Eye-Q: A Multilingual Benchmark for Visual Word Puzzle Solving and Image-to-Phrase Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on standard vision-language benchmarks, yet often rely on surface-level recognition rather than deeper reasoning. We propose visual word puzzles as a challenging alternative, as they require discovering implicit visual cues, generating and revising hypotheses, and mapping perceptual evidence to non-literal concepts in ways that are difficult to solve via literal grounding, OCR-heavy shortcuts, or simple retrieval-style matching. We introduce Eye-Q, a multilingual benchmark designed to assess this form of complex visual understanding. Eye-Q contains 1,343 puzzles in which a model observes a conceptually dense scene with a brief description and must infer a specific target word or phrase. The puzzles are intentionally unstructured and cue-implicit, with distractors and contextual relationships that demand selective attention, abstraction, and associative inference. The benchmark spans English, Persian, Arabic, and cross-lingual puzzles. We evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs using an open-ended, human-aligned protocol that probes hypothesis formation and revision under lightweight assistance. Results reveal substantial performance gaps, especially on abstract and cross-lingual puzzles, highlighting limitations in current models' ability to construct and search over appropriate conceptual representations for flexible image-to-phrase inference; maximum accuracy reaches only 60.27%.