VisualSimpleQA: A Benchmark for Decoupled Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models in Fact-Seeking Question Answering

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements, yet the generation of non-factual responses remains prevalent in fact-seeking question answering (QA). Current multimodal fact-seeking benchmarks primarily focus on comparing model outputs to ground truth answers, providing limited insights into the performance of modality-specific modules. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualSimpleQA, a multimodal fact-seeking benchmark with two key features. First, it enables streamlined and decoupled evaluation of LVLMs in visual and linguistic modalities. Second, it incorporates well-defined difficulty criteria to guide human annotation and facilitates the extraction of a challenging subset, VisualSimpleQA-hard. Experiments on 15 LVLMs show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve merely 60%+ correctness in multimodal fact-seeking QA on VisualSimpleQA and 30%+ on VisualSimpleQA-hard. Furthermore, the decoupled evaluation across these models highlights substantial opportunities for improvement in both visual and linguistic modules. The dataset is available atthis https URL.

@article{wang2025_2503.06492,
  title={ VisualSimpleQA: A Benchmark for Decoupled Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models in Fact-Seeking Question Answering },
  author={ Yanling Wang and Yihan Zhao and Xiaodong Chen and Shasha Guo and Lixin Liu and Haoyang Li and Yong Xiao and Jing Zhang and Qi Li and Ke Xu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06492},
  year={ 2025 }
}