Commonsense Reasoning in Computer Vision: Foundations, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference. While early surveys focus on monolithic vision-language models or general multimodal reasoning, a dedicated synthesis of the rapidly expanding compositional visual reasoning literature is still missing. We fill this gap with a comprehensive survey spanning 2023 to 2025 that systematically reviews 260+ papers from top venues (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, etc.). We first formalize core definitions and describe why compositional approaches offer advantages in cognitive alignment, semantic fidelity, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency. Next, we trace a five-stage paradigm shift: from prompt-enhanced language-centric pipelines, through tool-enhanced LLMs and tool-enhanced VLMs, to recently minted chain-of-thought reasoning and unified agentic VLMs, highlighting their architectural designs, strengths, and limitations. We then catalog 60+ benchmarks and corresponding metrics that probe compositional visual reasoning along dimensions such as grounding accuracy, chain-of-thought faithfulness, and high-resolution perception. Drawing on these analyses, we distill key insights, identify open challenges (e.g., limitations of LLM-based reasoning, hallucination, a bias toward deductive reasoning, scalable supervision, tool integration, and benchmark limitations), and outline future directions, including world-model integration, human-AI collaborative reasoning, and richer evaluation protocols. By offering a unified taxonomy, historical roadmap, and critical outlook, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference and inspire the next generation of compositional visual reasoning research.

Recent advancements in zero-shot commonsense reasoning have empowered Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to acquire extensive commonsense knowledge without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Despite this progress, these models frequently suffer from limitations caused by human reporting biases inherent in textual knowledge, leading to understanding discrepancies between machines and humans. To bridge this gap, we introduce an additional modality to enrich the reasoning capabilities of PLMs. We propose Imagine (Machine Imagination-based Reasoning), a novel zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework that supplements textual inputs with visual signals from machine-generated images. Specifically, we enhance PLMs with the ability to imagine by embedding an image generator directly into the reasoning pipeline. To facilitate effective utilization of this imagined visual context, we construct synthetic datasets designed to emulate visual question-answering scenarios. Through comprehensive evaluations on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we demonstrate that Imagine substantially outperforms existing zero-shot approaches and even surpasses advanced large language models. These results underscore the capability of machine imagination to mitigate reporting bias and significantly enhance the generalization ability of commonsense reasoning models

Inspired by human categorization, visual reasoning about object properties, such as physical attributes and functions, involves identifying and recognizing low-level details and higher-level abstractions. While current visual question answering (VQA) studies consider multiple object properties, such as size, they typically blend perception and reasoning and lack representativeness with respect to reasoning levels and image categories, making it unclear whether and how vision-language models (VLMs) recognize and reason about depicted objects. To this end, we introduce a systematic evaluation framework comprising images of three representative types, three reasoning levels of increasing complexity, and four object property dimensions, informed by prior work on commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning. We develop a procedure to instantiate this framework in two VQA object-reasoning benchmarks: OPTICS-CNT, comprising 360 images paired with 1,080 multi-level, count-based questions, and OPTICS-CMP, comprising 2.1k comparison questions. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero-shot settings reveal significant limitations relative to humans, with the best-performing model achieving below 40% counting and 70% comparison accuracy. While newer reasoning models perform better, a 20% gap to human performance remains. VLMs struggle particularly with photographic images, counterfactual reasoning, physical and functional properties, and higher counts. We make the OPTICS benchmark data and code available to support future scalable benchmarking methods, generalized annotation guidelines, and advanced reasoning VLMs.