VisualPuzzles: Decoupling Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation from Domain
  Knowledge
Authors: name: Yueqi Song; name: Tianyue Ou; name: Yibo Kong; name: Zecheng Li; name: Graham Neubig; name: Xiang Yue
Published: 2025-04-14 15:50:39

Abstract: Current multimodal benchmarks often conflate reasoning with domain-specific
knowledge, making it difficult to isolate and evaluate general reasoning
abilities in non-expert settings. To address this, we introduce VisualPuzzles,
a benchmark that targets visual reasoning while deliberately minimizing
reliance on specialized knowledge. VisualPuzzles consists of diverse questions
spanning five categories: algorithmic, analogical, deductive, inductive, and
spatial reasoning. One major source of our questions is manually translated
logical reasoning questions from the Chinese Civil Service Examination.
Experiments show that VisualPuzzles requires significantly less intensive
domain-specific knowledge and more complex reasoning compared to benchmarks
like MMMU, enabling us to better evaluate genuine multimodal reasoning.
Evaluations show that state-of-the-art multimodal large language models
consistently lag behind human performance on VisualPuzzles, and that strong
performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks does not necessarily translate to
success on reasoning-focused, knowledge-light tasks. Additionally, reasoning
enhancements such as scaling up inference compute (with "thinking" modes) yield
inconsistent gains across models and task types, and we observe no clear
correlation between model size and performance. We also found that models
exhibit different reasoning and answering patterns on VisualPuzzles compared to
benchmarks with heavier emphasis on knowledge. VisualPuzzles offers a clearer
lens through which to evaluate reasoning capabilities beyond factual recall and
domain knowledge.