It's Time to Get It Right: Improving Analog Clock Reading and Clock-Hand Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

ArXi:2603.08011v1 Announce Type: new Advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success on complex multimodal reasoning tasks, leading to the assumption that they should also excel at reading analog clocks. However, contrary to this expectation, our study reveals that reading analog clocks in real-world environments remains a significant challenge for state-of-the-art VLMs. Existing analog clock datasets are largely synthetic or planar with limited stylistic diversity and minimal background context, failing to capture the visual variability of real-world scenes.