Puzzled by Puzzles: When Vision-Language Models Can't Take a Hint
Authors: name: Heekyung Lee, name: Jiaxin Ge, name: Tsung-Han Wu, name: Minwoo Kang, name: Trevor Darrell, name: David M. Chan

Rebus puzzles, visual riddles that encode language through imagery, spatial
arrangement, and symbolic substitution, pose a unique challenge to current
vision-language models (VLMs). Unlike traditional image captioning or question
answering tasks, rebus solving requires multi-modal abstraction, symbolic
reasoning, and a grasp of cultural, phonetic and linguistic puns. In this
paper, we investigate the capacity of contemporary VLMs to interpret and solve
rebus puzzles by constructing a hand-generated and annotated benchmark of
diverse English-language rebus puzzles, ranging from simple pictographic
substitutions to spatially-dependent cues ("head" over "heels"). We analyze how
different VLMs perform, and our findings reveal that while VLMs exhibit some
surprising capabilities in decoding simple visual clues, they struggle
significantly with tasks requiring abstract reasoning, lateral thinking, and
understanding visual metaphors.