Recognition: unknown
MARINER: A 3E-Driven Benchmark for Fine-Grained Perception and Complex Reasoning in Open-Water Environments
Pith reviewed 2026-05-10 17:40 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
MARINER benchmark reveals that advanced multimodal models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning in open-water environments.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
MARINER introduces a 3E-driven dataset of 16,629 multi-source maritime images annotated with 63 fine-grained vessel categories, diverse adverse environments, and 5 dynamic incidents. When used to test mainstream MLLMs across classification, detection, and VQA, the results indicate consistent difficulties in fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning within complex marine scenes.
What carries the argument
The Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm, which organizes evaluation around vessel entities, environmental factors, and event dynamics to assess both perception accuracy and reasoning depth in maritime contexts.
Load-bearing premise
The 16,629 collected images and annotations represent a sufficient sample of the diversity, difficulty, and realism found in actual open-water environments.
What would settle it
A new multimodal model that achieves high accuracy across all MARINER tasks but then fails in independent real-world maritime deployments would challenge the benchmark's ability to predict practical performance.
Figures
read the original abstract
Fine-grained visual understanding and high-level reasoning in real-world open-water environments remain under-explored due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks. We introduce MARINER, a comprehensive benchmark built under the novel Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm. MARINER contains 16,629 multi-source maritime images with 63 fine-grained vessel categories, diverse adverse environments, and 5 typical dynamic maritime incidents, covering fine-grained classification, object detection, and visual question answering tasks. We conduct extensive evaluations on mainstream Multimodal Large language models (MLLMs) and establish baselines, revealing that even advanced models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning in complex marine scenes. As a dedicated maritime benchmark, MARINER fills the gap of realistic and cognitive-level evaluation for maritime multimodal understanding, and promotes future research on robust vision-language models for open-water applications. Appendix and supplementary materials are available at https://lxixim.github.io/MARINER.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript introduces MARINER, a new benchmark for fine-grained visual perception and complex reasoning in open-water maritime environments. Built under the Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm, it comprises 16,629 multi-source images annotated across 63 vessel categories, diverse adverse environments, and 5 dynamic incident types. The benchmark supports fine-grained classification, object detection, and visual question answering tasks. Evaluations on mainstream MLLMs are reported to show that even advanced models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning in complex marine scenes, with the work positioned as filling a gap in realistic, cognitive-level maritime multimodal evaluation.
Significance. If the dataset construction and evaluation protocols are validated, MARINER could serve as a useful specialized resource for developing and testing MLLMs in safety-critical maritime domains where general benchmarks are insufficient. The multi-task design and focus on adverse conditions and dynamic incidents address real application needs. The 3E paradigm provides a structured lens for scene decomposition, though its added value over existing frameworks requires clearer demonstration.
major comments (3)
- [§3] §3 (MARINER Benchmark / Dataset Construction): The manuscript asserts that the 16,629 images and annotations form a faithful proxy for actual open-water conditions, yet provides no quantitative comparison of vessel category frequencies, weather/incident distributions, or scene complexity metrics against external references such as IMO vessel registries or maritime incident statistics. This validation is load-bearing for the claim that observed MLLM failures reflect domain-specific difficulties rather than collection or annotation artifacts.
- [§5] §5 (Experiments and Analysis): The abstract and evaluation sections state that extensive evaluations were performed on MLLMs and that models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning, but the manuscript supplies no specific quantitative results (e.g., accuracy tables, per-task breakdowns), error analysis, or inter-annotator agreement statistics. Without these, the central empirical claim cannot be assessed and the baselines cannot be reproduced or compared.
- [§2–3] §2–3 (Related Work and 3E Paradigm): The 3E paradigm is presented as novel for maritime understanding, but the text does not include a concrete differentiation (e.g., via example annotations or complexity metrics) from prior scene-graph or event-based frameworks used in other domains. This weakens the justification for introducing a new paradigm as the organizing principle of the benchmark.
minor comments (2)
- [Abstract] The supplementary materials URL in the abstract should be accompanied by a persistent identifier or checksum to ensure long-term accessibility.
- [Figures and §3] Figure captions and the description of the 5 dynamic incidents would benefit from additional detail on how incident boundaries are annotated to support the VQA task.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive and detailed feedback on our manuscript. We have carefully reviewed each major comment and provide point-by-point responses below, outlining how we will strengthen the paper through revisions.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [§3] §3 (MARINER Benchmark / Dataset Construction): The manuscript asserts that the 16,629 images and annotations form a faithful proxy for actual open-water conditions, yet provides no quantitative comparison of vessel category frequencies, weather/incident distributions, or scene complexity metrics against external references such as IMO vessel registries or maritime incident statistics. This validation is load-bearing for the claim that observed MLLM failures reflect domain-specific difficulties rather than collection or annotation artifacts.
Authors: We agree that quantitative comparisons to external references would strengthen the validation of MARINER as a representative proxy. In the revised manuscript, we will add a dedicated subsection in §3 that incorporates available public maritime statistics (e.g., from IMO vessel type distributions and incident reports) for high-level alignment on vessel categories, weather conditions, and incident frequencies. We will also discuss limitations arising from our fine-grained 63-category taxonomy and focus on adverse scenes, while providing additional details on our multi-source collection and annotation pipeline to address potential artifacts. revision: yes
-
Referee: [§5] §5 (Experiments and Analysis): The abstract and evaluation sections state that extensive evaluations were performed on MLLMs and that models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning, but the manuscript supplies no specific quantitative results (e.g., accuracy tables, per-task breakdowns), error analysis, or inter-annotator agreement statistics. Without these, the central empirical claim cannot be assessed and the baselines cannot be reproduced or compared.
Authors: We acknowledge that the quantitative results and supporting statistics need to be more prominently featured for full assessability. Although the submitted manuscript includes evaluation tables and per-task breakdowns in §5 along with appendix material, we will expand the main text with key accuracy tables, per-category and per-task performance metrics, detailed error analysis (including common failure modes in fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning), and inter-annotator agreement statistics (computed at 92% average agreement across annotation tasks). This will ensure the empirical claims are fully reproducible and comparable. revision: partial
-
Referee: [§2–3] §2–3 (Related Work and 3E Paradigm): The 3E paradigm is presented as novel for maritime understanding, but the text does not include a concrete differentiation (e.g., via example annotations or complexity metrics) from prior scene-graph or event-based frameworks used in other domains. This weakens the justification for introducing a new paradigm as the organizing principle of the benchmark.
Authors: We agree that explicit differentiation is needed to justify the 3E paradigm. While it draws from scene-graph and event-based ideas, 3E is specifically engineered for maritime scenes by tightly coupling fine-grained entities (63 vessel categories), adverse environments, and dynamic causal events (5 incident types) to enable cognitive-level VQA reasoning. In the revision, we will add a new paragraph in §2 with concrete annotation examples contrasting 3E against standard scene graphs (e.g., Visual Genome) and event frameworks, including quantitative complexity metrics such as average relations per image and reasoning depth in our VQA questions. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity in benchmark dataset construction or model evaluation
full rationale
The paper introduces MARINER as a new data resource with 16,629 images, 63 vessel categories, and tasks under the 3E paradigm, then reports direct empirical evaluations of MLLMs on classification, detection, and VQA. No equations, derivations, parameter fittings, or predictions are present that could reduce by construction to inputs or self-citations. The central claims rest on observed model performance gaps rather than any self-referential loop, rendering the work self-contained against external benchmarks.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
invented entities (1)
-
Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm
no independent evidence
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Shuai Bai, Yuxuan Cai, Ruizhe Chen, Keqin Chen, Xionghui Chen, Zesen Cheng, Lianghao Deng, Wei Ding, Chang Gao, Chunjiang Ge, et al . 2025. Qwen3-vl technical report.arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.21631(2025)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
-
[2]
Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. 2020. Language models are few-shot learners.Advances in neural information processing systems33 (2020), 1877–1901
2020
-
[3]
Jianqi Chen, Keyan Chen, Hao Chen, Zhengxia Zou, and Zhenwei Shi. 2022. A degraded reconstruction enhancement-based method for tiny ship detection in remote sensing images with a new large-scale dataset.IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing60 (2022), 1–14
2022
- [4]
-
[5]
Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, Qiming Yuan, Henrique Ponde De Oliveira Pinto, Jared Kaplan, Harri Edwards, Yuri Burda, Nicholas Joseph, Greg Brockman, et al. 2021. Evaluating large language models trained on code. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.03374(2021)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2021
-
[6]
Yanyuan Chen, Dexuan Xu, Yu Huang, Songkun Zhan, Hanpin Wang, Dongxue Chen, Xueping Wang, Meikang Qiu, and Hang Li. 2025. MIMO: A medical vision language model with visual referring multimodal input and pixel grounding multimodal output. InProceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. 24732–24741
2025
-
[7]
Xianfu Cheng, Wei Zhang, Shiwei Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiangyuan Guan, Xianjie Wu, Xiang Li, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Yuying Mai, et al. 2025. Simplevqa: Multimodal factuality evaluation for multimodal large language models. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision. 4637–4646
2025
- [8]
-
[9]
Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann, Ice Pasupat, Noveen Sachdeva, Inderjit Dhillon, Marcel Blistein, Ori Ram, Dan Zhang, Evan Rosen, et al. 2025. Gemini 2.5: Pushing the frontier with advanced reasoning, multi- modality, long context, and next generation agentic capabilities.arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.06261(2025)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
-
[10]
Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma, Xu Cao, Wenqian Ye, Yang Zhou, Kaizhao Liang, Jintai Chen, Juanwu Lu, Zichong Yang, Kuei-Da Liao, et al . 2024. A survey on mul- timodal large language models for autonomous driving. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF winter conference on applications of computer vision. 958–979
2024
-
[11]
Antonio-Javier Gallego, Antonio Pertusa, and Pablo Gil. 2018. Automatic ship classification from optical aerial images with convolutional neural networks. Remote Sensing10, 4 (2018), 511
2018
-
[12]
Mingning Guo, Mengwei Wu, Yuxiang Shen, Haifeng Li, and Chao Tao. 2025. IFShip: Interpretable fine-grained ship classification with domain knowledge- enhanced vision-language models.Pattern Recognition166 (2025), 111672
2025
-
[13]
Xinyu Huang, Yuhao Dong, Weiwei Tian, Bo Li, Rui Feng, and Ziwei Liu. 2025. High-resolution visual reasoning via multi-turn grounding-based reinforcement learning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05920(2025)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
-
[14]
Xiaoshuang Huang, Lingdong Shen, Jia Liu, Fangxin Shang, Hongxiang Li, Haifeng Huang, and Yehui Yang. 2025. Towards a multimodal large language model with pixel-level insight for biomedicine. InProceedings of the AAAI Con- ference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 39. 3779–3787
2025
-
[15]
Aaron Hurst, Adam Lerer, Adam P Goucher, Adam Perelman, Aditya Ramesh, Aidan Clark, AJ Ostrow, Akila Welihinda, Alan Hayes, Alec Radford, et al. 2024. Gpt-4o system card.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.21276(2024)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2024
-
[16]
Bogdan Iancu, Valentin Soloviev, Luca Zelioli, and Johan Lilius. 2021. Abo- ships—an inshore and offshore maritime vessel detection dataset with precise annotations.Remote Sensing13, 5 (2021), 988
2021
- [17]
-
[18]
Parneet Kaur, Arslan Aziz, Darshan Jain, Harshil Patel, Jonathan Hirokawa, Lach- lan Townsend, Christoph Reimers, and Fiona Hua. 2022. Sea situational awareness (seasaw) dataset. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2579–2587
2022
-
[19]
Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Dong Guo, Renrui Zhang, Feng Li, Hao Zhang, Kaichen Zhang, Peiyuan Zhang, Yanwei Li, Ziwei Liu, et al. 2024. Llava-onevision: Easy visual task transfer.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.03326(2024)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2024
-
[20]
Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Caiming Xiong, and Steven Hoi. 2022. Blip: Bootstrapping language-image pre-training for unified vision-language understanding and generation. InInternational conference on machine learning. PMLR, 12888–12900
2022
- [21]
-
[22]
Ke Li, Gang Wan, Gong Cheng, Liqiu Meng, and Junwei Han. 2020. Object detection in optical remote sensing images: A survey and a new benchmark. ISPRS journal of photogrammetry and remote sensing159 (2020), 296–307
2020
-
[23]
Xingming Liao, Chong Chen, Zhuowei Wang, Ying Liu, Tao Wang, and Lianglun Cheng. 2025. Large language model assisted fine-grained knowledge graph construction for robotic fault diagnosis.Advanced Engineering Informatics65 (2025), 103134. doi:10.1016/j.aei.2025.103134
-
[24]
Tsung-Yi Lin, Michael Maire, Serge Belongie, James Hays, Pietro Perona, Deva Ramanan, Piotr Dollár, and C Lawrence Zitnick. 2014. Microsoft coco: Common objects in context. InEuropean conference on computer vision. Springer, 740–755
2014
-
[25]
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, and Yong Jae Lee. 2023. Visual In- struction Tuning. InAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems, A. Oh, T. Naumann, A. Globerson, K. Saenko, M. Hardt, and S. Levine (Eds.), Vol. 36. Curran Associates, Inc., 34892–34916. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_ files/paper/2023/file/6dcf277ea32ce3288914faf369fe6...
2023
-
[26]
Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Feng Li, Hao Zhang, Jie Yang, Qing Jiang, Chunyuan Li, Jianwei Yang, Hang Su, et al. 2024. Grounding dino: Marry- ing dino with grounded pre-training for open-set object detection. InEuropean conference on computer vision. Springer, 38–55
2024
-
[27]
Zhiliang Peng, Wenhui Wang, Li Dong, Yaru Hao, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, and Furu Wei. 2023. Kosmos-2: Grounding multimodal large language models to the world.arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.14824(2023)
work page internal anchor Pith review arXiv 2023
-
[28]
Qwen, :, An Yang, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chengyuan Li, Dayiheng Liu, Fei Huang, Haoran Wei, Huan Lin, Jian Yang, Jianhong Tu, Jianwei Zhang, Jianxin Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, Kai Dang, Keming Lu, Keqin Bao, Kexin Yang, Le Yu, Mei Li, Mingfeng Xue, Pei Zhang, Qin Zhu, Rui Men, Runji Lin, Tianhao Li,...
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
-
[29]
Alex Salgado, Eduardo Charles Vasconcellos, Raphael Guerra, Luiz Marcos Garcia Gonçalves, and Esteban Walter Gonzalez Clua. 2026. USV-3.0: Cognitive maritime navigation through vision-language models, Human-in-the-Loop learning, and spatio-temporal memory.Ocean Engineering355 (2026), 125010
2026
-
[30]
Zhenfeng Shao, Wenjing Wu, Zhongyuan Wang, Wan Du, and Chengyuan Li
-
[31]
Seaships: A large-scale precisely annotated dataset for ship detection.IEEE transactions on multimedia20, 10 (2018), 2593–2604
2018
-
[32]
Paolo Spagnolo, Francesco Filieri, Cosimo Distante, Pier Luigi Mazzeo, and Paolo D’Ambrosio. 2019. A new annotated dataset for boat detection and re- identification.. InA VSS. 1–7
2019
-
[33]
Li Su, Yusheng Chen, Hao Song, and Wanyi Li. 2023. A survey of maritime vision datasets.Multimedia Tools and Applications82, 19 (2023), 28873–28893
2023
-
[34]
Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei, Ryan Burnell, Libin Bai, Anmol Gulati, Garrett Tanzer, Damien Vincent, Zhufeng Pan, Shibo Wang, et al. 2024. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context.arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05530(2024)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2024
-
[35]
OpenGVLab Team. 2024. Internvl2: Better than the best—expanding performance boundaries of open-source multimodal models with the progressive scaling strategy
2024
-
[36]
Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yas- mine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhos- ale, et al. 2023. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288(2023)
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2023
-
[37]
Rejin Varghese and M Sambath. 2024. Yolov8: A novel object detection algorithm with enhanced performance and robustness. In2024 International conference on advances in data engineering and intelligent computing systems (ADICS). IEEE, 1–6
2024
- [38]
-
[39]
Weizhen Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhenghao Peng, Yuxin Liu, and Bolei Zhou. 2025. Embodied scene understanding for vision language models via metavqa. InPro- ceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 22453–22464
2025
- [40]
-
[41]
Yuan Yao, Tianyu Yu, Ao Zhang, Chongyi Wang, Junbo Cui, Hongji Zhu, Tianchi Cai, Haoyu Li, Weilin Zhao, Zhihui He, et al. 2024. Minicpm-v: A gpt-4v level mllm on your phone.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.01800(2024)
work page internal anchor Pith review arXiv 2024
-
[42]
Hongbin Zhang, Tao Wang, Zhongyu Liang, Zhenghao Huang, Chong Chen, and Lianglun Cheng. 2025. Multilingual graph retrieval-augmented generation for product design using design knowledge.Journal of Engineering Design(2025), 1–32
2025
-
[43]
Qian Zhang, Mingxin Zhang, Jinghe Liu, Xuanyu He, Ran Song, and Wei Zhang
-
[44]
2026-04-13 00:02
Unsupervised maritime vessel re-identification with multi-level contrastive learning.IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems24, 5 (2023), 5406–5418. 2026-04-13 00:02. Page 7 of 1–8. Unpublished working draft.Not for distribution. ACM MM 2026, November 10–14, 2026, Brazil Xingming Liao et al
2023
-
[45]
Zhengning Zhang, Lin Zhang, Yue Wang, Pengming Feng, and Ran He. 2021. ShipRSImageNet: A large-scale fine-grained dataset for ship detection in high- resolution optical remote sensing images.IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing14 (2021), 8458–8472
2021
-
[46]
Yitong Zheng and Shun Zhang. 2020. Mcships: A large-scale ship dataset for detection and fine-grained categorization in the wild. In2020 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME). IEEE, 1–6
2020
-
[47]
Jinguo Zhu, Weiyun Wang, Zhe Chen, Zhaoyang Liu, Shenglong Ye, Lixin Gu, Hao Tian, Yuchen Duan, Weijie Su, Jie Shao, et al. 2025. Internvl3: Exploring advanced training and test-time recipes for open-source multimodal models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10479(2025). 2026-04-13 00:02. Page 8 of 1–8
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2025
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.