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HFEPX · Eval paper review

How Do VLMs Behave When Blind or Misled? Behavioral Evaluation of VLMs on Scientific Figures

Paul Osemudiame Oamen, Owusu-Banahene Osei, Ananya Mukherjee, Christian Greisinger +3 more

Published

Aug 13, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

5/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Aug 13, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
5/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading). We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty. It contains 250 figures with high-quality human annotations across three evaluation aspects, totaling 600+ hours of annotation effort. We further extend these figures via image transformations, reasoning questions, resistance probes, caption-bias probes, and confirmed selective-blur targets, producing over 34,000 evaluation setups for stress testing. We further propose the Admittance-Resistance-Inductance (A-R-I) framework to evaluate whether models acknowledge insufficient evidence, resist misleading context, and infer cautiously from partial information. Our results reveal substantial behavioral differences among models. GPT-5.2 achieves the highest description quality (MQM 91.6) with strong reasoning accuracy (78.4%), yet hallucinates unreadable content in 96% of cases, whereas Gemini 3.1 Pro, a comparably capable model (MQM 90.2, reasoning 81.0%), admits uncertainty in 71% of such cases and achieves the strongest resistance score (0.91). These findings show that high perception and reasoning accuracy alone do not guarantee behavioral reliability, a dimension critical for deployment in scientific workflows.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading)."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading)."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading)."

Benchmarks / Datasets

partial

Scifigbench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading)."

Benchmarks and datasets

Scifigbench

Reported metrics

accuracy
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading).

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they behave when visual evidence is missing or misleading).
  • We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty.
  • It contains 250 figures with high-quality human annotations across three evaluation aspects, totaling 600+ hours of annotation effort.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they…
  • We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty.
  • It contains 250 figures with high-quality human annotations across three evaluation aspects, totaling 600+ hours of annotation effort.

Why it matters for eval

  • Existing vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks emphasize perception and reasoning accuracy (how well VLMs describe and reason about what they see in an image), with limited attention to behavioral reliability under uncertainty (how they…
  • We introduce SciFigBench, a diagnostic VLM benchmark for scientific figure understanding that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and behavioral reliability under uncertainty.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Scifigbench

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy