Daily Papers

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) combine the linguistic strengths of LLMs with the ability to process multimodal data, enbaling them to address a broader range of visual tasks. Because MLLMs aim at more general, human-like competence than language-only models, we take inspiration from the Wechsler Intelligence Scales - an established battery for evaluating children by decomposing intelligence into interpretable, testable abilities. We introduce KidGym, a comprehensive 2D grid-based benchmark for assessing five essential capabilities of MLLMs: Execution, Perception Reasoning, Learning, Memory and Planning. The benchmark comprises 12 unique tasks, each targeting at least one core capability, specifically designed to guage MLLMs' adaptability and developmental potential, mirroring the stages of children's cognitive growth. Additionally, our tasks encompass diverse scenarios and objects with randomly generated layouts, ensuring a more accurate and robust evluation of MLLM capabilities. KidGym is designed to be fully user-customizable and extensible, allowing researchers to create new evaluation scenarios and adjust difficuly levels to accommodate the rapidly growing MLLM community. Through the evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs using KidGym, we identified significant insights into model capabilities and revealed several limitations of current models. We release our benchmark at: https://bobo-ye.github.io/KidGym/.

While agentic AI and its core multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable promise in language and visual reasoning across domains ranging from daily life to advanced scientific research, a profound gap remains between artificial and human intelligence. Despite the integration of powerful tools and advanced MLLMs, state-of-the-art AI agents frequently fail at foundational, seemingly simple tasks that a child can resolve with ease. Inspired by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we introduce ChildAgentEval, the first psychometrically grounded interactive benchmark for evaluating cognitive age alignment in MLLM-based agents. ChildAgentEval systematically compares the reasoning performance of various MLLM-based interactive agents against age-specific human developmental stages, exposing where current agentic AI systems can and cannot simulate age-specific cognitive behavior.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level reasoning is not well-established. One such challenge is abstract visual reasoning (AVR) -- the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the AVR tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA and a new benchmark VCog-Bench containing three datasets to evaluate the zero-shot AVR capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human intelligent investigation. Our comparative experiments with different open-source and closed-source MLLMs on the VCog-Bench revealed a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of VCog-Bench, consisting of MaRs-VQA, and the inference pipeline will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities.

As recent multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) have shown formidable proficiency on various complex tasks, there has been increasing attention on debating whether these models could eventually mirror human intelligence. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating solely on task performance, such as the accuracy of identifying the attribute of an object. Combining well-developed cognitive science to understand the intelligence of MLLMs beyond superficial achievements remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce the first cognitive-driven multi-lingual and multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the general intelligence ability of MLLMs, dubbed M3GIA. Specifically, we identify five key cognitive factors based on the well-recognized Cattell-Horn-Carrol (CHC) model of intelligence and propose a novel evaluation metric. In addition, since most MLLMs are trained to perform in different languages, a natural question arises: is language a key factor influencing the cognitive ability of MLLMs? As such, we go beyond English to encompass other languages based on their popularity, including Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean, to construct our M3GIA. We make sure all the data relevant to the cultural backgrounds are collected from their native context to avoid English-centric bias. We collected a significant corpus of data from human participants, revealing that the most advanced MLLM reaches the lower boundary of human intelligence in English. Yet, there remains a pronounced disparity in the other five languages assessed. We also reveals an interesting winner takes all phenomenon that are aligned with the discovery in cognitive studies. Our benchmark will be open-sourced, with the aspiration of facilitating the enhancement of cognitive capabilities in MLLMs.

In the field of psychology, traditional assessment methods, such as standardized scales, are frequently critiqued for their static nature, lack of personalization, and reduced participant engagement, while comprehensive counseling evaluations are often inaccessible. The complexity of quantifying psychological traits further limits these methods. Despite advances with large language models (LLMs), many still depend on single-round Question-and-Answer interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PsyDI, a personalized and progressively in-depth chatbot designed for psychological measurements, exemplified by its application in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework. PsyDI leverages user-related multi-modal information and engages in customized, multi-turn interactions to provide personalized, easily accessible measurements, while ensuring precise MBTI type determination. To address the challenge of unquantifiable psychological traits, we introduce a novel training paradigm that involves learning the ranking of proxy variables associated with these traits, culminating in a robust score model for MBTI measurements. The score model enables PsyDI to conduct comprehensive and precise measurements through multi-turn interactions within a unified estimation context. Through various experiments, we validate the efficacy of both the score model and the PsyDI pipeline, demonstrating its potential to serve as a general framework for psychological measurements. Furthermore, the online deployment of PsyDI has garnered substantial user engagement, with over 3,000 visits, resulting in the collection of numerous multi-turn dialogues annotated with MBTI types, which facilitates further research.