Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs $10 \times$ larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar. The project is released at: https://github.com/SparksJoe/Prism.

Prism是一个创新的框架，旨在解决视觉问题求解中构成的知觉和推理过程的相互交织难题，通过将感知和推理分离为两个不同的阶段，实现了对专有和开源Vision Language Models在感知和推理能力上的系统比较和评估。通过将专注于感知的精简VLM与专为推理而设计的强大LLM相结合，Prism在一般的视觉语言任务中取得了卓越的结果，同时大幅减少了训练和操作成本的投入。在严格的多模式基准MMStar上，使用vanilla 2B LLaVA和免费获取的GPT-3.5配置Prism，在性能上媲美比其大10倍的VLM。

Prism: 一个解耦和评估VLM能力的框架