Seeing Through Their Eyes: Evaluating Visual Perspective Taking in Vision Language Models

Gracjan Góral, Alicja Ziarko, Michal Nauman, Maciej Wolczyk

Keywords: vision language models, perspective taking

Abstract: Visual perspective-taking (VPT), the ability to understand the viewpoint of another person, enables individuals to anticipate the actions of other people. For instance, a driver can avoid accidents by assessing what pedestrians see. Humans typically develop this skill in early childhood, but it remains unclear whether the recently emerging Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess such capability. Furthermore, as these models are increasingly deployed in the real world, understanding how they perform nuanced tasks like VPT becomes essential. In this paper, we introduce two manually curated datasets, **Isle-Bricks** and **Isle-Dots** for testing VPT skills, and we use it to evaluate $12$ commonly used VLMs. Across all models, we observe a significant performance drop when perspective-taking is required. Additionally, we find performance in object detection tasks is poorly correlated with performance on VPT tasks, suggesting that the existing benchmarks might not be sufficient to understand this problem. The code is available at [this URL](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ISLE-8758/).

Submission Number: 9