UniBench: Visual Reasoning Requires Rethinking Vision-Language Beyond
  Scaling
Authors: name: Haider Al-Tahan, name: Quentin Garrido, name: Randall Balestriero, name: Diane Bouchacourt, name: Caner Hazirbas, name: Mark Ibrahim

Significant research efforts have been made to scale and improve
vision-language model (VLM) training approaches. Yet, with an ever-growing
number of benchmarks, researchers are tasked with the heavy burden of
implementing each protocol, bearing a non-trivial computational cost, and
making sense of how all these benchmarks translate into meaningful axes of
progress. To facilitate a systematic evaluation of VLM progress, we introduce
UniBench: a unified implementation of 50+ VLM benchmarks spanning a
comprehensive range of carefully categorized capabilities from object
recognition to spatial awareness, counting, and much more. We showcase the
utility of UniBench for measuring progress by evaluating nearly 60 publicly
available vision-language models, trained on scales of up to 12.8B samples. We
find that while scaling training data or model size can boost many
vision-language model capabilities, scaling offers little benefit for reasoning
or relations. Surprisingly, we also discover today's best VLMs struggle on
simple digit recognition and counting tasks, e.g. MNIST, which much simpler
networks can solve. Where scale falls short, we find that more precise
interventions, such as data quality or tailored-learning objectives offer more
promise. For practitioners, we also offer guidance on selecting a suitable VLM
for a given application. Finally, we release an easy-to-run UniBench code-base
with the full set of 50+ benchmarks and comparisons across 59 models as well as
a distilled, representative set of benchmarks that runs in 5 minutes on a
single GPU.