Do MLLMs Exhibit Human-like Perceptual Behaviors? HVSBench: A Benchmark for MLLM Alignment with Human Perceptual Behavior

Abstract

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at many vision tasks, it is unknown if they exhibit human-like perceptual behaviors. To evaluate this, we introduce HVSBench, the first large-scale benchmark with over 85,000 samples designed to test MLLM alignment with the human visual system (HVS). The benchmark covers 13 categories across 5 key fields: Prominence, Subitizing, Prioritizing, Free-Viewing, and Searching. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a significant perceptual gap: even state-of-the-art MLLMs achieve only moderate results. In contrast, human participants demonstrate strong performance, significantly outperforming all models. This underscores the high quality of HVSBench and the need for more human-aligned AI. We believe our benchmark will be a critical tool for developing the next generation of explainable MLLMs.