# Do MLLMs Exhibit Human-like Perceptual Behaviors? HVSBench: A Benchmark for MLLM Alignment with Human Perceptual Behavior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09603/

## 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 32 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11691/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04840/) (2024)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [Predicting Human Eye Fixations via an LSTM-based Saliency Attentive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09571/) (2016)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00230/) (2020)
- [DeepGaze II: Reading fixations from deep features trained on object recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01563/) (2016)
- [Predicting Goal-directed Human Attention Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14310/) (2020)
- [Unifying Top-down and Bottom-up Scanpath Prediction Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09383/) (2023)
- [Salient Object Subitizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07525/) (2016)

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

- [GazeLLM: Multimodal LLMs incorporating Human Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00221/) (2025)
- [Matched Outcomes, Divergent Gaze: How Foveated MLLMs Search Compared to Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16514/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at many vision tasks, it is unknown if they exhibit human-like perceptual behaviors. To evaluate this, we introduce HVSBench, the first large-scale benchmark with over 85,000 samples designed to test MLLM alignment with the human visual system (HVS). The benchmark covers 13 categories across 5 key fields: Prominence, Subitizing, Prioritizing, Free-Viewing, and Searching. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a significant perceptual gap: even state-of-the-art MLLMs achieve only moderate results. In contrast, human participants demonstrate strong performance, significantly outperforming all models. This underscores the high quality of HVSBench and the need for more human-aligned AI. We believe our benchmark will be a critical tool for developing the next generation of explainable MLLMs.