Show Me Examples: Inferring Visual Concepts from Image Sets

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

When answering questions about images, humans naturally point, label, and draw to explain their reasoning. In contrast, modern vision-language models (VLMs) such as Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 only respond with text, which can be difficult for users to verify. We present SketchVLM, a training-free, model-agnostic framework that enables VLMs to produce non-destructive, editable SVG overlays on the input image to visually explain their answers. Across seven benchmarks spanning visual reasoning (maze navigation, ball-drop trajectory prediction, and object counting) and drawing (part labeling, connecting-the-dots, and drawing shapes around objects), SketchVLM improves visual reasoning task accuracy by up to +28.5 percentage points and annotation quality by up to 1.48x relative to image-editing and fine-tuned sketching baselines, while also producing annotations that are more faithful to the model's stated answer. We find that single-turn generation already achieves strong accuracy and annotation quality, and multi-turn generation opens up further opportunities for human-AI collaboration. An interactive demo and code are at https://sketchvlm.github.io/.

A useful test of visual concept learning is not just whether a model can recognize a concept in a single image, but whether it can preserve and manipulate concept-level properties under transformation and transfer them to new scenes. We introduce VisAnalog, a controlled suite for this setting on natural images. Each example instantiates $A\!:\!B::C\!:\,?$: images $B$ and a hidden target image $D$ are produced by applying the same deterministic transformation sequence to source images $A$ and $C$. Given $A$, $B$, and $C$, a model must answer a multiple-choice question about $D$. The benchmark contains 617 human-validated questions spanning one- to four-step transformations such as zoom, quadrant swap, rotation, flip, and hue rotation. Across strong proprietary and open-source VLMs, end-to-end accuracy is substantially lower than oracle accuracy when $D$ is directly shown, and degrades sharply as transformation depth increases, while human performance remains near the ceiling. A program-conditioned evaluation further separates failures of relation inference from failures of transformation application, showing that inferring the visual relation from $A \rightarrow B$ is the dominant bottleneck, with additional application errors emerging on harder multi-step cases. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zli99/VisAnalog.