Papers › IllusionVQA: A Challenging Optical Illusion Dataset for Vision Language Models

IllusionVQA: A Challenging Optical Illusion Dataset for Vision Language Models

23 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.15952archive 2025-07-28

HAZ Sameen Shahgir, Khondker Salman Sayeed, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Yue Dong, Rifat Shahriyar

The advent of Vision Language Models (VLM) has allowed researchers to investigate the visual understanding of a neural network using natural language. Beyond object classification and detection, VLMs are capable of visual comprehension and common-sense reasoning. This naturally led to the question: How do VLMs respond when the image itself is inherently unreasonable? To this end, we present IllusionVQA: a diverse dataset of challenging optical illusions and hard-to-interpret scenes to test the capability of VLMs in two distinct multiple-choice VQA tasks - comprehension and soft localization. GPT4V, the best performing VLM, achieves 62.99% accuracy (4-shot) on the comprehension task and 49.7% on the localization task (4-shot and Chain-of-Thought). Human evaluation reveals that humans achieve 91.03% and 100% accuracy in comprehension and localization. We discover that In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought reasoning substantially degrade the performance of Gemini-Pro in the localization task. Tangentially, we discover a potential weakness in the ICL capabilities of VLMs: they fail to locate optical illusions even when the correct answer is in the context window as a few-shot example.

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Tasks

Common Sense ReasoningIn-Context LearningMultiple-choiceObject LocalizationVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

IllusionVQA

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Object Localization IllusionVQA GPT4-Vision 4-shot+CoT Accuracy 49.7 #1 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA GPT4-Vision 4-shot Accuracy 46 #2 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA Gemini-Pro Accuracy 43.5 #3 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA Gemini-Pro 4-shot Accuracy 41.8 #4 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA GPT4-Vision Accuracy 40 #5 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA Gemini-Pro 4-shot+CoT Accuracy 33.9 #6 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA CogVLM Accuracy 28 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA LLaVA-1.5-13B Accuracy 24.8 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Object Localization IllusionVQA InstructBLIP-13B Accuracy 24.3 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA GPT4-Vision 4-shot Accuracy 62.99 #1 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA GPT4-Vision Accuracy 58.85 #2 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA Gemini-Pro 4-shot Accuracy 52.87 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA Gemini-Pro Accuracy 51.26 #4 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA LLaVA-1.5-13B Accuracy 40 #5 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA CogVLM Accuracy 38.16 #6 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) IllusionVQA InstructBLIP-13B Accuracy 34.25 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report

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