What do MLLMs know about 'Waldo'? Evaluating Visual Reasoning under Multi-Instance Multi-Object Challenges

arXiv:2610.38957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have led to significant progress in visual reasoning capabilities. However, existing benchmarks curate image-question pairs pertaining to object categories with few instances, enabling trivial object referencing and limited visual ambiguity. In this work, we introduce MIMO-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in a Multi-Instance per Multi-Object categories (MIMO) setting. Each image-question pair in our benchmark pertains to instances belonging to object categories with multiple instances. The presence of such similar feature distractors causes hindrance in basic visual reasoning tasks, necessitating the referring expression to be composed of multiple visual subtasks to uniquely and unambiguously identify the target object. MIMO-Bench comprises 3,802 image-question pairs across attribute binding and numerical counting tasks. Despite impressive performances on existing benchmarks, both SOTA open-source (InternVL, QwenVL) and proprietary (Gemini, GPT-5) models exhibit substantially lower performance on MIMO-Bench, highlighting their limitations in the MIMO setting. The benchmark will be made publicly available.