arXiv:2604.16256cs.CVcs.CL2026-04被引 3

测试发现视觉语言模型主要靠文字推理,视觉信息用得很少。

Do Vision-Language Models Truly Perform Vision Reasoning? A Rigorous Study of the Modality Gap

论文配图:Do Vision-Language Models Truly Perform Vision Reasoning? A Rigorous Study of the Modality Gap
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 设计跨模态对比基准CrossMath,三类输入保持信息一致
  • 模型在纯文字上表现优异,加图像后性能反而下降
  • 建议用CrossMath数据微调,可提升多模态推理能力

视觉语言模型(VLMs)的视觉推理能力近年来备受关注,但其性能是否源于真正的视觉理解仍不明确。为系统评估,我们提出CrossMath,一个用于控制性跨模态比较的新型多模态推理基准。通过构建文本仅、图像仅和图像+文本三种格式的问题,确保任务相关的信息完全一致,并经人工验证。该严格对齐有效隔离了模态特异性推理差异,消除了信息不匹配等干扰因素。对主流VLMs的广泛评估显示,存在显著的文字与视觉推理性能差距:模型在纯文本输入下表现优异,而加入图像后(图像+文本)性能常低于纯文本基线。这表明当前VLMs主要在文本空间进行推理,对视觉证据依赖有限。为此,我们构建了CrossMath训练集用于模型微调。实证结果表明,基于该数据集的微调显著提升所有单模态及联合模态的推理表现,并在两个通用视觉推理任务上取得稳健增益。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) has recently attracted significant attention due to its broad applicability across diverse downstream tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the superior performance of VLMs stems from genuine vision-grounded reasoning or relies predominantly on the reasoning capabilities of their textual backbones. To systematically measure this, we introduce CrossMath, a novel multimodal reasoning benchmark designed for controlled cross-modal comparisons. Specifically, we construct each problem in text-only, image-only, and image+text formats guaranteeing identical task-relevant information, verified by human annotators. This rigorous alignment effectively isolates modality-specific reasoning differences while eliminating confounding factors such as information mismatch. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs reveals a consistent phenomenon: a substantial performance gap between textual and visual reasoning. Notably, VLMs excel with text-only inputs, whereas incorporating visual data (image+text) frequently degrades performance compared to the text-only baseline. These findings indicate that current VLMs conduct reasoning primarily in the textual space, with limited genuine reliance on visual evidence. To mitigate this limitation, we curate a CrossMath training set for VLM fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that fine-tuning on this training set significantly boosts reasoning performance across all individual and joint modalities, while yielding robust gains on two general visual reasoning tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/xuyige/CrossMath.

视觉推理多模态模型评估

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