How Do Artificial Agents Make Decisions in Light of Visual Data?

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in reasoning with visual data, which is particularly important given that much of human knowledge is encoded visually in scientific articles and other sources. However, a gap remains in understanding how artificial agents, powered by VLMs, perceive and navigate decision-making under uncertainty in the presence of visual data. This study explores this gap by evaluating and analyzing autonomous decision-making processes. Building upon prior work in visualization literacy and decision theory, we conducted two complementary studies: one examining how agents perceive and quantify uncertainty encoded in visualizations, and another investigating how artificial agents make decisions based on visual data in the form of images. We analyzed perception accuracy and decision performance across models and visualization types. Our results show that GPT-4o demonstrates the highest accuracy in perceiving uncertainty in pie and bar charts among the tested models. For decision-making, autonomous agents showed the best alignment with rational decision theory when uncertainty was represented through circle charts, icon arrays, or text.