# NEMO: Can Multimodal LLMs Identify Attribute-Modified Objects?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [InternLM2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17297/) (2024)
- [On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16934/) (2023)
- [InternLM-XComposer-2.5: A Versatile Large Vision Language Model Supporting Long-Contextual Input and Output](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03320/) (2024)
- [Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04567/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17092/) (2023)
- [NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14669/) (2024)
- [Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02462/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CAVE: Detecting and Explaining Commonsense Anomalies in Visual Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26006/) (2025)
- [Concrete Jungle: Towards Concreteness Paved Contrastive Negative Mining for Compositional Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made notable advances in visual understanding, yet their abilities to recognize objects modified by specific attributes remain an open question. To address this, we explore MLLMs' reasoning capabilities in object recognition, ranging from commonsense to beyond-commonsense scenarios. We introduce a novel benchmark, NEMO, which comprises 900 images of origiNal fruits and their corresponding attributE-MOdified ones; along with a set of 2,700 questions including open-, multiple-choice-, unsolvable types. We assess 26 recent open-sourced and commercial models using our benchmark. The findings highlight pronounced performance gaps in recognizing objects in NEMO and reveal distinct answer preferences across different models. Although stronger vision encoders improve performance, MLLMs still lag behind standalone vision encoders. Interestingly, scaling up the model size does not consistently yield better outcomes, as deeper analysis reveals that larger LLMs can weaken vision encoders during fine-tuning. These insights shed light on critical limitations in current MLLMs and suggest potential pathways toward developing more versatile and resilient multimodal models.