测试视觉语言模型在无关但有意义的干扰下的推理鲁棒性。
Are Reasoning Vision-Language Models Robust to Semantic Visual Distractions?

- 设计新基准Distract-Bench,模拟任务无关但语义合理的视觉干扰。
- 8个开源和2个闭源模型在干扰下准确率下降超过30%。
- 适合关注真实场景中模型可靠性的研究者和开发者。
推理型视觉语言模型(VLMs)在复杂多模态任务上表现优异,但实际应用需应对比标准数据集更杂乱的视觉输入。现有评估主要关注噪声、模糊等感知退化,却忽略了另一种关键可靠性问题:模型可能正确感知视觉证据,却基于看似合理但无关的干扰信息进行错误推理并影响最终答案。为此,我们提出Distract-Bench基准,用于评估VLM对语义视觉干扰的鲁棒性——即在不改变真实答案的前提下,向输入添加有意义但与任务无关的视觉线索。我们对8个开源和2个闭源领先VLM进行了全面评估,结果表明:在感知退化下,推理模型的表现接近其非推理基线;但在语义干扰下,其鲁棒性显著下降。分析显示,干扰信息常被纳入推理过程,被当作有效证据,导致错误结论。这些发现重新定义了推理VLM的鲁棒性评估方向,从感知退化转向干扰识别。数据与代码已公开于https://github.com/Yizheng-Sun/Distract-Bench。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reasoning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on complex multimodal tasks, but reliable real-world application requires handling visual inputs that are messier than clean, curated benchmarks. Existing works mainly evaluate such reliability of VLMs through input corruptions, such as noise, blur and weather effects, which make visual evidence harder to perceive. This leaves a critical reliability failure mode underexplored: a model may perceive the evidence correctly, yet reason from plausible but irrelevant and distracting evidence and propagate this mistake to its final answer. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{Distract-Bench}, a benchmark for evaluating VLM robustness to \textbf{semantic visual distractions}, defined as meaningful but task-irrelevant visual cues added to inputs while preserving the ground-truth answer. We comprehensively evaluate eight leading open-source and two closed-source VLMs across conventional vision corruptions and Distract-Bench. Our results show that Distract-Bench exposes a robustness failure distinct from vision corruptions: reasoning VLMs largely track their non-reasoning base models under perceptual degradation, but show consistently lower robustness to semantic distractions. Further analysis shows that these distractions often enter the reasoning process of VLMs, are treated as evidence, and lead to incorrect answers. Together, these findings reframe robustness evaluation for reasoning VLMs, shifting the focus from degraded perception to distractions for reliable real-world visual reasoning. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Yizheng-Sun/Distract-Bench.
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