# UOUO: Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects for Measuring Knowledge Horizons of Vision Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18391/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (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)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Training generative neural networks via Maximum Mean Discrepancy optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03906/) (2015)
- [A Realistic Fish-Habitat Dataset to Evaluate Algorithms for Underwater Visual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12603/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21876/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smaller-scale Vision-Langauge Models (VLMs) often claim to perform on par with larger models in general-domain visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks while offering advantages in computational efficiency and storage. However, their ability to handle rare objects, which fall into the long tail of data distributions, is less understood. To rigorously evaluate this aspect, we introduce the "Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects" (UOUO) benchmark. This benchmark focuses on systematically testing VLMs with both large and small parameter counts on rare and specialized objects. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that while smaller VLMs maintain competitive performance on common datasets, they significantly underperform on tasks involving uncommon objects. We also propose an advanced, scalable pipeline for data collection and cleaning, ensuring the UOUO benchmark provides high-quality, challenging instances. These findings highlight the need to consider long-tail distributions when assessing the true capabilities of VLMs.