VIGOR: Benchmarking Visual Rationale Correctness in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are typically evaluated by whether they produce correct answers, but correctness alone does not reveal whether their outputs are supported by the right visual evidence. We introduce VIGOR, a benchmark for evaluating VIsually GrOunded Rationales in MLLMs. VIGOR represents visual rationales as explicit concepts paired with pixel-level groundings, covering multiple abstraction levels including low-level visual properties, intermediate structures, objects, parts and high-level motion, relations. To construct VIGOR at scale, we develop an automatic annotation framework that reuses existing dense supervision when available and generates missing concept groundings through proposal-based annotation followed by conservative multimodal verification. Using VIGOR, we evaluate whether MLLMs "look at what they say" by comparing model-derived visual evidence for each expressed concept against annotated ground-truth rationales. Our results show that current MLLMs exhibit limited visual rationale correctness and reveal distinct grounding failures across concept levels. VIGOR provides a benchmark and scalable data construction pipeline for studying whether MLLM outputs are supported by appropriate visual evidence. Code is available at https://github.com/deep-real/VIGOR