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This paper introduces VisualNoiseQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate how large language models perform active reasoning when visual sensors provide inconsistent or noisy feedback. By forcing text-only LLMs to iteratively query stochastic vision-language models and interpret uncertainty signals, the study addresses a critical gap in current evaluation metrics that often assume perfect environmental data. The results offer valuable insights into the robustness of AI agents operating in real-world scenarios where evidence reliability cannot be guaranteed.
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How Well Do LLMs Reason with Noisy Evidence? An Active Visual Reasoning Benchmark

arXiv2 min read

arXiv:2610.07751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world reasoning rarely reduces to static question answering: agents must actively gather information from tools and sensors that are often noisy and unreliable. Yet most existing active reasoning benchmarks assume that environmental feedback is trustworthy, or introduce noise without exposing an explicit, calibrated uncertainty signal, leaving open how LLMs should reason when the evidence itself is uncertain. We introduce VisualNoiseQA, a novel benchmark for active reasoning under noisy visual feedback. A text-only LLM must solve VQA problems by iteratively querying a fixed, off-the-shelf VLM treated as a stochastic visual sensor. For each query, we draw multiple samples and expose an empirical uncertainty signal via self-consistency, enabling the reasoner to probe from different angles and decide what to ask next and when to stop. Our construction is automatic and scalable: starting from diverse VQA sources and two noisy VLMs, we retain only questions where the sensor is inconsistent yet human-solvable. We evaluate multiple LLM reasoners on 1,000 instances spanning perception, chart understanding, and knowledge-intensive reasoning. VisualNoiseQA thus provides a controlled playground to study how different LLMs exploit uncertainty signals for robust reasoning.

Title:How Well Do LLMs Reason with Noisy Evidence? An Active Visual Reasoning Benchmark

Abstract:Real-world reasoning rarely reduces to static question answering: agents must actively gather information from tools and sensors that are often noisy and unreliable. Yet most existing active reasoning benchmarks assume that environmental feedback is trustworthy, or introduce noise without exposing an explicit, calibrated uncertainty signal, leaving open how LLMs should reason when the evidence itself is uncertain. We introduce VisualNoiseQA, a novel benchmark for active reasoning under noisy visual feedback. A text-only LLM must solve VQA problems by iteratively querying a fixed, off-the-shelf VLM treated as a stochastic visual sensor. For each query, we draw multiple samples and expose an empirical uncertainty signal via self-consistency, enabling the reasoner to probe from different angles and decide what to ask next and when to stop. Our construction is automatic and scalable: starting from diverse VQA sources and two noisy VLMs, we retain only questions where the sensor is inconsistent yet human-solvable. We evaluate multiple LLM reasoners on 1,000 instances spanning perception, chart understanding, and knowledge-intensive reasoning. VisualNoiseQA thus provides a controlled playground to study how different LLMs exploit uncertainty signals for robust reasoning.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.07751 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.07751v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.07751 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 288 words

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