TACIT Benchmark: A Programmatic Visual Reasoning Benchmark for Generative and Discriminative Models
Organizations: Independent Researcher
Abstract
Existing visual reasoning benchmarks predominantly rely on natural language prompts, evaluate narrow reasoning modalities, or depend on subjective scoring procedures such as LLM-as-judge. We introduce the TACIT Benchmark, a programmatic visual reasoning benchmark comprising 10 tasks across 6 reasoning domains: spatial navigation, abstract pattern completion, causal simulation, logical constraint satisfaction, graph theory, and topology. The benchmark provides dual-track evaluation: a generative track in which models must produce solution images verified through deterministic computer-vision pipelines, and a discriminative track offering five-way multiple choice with structurally plausible near-miss distractors. Each distractor violates exactly one structural constraint, requiring models to reason about fine-grained visual differences rather than exploit superficial cues. Version 0.1.0 distributes 6,000 puzzles (108,000 PNG images across three resolutions) with fully deterministic seeded generation and reproducible verification. The dataset, generation code, and evaluation harness are released under the Apache 2.0 license on HuggingFace (DOI: 10.57967/hf/7904).
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | Domains | Tasks | Lang-min | Gen | Disc | Det-V |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RAVEN | 1 | 1 | ✓ | × | ✓ | ✓ |
| ARC | 1 | vary | ✓ | × | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bongard-LOGO | 1 | 1 | ✓ | × | ✓ | × |
| MMMU | many | 900+ | × | × | ✓ | × |
| MathVista | many | 6k+ | × | × | ✓ | × |
| CLEVR | 1 | 1 | × | × | ✓ | ✓ |
| # | Task | Domain | Bin. | Verification | Difficulty Axes | Easy | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Multi-Layer Maze | Spatial | No | BFS path tracing | grid, layers, portals | , 1L, 0P | , 3L, 5P |
| 2 | Raven’s Matrices | Pattern | No | SSIM | rules, complexity | 1 rule, additive | 3 rules, compositional |
| 3 | CA Forward | Pattern | No | Pixel sampling | grid, states, steps | , 2-state, 1-step | , 8-state, 5-step |
| 4 | CA Inverse | Pattern | No | Pixel sampling | grid, states, steps | , 4-state, 1-step | , 16-state, 3-step |
| 5 | Logic Grid | Logical | No | Pixel sampling | grid, constraints, types | , 6C, 2T | , 16C, 4T |
| 6 | Graph -Coloring | Graph | No | Node sampling | nodes, density, | 6N, 0.3, | 20N, 0.5, |
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| # | Strategy | Threshold | Failure Diagnostic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BFS path tracing | 4 structural checks | Failed check ID |
| 2 | SSIM | SSIM score | |
| 3 | Pixel sampling | All cells match | Diff. cells / total |
| 4 | Pixel sampling | All entries match | Diff. entries / total |
| 5 | Color voting | Latin sq. + exact | Constraint ID |
| 6 | Node sampling | Proper -coloring | Violating node(s) |
| # | Violation Types |
|---|---|
| 1 | wall_breach , portal_skip , disconnected , wrong_exit |
| 2 | wrong_shape , wrong_color , wrong_rotation , wrong_count |
| 3 | wrong_cell , wrong_step_count , wrong_rule |
| 4 | off_by_one_rule , transposed_rule , partial_rule |
| 5 | constraint_violation , symbol_swap , non_unique |
| 6 | adjacent_conflict , missing_color , wrong_k |
| # | Task | Easy | Medium | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maze | , 1L, 0P | , 2L, 2P | , 3L, 5P |
| 2 | Raven | 1r, add. | 2r, add. | 3r, comp. |
| 3 | CA Fwd | , 2s, 1t | , 4s, 3t | , 8s, 5t |
| 4 | CA Inv | , 4s, 1t | , 8s, 2t | , 16s, 3t |
| 5 | Logic | , 6c, 2ty | , 10c, 3ty | , 16c, 4ty |
| 6 | Color | 6n, .3, | 12n, .4, | 20n, .5, |
Visual Reasoning
Visual reasoning studies how AI systems interpret and combine visual evidence to solve spatial, relational, compositional, and physical problems.
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