Mind’s Eye: A Benchmark of Visual Abstraction, Transformation and Composition for Multimodal LLMs

摘要

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive progress on vision language benchmarks, yet their capacity for cognitive and psychological reasoning remains largely unexplored. We introduce Mind’s Eye, a multiple-choice benchmark of eight visuo-cognitive tasks inspired by classic human intelligence tests and organized under a novel A–R–T taxonomy: Abstraction, Relation, and Transformation. The tasks probe core processes of fluid intelligence such as pattern induction, analogical Relation mapping, and mental Transformation. We evaluate a diverse suite of closed-source and open-source MLLMs and compare their performance with human participants. Humans achieve 80% accuracy, while top performing MLLMs remain below 50%. Error analysis reveals failures in (i) visual attention allocation, (ii) internal perceptual manipulation, (iii) over reliance on domain priors, and (iv) weak abstraction of underlying visual concepts. Our findings suggest that current MLLMs exhibit limited fluid reasoning and visuo-cognitive integration compared with human participants, highlighting the need for cognitively grounded evaluation frameworks like Mind’s Eye.