Can Large Models Fool the Eye? A New Turing Test for Biological Animation

Abstract: Evaluating the abilities of large models and manifesting their gaps are challenging. Current benchmarks adopt either ground-truth-based score-form evaluation on static datasets or indistinct textual chatbot-style human preferences collection, which may not provide users with immediate, intuitive, and perceptible feedback on performance differences. In this paper, we introduce BioMotion Arena, a novel framework for evaluating LLMs and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) via visual animation. Our methodology draws inspiration from the inherent visual perception of motion patterns characteristic of living organisms that utilizes point-light source imaging to amplify the performance discrepancies between models. Specifically, we employ a pairwise comparison evaluation and collect more than 45k votes for 53 mainstream LLMs and MLLMs on 90 biological motion variants. Data analyses show that the crowd-sourced human votes are in good agreement with those of expert raters, demonstrating the superiority of our BioMotion Arena in offering discriminative feedback. We also find that over 90\% of evaluated models, including the cutting-edge open-source InternVL3 and proprietary Claude-4 series, fail to produce fundamental humanoid point-light groups, much less smooth and biologically plausible motions. This enables BioMotion Arena to serve as a challenging benchmark for performance visualization and a flexible evaluation framework without restrictions on ground-truth.