Abstract
Kamon (family crests) are an important part of Japanese culture and a natural test case for compositional visual recognition: each crest combines a small number of symbolic choices, but the space of possible descriptions is sparse. We introduce KamonBench, a grammar-based image-to-structure benchmark with 20,000 synthetic composite crests and auxiliary component examples. Each composite crest is paired with a formal kamon description language - "kamon yōgo" - description, a segmented Japanese analysis, an English translation, and a non-linguistic program code. Because each synthetic crest is generated from known factors, namely container, modifier, and motif, KamonBench supports evaluation beyond caption-level accuracy: direct program-code factor metrics, controlled factor-pair recombination splits, counterfactual motif-sensitivity groups under fixed container-modifier contexts, and linear probes of factor accessibility. We include baseline results for a ViT encoder/Transformer decoder and two VGG n-gram decoders, with and without learned positional masks. KamonBench therefore provides a controlled testbed for sparse compositional visual recognition and factor recovery in vision-language models.
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