KiVA: Kid-inspired Visual Analogies for Testing Large Multimodal Models

This paper investigates visual analogical reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs) compared to human adults and children. A "visual analogy" is an abstract rule inferred from one image and applied to another. While benchmarks exist for testing visual reasoning in LMMs, they require advanced skills and omit basic visual analogies that even young children can make. Inspired by developmental psychology, we propose a new benchmark of 1,400 visual transformations of everyday objects to test LMMs on visual analogical reasoning and compare them to children and adults. We structure the evaluation into three stages: identifying what changed (e.g., color, number, etc.), how it changed (e.g., added one object), and applying the rule to new scenarios. Our findings show that while models like GPT-4V, LLaVA-1.5, and MANTIS identify the "what" effectively, they struggle with quantifying the "how" and extrapolating this rule to new objects. In contrast, children and adults exhibit much stronger analogical reasoning at all three stages. Additionally, the strongest tested model, GPT-4V, performs better in tasks involving simple visual attributes like color and size, correlating with quicker human adult response times. Conversely, more complex tasks such as number, rotation, and reflection, which necessitate extensive cognitive processing and understanding of the 3D physical world, present more significant challenges. Altogether, these findings highlight the limitations of training models on data that primarily consists of 2D images and text.

Imitation versus Innovation: What children can do that large language and language-and-vision models cannot (yet)?

Much discussion about large language models and language-and-vision models has focused on whether these models are intelligent agents. We present an alternative perspective. We argue that these artificial intelligence models are cultural technologies that enhance cultural transmission in the modern world, and are efficient imitation engines. We explore what AI models can tell us about imitation and innovation by evaluating their capacity to design new tools and discover novel causal structures, and contrast their responses with those of human children. Our work serves as a first step in determining which particular representations and competences, as well as which kinds of knowledge or skill, can be derived from particular learning techniques and data. Critically, our findings suggest that machines may need more than large scale language and images to achieve what a child can do.