Title: AVA-Bench: Atomic Visual Ability Benchmark for Vision Foundation Models
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Vision Foundation Models, Atomic Visual Ability

Abstract: The rise of vision foundation models (VFMs) calls for systematic evaluation. A common approach pairs VFMs with large language models (LLMs) as general-purpose heads, followed by evaluation on broad Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks. However, this protocol has two key blind spots: (i) Instruction tuning data may not align with VQA test distributions, meaning a wrong prediction can stem from such data mismatch rather than VFMs' visual shortcomings; (ii) VQA benchmarks often require multiple visual abilities in a single question, making it difficult to determine whether errors arise from the lack of all required abilities or just one key ability. 
To address these gaps, we introduce AVA-Bench, the first benchmark that explicitly disentangles 14 Atomic Visual Abilities (AVAs)---foundational skills like localization, depth estimation, and spatial understanding that collectively support complex visual reasoning tasks. By decoupling AVAs and matching training and test distributions within each, AVA-Bench pinpoints exactly where a VFM excels or falters.
Applying AVA-Bench to leading VFMs thus reveals distinctive "ability fingerprints," turning VFM selection from educated guesswork into principled engineering. Notably, we find that a 0.5B LLM yields similar VFM rankings as a 7B LLM while cutting GPU hours by 8x, enabling more efficient evaluation. By offering a comprehensive and transparent benchmark, we hope AVA-Bench lays the foundation for the next generation of VFMs.

TL;DR: AVA-BENCH, the first benchmark that explicitly evaluates Vision Foundation Models' Atomic Visual Abilities--foundational skills like localization and depth estimation that collectively support complex visual reasoning tasks.