Evaluating VLMs for Autonomous Agent-Driven Geometry Clipping Detection in Video Game QA

Visual anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial in many real-world fields, such as industrial inspection, medical imaging, infrastructure monitoring, and remote sensing. However, the specific anomaly definitions, data modalities, and annotation standards across different domains make it difficult to transfer single-domain trained VAD models. Vision-language models (VLMs), pre-trained on large-scale cross-domain data, can perform visual perception under task instructions, offering a promising solution for cross-domain VAD. However, single-inference VLM judgments are unreliable, since they rely more on prior knowledge than on normal-sample references or fine-grained feature evidence. We therefore present AnomalyClaw, a training-free VAD agent that turns anomaly judgment into a multi-round refutation process. In each round, the agent proposes candidate anomalies and refutes each against normal-sample references, drawing on a 13-tool library for visual verification, reference parsing, and frozen expert probing. On the CrossDomainVAD-12 benchmark (12 datasets), AnomalyClaw achieves consistent macro-AUROC improvements over single-step direct inference with +6.23 pp on GPT-5.5, +7.93 pp on Seed2.0-lite, and +3.52 pp on Qwen3.5-VL-27B. We further introduce an optional verbalized self-evolution extension. It builds an online rulebook from internal-branch disagreement without oracle labels. On Qwen3.5-VL-27B, it delivers a +2.09 pp mean gain, comparable to a K = 10 oracle-label supervised baseline (+1.99 pp). These results show that agentic refutation improve anomaly understanding and reasoning of VLMs, rather than merely aggregating tool outputs.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being explored for video game quality assurance, especially gameplay glitch detection. Most existing evaluations, however, treat glitches as static visual anomalies, asking models to detect failures from a single frame. We argue that this framing misses a key distinction: some glitches are spatial and visible in an isolated frame, whereas others are temporal and become evident only through changes across ordered frames. A preliminary study confirms this gap, showing that temporal glitches are substantially harder for VLMs to detect than spatial ones. To enable systematic evaluation of this underexplored setting, we introduce TempGlitch, a controlled gameplay video benchmark for temporal glitch detection. TempGlitch covers five temporal glitch types with balanced per-category samples, together with paired glitch-free videos that enable reliable binary evaluation. We evaluate 12 proprietary and open-weight VLMs across multiple frame-sampling settings. Our results show that current VLMs remain near chance on TempGlitch, often collapsing into either overly conservative behavior that misses most glitches or overly sensitive behavior that flags clean videos as glitchy. Moreover, denser frame sampling and larger model size do not reliably resolve these failures. TempGlitch provides a focused testbed for temporal reasoning, robust gameplay understanding, and automated glitch detection with VLMs. Code and data are available at the project website.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have revolutionized how engineers approach complex problems in real-world applications. Their adoption in video games is on the other hand limited by the extreme variability of the synthetic scenarios and their poor compliance with real-world physics. Here we investigate the use of VLMs for annotating video game frame sequences with reward signals, a task with several potential applications including, among others, conditioned training and offline reinforcement learning. We show that VLMs often struggle to answer basic questions on racing video games (although we observed a similar behavior on other game genres) and discuss countermeasures such as VLM output mixing and prompt optimization. We also show how input sequence length, resolution, and question batching affect the annotation quality and its token consumption.