{"work":{"id":"c3797ec2-73a2-46c7-bc93-8bf33dd8b187","openalex_id":null,"doi":null,"arxiv_id":"2601.06521","raw_key":null,"title":"BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language","authors":null,"authors_text":"BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language , url =","year":2026,"venue":"cs.CV","abstract":"While humans develop core visual skills long before acquiring language, contemporary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still rely heavily on linguistic priors to compensate for their fragile visual understanding. We uncovered a crucial fact: state-of-the-art MLLMs consistently fail on basic visual tasks that humans, even 3-year-olds, can solve effortlessly. To systematically investigate this gap, we introduce BabyVision, a benchmark designed to assess core visual abilities independent of linguistic knowledge for MLLMs. BabyVision spans a wide range of tasks, with 388 items divided into 22 subclasses across four key categories. Empirical results and human evaluation reveal that leading MLLMs perform significantly below human baselines. Gemini3-Pro-Preview scores 49.7, lagging behind 6-year-old humans and falling well behind the average adult score of 94.1. These results show despite excelling in knowledge-heavy evaluations, current MLLMs still lack fundamental visual primitives. Progress in BabyVision represents a step toward human-level visual perception and reasoning capabilities. We also explore solving visual reasoning with generation models by proposing BabyVision-Gen and automatic evaluation toolkit. Our code and benchmark data are released at https://github.com/UniPat-AI/BabyVision for reproduction.","external_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06521","cited_by_count":null,"metadata_source":"pith","metadata_fetched_at":"2026-07-10T09:37:00.824668+00:00","pith_arxiv_id":"2601.06521","created_at":"2026-05-10T16:09:05.282792+00:00","updated_at":"2026-07-10T09:37:00.824668+00:00","title_quality_ok":true,"display_title":"Babyvision: Visual reasoning beyond language","render_title":"Babyvision: Visual reasoning beyond language"},"hub":{"state":{"work_id":"c3797ec2-73a2-46c7-bc93-8bf33dd8b187","tier":"hub","tier_reason":"10+ Pith inbound or 1,000+ external citations","pith_inbound_count":19,"external_cited_by_count":null,"distinct_field_count":4,"first_pith_cited_at":"2026-02-02T16:17:38+00:00","last_pith_cited_at":"2026-07-09T09:56:50+00:00","author_build_status":"not_needed","summary_status":"needed","contexts_status":"needed","graph_status":"needed","ask_index_status":"not_needed","reader_status":"not_needed","recognition_status":"not_needed","updated_at":"2026-08-21T07:19:54.477825+00:00","tier_text":"hub"},"tier":"hub","role_counts":[{"context_role":"baseline","n":2},{"context_role":"dataset","n":2}],"polarity_counts":[{"context_polarity":"baseline","n":2},{"context_polarity":"background","n":1},{"context_polarity":"use_dataset","n":1}],"runs":{},"summary":{},"graph":{},"authors":[]}}