Papers › BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive

BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive

18 Apr 2024arXiv:2404.12390archive 2025-07-28

Xingyu Fu, Yushi Hu, Bangzheng Li, Yu Feng, Haoyu Wang, Xudong Lin, Dan Roth, Noah A. Smith, Wei-Chiu Ma, Ranjay Krishna

We introduce Blink, a new benchmark for multimodal language models (LLMs) that focuses on core visual perception abilities not found in other evaluations. Most of the Blink tasks can be solved by humans "within a blink" (e.g., relative depth estimation, visual correspondence, forensics detection, and multi-view reasoning). However, we find these perception-demanding tasks cast significant challenges for current multimodal LLMs because they resist mediation through natural language. Blink reformats 14 classic computer vision tasks into 3,807 multiple-choice questions, paired with single or multiple images and visual prompting. While humans get 95.70% accuracy on average, Blink is surprisingly challenging for existing multimodal LLMs: even the best-performing GPT-4V and Gemini achieve accuracies of 51.26% and 45.72%, only 13.17% and 7.63% higher than random guessing, indicating that such perception abilities have not "emerged" yet in recent multimodal LLMs. Our analysis also highlights that specialist CV models could solve these problems much better, suggesting potential pathways for future improvements. We believe Blink will stimulate the community to help multimodal LLMs catch up with human-level visual perception.

PaperPDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Depth EstimationMultiple-choiceVisual Prompting

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

BlINK

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections