VisualNeedle: Benchmarking Active Visual Search in Information-Dense Scenes
Researchers introduce VisualNeedle, a benchmark that exposes limitations in multimodal large language models' ability to perform genuine fine-grained visual search in information-dense scenes. Despite frontier MLLMs reporting over 90% accuracy on existing benchmarks, VisualNeedle reveals that these models struggle significantly when critical evidence is spatially constrained to minute regions, with the best model achieving only 56% accuracy versus 63% human performance.