left|,circlearrowright,text{BUS},right|: A Large and
  Diverse Multimodal Benchmark for evaluating the ability of Vision-Language
  Models to understand Rebus Puzzles
Authors: name: Trishanu Das; name: Abhilash Nandy; name: Khush Bajaj; name: Deepiha S
Published: 2025-11-03 08:42:59

Abstract: Understanding Rebus Puzzles (Rebus Puzzles use pictures, symbols, and letters
to represent words or phrases creatively) requires a variety of skills such as
image recognition, cognitive skills, commonsense reasoning, multi-step
reasoning, image-based wordplay, etc., making this a challenging task for even
current Vision-Language Models. In this paper, we present
left|,circlearrowright,text{BUS},right|, a large and diverse
benchmark of 1,333 English Rebus Puzzles containing different artistic styles
and levels of difficulty, spread across 18 categories such as food, idioms,
sports, finance, entertainment, etc. We also propose RebusDescProgICE, a
model-agnostic framework which uses a combination of an unstructured
description and code-based, structured reasoning, along with better,
reasoning-based in-context example selection, improving the performance of
Vision-Language Models on
left|,circlearrowright,text{BUS},right| by 2.1-4.1% and
20-30% using closed-source and open-source models respectively compared to
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning.