# How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01955/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [NaviTrace: Evaluating Embodied Navigation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26909/) (2025)
- [Operationalizing Serendipity: Multi-Agent AI Workflows for Enhanced Materials Characterization with Theory-in-the-Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06569/) (2025)
- [CountLoop: Training-Free High-Instance Image Generation via Iterative Agent Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16644/) (2025)
- [CAVE: Detecting and Explaining Commonsense Anomalies in Visual Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26006/) (2025)
- [Towards Reliable and Interpretable Document Question Answering via VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10129/) (2025)
- [Seeing Straight: Document Orientation Detection for Efficient OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04161/) (2025)
- [Symbolic Grounding Reveals Representational Bottlenecks in Abstract Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21346/) (2026)
- [Embodied Spatial Intelligence: from Implicit Scene Modeling to Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00465/) (2025)
- [Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models: Benchmarking Object-Centric Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21922/) (2025)
- [Benchmark It Yourself (BIY): Preparing a Dataset and Benchmarking AI Models for Scatterplot-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06071/) (2025)
- [Exploring the AI Obedience: Why is Generating a Pure Color Image Harder than CyberPunk?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00166/) (2026)
- [Explaining is Harder Than Predicting Alone: Evaluating Concept-based Explanations of MLLMs as ICL Visual Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28215/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking and Enhancing Text-to-Image Models for Generating Visual Representations in Early Arithmetic Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31212/) (2026)
- [MODUS: Decoder-Only Any-to-Any Modeling of Diverse Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25948/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs), such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress. However, their detailed visual understanding beyond question answering remains unclear. In this paper, we benchmark popular MFMs (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet, etc). The main challenges in performing this analysis are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these by translating vision tasks into text-promptable, API-compatible formats via prompt chaining, creating a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that: 1) The MFMs are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. 2) They are respectable generalists; this is remarkable, as they are presumably trained on image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks. 5) Reasoning models, e.g., o3, show improvements in geometric tasks. 6) While prompt chaining techniques affect performance, better models are less sensitive to prompt variations. 7) An analysis of models with native image generation, such as the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit failure modes, such as hallucinated objects or misalignment between input and output.