Are VLMs Really Blind

TL;DR

This work presents a novel automatic pipeline designed to extract key information from images in response to specific questions that uses question-derived keywords to create a caption that highlights important details in the image related to the question.

Abstract

Vision Language Models excel in handling a wide range of complex tasks, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Visual Question Answering (VQA), and advanced geometric reasoning. However, these models fail to perform well on low-level basic visual tasks which are especially easy for humans. Our goal in this work was to determine if these models are truly "blind" to geometric reasoning or if there are ways to enhance their capabilities in this area. Our work presents a novel automatic pipeline designed to extract key information from images in response to specific questions. Instead of just relying on direct VQA, we use question-derived keywords to create a caption that highlights important details in the image related to the question. This caption is then used by a language model to provide a precise answer to the question without requiring external fine-tuning.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Using the trim and clip commands produces fragile layers that can result in disasters (like this one from an actual paper) when the color space is corrected or the PDF combined with others for the final proceedings. Crop your figures properly in a graphics program -- not in LaTeX.
• Figure 2: Adjusting the bounding box instead of actually removing the unwanted data resulted multiple layers in this paper. It also needlessly increased the PDF size. In this case, the size of the unwanted layer doubled the paper's size, and produced the following surprising results in final production. Crop your figures properly in a graphics program. Don't just alter the bounding box.
• Figure 3: Example listing quicksort.hs