Spot The Ball: A Benchmark for Visual Social Inference
This addresses the need for more human-like AI agents in social reasoning, but it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than proposing a new method.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating visual social inference in AI by introducing the Spot The Ball benchmark, which tests vision-language models on localizing a removed sports ball from images, and found that humans are two to three times more accurate (20-34%) than models (≤17%).
Humans excel at visual social inference, the ability to infer hidden elements of a scene from subtle behavioral cues such as other people's gaze, pose, and orientation. This ability drives everyday social reasoning in humans and is critical for developing more human-like AI agents. We introduce Spot The Ball, a challenging benchmark for evaluating visual social inference in vision-language models (VLMs) using sports as a test domain. The task is to localize a removed sports ball from soccer, basketball, and volleyball images. We present a curated evaluation set with human baselines and a scalable pipeline for generating additional test items. We evaluate four state-of-the-art VLMs (Gemini, GPT, LLaMA, Qwen) using three prompting strategies, finding that humans are consistently two to three times more accurate (20-34%) than models ($\leq$ 17%) across all sports. Our analyses show that models rely on superficial spatial heuristics--such as guessing near the image center or nearby players--while humans leverage social cues like gaze direction and body pose. These findings reveal a persistent human-model gap in visual social reasoning and underscore the need for architectures that explicitly encode structured behavioral cues to achieve robust, human-like inference.