Coding the Visual World: From Image to Simulation Using Vision Language Models

The ability to construct mental models of the world is a central aspect of understanding. Similarly, visual understanding can be viewed as the ability to construct a representative model of the system depicted in an image. This work explores the capacity of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to recognize and simulate the systems and mechanisms depicted in images using the Im2Sim methodology. The VLM is given a natural image of a real-world system (e.g., cities, clouds, vegetation) and is tasked with describing the system and writing code that simulates and generates it. This generative code is then executed to produce a synthetic image, which is compared against the original. This approach is tested on various complex emergent systems, ranging from physical systems (waves, lights, clouds) to vegetation, cities, materials, and geological formations. Through analysis of the models and images generated by the VLMs, we examine their understanding of the systems in images. The results show that leading VLMs (GPT, Gemini) demonstrate the capacity to understand and model complex, multi-component systems across multiple layers of abstraction and a wide range of domains. At the same time, the VLMs exhibit limited ability to replicate fine details and low-level arrangements of patterns in the image. These findings reveal an interesting asymmetry: VLMs combine high-level, deep visual understanding of images with limited perception of fine details.