LVLMs are Bad at Overhearing Human Referential Communication

During conversation, speakers collaborate on spontaneous referring expressions, which they can then re-use in subsequent conversation with the same partner. Understanding such referring expressions is an important ability for an embodied agent so that it can carry out tasks in the real world. This requires integrating and understanding language, vision, and conversational interaction. We study the capabilities of seven state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) as overhearers to a corpus of spontaneous conversations between pairs of human discourse participants engaged in a collaborative object-matching task. We find that such a task remains challenging for current LVLMs, which fail to show a consistent performance improvement as they overhear more conversations from the same discourse participants repeating the same task for multiple rounds. We release our corpus and code for reproducibility and to facilitate future research.