Tiny Scales, Great Challenges: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Scale Recognition
Jihang Jin, Ronghao Chen QuantaAlpha, Hao Zhang, Ziyan Liu, Huacan Wang QuantaAlpha, Qi Ye East China University of Science and Technology, Jingping Liu SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY
Visual scale recognition is a fundamental aspect for humans to perceive physical quantities in the real world, and it is crucial for enabling human-like intelligence in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing benchmarks typically focus on a single type of quantity (e.g., time) or a specific format (e.g., dials), lacking a comprehensive evaluation of scale recognition capabilities. To address these problems, we propose ScaleBench, a visual scale recognition benchmark built using images from COCO, Open Images, and Flickr, designed to comprehensively evaluate the scale recognition capabilities of MLLMs. To ensure high data quality, we develop detailed annotation guidelines and procedures, resulting in a total of 6,574 annotated samples. Based on this benchmark, we evaluate multiple closed-source and open-source MLLMs. Experimental results reveal that the best-performing model achieves only 42.60% accuracy, far lower than the 97.40% of humans. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth experimental analyses and provide future research directions. Our benchmark and implementation codes are available at https://github.com/Sonder-hang/ScaleBench.
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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