# Shape and Texture Recognition in Large Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23062/

## 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.
- Builds on 36 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2025.

## 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, 30 of 36)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Pix3D: Dataset and Methods for Single-Image 3D Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04610/) (2018)
- [LVLM-eHub: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09265/) (2023)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [A Large-Scale Car Dataset for Fine-Grained Categorization and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08959/) (2015)
- [VL-CheckList: Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models with Objects, Attributes and Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00221/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Data for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11512/) (2019)
- [ARC Prize 2024: Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04604/) (2024)
- [Material Recognition in the Wild with the Materials in Context Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.0623/) (2014)
- [Triplet-Center Loss for Multi-View 3D Object Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06189/) (2018)
- [VHELM: A Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07112/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Deep Multi-Shape Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09610/) (2022)
- [VisOnlyQA: Large Vision Language Models Still Struggle with Visual Perception of Geometric Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00947/) (2024)
- [A Dense Material Segmentation Dataset for Indoor and Outdoor Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10614/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DAVSP: Safety Alignment for Large Vision-Language Models via Deep Aligned Visual Safety Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09353/) (2025)
- [AVA-Bench: Atomic Visual Ability Benchmark for Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09082/) (2025)
- [Coding the Visual World: From Image to Simulation Using Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05344/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Shapes and textures are the basic building blocks of visual perception. The ability to identify shapes regardless of orientation, texture, or context, and to recognize textures and materials independently of their associated objects, is essential for a general visual understanding of the world. This work introduces the Large Shapes and Textures dataset (LAS&T), a giant collection of highly diverse shapes and textures, created by unsupervised extraction of patterns from natural images. This dataset is used to benchmark how effectively leading Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM/VLM) recognize and represent shapes, textures, and materials in 2D and 3D scenes. For shape recognition, we test the models' ability to match images of identical shapes that differ in orientation, texture, color, or environment. Our results show that the shape-recognition capabilities of LVLMs remain well below human performance, especially when multiple transformations are applied. LVLMs rely predominantly on high-level and semantic features and struggle with abstract shapes lacking class associations. For texture and material recognition, we evaluated the models' ability to identify images with identical textures and materials across different objects and environments. Interestingly, leading LVLMs approach human-level performance in recognizing materials in 3D scenes, yet substantially underperform humans when identifying simpler, more abstract 2D textures and shapes. These results are consistent across a wide range of leading LVLMs (GPT/Gemini/LLama/Qwen) and foundation vision models (DINO/CLIP), exposing major deficiencies in the ability of VLMs to extract low-level visual features. In contrast, humans and simple nets trained directly for these tasks achieve high accuracy. The LAS&T dataset, featuring over 700,000 images for 2D/3D shape and textures recognition and retrieval, is freely available.