Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Can VLM Agents Tell Who They Are at All?
In the animal kingdom, mirror self-recognition is a canonical probe of higher-order cognition, emerging only in some species. We ask whether an analogous functional capability emerges in embodied vision-language model (VLM) agents: can they recognize themselves in a mirror? We introduce a controlled 3D benchmark where a first-person VLM agent must infer a hidden body attribute from its reflection and select the matching target, while avoiding self-other misattribution. To separate mirror-grounded self-identification from shortcuts, we test mirror removal, misleading cues, and occluded reflections. We also evaluate the decision process through mirror seeking, temporal ordering, self-attrib...
| Authors | Filippo Ziliotto, Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 May 2026 |
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