@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-semvink,
    title = "{S}em{V}ink: Advancing {VLM}s' Semantic Understanding of Optical Illusions via Visual Global Thinking",
    author = "Li, Sifan  and
      Cai, Yujun  and
      Wang, Yiwei",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1381/",
    pages = "27155--27165",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in semantic tasks but falter at a core human capability: detecting hidden content in optical illusions or AI-generated images through perceptual adjustments like zooming. We introduce HC-Bench, a benchmark of 112 images with hidden texts, objects, and illusions, revealing that leading VLMs achieve near-zero accuracy (0{--}5.36{\%}) even with explicit prompting. Humans resolve such ambiguities instinctively, yet VLMs fail due to an overreliance on high-level semantics. Strikingly, we propose SemVink (Semantic Visual Thinking) by simply scaling images to low resolutions, which unlocks over 99{\%} accuracy by eliminating redundant visual noise. This exposes a critical architectural flaw: VLMs prioritize abstract reasoning over low-level visual operations crucial for real-world robustness. Our work urges a shift toward hybrid models integrating multi-scale processing, bridging the gap between computational vision and human cognition for applications in medical imaging, security, and beyond."
}