# Does AI Understand Imaging? A Systematic Benchmark of Agentic AI for Computational Imaging Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07189/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 37 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12983/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist's annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15029/) (2020)
- [Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06116/) (2017)
- [PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16411/) (2025)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [GMAI-MMBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark Towards General Medical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03361/) (2024)
- [Deep White-Balance Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01354/) (2020)
- [BANet: Blur-aware Attention Networks for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07518/) (2021)
- [Curriculum Learning for ab initio Deep Learned Refractive Optics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01089/) (2023)
- [Learned reconstructions for practical mask-based lensless imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11502/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) and agentic AI have shown strong performance on semantic visual tasks, but it remains unclear whether they can handle the physics and inverse problems that underlie computational imaging. We present ImagingBench, a benchmark of 20 computational imaging tasks spanning five categories: ray and wave optics, image signal processing, inverse reconstruction, computational sensing, and calibration. ImagingBench evaluates three complementary settings: Expert, fixed expert-guided inverse reconstruction; Planner, planner-guided inverse reconstruction; and Forward, forward-system simulation for consistency checking. We benchmark leading proprietary and open-source image-centric multimodal systems, including Gemini, GPT, and Qwen, and compare them with representative task-specific non-agentic baselines. Across tasks, agentic models remain consistently weaker than specialized methods, especially on computational sensing problems such as lensless imaging, event-based reconstruction, time-of-flight imaging, and holography. Planner guidance provides only modest and inconsistent gains over the fixed-prompt Expert baseline. Although the models often generate visually plausible outputs, their reference-based fidelity remains poor, revealing a substantial gap between semantic visual competence and physically grounded imaging performance. ImagingBench provides a unified testbed for measuring this gap and tracking progress in agentic AI for computational imaging.