Can Multimodal LLMs Solve the Basic Perception Problems of Percept-V?

The reasoning abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered a lot of attention in recent times, with advances made in frontiers like coding, mathematics, and science. However, very limited experiments have been done to assess their performance in simple perception tasks performed over uncontaminated, generated images containing basic shapes and structures. To address this issue, the paper introduces a dataset, Percept-V, containing a total of 7200 program-generated images equally divided into 30 categories, each testing a combination of visual perception skills. Unlike previously proposed datasets, Percept-V comprises very basic tasks of varying complexity that test the perception abilities of MLLMs. This dataset is then tested on state-of-the-art MLLMs like GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude as well as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like OpenAI o4-mini and DeepSeek R1 to gauge their performance. Contrary to the evidence that MLLMs excel in many complex tasks, our experiments show a significant drop in the models' performance with increasing problem complexity across all categories. An analysis of the performances also reveals that the tested MLLMs exhibit a similar trend in accuracy across categories, testing a particular cognitive skill and find some skills to be more difficult than others.