Value-Spectrum: Quantifying Preferences of Vision-Language Models via Value Decomposition in Social Media Contexts

Jingxuan Li, Yuning Yang, Shengqi Yang, Linfan Zhang, Ying Nian Wu


Abstract
The recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has broadened the scope of multimodal applications. However, evaluations often remain limited to functional tasks, neglecting abstract dimensions such as personality traits and human values. To address this gap, we introduce Value-Spectrum, a novel Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark aimed at assessing VLMs based on Schwartz’s value dimensions that capture core human values guiding people’s preferences and actions. We design a VLM agent pipeline to simulate video browsing and construct a vector database comprising over 50,000 short videos from TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. These videos span multiple months and cover diverse topics, including family, health, hobbies, society, technology, etc. Benchmarking on Value-Spectrum highlights notable variations in how VLMs handle value-oriented content. Beyond identifying VLMs’ intrinsic preferences, we also explore the ability of VLM agents to adopt specific personas when explicitly prompted, revealing insights into the adaptability of the model in role-playing scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of Value-Spectrum as a comprehensive evaluation set for tracking VLM preferences in value-based tasks and abilities to simulate diverse personas. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/Jeremyyny/Value-Spectrum.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.472
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9591–9610
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.472/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingxuan Li, Yuning Yang, Shengqi Yang, Linfan Zhang, and Ying Nian Wu. 2025. Value-Spectrum: Quantifying Preferences of Vision-Language Models via Value Decomposition in Social Media Contexts. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9591–9610, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Value-Spectrum: Quantifying Preferences of Vision-Language Models via Value Decomposition in Social Media Contexts (Li et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.472.pdf