测试视觉语言模型追踪相似物体的能力,发现其表现接近随机,提出新方法提升至90%以上。
Can Vision-Language Models Solve the Shell Game?
- 设计新基准VET-Bench,用视觉相同的物体逼迫模型依赖时空连续性追踪。
- 现有顶级VLM在该任务上准确率接近随机(约50%),暴露时序记忆缺陷。
- 提出SGCoT方法,通过显式生成轨迹中间态,让模型端到端解决视频换桶谜题。
视觉实体追踪是人类与生俱来的认知能力,但对视觉-语言模型(VLMs)而言仍是重大瓶颈。现有视频基准常因视觉捷径掩盖此问题。我们提出VET-Bench,一个合成诊断测试平台,包含视觉上完全相同的物体,必须依赖时空连续性进行追踪。实验表明,当前最先进VLM在VET-Bench上的表现接近随机水平,暴露出其过度依赖静态帧特征、无法维持实体表征的深层缺陷。我们从状态追踪理论出发,证明基于固定深度Transformer的VLM在无中间监督时,因表达能力受限,无法追踪不可区分物体。为此,我们提出时空锚定思维链(SGCoT):将物体轨迹作为显式中间状态生成。通过在合成文本数据上微调Molmo2以对齐对象追踪能力,该方法在VET-Bench上达到超过90%的准确率,证明VLM可无需外部工具端到端解决视频换桶任务。代码与数据见https://vetbench.github.io。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Visual entity tracking is an innate cognitive ability in humans, yet it remains a critical bottleneck for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This deficit is often obscured in existing video benchmarks by visual shortcuts. We introduce VET-Bench, a synthetic diagnostic testbed featuring visually identical objects that necessitate tracking exclusively through spatiotemporal continuity. Our experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art VLMs perform at or near chance level on VET-Bench, exposing a fundamental limitation: an over-reliance on static frame-level features and a failure to maintain entity representations over time. We provide a theoretical analysis drawing connections to the state-tracking problem, proving that fixed-depth transformer-based VLMs are fundamentally limited in tracking indistinguishable objects without intermediate supervision due to expressivity constraints. To address this, we propose Spatiotemporal Grounded Chain-of-Thought (SGCoT): generating object trajectories as explicit intermediate states. Leveraging Molmo2's object tracking ability, we elicit SGCoT reasoning by fine-tuning on synthesized text-only data for alignment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy exceeding 90% on VET-Bench, demonstrating that VLMs can reliably solve the video shell-game task end-to-end without external tools. Our code and data are available at https://vetbench.github.io .
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