Vision language models (VLMs) have shown promising reasoning capabilities across various benchmarks; however, our understanding of their visual perception remains limited. In this work, we propose an eye examination process to investigate how a VLM perceives images, specifically focusing on key elements of visual recognition, from primitive color and shape to semantic levels. To this end, we introduce a dataset named LENS to guide a VLM to follow the examination and check its readiness. Once the model is ready, we conduct the examination. Through this examination, we quantify and visualize VLMs' sensitivities to color and shape, and semantic matching. Our findings reveal that VLMs have varying sensitivity to different colors while consistently showing insensitivity to green across different VLMs. Also, we found different shape sensitivity and semantic recognition depending on LLM's capacity despite using the same fixed visual encoder. Our analyses and findings have potential to inspire the design of VLMs and the pre-processing of visual input to VLMs for improving application performance.

本研究针对视觉语言模型（VLMs）在视觉感知方面的理解不足，提出了一种眼科检查方法，以评估VLM对图像的感知能力。研究发现VLM对不同颜色的敏感性存在差异，尤其对绿色表现出普遍的不敏感，表明VLM的设计与输入处理有潜力改善其在应用中的表现。

视觉语言模型的眼科检查：指导与检测视觉能力