{"ID":2880772,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13968","arxiv_id":"2508.13968","title":"RotBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Identifying Image Rotation","abstract":"We investigate to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can accurately identify the orientation of input images rotated 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°. This task demands robust visual reasoning capabilities to detect rotational cues and contextualize spatial relationships within images, regardless of their orientation. To evaluate MLLMs on these abilities, we introduce RotBench, a 350-image manually-filtered benchmark comprising lifestyle, portrait, and landscape images. Despite the relatively simple nature of this task, we show that several state-of-the-art open and proprietary MLLMs, including GPT-5, o3, and Gemini-2.5-Pro, do not reliably identify rotation in input images. Providing models with auxiliary information -- including captions, depth maps, and more -- or using chain-of-thought prompting offers only small and inconsistent improvements. Our results indicate that most models are able to reliably identify right-side-up (0°) images, while certain models are able to identify upside-down (180°) images. None can reliably distinguish between 90° and 270° rotated images. Simultaneously showing the image rotated in different orientations leads to moderate performance gains for reasoning models, while a modified setup using voting improves the performance of weaker models. We further show that fine-tuning does not improve models' ability to distinguish 90° and 270° rotations, despite substantially improving the identification of 180° images. Together, these results reveal a significant gap between MLLMs' spatial reasoning capabilities and human perception in identifying rotation.","short_abstract":"We investigate to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can accurately identify the orientation of input images rotated 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°. This task demands robust visual reasoning capabilities to detect rotational cues and contextualize spatial relationships within images, regardless of their orie...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13968","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13968v3","authors":"[\"Tianyi Niu\",\"Jaemin Cho\",\"Elias Stengel-Eskin\",\"Mohit Bansal\"]","published":"2025-08-19T15:58:25Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}