gsm8k-v-eval
GSM8K-V: Can Vision Language Models Solve Grade School Math Word Problems in Visual Contexts — Fan Yuan et al. (2025) (arXiv:2509.25160, 2025)
What this evaluates
This benchmark evaluates vision-language models' ability to perform multi-step mathematical reasoning using purely visual, comic-style narratives instead of text. It specifically probes challenges in inter-image semantic understanding, object grounding, and extracting numerical relationships from multi-panel visual contexts.
Datasets
- GSM8K-V — total ?; splits: test (-1); repo https://github.com/ZJU-REAL/GSM8K-V
Metrics
accuracy(primary) — range: percent- Percentage of problems where the model's final predicted numeric answer exactly matches the ground truth answer. Calculated as (number of correct predictions / total number of problems) * 100.
Input / output format
Input: Multi-image comic-style visual narratives depicting grade school math word problems. Models receive a sequence of images representing the problem context and are prompted to reason step by step.
Output: Only the final numeric answer in the required format (integer, decimal, or fraction), without additional reasoning text.
Scoring recipe
def compute_accuracy(predictions, gold_answers):
correct = 0
for pred, gold in zip(predictions, gold_answers):
# Normalize whitespace and numeric formats
pred_val = normalize_numeric(pred.strip())
gold_val = normalize_numeric(gold.strip())
if pred_val == gold_val:
correct += 1
return (correct / len(predictions)) * 100
Common pitfalls
- Models often fail to maintain semantic consistency across multiple comic panels, leading to incorrect intermediate values or misaligned object grounding.
- Strict output formatting is required; models that output reasoning text alongside the answer may cause parsing failures if not explicitly stripped before scoring.
- Visual ambiguity in comic-style representations can cause models to misidentify quantities or relationships, resulting in systematic category-specific drops (e.g., 'Other' category).
Evidence (verbatim from paper)
For GSM8K-V, models are instructed to reason step by step over the images and report only the final numeric answer in the required format (integer, decimal, or fraction). The best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieved only 46.93% accuracy, while other models—including flagship ones such as GPT-5 and Llama-4-17B-128E—reached merely around 30%.
Citation
@misc{yuan2025gsm8kv,
title={GSM8K-V: Can Vision Language Models Solve Grade School Math Word Problems in Visual Contexts},
author={Fan Yuan et al. (2025)},
year={2025},
note={arXiv:2509.25160}
}
- arXiv: 2509.25160