@inproceedings{liu-etal-2025-associam,
    title = "{A}sso{C}i{A}m: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity",
    author = "Liu, Yifan  and
      Zhao, Wenkuan  and
      Zhong, Shanshan  and
      Qin, Jinghui  and
      Liang, Mingfu  and
      Huang, Zhongzhan  and
      Wen, Wushao",
    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.263/",
    pages = "5203--5219",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention, offering a promising pathway toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Among the essential capabilities required for AGI, creativity has emerged as a critical trait for MLLMs, with association serving as its foundation. Association reflects a model{'}s ability to think creatively, making it vital to evaluate and understand. While several frameworks have been proposed to assess associative ability, they often overlook the inherent ambiguity in association tasks, which arises from the divergent nature of associations and undermines the reliability of evaluations. To address this issue, we decompose ambiguity into two types{---}internal ambiguity and external ambiguity{---}and introduce AssoCiAm, a benchmark designed to evaluate associative ability while circumventing the ambiguity through a hybrid computational method. We then conduct extensive experiments on MLLMs, revealing a strong positive correlation between cognition and association. Additionally, we observe that the presence of ambiguity in the evaluation process causes MLLMs' behavior to become more random-like. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our method in ensuring more accurate and reliable evaluations. See Project Page for the data and codes."
}