GSM8K-V: Can Vision Language Models Solve Grade School Math Word
  Problems in Visual Contexts
Authors: name: Fan Yuan; name: Yuchen Yan; name: Yifan Jiang; name: Haoran Zhao; name: Tao Feng; name: Jinyan Chen; name: Yanwei Lou; name: Wenqi Zhang; name: Yongliang Shen; name: Weiming Lu; name: Jun Xiao; name: Yueting Zhuang
Published: 2025-09-29 17:57:05

Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) achieve unified modeling of images and text,
enabling them to accomplish complex real-world tasks through perception,
planning, and reasoning. Among these tasks, reasoning is particularly
representative, with mathematical reasoning serving as a prominent example. It
highlights the high-level capability of VLMs to comprehend mathematical
information in images and to perform sophisticated reasoning. Recently,
numerous visual mathematical reasoning benchmarks have been proposed, but they
are often restricted to geometry, lack coverage of math word problems, and
rarely assess reasoning across multiple images. To address these gaps, we
introduce GSM8K-V, a purely visual multi-image mathematical reasoning
benchmark. GSM8K-V is built by systematically mapping each sample from the
widely used text-based GSM8K into visual form. Through a carefully designed
automated image-generation pipeline combined with meticulous human annotation,
we curate 1,319 high-quality samples. We evaluate a wide range of open-source
and closed-source models on GSM8K-V. Results show that although existing VLMs
have nearly saturated performance on text-based GSM8K, there remains
substantial room for improvement on GSM8K-V. For example, the best-performing
model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves 95.22% accuracy on GSM8K but only 46.93% on
GSM8K-V. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of GSM8K-V, examining the
limitations of current models as well as potential directions for improvement.
GSM8K-V offers a new perspective on visual mathematical reasoning and
establishes a benchmark to guide the development of more robust and
generalizable VLMs.