VIALM: A Survey and Benchmark of Visually Impaired Assistance with Large Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Visually Impaired Assistance (VIA) aims to automatically help the visually impaired (VI) handle daily activities. The advancement of VIA primarily depends on developments in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), both of which exhibit cutting-edge paradigms with large models (LMs). Furthermore, LMs have shown exceptional multimodal abilities to tackle challenging physically-grounded tasks such as embodied robots. To investigate the potential and limitations of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LMs' capabilities in VIA applications, we present an extensive study for the task of VIA with LMs (VIALM). In this task, given an image illustrating the physical environments and a linguistic request from a VI user, VIALM aims to output step-by-step guidance to assist the VI user in fulfilling the request grounded in the environment. The study consists of a survey reviewing recent LM research and benchmark experiments examining selected LMs' capabilities in VIA. The results indicate that while LMs can potentially benefit VIA, their output cannot be well environment-grounded (i.e., 25.7% GPT-4's responses) and lacks fine-grained guidance (i.e., 32.1% GPT-4's responses).
Key facts. Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 57 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2024.
Builds on
57 of 75 references.
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50 most cited of 57 All 57 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 13; 2026: 5.
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- 2024VIAssist: Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Models for Users with Visual Impairmentscited by 24
- 2024VisionGPT: LLM-Assisted Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Safe Visual Navigationcited by 13
- 2024WalkVLM:Aid Visually Impaired People Walking by Vision Language Modelcited by 13
- 2025Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 13
- 2024Emerging Practices for Large Multimodal Model (LMM) Assistance for People with Visual Impairments: Implications for Designcited by 10
- 2025Gaze-VLM:Bridging Gaze and VLMs through Attention Regularization for Egocentric Understandingcited by 10
- 2026Gaze-Regularized Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 7
- 2024ObjectFinder: An Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind Peoplecited by 5
- 2025Space-Aware Instruction Tuning: Dataset and Benchmark for Guide Dog Robots Assisting the Visually Impairedcited by 4
- 2025"I Can See Forever!": Evaluating Real-time VideoLLMs for Assisting Individuals with Visual Impairmentscited by 3
- 2025"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Modelscited by 3
- 2025Prompting without Panic: Attribute-aware, Zero-shot, Test-Time Calibrationcited by 2
11 more
- 2025Situat3DChange: Situated 3D Change Understanding Dataset for Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 2
- 2025Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?cited by 1
- 2026DEX-AR: A Dynamic Explainability Method for Autoregressive Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025EmoAssist: Emotional Assistant for Visual Impairment Communitycited by 0
- 2025How Blind and Low-Vision Individuals Prefer Large Vision-Language Model-Generated Scene Descriptionscited by 0
- 2025From Semantics, Scene to Instance-awareness: Distilling Foundation Model for Grounded Open-vocabulary Situation Recognitioncited by 0
- 2025Not There Yet: Evaluating Vision Language Models in Simulating the Visual Perception of People with Low Visioncited by 0
- 2025VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Makingcited by 0
- 2026RPIQ: Residual-Projected Multi-Collaboration Closed-Loop and Single Instance Quantization for Visually Impaired Assistancecited by 0
- 2026Gaze-Regularized VLMs for Ego-Centric Behavior Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Urban Risk-Aware Navigation via VQA-Based Event Maps for People with Low Visioncited by 0
- 2026Urban Risk-Aware Navigation via VQA-Based Event Maps for People with Low Vision12 May 2026
- 2026Gaze-Regularized Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation24 Mar 2026
- 2026Gaze-Regularized VLMs for Ego-Centric Behavior Understanding24 Mar 2026
- 2026DEX-AR: A Dynamic Explainability Method for Autoregressive Vision-Language Models6 Mar 2026
- 2026RPIQ: Residual-Projected Multi-Collaboration Closed-Loop and Single Instance Quantization for Visually Impaired Assistance6 Jan 2026
- 2025"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models12 Nov 2025
- 2025Gaze-VLM:Bridging Gaze and VLMs through Attention Regularization for Egocentric Understanding24 Oct 2025
- 2025Situat3DChange: Situated 3D Change Understanding Dataset for Multimodal Large Language Model13 Oct 2025
- 2025Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?1 Oct 2025
- 2025VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making28 Sep 2025
- 2025Not There Yet: Evaluating Vision Language Models in Simulating the Visual Perception of People with Low Vision14 Aug 2025
- 2025From Semantics, Scene to Instance-awareness: Distilling Foundation Model for Grounded Open-vocabulary Situation Recognition19 Jul 2025
11 more
- 2025Prompting without Panic: Attribute-aware, Zero-shot, Test-Time Calibration28 Jun 2025
- 2025"I Can See Forever!": Evaluating Real-time VideoLLMs for Assisting Individuals with Visual Impairments7 May 2025
- 2025Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Models22 Feb 2025
- 2025How Blind and Low-Vision Individuals Prefer Large Vision-Language Model-Generated Scene Descriptions15 Feb 2025
- 2025EmoAssist: Emotional Assistant for Visual Impairment Community13 Feb 2025
- 2025Space-Aware Instruction Tuning: Dataset and Benchmark for Guide Dog Robots Assisting the Visually Impaired11 Feb 2025
- 2024WalkVLM:Aid Visually Impaired People Walking by Vision Language Model30 Dec 2024
- 2024ObjectFinder: An Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind People4 Dec 2024
- 2024Emerging Practices for Large Multimodal Model (LMM) Assistance for People with Visual Impairments: Implications for Design11 Jul 2024
- 2024VIAssist: Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Models for Users with Visual Impairments3 Apr 2024
- 2024VisionGPT: LLM-Assisted Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Safe Visual Navigation19 Mar 2024
- 2024VIAssist: Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Models for Users with Visual Impairmentscited by 24
- 2024WalkVLM:Aid Visually Impaired People Walking by Vision Language Modelcited by 13
- 2025Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 13
- 2024Emerging Practices for Large Multimodal Model (LMM) Assistance for People with Visual Impairments: Implications for Designcited by 10
- 2025"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Modelscited by 3
- 2025Prompting without Panic: Attribute-aware, Zero-shot, Test-Time Calibrationcited by 2
- 2025Situat3DChange: Situated 3D Change Understanding Dataset for Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 2
- 2025Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?cited by 1
- 2026DEX-AR: A Dynamic Explainability Method for Autoregressive Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025How Blind and Low-Vision Individuals Prefer Large Vision-Language Model-Generated Scene Descriptionscited by 0
- 2025From Semantics, Scene to Instance-awareness: Distilling Foundation Model for Grounded Open-vocabulary Situation Recognitioncited by 0
- 2025Not There Yet: Evaluating Vision Language Models in Simulating the Visual Perception of People with Low Visioncited by 0
12 most cited of 14 All 14 (JSON)
- 2026Urban Risk-Aware Navigation via VQA-Based Event Maps for People with Low Vision12 May 2026
- 2026DEX-AR: A Dynamic Explainability Method for Autoregressive Vision-Language Models6 Mar 2026
- 2025"It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models12 Nov 2025
- 2025Situat3DChange: Situated 3D Change Understanding Dataset for Multimodal Large Language Model13 Oct 2025
- 2025Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?1 Oct 2025
- 2025VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making28 Sep 2025
- 2025Not There Yet: Evaluating Vision Language Models in Simulating the Visual Perception of People with Low Vision14 Aug 2025
- 2025From Semantics, Scene to Instance-awareness: Distilling Foundation Model for Grounded Open-vocabulary Situation Recognition19 Jul 2025
- 2025Prompting without Panic: Attribute-aware, Zero-shot, Test-Time Calibration28 Jun 2025
- 2025Beyond Visual Perception: Insights from Smartphone Interaction of Visually Impaired Users with Large Multimodal Models22 Feb 2025
- 2025How Blind and Low-Vision Individuals Prefer Large Vision-Language Model-Generated Scene Descriptions15 Feb 2025
- 2024WalkVLM:Aid Visually Impaired People Walking by Vision Language Model30 Dec 2024
12 newest of 14 All 14 (JSON)
- 2024VisionGPT: LLM-Assisted Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Safe Visual Navigationcited by 13
- 2025Gaze-VLM:Bridging Gaze and VLMs through Attention Regularization for Egocentric Understandingcited by 10
- 2024ObjectFinder: An Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind Peoplecited by 5
- 2025Space-Aware Instruction Tuning: Dataset and Benchmark for Guide Dog Robots Assisting the Visually Impairedcited by 4
- 2025"I Can See Forever!": Evaluating Real-time VideoLLMs for Assisting Individuals with Visual Impairmentscited by 3
- 2025EmoAssist: Emotional Assistant for Visual Impairment Communitycited by 0
- 2026RPIQ: Residual-Projected Multi-Collaboration Closed-Loop and Single Instance Quantization for Visually Impaired Assistancecited by 0
- 2026Gaze-Regularized VLMs for Ego-Centric Behavior Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Gaze-Regularized VLMs for Ego-Centric Behavior Understanding24 Mar 2026
- 2026RPIQ: Residual-Projected Multi-Collaboration Closed-Loop and Single Instance Quantization for Visually Impaired Assistance6 Jan 2026
- 2025Gaze-VLM:Bridging Gaze and VLMs through Attention Regularization for Egocentric Understanding24 Oct 2025
- 2025"I Can See Forever!": Evaluating Real-time VideoLLMs for Assisting Individuals with Visual Impairments7 May 2025
- 2025EmoAssist: Emotional Assistant for Visual Impairment Community13 Feb 2025
- 2025Space-Aware Instruction Tuning: Dataset and Benchmark for Guide Dog Robots Assisting the Visually Impaired11 Feb 2025
- 2024ObjectFinder: An Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind People4 Dec 2024
- 2024VisionGPT: LLM-Assisted Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Safe Visual Navigation19 Mar 2024