and data have been made publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) garner significant attention for their unprecedented performance, leading to an increasing number of researches evaluating LLMs. However, these evaluation benchmarks are limited to assessing the instruction-following capabilities, overlooking the fundamental abilities that emerge during the pre-training stage. Previous subjective evaluation methods mainly reply on scoring by API models. However, in the absence of references, large models have shown limited ability to discern subtle differences. To bridge the gap, we propose F-Eval, a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities, including expression, commonsense and logic. The tasks in F-Eval include multi-choice objective tasks, open-ended objective tasks, reference-based subjective tasks and reference-free subjective tasks. For reference-free subjective tasks, we devise new evaluation methods, serving as alternatives to scoring by API models. We conduct evaluations on 13 advanced LLMs. Results show that our evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. Additionally, we discuss the influence of different model sizes, dimensions, and normalization methods. We anticipate that F-Eval will facilitate the study of LLMs' fundamental abilities.

In this position paper, we argue that human evaluation of generative large language models (LLMs) should be a multidisciplinary undertaking that draws upon insights from disciplines such as user experience research and human behavioral psychology to ensure that the experimental design and results are reliable. The conclusions from these evaluations, thus, must consider factors such as usability, aesthetics, and cognitive biases. We highlight how cognitive biases can conflate fluent information and truthfulness, and how cognitive uncertainty affects the reliability of rating scores such as Likert. Furthermore, the evaluation should differentiate the capabilities and weaknesses of increasingly powerful large language models -- which requires effective test sets. The scalability of human evaluation is also crucial to wider adoption. Hence, to design an effective human evaluation system in the age of generative NLP, we propose the ConSiDERS-The-Human evaluation framework consisting of 6 pillars -- Consistency, Scoring Criteria, Differentiating, User Experience, Responsible, and Scalability.

With the rapid development of large multimodal models, reliable judge and critic models have become essential for open-ended evaluation and preference alignment, providing pairwise preferences, numerical scores, and explanatory justifications for assessing model-generated responses. However, existing critics are primarily trained in general visual domains such as captioning or image question answering, leaving physical AI tasks involving perception, causal reasoning, and planning largely underexplored. We introduce PhyCritic, a multimodal critic model optimized for physical AI through a two-stage RLVR pipeline: a physical skill warmup stage that enhances physically oriented perception and reasoning, followed by self-referential critic finetuning, where the critic generates its own prediction as an internal reference before judging candidate responses, improving judgment stability and physical correctness. Across both physical and general-purpose multimodal judge benchmarks, PhyCritic achieves strong performance gains over open-source baselines and, when applied as a policy model, further improves perception and reasoning in physically grounded tasks.

Large language models excel on objectively verifiable tasks such as math and programming, where evaluation reduces to unit tests or a single correct answer. In contrast, real-world enterprise work is often subjective and context-dependent: success hinges on organizational goals, user intent, and the quality of intermediate artifacts produced across long, multi-tool workflows. We introduce LH-Bench, a three-pillar evaluation design that moves beyond binary correctness to score autonomous, long-horizon execution on subjective enterprise tasks. The pillars are: (i) expert-grounded rubrics that give LLM judges the domain context needed to score subjective work, (ii) curated ground-truth artifacts that enable stepwise reward signals (e.g., chapter-level annotation for content tasks), and (iii) pairwise human preference evaluation for convergent validation. We show that domain-authored rubrics provide substantially more reliable evaluation signals than LLM-authored rubrics (kappa = 0.60 vs. 0.46), and that human preference judgments confirm the same top-tier separation (p < 0.05), evidence that expert-grounded evaluation can scale without sacrificing reliability. We release public datasets and report results on two environments: Figma-to-code (33 real .fig tasks against the Figma API via MCP) and Programmatic content (41 courses comprising 183 individually-evaluated chapters on a course platform serving 30+ daily users).

We conduct a systematic study of 18 widely used vision-language benchmarks and identify three major issues: 1) many items do not rely on visual cues and therefore fail to effectively measure multimodal understanding; 2) many items are already close to performance saturation for current LVLMs, which limits their discriminative power; 3) a small number of anomalous items affect the reliability of evaluation results. To this end, we propose MMGist, a curated benchmark that covers seven capability dimensions and contains 7,262 items. MMGist is constructed through a three-stage pipeline, which sequentially combines text-ablation filtering, cross-model saturation filtering, and anomaly detection filtering. We conduct extensive experiments on 27 leading LVLMs and compare MMGist with the raw pool of 23,250 items. The results show that MMGist preserves model rankings with high fidelity, with Spearman ρ= 0.98, while reducing evaluation items by 69\% and improving cross-model discrimination by 78\%. Further results indicate that Visual Logic remains a systematic weakness of current LVLMs, while knowledge-intensive dimensions such as Expert Knowledge dimensions remain important factors for distinguishing closed-source models from open-source models. These findings suggest that high-quality evaluation should prioritize visual dependency, discriminative power, and reliability, rather than simply pursuing benchmark scale.

Modern deep-learning super-resolution (SR) techniques process images and videos independently of the underlying content and viewing conditions. However, the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) to image details changes depending on the underlying image characteristics, such as spatial frequency, luminance, color, contrast, or motion; as well viewing condition aspects such as ambient lighting and distance to the display. This observation suggests that computational resources spent on up-sampling images/videos may be wasted whenever a viewer cannot resolve the synthesized details i.e the resolution of details exceeds the resolving capability of human vision. Motivated by this observation, we propose a human vision inspired and architecture-agnostic approach for controlling SR techniques to deliver visually optimal results while limiting computational complexity. Its core is an explicit Human Visual Processing Framework (HVPF) that dynamically and locally guides SR methods according to human sensitivity to specific image details and viewing conditions. We demonstrate the application of our framework in combination with network branching to improve the computational efficiency of SR methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing FLOPS by factors of 2times and greater, without sacrificing perceived quality.

Fitness Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is important for intelligent sports training, yet the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this setting remain underexplored. Existing benchmarks rely on action-specific annotation schemes and focus primarily on final assessment outputs, offering limited insight into how models assess exercise quality. We introduce FitAQA, a systematic benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in fitness AQA, containing 2,219 videos and 5,512 QA instances across 30 bodyweight exercises. In collaboration with experts in sports science, we develop a unified form error taxonomy that defines 38 recurring form errors within six complementary quality dimensions: alignment, symmetry, stability, coordination, tempo, and completeness. This taxonomy provides a shared assessment framework across different exercises. FitAQA further formulates three evaluation tasks: perception for recognizing relevant visual evidence, judgement for combining that evidence with domain knowledge to assess execution correctness, and temporal grounding for localizing form errors over time. Extensive evaluation shows that current MLLMs still struggle to assess exercise quality comprehensively and localize form errors precisely. Controlled experiments further indicate that visual perception is a key bottleneck, as judgement performance improves substantially when ground-truth perceptual evidence is provided. The dataset and evaluation code will be made publicly available.

Scientific images function as critical evidence in research communication, yet their integrity faces unprecedented threats from AI-generated content that introduces subtle but consequential errors. Existing evaluation paradigms prove inadequate: perceptual quality metrics poorly correlate with scientific validity, while language models lack domain-specific verification capabilities. To address this gap, we propose the Scientific Image Utility and Upgradability Assessment (SIU^2A) framework, which introduces two complementary dimensions for scientific image evaluation. Utility encompasses error detection (identifying scientific inaccuracies) and correction feasibility (assessing whether errors can be reliably repaired). Upgradability measures the quality of correction. We categorize scientific image corruption into four fundamental types: Detail Distortion, Incompleteness, False Content, and Entity Confusion. Based on this taxonomy, we construct SIU^2A-Benchmark, a dataset with expert annotations for error identification and repair. The framework implements a two-stage evaluation protocol: the Utility stage evaluates error detection capability and repair instruction generation, while the Upgradability stage assesses whether corrections faithfully restore scientific validity without compromising existing accurate information. Experiments reveal that current multimodal systems exhibit significant limitations in both scientific error assessment and faithful correction, exposing a fundamental gap between visual perception and scientific usability.

Standard evaluation of LLM confidence relies on calibration metrics (ECE, Brier score) that conflate two distinct capacities: how much a model knows (Type-1 sensitivity) and how well it knows what it knows (Type-2 metacognitive sensitivity). We introduce an evaluation framework based on Type-2 Signal Detection Theory that decomposes these capacities using meta-d' and the metacognitive efficiency ratio M-ratio. Applied to four LLMs (Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Llama-3-8B-Base, Gemma-2-9B-Instruct) across 224,000 factual QA trials, we find: (1) metacognitive efficiency varies substantially across models even when Type-1 sensitivity is similar -- Mistral achieves the highest d' but the lowest M-ratio; (2) metacognitive efficiency is domain-specific, with different models showing different weakest domains, invisible to aggregate metrics; (3) temperature manipulation shifts Type-2 criterion while meta-d' remains stable for two of four models, dissociating confidence policy from metacognitive capacity; (4) AUROC_2 and M-ratio produce fully inverted model rankings, demonstrating these metrics answer fundamentally different evaluation questions. The meta-d' framework reveals which models "know what they don't know" versus which merely appear well-calibrated due to criterion placement -- a distinction with direct implications for model selection, deployment, and human-AI collaboration. Pre-registered analysis; code and data publicly available.

Modern video generation models are increasingly hailed as emerging world models with an internalized grasp of physical law. Yet existing benchmarks largely evaluate physical plausibility only at the output level, without verifying whether the model arrives there through a faithful, law-grounded reasoning process. We introduce Apple-PI, the first benchmark that anchors video-model evaluation explicitly in physical laws. Apple-PI comprises three components. 1) Orchard: a dataset of 400 videos covering ten canonical tasks in classical mechanics. It separates single-law tasks for confounder-free diagnosis from multi-law tasks for probing generalization. 2) Benchmark Protocol: a three-stage protocol based on scientific reasoning, including Perception, Formulation, and Deduction. It uses chain-of-frames prompting on infographic-annotated first frames, treating the generated video as the model's visible reasoning trace. 3) Evaluation Suite: a hybrid evaluation suite that combines MLLM-based subjective scoring with physics-law-grounded objective measures. This enables stage-resolved diagnosis of not only whether a model fails, but where it fails. Benchmarking 11 models shows that current video models remain far from reliable law-grounded world simulators, with the best video model scoring only 0.473. Our stage-, pillar-, and source-resolved analyses further expose a Perception-to-Formulation-to-Deduction bottleneck, weak multi-law state transfer, and a persistent Sim-to-Real gap. These findings position Apple-PI as a diagnostic foundation for guiding future video models toward world models with law-grounded physical intelligence.

Large vision language models (VLMs) report strong accuracy on medical question-answering, yet it remains unclear whether they reason from visual evidence or exploit textual shortcuts. We introduce a counterfactual evaluation framework that decouples visual and textual contributions by substituting input images with controlled surrogates blank, pixel-shuffled, image-absent, and CLIP-retrieved hard negatives and derive a suite of grounding metrics including the Visual Reliance Score (VRS) and Visual Hallucination Rate (VHR). We further introduce CORAL (COntrastive Retrieval-Augmented Learning), a 7B-parameter LoRA fine-tune of Qwen2.5-VL-7B trained with a Contrastive Grounding Objective (CGO) that penalises answer invariance under hard-negative image swaps. On a paired controlled evaluation across four closed-form medical VQA benchmarks (PathVQA, PMC-VQA, SLAKE, VQA-RAD; n=400 total), CORAL improves macro accuracy by +6.7 pp (P(Delta>0)=0.988) and reduces VHR by 8.0 pp (P<0.001) over the matched Qwen2.5-VL-7B base; neither MedVLThinker RL variant achieves a significant gain on either metric. Cross-domain diagnostics further reveal that image substitution costs only <=6.5 pp on medical benchmarks versus 48-61 pp on general-domain tasks, situating the grounding gap that CGO targets. We discuss evaluation limitations openly including train/eval benchmark overlap and underpowered secondary metrics and release our framework, training code, and model weights to support reproducible grounding audits of medical VLMs.

Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to 'see through the eyes' of a bionic eye user. To demonstrate its utility, we systematically evaluated how clinically reported visual distortions affect performance in a letter recognition and an immersive obstacle avoidance task. Our results highlight the importance of using an appropriate phosphene model when predicting visual outcomes for bionic vision.

Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel embodied knowledge understanding benchmark based on the perceptual theory from psychology, encompassing visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory external senses, and interoception. The benchmark assesses the models' perceptual abilities across different sensory modalities through vector comparison and question-answering tasks with over 1,700 questions. By comparing 30 state-of-the-art LMs, we surprisingly find that vision-language models (VLMs) do not outperform text-only models in either task. Moreover, the models perform significantly worse in the visual dimension compared to other sensory dimensions. Further analysis reveals that the vector representations are easily influenced by word form and frequency, and the models struggle to answer questions involving spatial perception and reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for more effective integration of embodied knowledge in LMs to enhance their understanding of the physical world.

With the ever-increasing popularity of pretrained Video-Language Models (VidLMs), there is a pressing need to develop robust evaluation methodologies that delve deeper into their visio-linguistic capabilities. To address this challenge, we present ViLMA (Video Language Model Assessment), a task-agnostic benchmark that places the assessment of fine-grained capabilities of these models on a firm footing. Task-based evaluations, while valuable, fail to capture the complexities and specific temporal aspects of moving images that VidLMs need to process. Through carefully curated counterfactuals, ViLMA offers a controlled evaluation suite that sheds light on the true potential of these models, as well as their performance gaps compared to human-level understanding. ViLMA also includes proficiency tests, which assess basic capabilities deemed essential to solving the main counterfactual tests. We show that current VidLMs' grounding abilities are no better than those of vision-language models which use static images. This is especially striking once the performance on proficiency tests is factored in. Our benchmark serves as a catalyst for future research on VidLMs, helping to highlight areas that still need to be explored.

Visualization, a domain-specific yet widely used form of imagery, is an effective way to turn complex datasets into intuitive insights, and its value depends on whether data are faithfully represented, clearly communicated, and aesthetically designed. However, evaluating visualization quality is challenging: unlike natural images, it requires simultaneous judgment across data encoding accuracy, information expressiveness, and visual aesthetics. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising performance in aesthetic assessment of natural images, no systematic benchmark exists for measuring their capabilities in evaluating visualizations. To address this, we propose VisJudge-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MLLMs' performance in assessing visualization aesthetics and quality. It contains 3,090 expert-annotated samples from real-world scenarios, covering single visualizations, multiple visualizations, and dashboards across 32 chart types. Systematic testing on this benchmark reveals that even the most advanced MLLMs (such as GPT-5) still exhibit significant gaps compared to human experts in judgment, with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.551 and a correlation with human ratings of only 0.429. To address this issue, we propose VisJudge, a model specifically designed for visualization aesthetics and quality assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that VisJudge significantly narrows the gap with human judgment, reducing the MAE to 0.442 (a 19.8% reduction) and increasing the consistency with human experts to 0.681 (a 58.7% improvement) compared to GPT-5. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/VisJudgeBench.

In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms, scaling behavior, and generalization of physical Recursive self-improvement. We introduce PhysRSI-eval to quantify physical RSI through a five-axis metric: First-Attempt Performance, Efficiency, Success, Budget and Improvement from failure. Different VLMs are evaluated on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. The analysis of experimental results motivates the Physical Barrel Hypothesis: different capabilities may constrain different parts of improvement. The five-axis metrics also distinguish systems with close public benchmark averages and show that high scores need not come with early or efficient gains. We study observational scaling from two perspectives: predicting the relative performance of VLM agents from their public capabilities, and forecasting later progress from early physical feedback. Together, these analyses ask how quickly and how far an agent can improve. Moreover, we conduct workspace interventions and then analyze what improvement leaves behind. Removing history reduces late-round success, frozen workspaces remain useful on unseen layouts, and three cross-task cases achieve success earlier. The results suggest that scene-specific adaptation and reusable experience can coexist.

Understanding of video creativity and content often varies among individuals, with differences in focal points and cognitive levels across different ages, experiences, and genders. There is currently a lack of research in this area, and most existing benchmarks suffer from several drawbacks: 1) a limited number of modalities and answers with restrictive length; 2) the content and scenarios within the videos are excessively monotonous, transmitting allegories and emotions that are overly simplistic. To bridge the gap to real-world applications, we introduce a large-scale Subjective Response Indicators for Advertisement Videos dataset, namely SRI-ADV. Specifically, we collected real changes in Electroencephalographic (EEG) and eye-tracking regions from different demographics while they viewed identical video content. Utilizing this multi-modal dataset, we developed tasks and protocols to analyze and evaluate the extent of cognitive understanding of video content among different users. Along with the dataset, we designed a Hypergraph Multi-modal Large Language Model (HMLLM) to explore the associations among different demographics, video elements, EEG, and eye-tracking indicators. HMLLM could bridge semantic gaps across rich modalities and integrate information beyond different modalities to perform logical reasoning. Extensive experimental evaluations on SRI-ADV and other additional video-based generative performance benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The codes and dataset will be released at https://github.com/suay1113/HMLLM.

Robustness evaluation must examine diverse visual perturbations, while benchmarks cover only some real-world conditions and physical testing is costly. Paired evaluations link clean and perturbed predictions for the same image, capturing changes in correctness, confidence, and acceptance beyond aggregate accuracy. We investigate how this image correspondence supports two needs in robustness evaluation: interpreting paired evaluation results and prioritizing samples for physical testing. To interpret paired evaluation results, we fix both sets of prediction records and vary their correspondence within each class. We prove that classwise correct-correct counts give the same sharp bounds on lost acceptance and mean true-class probability decrease among retained-correct inputs as any feasible five-state refinement. Distinguishing persistent from changed wrong answers can further constrain accepted-error transitions, while shared correspondence can establish policy orderings left unresolved by separate cost intervals. To prioritize samples for physical testing, we retain each image's synthetic responses and rank clean-correct images by their mean true-class probability under corruption. Across 44 classifiers, testing the highest-risk 20% finds 67% and 45% of failures under mild screen and print recaptures, versus 58% and 36% for clean confidence and 60% and 37% for an equal-size natural-transformation average. With both probability averaging and an A3Rank scoring adaptation, the tested corruption set yields higher mean failure recall than the natural-transform set; differences between scores depend on the source and budget. Together, these findings show that the value of correspondence depends on the evaluation objective: classwise counts suffice for specified reliability bounds, while image-specific synthetic responses improve the allocation of physical tests within the evaluated pool.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed for high-stakes medical applications, there has emerged a critical need for reliable and accurate evaluation methodologies. Traditional accuracy metrics fail inadequately as they neither capture question characteristics nor offer topic-specific insights. To address this gap, we introduce MedIRT, a rigorous evaluation framework grounded in Item Response Theory (IRT), the gold standard in high-stakes educational testing. Unlike previous research relying on archival data, we prospectively gathered fresh responses from 80 diverse LLMs on a balanced, 1,100-question USMLE-aligned benchmark. Using one unidimensional two-parameter logistic IRT model per topic, we estimate LLM's latent model ability jointly with question difficulty and discrimination, yielding more stable and nuanced performance rankings than accuracy alone. Notably, we identify distinctive ``spiky'' ability profiles, where overall rankings can be misleading due to highly specialized model abilities. While GPT-5 was the top performer in a majority of domains (8 of 11), it was outperformed in Social Science and Communication by Claude-3-opus, demonstrating that even an overall 23rd-ranked model can hold the top spot for specific competencies. Furthermore, we demonstrate IRT's utility in auditing benchmarks by identifying flawed questions. We synthesize these findings into a practical decision-support framework that integrates our multi-factor competency profiles with operational metrics. This work establishes a robust, psychometrically grounded methodology essential for the safe, effective, and trustworthy deployment of LLMs in healthcare.

Recent approaches in personalized reward modeling have primarily focused on leveraging user interaction history to align model judgments with individual preferences. However, existing approaches largely treat user context as a static or implicit conditioning signal, failing to capture the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of human judgment. In this paper, we propose P-Check, a novel personalized reward modeling framework, designed to train a plug-and-play checklist generator that synthesizes dynamic evaluation criteria for guiding the reward prediction. To better align these checklists with personalized nuances, we introduce Preference-Contrastive Criterion Weighting, a training strategy that assigns saliency scores to criteria based on their discriminative power for personalized judgment. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that P-Check not only improves reward accuracy but also enhances downstream personalized generation, and remains robust in OOD scenarios.

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) evaluation is central to product development, yet reliable feedback still relies on recruiting human participants or running online A/B tests, making early-stage iteration slow and costly. In light of this, recent work has explored Multimodal Large Language Models as proxy evaluators. However, existing approaches either produce surface-level critiques or a judgment that reflects the model's own biases rather than the genuine response of a particular user. We introduce PerceptUI, a framework for persona-conditioned UI/UX evaluation that predicts how a specific user would answer interface-related questions and produces natural-language rationales. PerceptUI is trained in two stages: (i) contrastive reflection fine-tuning distills teacher-generated rationales by extracting lessons from human decisions, and (ii) a reflective prompt-evolution step from the model's own failure traces. Across multiple domains and datasets, PerceptUI achieves human-level realism, generalizes to unseen questions and personas, and yields population-level response distributions.

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

Recent advances in video generation have produced vivid content that are often indistinguishable from real videos, making AI-generated video detection an emerging societal challenge. Prior AIGC detection benchmarks mostly evaluate video without audio, target broad narrative domains, and focus on classification solely. Yet it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art video generation models can produce immersive, audio-paired videos that reliably deceive humans and VLMs. To this end, we introduce Video Reality Test, an ASMR-sourced video benchmark suite for testing perceptual realism under tight audio-visual coupling, featuring the following dimensions: (i) Immersive ASMR video-audio sources. Built on carefully curated real ASMR videos, the benchmark targets fine-grained action-object interactions with diversity across objects, actions, and backgrounds. (ii) Peer-Review evaluation. An adversarial creator-reviewer protocol where video generation models act as creators aiming to fool reviewers, while VLMs serve as reviewers seeking to identify fakeness. Our experimental findings show: The best creator Veo3.1-Fast even fools most VLMs: the strongest reviewer (Gemini 2.5-Pro) achieves only 56\% accuracy (random 50\%), far below that of human experts (81.25\%). Adding audio improves real-fake discrimination, yet superficial cues such as watermarks can still significantly mislead models. These findings delineate the current boundary of video generation realism and expose limitations of VLMs in perceptual fidelity and audio-visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/video-reality-test/video-reality-test.

The rapid evolution of generative video foundation models has propelled the field toward professional-grade cinematic synthesis. To achieve such demanding quality, the community transitions towards Reinforcement Learning (RL) and agentic workflows. However, reliable evaluation has emerged as a critical bottleneck. Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate ''whether it is right'' (basic prompt-following) while fundamentally neglecting ''whether it is good'' (cinematic quality, acting, and aesthetics). Furthermore, current automated metrics lack the domain-specific rigor required to provide trustworthy signals, creating a severe credibility gap between human aesthetic perception and machine scoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce EvalVerse, a comprehensive, pipeline-aware, and expert-calibrated evaluation framework. We treat video generation assessment not merely as an engineering task, but as a core scientific problem: the systematic digitization of subjective cinematic expertise. First, we organize domain knowledge into an evaluation taxonomy aligned with the professional filmmaking workflow (pre-production, production, and post-production). Second, we distill human expert judgments into a curated dataset with large-scale human annotations. Third, we inject this knowledge into Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through an expert-calibrated fine-tuning strategy, enabling the VLM to perform explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Compared to previous works, EvalVerse not only retains compatibility with foundational ''rightness'' metrics, but also significantly expands the criteria to ''goodness'' and broaden the task coverage to complex multi-shot sequencing and audio-visual integration. Consequently, by providing granular diagnostic signals, EvalVerse transcends a static leaderboard and establishes a fundamental infrastructure for future work, such as reward models and evaluator agent.

Generative video models are increasingly used in design animation tasks, yet no standardized evaluation framework exists for this domain. Unlike natural video generation, design animation imposes structured constraints: specific components shall animate with prescribed motion types, directions, speed and timing, while non-animated regions must remain stable and layout structure must be preserved. This paper provides a fully automated evaluation framework organized across four dimensions: layout fidelity, motion correctness, temporal quality, and content fidelity. This eliminates the reliance on subjective human evaluation and establishes a common basis for benchmarking progress in the field. We release the code and dataset here: https://github.com/purvanshi/lica-bench.

The ecological validity of soundscape studies usually rests on a choice of soundscapes that are representative of the perceptual space under investigation. For example, a soundscape pleasantness study might investigate locations with soundscapes ranging from "pleasant" to "annoying". The choice of soundscapes is typically researcher-led, but a participant-led process can reduce selection bias and improve result reliability. Hence, we propose a robust participant-led method to pinpoint characteristic soundscapes possessing arbitrary perceptual attributes. We validate our method by identifying Singaporean soundscapes spanning the perceptual quadrants generated from the "Pleasantness" and "Eventfulness" axes of the ISO 12913-2 circumplex model of soundscape perception, as perceived by local experts. From memory and experience, 67 participants first selected locations corresponding to each perceptual quadrant in each major planning region of Singapore. We then performed weighted k-means clustering on the selected locations, with weights for each location derived from previous frequencies and durations spent in each location by each participant. Weights hence acted as proxies for participant confidence. In total, 62 locations were thereby identified as suitable locations with characteristic soundscapes for further research utilizing the ISO 12913-2 perceptual quadrants. Audio-visual recordings and acoustic characterization of the soundscapes will be made in a future study.

Crowdsourced pairwise evaluation has emerged as a scalable approach for assessing foundation models. However, applying it to Text to Speech(TTS) introduces high variance due to linguistic diversity and multidimensional nature of speech perception. We present a controlled multidimensional pairwise evaluation framework for multilingual TTS that combines linguistic control with perceptually grounded annotation. Using 5K+ native and code-mixed sentences across 10 Indic languages, we evaluate 7 state-of-the-art TTS systems and collect over 120K pairwise comparisons from over 1900 native raters. In addition to overall preference, raters provide judgments across 6 perceptual dimensions: intelligibility, expressiveness, voice quality, liveliness, noise, and hallucinations. Using Bradley-Terry modeling, we construct a multilingual leaderboard, interpret human preference using SHAP analysis and analyze leaderboard reliability alongside model strengths and trade-offs across perceptual dimensions.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences underscores the hierarchical nature of cognitive capabilities. To advance Spatial Artificial Intelligence, we pioneer a psychometric framework defining five Basic Spatial Abilities (BSAs) in Visual Language Models (VLMs): Spatial Perception, Spatial Relation, Spatial Orientation, Mental Rotation, and Spatial Visualization. Benchmarking 13 mainstream VLMs through nine validated psychometric experiments reveals significant gaps versus humans (average score 24.95 vs. 68.38), with three key findings: 1) VLMs mirror human hierarchies (strongest in 2D orientation, weakest in 3D rotation) with independent BSAs (Pearson's r<0.4); 2) Smaller models such as Qwen2-VL-7B surpass larger counterparts, with Qwen leading (30.82) and InternVL2 lagging (19.6); 3) Interventions like chain-of-thought (0.100 accuracy gain) and 5-shot training (0.259 improvement) show limits from architectural constraints. Identified barriers include weak geometry encoding and missing dynamic simulation. By linking psychometric BSAs to VLM capabilities, we provide a diagnostic toolkit for spatial intelligence evaluation, methodological foundations for embodied AI development, and a cognitive science-informed roadmap for achieving human-like spatial intelligence.

Rapid advances in audio-video (AV) generation have enabled high-fidelity synthesis with synchronized sound, particularly for human-related scenarios involving speech and interactions. Yet evaluation for AV generation remains at an early stage, with only a few coarse-grained benchmarks for human-related scenarios and relying on limited preset evaluations with generic multimodal LLMs, leading to inaccurate assessments of model capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce AVBench, a fully automated benchmark tailored for human-centric AV generation. AVBench is built on two key designs for comprehensive and accurate evaluation: (i) Human-centric and fine-grained metrics. AVBench integrates ten evaluation dimensions designed for human-centered real-world scenarios, covering visual quality, audio quality, and multi-level consistency across modalities. These practical metrics capture human-related details that existing benchmarks often overlook. (ii) Specialized evaluators via preference learning. To address the lack of specialized training data, we construct large-scale supervision by transforming real-world videos into diverse training pairs with controlled perturbations. After fine-tuning on this high-quality dataset, the evaluators learn to reliably detect subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. Crucially, instead of producing discrete textual judgment, AVBench derives continuous evaluation scores from the model's prediction confidence on binary decisions. This probabilistic scoring mechanism enables a more reliable assessment than traditional VQA-style evaluation and aligns closely with human judgment. Taken together, AVBench offers automated evaluation for AV generation, demonstrates strong potential for data filtering, and serves as a differentiable reward signal for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

World Generation Models are emerging as a cornerstone of next-generation multimodal intelligence systems. Unlike traditional 2D visual generation, World Models aim to construct realistic, dynamic, and physically consistent 3D/4D worlds from images, videos, or text. These models not only need to produce high-fidelity visual content but also maintain coherence across space, time, physics, and instruction control, enabling applications in virtual reality, autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and content creation. However, prior benchmarks emphasize different evaluation dimensions and lack a unified assessment of world-realism capability. To systematically evaluate World Models, we introduce the 4DWorldBench, which measures models across four key dimensions: Perceptual Quality, Condition-4D Alignment, Physical Realism, and 4D Consistency. The benchmark covers tasks such as Image-to-3D/4D, Video-to-4D, Text-to-3D/4D. Beyond these, we innovatively introduce adaptive conditioning across multiple modalities, which not only integrates but also extends traditional evaluation paradigms. To accommodate different modality-conditioned inputs, we map all modality conditions into a unified textual space during evaluation, and further integrate LLM-as-judge, MLLM-as-judge, and traditional network-based methods. This unified and adaptive design enables more comprehensive and consistent evaluation of alignment, physical realism, and cross-modal coherence. Preliminary human studies further demonstrate that our adaptive tool selection achieves closer agreement with subjective human judgments. We hope this benchmark will serve as a foundation for objective comparisons and improvements, accelerating the transition from "visual generation" to "world generation." Our project can be found at https://yeppp27.github.io/4DWorldBench.github.io/.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination issues, wherein the models generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect outputs, undermining their reliability. A comprehensive quantitative evaluation is necessary to identify and understand the extent of hallucinations in these models. However, existing benchmarks are often limited in scope, focusing mainly on object hallucinations. Furthermore, current evaluation methods struggle to effectively address the subtle semantic distinctions between model outputs and reference data, as well as the balance between hallucination and informativeness. To address these issues, we introduce a multi-dimensional benchmark covering objects, attributes, and relations, with challenging images selected based on associative biases. Moreover, we propose a large language model (LLM)-based two-stage evaluation framework that generalizes the popular CHAIR metric and incorporates both faithfulness and coverage into the evaluation. Experiments on 10 established LVLMs demonstrate that our evaluation metric is more comprehensive and better correlated with humans than existing work when evaluating on our challenging human-annotated benchmark dataset. Our work also highlights the critical balance between faithfulness and coverage of model outputs, and encourages future works to address hallucinations in LVLMs while keeping their outputs informative.

To increase the availability and adoption of the soundscape standard, a low-cost calibration procedure for reproduction of audio stimuli over headphones was proposed as part of the global ``Soundscape Attributes Translation Project'' (SATP) for validating ISO/TS~12913-2:2018 perceived affective quality (PAQ) attribute translations. A previous preliminary study revealed significant deviations from the intended equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure levels (L_{A,eq}) using the open-circuit voltage (OCV) calibration procedure. For a more holistic human-centric perspective, the OCV method is further investigated here in terms of psychoacoustic parameters, including relevant exceedance levels to account for temporal effects on the same 27 stimuli from the SATP. Moreover, a within-subjects experiment with 36 participants was conducted to examine the effects of OCV calibration on the PAQ attributes in ISO/TS~12913-2:2018. Bland-Altman analysis of the objective indicators revealed large biases in the OCV method across all weighted sound level and loudness indicators; and roughness indicators at 5{\%} and 10{\%} exceedance levels. Significant perceptual differences due to the OCV method were observed in about 20{\%} of the stimuli, which did not correspond clearly with the biased acoustic indicators. A cautioned interpretation of the objective and perceptual differences due to small and unpaired samples nevertheless provide grounds for further investigation.

Understanding the quality of a performance evaluation metric is crucial for ensuring that model outputs align with human preferences. However, it remains unclear how well each metric captures the diverse aspects of these preferences, as metrics often excel in one particular area but not across all dimensions. To address this, it is essential to systematically calibrate metrics to specific aspects of human preference, catering to the unique characteristics of each aspect. We introduce MetaMetrics, a calibrated meta-metric designed to evaluate generation tasks across different modalities in a supervised manner. MetaMetrics optimizes the combination of existing metrics to enhance their alignment with human preferences. Our metric demonstrates flexibility and effectiveness in both language and vision downstream tasks, showing significant benefits across various multilingual and multi-domain scenarios. MetaMetrics aligns closely with human preferences and is highly extendable and easily integrable into any application. This makes MetaMetrics a powerful tool for improving the evaluation of generation tasks, ensuring that metrics are more representative of human judgment across diverse contexts.

Machine learning advances in the last decade have relied significantly on large-scale datasets that continue to grow in size. Increasingly, those datasets also contain different data modalities. However, large multi-modal datasets are hard to annotate, and annotations may contain biases that we are often unaware of. Deep-net-based classifiers, in turn, are prone to exploit those biases and to find shortcuts. To study and quantify this concern, we introduce the perceptual score, a metric that assesses the degree to which a model relies on the different subsets of the input features, i.e., modalities. Using the perceptual score, we find a surprisingly consistent trend across four popular datasets: recent, more accurate state-of-the-art multi-modal models for visual question-answering or visual dialog tend to perceive the visual data less than their predecessors. This trend is concerning as answers are hence increasingly inferred from textual cues only. Using the perceptual score also helps to analyze model biases by decomposing the score into data subset contributions. We hope to spur a discussion on the perceptiveness of multi-modal models and also hope to encourage the community working on multi-modal classifiers to start quantifying perceptiveness via the proposed perceptual score.

Recent advancements in video generation have witnessed significant progress, especially with the rapid advancement of diffusion models. Despite this, their deficiencies in physical cognition have gradually received widespread attention - generated content often violates the fundamental laws of physics, falling into the dilemma of ''visual realism but physical absurdity". Researchers began to increasingly recognize the importance of physical fidelity in video generation and attempted to integrate heuristic physical cognition such as motion representations and physical knowledge into generative systems to simulate real-world dynamic scenarios. Considering the lack of a systematic overview in this field, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive summary of architecture designs and their applications to fill this gap. Specifically, we discuss and organize the evolutionary process of physical cognition in video generation from a cognitive science perspective, while proposing a three-tier taxonomy: 1) basic schema perception for generation, 2) passive cognition of physical knowledge for generation, and 3) active cognition for world simulation, encompassing state-of-the-art methods, classical paradigms, and benchmarks. Subsequently, we emphasize the inherent key challenges in this domain and delineate potential pathways for future research, contributing to advancing the frontiers of discussion in both academia and industry. Through structured review and interdisciplinary analysis, this survey aims to provide directional guidance for developing interpretable, controllable, and physically consistent video generation paradigms, thereby propelling generative models from the stage of ''visual mimicry'' towards a new phase of ''human-like physical comprehension''.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding, received limited academic and industrial attention. This paper introduces PHYSICS, a dataset containing 16,568 high-quality physics problems spanning subjects and difficulty levels, to facilitate this issue. Specifically, PHYSICS is curated with exercises from over 100 textbooks through a carefully designed pipeline for quality control. It covers five major physics domains: Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Optics, and Modern Physics. It also spans a wide range of difficulty levels, from high school to graduate-level physics courses. To utilize the data for improving and evaluating the model's physical reasoning capabilities, we split the dataset into training and test sets, and provide reasoning paths generated by powerful reasoning models for the training data to facilitate model training. In addition, for the evaluation part, we find that existing evaluation frameworks exhibit biases in aspects such as units, simplification, and precision in physics domain. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a Rule+Model evaluation framework tailored to physics problems. Our evaluations on current state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models highlight the limitations of current models in handling physics-related tasks. We hope that our dataset and evaluation methodology will jointly advance the development of LLMs in the field of physics.

Recent video generation models can produce highly realistic videos from natural language instructions, with visual quality approaching cinematic standards. Existing evaluation benchmarks, however, predominantly assess visual quality, aesthetic appeal and physical plausibility, while paying limited attention to text, an essential medium for conveying information in everyday scenes. A generated video may appear visually compelling and feature lifelike subjects, yet still render the text within the scene incorrectly. To address this overlooked dimension, we introduce VTR-Bench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating the Visual Text Rendering capabilities of video generation models. VTR-Bench situates text within concrete application scenarios, such as advertisements and scientific videos, with 300 carefully constructed prompts spanning five scenario categories. We develop an automated evaluation pipeline with human alignments that separately assesses text fidelity through carrier-specific transcription and scene and motion requirements through a prompt-specific chain of query. Beyond evaluation, we introduce a Keyframe-Guided Agentic Framework in which a Director agent coordinates image and video generation with visual evaluation, guiding iterative refinement and candidate selection through visual feedback. Experiments on 11 state-of-the-art models reveal widespread difficulties in accurately rendering scene text, with the best-performing model recording an overall word error rate (WER) of 0.250. We further analyze text rendering failures to characterize the challenges faced by current video generation models. These findings highlight visual text rendering as a key challenge for video generation and demonstrate a practical path toward improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/hardenyu21/VTR-Bench.

Generative image super-resolution produces visually realistic high-resolution images, but may also introduce hallucinations by adding unsupported content or altering existing details. Because existing super-resolution metrics fail to measure whether generated details remain grounded in the reference image, we present a hallucination assessment technique based on bidirectional visual question answering (VQA), which we term VQA-based Hallucination Assessment (VHA). The proposed approach uses a vision-language model (VLM) to determine whether the semantic content and low-level visual evidence in a super-resolved image are supported by its ground-truth counterpart. To this end, it constructs question--answer pairs from each image and evaluates them on both images. Discrepancies between the resulting scores in both directions reveal missing or altered ground-truth information and unsupported additions. However, obtaining these scores requires computationally expensive VLM inference. We therefore develop VHA+, a learned, lightweight model that directly predicts VHA scores from ground-truth and super-resolved image pairs. We construct a hallucination benchmark, VHA-bench, through a human study and show that both VHA and VHA+ correlate highly with human judgments of hallucination. The code, benchmark, and model weights are available at https://github.com/dhryougit/Hallucination-Assessment

LLM-judged benchmarks are increasingly used to evaluate complex model behaviors, yet their design introduces failure modes absent in conventional ground-truth based benchmarks. We argue that without tight objectives and verifiable constructions, benchmark rankings can produce high-confidence rankings that are in fact largely noise. We introduce two mechanisms to diagnose these issues. Schematic adherence quantifies how much of a judge's overall verdict is explained by the explicit evaluation schema, revealing unexplained variance when judges deviate from their own rubric. Psychometric validity aggregates internal consistency and discriminant validity signals to quantify irreducible uncertainty in any benchmarking run. Applying these tools to Arena-Hard Auto, we find severe schema incoherence and factor collapse across popular judges: for example, unexplained variance exceeding 90 percent for DeepSeek-R1-32B and factor correlations above 0.93 for most criteria. We also show that the ELO-style aggregation used by Arena-Hard Auto collapses and masks genuine ranking uncertainty. Our results highlight design failures that undermine validity and offer actionable principles for building better-scoped, reliability-aware LLM-judged benchmarks. We release our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/judgment-to-noise-947D/README.md

While recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly improved their abilities in image quality assessment (IQA) relying on absolute quality rating, how to transfer reliable relative quality comparison outputs to continuous perceptual quality scores remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Compare2Score-an all-around LMM-based no-reference IQA (NR-IQA) model, which is capable of producing qualitatively comparative responses and effectively translating these discrete comparative levels into a continuous quality score. Specifically, during training, we present to generate scaled-up comparative instructions by comparing images from the same IQA dataset, allowing for more flexible integration of diverse IQA datasets. Utilizing the established large-scale training corpus, we develop a human-like visual quality comparator. During inference, moving beyond binary choices, we propose a soft comparison method that calculates the likelihood of the test image being preferred over multiple predefined anchor images. The quality score is further optimized by maximum a posteriori estimation with the resulting probability matrix. Extensive experiments on nine IQA datasets validate that the Compare2Score effectively bridges text-defined comparative levels during training with converted single image quality score for inference, surpassing state-of-the-art IQA models across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we verify that the probability-matrix-based inference conversion not only improves the rating accuracy of Compare2Score but also zero-shot general-purpose LMMs, suggesting its intrinsic effectiveness.

We present the first study on how Multimodal LLMs' (MLLMs) reasoning ability shall be elicited to evaluate the aesthetics of artworks. To facilitate this investigation, we construct MM-StyleBench, a novel high-quality dataset for benchmarking artistic stylization. We then develop a principled method for human preference modeling and perform a systematic correlation analysis between MLLMs' responses and human preference. Our experiments reveal an inherent hallucination issue of MLLMs in art evaluation, associated with response subjectivity. ArtCoT is proposed, demonstrating that art-specific task decomposition and the use of concrete language boost MLLMs' reasoning ability for aesthetics. Our findings offer valuable insights into MLLMs for art and can benefit a wide range of downstream applications, such as style transfer and artistic image generation. Code available at https://github.com/songrise/MLLM4Art.

With people increasingly turning to AI chatbots for mental health support, the need to evaluate these tools is becoming more pressing. Recent benchmarks attempt to mimic a realistic setting by simulating multi-turn interactions with synthetic patients and evaluating them with an LLM-as-a-judge. However, the usefulness of these methods is limited because simulated patients can be overly forthcoming and self-reflective, and judgments typically involve opaque Likert scales with unclear practical utility. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MindEval2, an evaluation framework that consists of two components: Mental Health Quality Rubrics (MHQR), for evaluation, and MindSim, for patient simulation. For MHQR, we collaborate with PhD-level psychologists to develop a set of rubrics that break down response quality into explicit operational criteria that are more interpretable and actionable than existing evaluation taxonomies. MindSim, in turn, is an LLM harness that combines carefully-designed patient profiles with tools, enabling more varied, challenging, and realistic interactions than existing baselines. The harness also contains a memory component that is updated between each interaction, enabling MindEval2 to model the longitudinal aspect of mental health. We evaluate 18 proprietary and open-weight models on MindEval2, finding that while frontier models have largely improved on issues related to surface level quality and boundaries, guidance calibration remains the dominant failure mode across all models, accounting for most of the quality gap.

Understanding how people read city scenes can inform design and planning. We introduce a small benchmark for testing vision-language models (VLMs) on urban perception using 100 Montreal street images, evenly split between photographs and photorealistic synthetic scenes. Twelve participants from seven community groups supplied 230 annotation forms across 30 dimensions mixing physical attributes and subjective impressions. French responses were normalized to English. We evaluated seven VLMs in a zero-shot setup with a structured prompt and deterministic parser. We use accuracy for single-choice items and Jaccard overlap for multi-label items; human agreement uses Krippendorff's alpha and pairwise Jaccard. Results suggest stronger model alignment on visible, objective properties than subjective appraisals. The top system (claude-sonnet) reaches macro 0.31 and mean Jaccard 0.48 on multi-label items. Higher human agreement coincides with better model scores. Synthetic images slightly lower scores. We release the benchmark, prompts, and harness for reproducible, uncertainty-aware evaluation in participatory urban analysis.

Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.