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Egocentric Bias in Vision-Language Models

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arxiv 2602.15892 v2 pith:H7TB5IEF submitted 2026-02-10 cs.CV cs.AI

Egocentric Bias in Vision-Language Models

classification cs.CV cs.AI
keywords perspectivespatialanotherbiasegocentricflipsetmodelssocial
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Visual perspective taking--inferring how the world appears from another's viewpoint--is foundational to social cognition. We introduce FlipSet, a diagnostic benchmark for Level-2 visual perspective taking (L2 VPT) in vision-language models. The task requires simulating 180-degree rotations of 2D character strings from another agent's perspective, isolating spatial transformation from 3D scene complexity. Evaluating 103 VLMs reveals systematic egocentric bias: the vast majority perform below chance, with roughly three-quarters of errors reproducing the camera viewpoint. Control experiments expose a compositional deficit--models achieve high theory-of-mind accuracy and above-chance mental rotation in isolation, yet fail catastrophically when integration is required. This dissociation indicates that current VLMs lack the mechanisms needed to bind social awareness to spatial operations, suggesting fundamental limitations in model-based spatial reasoning. FlipSet provides a cognitively grounded testbed for diagnosing perspective-taking capabilities in multimodal systems.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    A new benchmark reveals MLLMs achieve only 13% or lower accuracy on advanced perspective-conditioned spatial tasks in omnidirectional images, with RL reward shaping raising a 7B model from 31% to 60% in controlled settings.

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    MLLMs display a large perception-reasoning gap on perspective-conditioned spatial reasoning tasks from omnidirectional images, with sharp accuracy drops on advanced tasks like egocentric rotation, though partial gains...