NumerosityVLM: A Cognitively Inspired Benchmark for Interpreting Numerosity Representations in Vision-Language Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.15425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on high-level multimodal tasks, yet numerosity perception, a cognitive ability that emerges in human infants before language acquisition, remains poorly understood in current models, as existing counting benchmarks entangle numerosity with correlated visual factors. We introduce a cognitively inspired diagnostic benchmark, NumerosityVLM, comprising 10,800 synthetic images across six control