Evaluating Model Perception of Color Illusions in Photorealistic Scenes
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
We study the perception of color illusions by vision-language models. Color illusion, where a person's visual system perceives color differently from actual color, is well-studied in human vision. However, it remains underexplored whether vision-language models (VLMs), trained on large-scale human data, exhibit similar perceptual biases when confronted with such color illusions. We propose an automated framework for generating color illusion images, resulting in RCID (Realistic Color Illusion Dataset), a dataset of 19,000 realistic illusion images. Our experiments show that all studied VLMs exhibit perceptual biases similar human vision. Finally, we train a model to distinguish both human perception and actual pixel differences.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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. First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2024.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
3 papers.
- 2025ColorBench: Can VLMs See and Understand the Colorful World? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Color Perception, Reasoning, and Robustnesscited by 28
- 2025ChromouVQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models under Chromatic Camouflaged Imagescited by 1
- 2026Spatial Colour Mixing Illusions as a Perception Stress Test for Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Spatial Colour Mixing Illusions as a Perception Stress Test for Vision-Language Models6 Mar 2026
- 2025ChromouVQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models under Chromatic Camouflaged Images30 Nov 2025
- 2025ColorBench: Can VLMs See and Understand the Colorful World? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Color Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness10 Apr 2025
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- 2024The Art of Deception: Color Visual Illusions and Diffusion Models
- 2025Diagnosing Vision Language Models' Perception by Leveraging Human Methods for Color Vision Deficiencies
- 2026Seeing Is Believing? A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models on Visual Illusions and Anomalies
- 2026Illusion-Aware Visual Preprocessing and Anti-Illusion Prompting for Classic Illusion Understanding in Vision-Language Models
- 2023Grounding Visual Illusions in Language: Do Vision-Language Models Perceive Illusions Like Humans?
- 2026Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment using Psychophysical Data
- 2026Human-AI Perceptual Alignment by Playing Hues and Cues
- 2025Do Large Vision-Language Models Distinguish between the Actual and Apparent Features of Illusions?