cs.AIJul 9, 2026

Blind-Spots-Bench: Evaluating Blind Spots in Multimodal Models

Authors: Matteo SantelmoXiuying WeiIsraa FakihFelix BauerJuan Garcia GiraldoChengkun LiEtienne BamasEmmanuel Abbé

Abstract

Modern AI models achieve strong performance on many established benchmarks, yet they still fail on tasks that humans find almost trivial, such as manipulating a string or drawing a dog with five legs. These examples suggest that existing benchmarks may under-measure persistent blind spots in current systems. We introduce blind-spots-bench\texttt{blind-spots-bench}, a benchmark designed to expose such blind spots through tasks that appear simple for humans but remain challenging for modern AI. We collect raw questions from students in an AI course, clean and annotate them with structured reference solutions, and propose a task taxonomy tailored to the resulting dataset of 235 samples. We further develop an automated grading pipeline to evaluate a wide range of models, including open-weight and closed-source language, vision-language, and image-generation models. Our analysis on blind-spots-bench\texttt{blind-spots-bench} reveals that closed-source frontier models can substantially outperform open-weight models with even 10%\approx10\% gap, even when they attain comparable performance on existing benchmarks. A more fine-grained analysis shows that no single model dominates across all task types, and that some tasks remain challenging for all evaluated models. These results highlight the value of blind-spots-bench\texttt{blind-spots-bench} as a diagnostic stress test for identifying concrete weaknesses in current modern models.

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