# KiVA: Kid-inspired Visual Analogies for Testing Large Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 45 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [Learning How to Ask: Querying LMs with Mixtures of Soft Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06599/) (2021)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13786/) (2023)
- [Visual Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00363/) (2022)
- [What's "up" with vision-language models? Investigating their struggle with spatial reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19785/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [Emergent Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09196/) (2022)
- [MANTIS: Interleaved Multi-Image Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01483/) (2024)
- [Sequential Modeling Enables Scalable Learning for Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00785/) (2023)
- [Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12066/) (2023)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)
- [Vision language models are blind: Failing to translate detailed visual features into words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06581/) (2024)
- [Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06129/) (2021)
- [Using Shape to Categorize: Low-Shot Learning with an Explicit Shape Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07296/) (2021)
- [Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Delving Into Spatial Reasoning for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14852/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Really Improve by Self-critiquing Their Own Plans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08118/) (2023)
- [Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10717/) (2021)
- [The ConceptARC Benchmark: Evaluating Understanding and Generalization in the ARC Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07141/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20328/) (2025)
- [Understanding the Limits of Vision Language Models Through the Lens of the Binding Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00238/) (2024)
- [Unfolding Spatial Cognition: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Visual Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04633/) (2025)
- [Can World Simulators Reason? Gen-ViRe: A Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13853/) (2025)
- [TRAVL: A Recipe for Making Video-Language Models Better Judges of Physics Implausibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07550/) (2025)
- [Visual symbolic mechanisms: Emergent symbol processing in vision language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15871/) (2025)
- [Can Large Language Models generalize analogy solving like children can?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02348/) (2024)
- [MimeQA: Towards Socially-Intelligent Nonverbal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16671/) (2025)
- [PuzzleWorld: A Benchmark for Multimodal, Open-Ended Reasoning in Puzzlehunts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06211/) (2025)
- [Toward Cognitive Supersensing in Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01541/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Compositional Scene Understanding in Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23125/) (2025)
- [BabyVLM-V2: Toward Developmentally Grounded Pretraining and Benchmarking of Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10932/) (2025)
- [Empowerment Gain and Causal Model Construction: Children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08230/) (2025)
- [The potential -- and the pitfalls -- of using pre-trained language models as cognitive science theories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12651/) (2025)
- [Understanding Space Is Rocket Science -- Only Top Reasoning Models Can Solve Spatial Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02175/) (2025)
- [LacMaterial: Large Language Models as Analogical Chemists for Materials Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22312/) (2025)
- [CARV: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Compositional Analogical Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27958/) (2026)
- [Reversing the Flow: Generation-to-Understanding Synergy in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15792/) (2026)
- [Thinking in Pictures: A Systematic Benchmark for Reasoning-driven Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02864/) (2026)
- [Quo Vadis, Visual In-Context Learning? A Unified Benchmark Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10967/) (2026)
- [MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11900/) (2026)
- [PRISM: A Category-Theoretic Framework for Measuring and Refining Multimodal Analogies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01383/) (2026)
- [Human-Like Attention? A Psychophysical Comparison of Visual Search in Humans and MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05463/) (2026)
- [Matching Object or Relation? Tracing Abstract Reasoning Inside VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07646/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates visual analogical reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs) compared to human adults and children. A "visual analogy" is an abstract rule inferred from one image and applied to another. While benchmarks exist for testing visual reasoning in LMMs, they require advanced skills and omit basic visual analogies that even young children can make. Inspired by developmental psychology, we propose a new benchmark of 4,300 visual transformations of everyday objects to test LMMs on visual analogical reasoning and compare them to children (ages three to five) and to adults. We structure the evaluation into three stages: identifying what changed (e.g., color, number, etc.), how it changed (e.g., added one object), and applying the rule to new scenarios. Our findings show that while GPT-o1, GPT-4V, LLaVA-1.5, and MANTIS identify the "what" effectively, they struggle with quantifying the "how" and extrapolating this rule to new objects. In contrast, children and adults exhibit much stronger analogical reasoning at all three stages. Additionally, the strongest tested model, GPT-o1, performs better in tasks involving simple surface-level visual attributes like color and size, correlating with quicker human adult response times. Conversely, more complex tasks such as number, rotation, and reflection, which necessitate extensive cognitive processing and understanding of extrinsic spatial properties in the physical world, present more significant challenges. Altogether, these findings highlight the limitations of training models on data that primarily consists of 2D images and text.