CogEvolve: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Relational Reasoning in Semantic Extension
Jingjie Zeng, Huayang Li, Liang Yang Dalian University of Technology, Yuanyuan Sun Dalian University of Technology, Shaowu Zhang Dalian University of Technology, Hongfei Lin
Human cognition excels at extending knowledge through analogy, where word meanings evolve along structured pathways from concrete prototypes to abstract senses via metaphor and metonymy. Do Large Language Models (LLMs) internalize this generative logic, or merely mimic statistical patterns? To investigate this, we introduce CogEvolve, a cognitive linguistic benchmark designed to test these evolutionary pathways across textual and visual modalities. Our evaluation reveals a distinct cognitive profile: models function as “Super-Associators” expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning. In text, they exhibit a Frequency-Primacy Conflation, confusing statistical prevalence with cognitive basicness. Crucially, this reasoning collapses further in the visual domain. We term this deficit the Ungrounded Arrow: models possess high-fidelity concept representations (the “dots”) but lack the transformational operators (the “arrows”) essential for true relational understanding.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表