Daily Papers

Building on the success of text-based reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, extending these capabilities to multimodal reasoning holds great promise. While recent works have attempted to adapt DeepSeek-R1-style reinforcement learning (RL) training paradigms to multimodal large language models (MLLM), focusing on domain-specific tasks like math and visual perception, a critical question remains: How can we achieve the general-purpose visual-language reasoning through RL? To address this challenge, we make three key efforts: (1) A novel Scalable Multimodal QA Synthesis pipeline that autonomously generates context-aware, reasoning-centric question-answer (QA) pairs directly from the given images. (2) The open-source WeThink dataset containing over 120K multimodal QA pairs with annotated reasoning paths, curated from 18 diverse dataset sources and covering various question domains. (3) A comprehensive exploration of RL on our dataset, incorporating a hybrid reward mechanism that combines rule-based verification with model-based assessment to optimize RL training efficiency across various task domains. Across 14 diverse MLLM benchmarks, we demonstrate that our WeThink dataset significantly enhances performance, from mathematical reasoning to diverse general multimodal tasks. Moreover, we show that our automated data pipeline can continuously increase data diversity to further improve model performance.

Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs), most QA benchmarks are still confined to single-paragraph or single-document settings, failing to capture the complexity of real-world information-seeking tasks. Practical QA often requires multi-hop reasoning over information distributed across multiple documents, modalities, and structural formats. Although prior datasets made progress in this area, they rely heavily on Wikipedia-based content and unimodal plain text, with shallow reasoning paths that typically produce brief phrase-level or single-sentence answers, thus limiting their realism and generalizability. We propose DocHop-QA, a large-scale benchmark comprising 11,379 QA instances for multimodal, multi-document, multi-hop question answering. Constructed from publicly available scientific documents sourced from PubMed, DocHop-QA is domain-agnostic and incorporates diverse information formats, including textual passages, tables, and structural layout cues. Unlike existing datasets, DocHop-QA does not rely on explicitly hyperlinked documents; instead, it supports open-ended reasoning through semantic similarity and layout-aware evidence synthesis. To scale realistic QA construction, we designed an LLM-driven pipeline grounded in 11 high-frequency scientific question concepts. We evaluated DocHop-QA through four tasks spanning structured index prediction, generative answering, and multimodal integration, reflecting both discriminative and generative paradigms. These tasks demonstrate DocHop-QA's capacity to support complex, multimodal reasoning across multiple documents.

Multimodal question answering (QA) often requires identifying which video, audio, or sensor tokens are relevant to the question. Yet modality disagreements are common: off-camera speech, background noise, or motion outside the field of view often mislead fusion models that weight all streams equally. We present RAVEN, a unified QA architecture whose core is QuART, a query-conditioned cross-modal gating module that assigns scalar relevance scores to each token across modalities, enabling the model to amplify informative signals and suppress distractors before fusion. RAVEN is trained through a three-stage pipeline comprising unimodal pretraining, query-aligned fusion, and disagreement-oriented fine-tuning -- each stage targeting a distinct challenge in multi-modal reasoning: representation quality, cross-modal relevance, and robustness to modality mismatch. To support training and evaluation, we release AVS-QA, a dataset of 300K synchronized Audio--Video-Sensor streams paired with automatically generated question-answer pairs. Experimental results on seven multi-modal QA benchmarks -- including egocentric and exocentric tasks -- show that RAVEN achieves up to 14.5\% and 8.0\% gains in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models, respectively. Incorporating sensor data provides an additional 16.4\% boost, and the model remains robust under modality corruption, outperforming SOTA baselines by 50.23\%. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BASHLab/RAVEN.

Vision-language pre-training and instruction tuning have demonstrated general-purpose capabilities in 2D visual reasoning tasks by aligning visual encoders with state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a simple, yet effective, cross-modality framework built atop frozen LLMs that allows the integration of various modalities without extensive modality-specific customization. To facilitate instruction-modality fine-tuning, we collect high-quality instruction tuning data in an automatic and scalable manner, composed of 24K QA samples for audio and 250K QA samples for 3D. Leveraging instruction-aware representations, our model performs comparably with leading-edge counterparts without the need of extensive modality-specific pre-training or customization. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates cross-modal reasoning abilities across two or more input modalities, despite each modality projection being trained individually. To study the model's cross-modal abilities, we contribute a novel Discriminative Cross-modal Reasoning (DisCRn) evaluation task, comprising 9K audio-video QA samples and 28K image-3D QA samples that require the model to reason discriminatively across disparate input modalities.

Multimodal systems have great potential to assist humans in procedural activities, where people follow instructions to achieve their goals. Despite diverse application scenarios, systems are typically evaluated on traditional classification tasks, e.g., action recognition or temporal action segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel evaluation dataset, ProMQA, to measure system advancements in application-oriented scenarios. ProMQA consists of 401 multimodal procedural QA pairs on user recording of procedural activities coupled with their corresponding instruction. For QA annotation, we take a cost-effective human-LLM collaborative approach, where the existing annotation is augmented with LLM-generated QA pairs that are later verified by humans. We then provide the benchmark results to set the baseline performance on ProMQA. Our experiment reveals a significant gap between human performance and that of current systems, including competitive proprietary multimodal models. We hope our dataset sheds light on new aspects of models' multimodal understanding capabilities.

Vision-Language (VL) models have gained significant research focus, enabling remarkable advances in multimodal reasoning. These architectures typically comprise a vision encoder, a Large Language Model (LLM), and a projection module that aligns visual features with the LLM's representation space. Despite their success, a critical limitation persists: the vision encoding process remains decoupled from user queries, often in the form of image-related questions. Consequently, the resulting visual features may not be optimally attuned to the query-specific elements of the image. To address this, we introduce QA-ViT, a Question Aware Vision Transformer approach for multimodal reasoning, which embeds question awareness directly within the vision encoder. This integration results in dynamic visual features focusing on relevant image aspects to the posed question. QA-ViT is model-agnostic and can be incorporated efficiently into any VL architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of applying our method to various multimodal architectures, leading to consistent improvement across diverse tasks and showcasing its potential for enhancing visual and scene-text understanding.

We introduce FUSION, a family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with a fully vision-language alignment and integration paradigm. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on late-stage modality interaction during LLM decoding, our approach achieves deep, dynamic integration throughout the entire processing pipeline. To this end, we propose Text-Guided Unified Vision Encoding, incorporating textual information in vision encoding to achieve pixel-level integration. We further design Context-Aware Recursive Alignment Decoding that recursively aggregates visual features conditioned on textual context during decoding, enabling fine-grained, question-level semantic integration. To guide feature mapping and mitigate modality discrepancies, we develop Dual-Supervised Semantic Mapping Loss. Additionally, we construct a Synthesized Language-Driven Question-Answer (QA) dataset through a new data synthesis method, prioritizing high-quality QA pairs to optimize text-guided feature integration. Building on these foundations, we train FUSION at two scales-3B, 8B-and demonstrate that our full-modality integration approach significantly outperforms existing methods with only 630 vision tokens. Notably, FUSION 3B surpasses Cambrian-1 8B and Florence-VL 8B on most benchmarks. FUSION 3B continues to outperform Cambrian-1 8B even when limited to 300 vision tokens. Our ablation studies show that FUSION outperforms LLaVA-NeXT on over half of the benchmarks under same configuration without dynamic resolution, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. We release our code, model weights, and dataset. https://github.com/starriver030515/FUSION

We present MEGA-Bench, an evaluation suite that scales multimodal evaluation to over 500 real-world tasks, to address the highly heterogeneous daily use cases of end users. Our objective is to optimize for a set of high-quality data samples that cover a highly diverse and rich set of multimodal tasks, while enabling cost-effective and accurate model evaluation. In particular, we collected 505 realistic tasks encompassing over 8,000 samples from 16 expert annotators to extensively cover the multimodal task space. Instead of unifying these problems into standard multi-choice questions (like MMMU, MMBench, and MMT-Bench), we embrace a wide range of output formats like numbers, phrases, code, \LaTeX, coordinates, JSON, free-form, etc. To accommodate these formats, we developed over 40 metrics to evaluate these tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MEGA-Bench offers a fine-grained capability report across multiple dimensions (e.g., application, input type, output format, skill), allowing users to interact with and visualize model capabilities in depth. We evaluate a wide variety of frontier vision-language models on MEGA-Bench to understand their capabilities across these dimensions.

Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20%.

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a challenging multimodal reasoning task requiring intelligent systems to answer natural language queries based on paired audio-video inputs accurately. However, existing AVQA approaches often suffer from overfitting to dataset biases, leading to poor robustness. Moreover, current datasets may not effectively diagnose these methods. To address these challenges, we first introduce a novel dataset, FortisAVQA, constructed in two stages: (1) rephrasing questions in the test split of the public MUSIC-AVQA dataset and (2) introducing distribution shifts across questions. The first stage expands the test space with greater diversity, while the second enables a refined robustness evaluation across rare, frequent, and overall question distributions. Second, we introduce a robust Multimodal Audio-Visual Epistemic Network (MAVEN) that leverages a multifaceted cycle collaborative debiasing strategy to mitigate bias learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on FortisAVQA, with a notable improvement of 7.81\%. Extensive ablation studies on both datasets validate the effectiveness of our debiasing components. Additionally, our evaluation reveals the limited robustness of existing multimodal QA methods. We also verify the plug-and-play capability of our strategy by integrating it with various baseline models across both datasets. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/reml-group/fortisavqa.

Thanks to the emerging of foundation models, the large language and vision models are integrated to acquire the multimodal ability of visual captioning, dialogue, question answering, etc. Although existing multimodal models present impressive performance of visual understanding and reasoning, their limits are still largely under-explored due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction tuning data. To push the limits of multimodal capability, we Sale up Visual Instruction Tuning (SVIT) by constructing a dataset of 3.2 million visual instruction tuning data including 1.6M conversation question-answer (QA) pairs and 1.6M complex reasoning QA pairs and 106K detailed image descriptions. Besides the volume, the proposed dataset is also featured by the high quality and rich diversity, which is generated by prompting GPT-4 with the abundant manual annotations of images. We empirically verify that training multimodal models on SVIT can significantly improve the multimodal performance in terms of visual perception, reasoning and planing.

Multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MM-RAG) is a key approach for applying large language models (LLMs) and agents to real-world knowledge bases, yet current evaluations are fragmented, focusing on either text or images in isolation or on simplified multimodal setups that fail to capture document-centric multimodal use cases. In this paper, we introduce UniDoc-Bench, the first large-scale, realistic benchmark for MM-RAG built from 70k real-world PDF pages across eight domains. Our pipeline extracts and links evidence from text, tables, and figures, then generates 1,600 multimodal QA pairs spanning factual retrieval, comparison, summarization, and logical reasoning queries. To ensure reliability, 20% of QA pairs are validated by multiple annotators and expert adjudication. UniDoc-Bench supports apples-to-apples comparison across four paradigms: (1) text-only, (2) image-only, (3) multimodal text-image fusion, and (4) multimodal joint retrieval -- under a unified protocol with standardized candidate pools, prompts, and evaluation metrics. Our experiments show that multimodal text-image fusion RAG systems consistently outperform both unimodal and jointly multimodal embedding-based retrieval, indicating that neither text nor images alone are sufficient and that current multimodal embeddings remain inadequate. Beyond benchmarking, our analysis reveals when and how visual context complements textual evidence, uncovers systematic failure modes, and offers actionable guidance for developing more robust MM-RAG pipelines.

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks, however, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks seem to be limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity issue of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct - a novel approach that leverages search engine to create a diverse, and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines like math, physics, finance, chemistry, etc. Starting with meticulously selected 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process the HTMLs from over 700K unique URL sources. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering and synthesis, we build a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer pairs, with 40% being visual QA pairs and the rest as text QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance gains: (1) training from Llava-OV-mid shows 10-20% absolute point gains across benchmarks, (2) training from MAmmoTH-VL shows 5% absoluate gain. Our best model MAmmoTH-VL2 shows state-of-the-art performance within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro-std (40.7%), MathVerse (42.6%), and DynaMath (55.7%). These remarkable results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing VLMs' reasoning capabilities for complex multimodal tasks.

The scarcity of high-quality, knowledge-intensive training data hinders the development of large language models (LLMs), as traditional corpora provide limited information. Previous studies have synthesized and integrated corpora-dependent question-answering (QA) data to improve model performance but face challenges in QA data scalability and knowledge diversity, particularly in cross-domain contexts. Furthermore, leveraging our designed discipline and difficulty annotation system, we probe model deficiencies in STEM disciplines and high-difficulty data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel diversified pipeline to synthesize BoostQA, a 100B-token large-scale QA dataset. Our synthesis framework: (1) curates seed data from heterogeneous sources; (2) utilizes DeepSeek-R1 to implement STEM-focused multi-grade synthesis to boost data diversity and high-difficulty synthesis to mitigate difficulty degradation; (3) refines answers via DeepSeek-V3 to improve output quality. We utilize BoostQA in mid-training, a mid-stage between pre-training and post-training, to optimize domain-specific knowledge acquisition and enhance data quality. Our method enables Llama-3 8B, mid-trained on a 40B-token dataset, to achieve an average improvement of 12.74% on MMLU and CMMLU and establish SOTA average performance across 12 benchmarks. BoostQA also demonstrates robust scalability, with performance consistently improving as model size, data volume, and initial FLOPs scale.

Question answering systems should help users to access knowledge on a broad range of topics and to answer a wide array of different questions. Most systems fall short of this expectation as they are only specialized in one particular setting, e.g., answering factual questions with Wikipedia data. To overcome this limitation, we propose composing multiple QA agents within a meta-QA system. We argue that there exist a wide range of specialized QA agents in literature. Thus, we address the central research question of how to effectively and efficiently identify suitable QA agents for any given question. We study both supervised and unsupervised approaches to address this challenge, showing that TWEAC -- Transformer with Extendable Agent Classifiers -- achieves the best performance overall with 94% accuracy. We provide extensive insights on the scalability of TWEAC, demonstrating that it scales robustly to over 100 QA agents with each providing just 1000 examples of questions they can answer. Our code and data is available: https://github.com/UKPLab/TWEAC-qa-agent-selection

Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight speak head that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding.

This paper introduces MISS-QA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of models to interpret schematic diagrams within scientific literature. MISS-QA comprises 1,500 expert-annotated examples over 465 scientific papers. In this benchmark, models are tasked with interpreting schematic diagrams that illustrate research overviews and answering corresponding information-seeking questions based on the broader context of the paper. We assess the performance of 18 frontier multimodal foundation models, including o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and Qwen2.5-VL. We reveal a significant performance gap between these models and human experts on MISS-QA. Our analysis of model performance on unanswerable questions and our detailed error analysis further highlight the strengths and limitations of current models, offering key insights to enhance models in comprehending multimodal scientific literature.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show promise for scientific applications, yet open-source models still struggle with Scientific Visual Question Answering (SVQA), namely answering questions about figures from scientific papers. A key bottleneck lies in the lack of public, large-scale, high-quality SVQA datasets. Although recent work uses LVLMs to synthesize data at scale, we identify systematic errors in their resulting QA pairs, stemming from LVLMs' inherent limitations and information asymmetry between figures and text. To address these challenges, we propose a verification-centric Generate-then-Verify framework that first generates QA pairs with figure-associated textual context, then applies cross-modal consistency checks against figures along with auxiliary filters to eliminate erroneous pairs. We instantiate this framework to curate VeriSciQA, a dataset of 20,351 QA pairs spanning 20 scientific domains and 12 figure types. VeriSciQA poses a challenging benchmark for open-source models, with a substantial accuracy gap between the leading open-source models (64%) and a proprietary model (82%). Moreover, models fine-tuned on VeriSciQA achieve consistent improvements on SVQA benchmarks, with performance gains that scale with data size and surpass models trained on existing datasets. Human evaluation further validates the superior correctness of VeriSciQA. Together, these evidences demonstrate that continued data expansion by our scalable framework can further advance SVQA capability in the open-source community.

Multimodal multihop question answering is a complex task that requires reasoning over multiple sources of information, such as images and text, to answer questions. While there has been significant progress in visual question answering, the multihop setting remains unexplored due to the lack of high-quality datasets. Current methods focus on single-hop question answering or a single modality, which makes them unsuitable for real-world scenarios such as analyzing multimodal educational materials, summarizing lengthy academic articles, or interpreting scientific studies that combine charts, images, and text. To address this gap, we propose a novel methodology, introducing the first framework for creating a high-quality dataset that enables training models for multimodal multihop question answering. Our approach consists of a 5-stage pipeline that involves acquiring relevant multimodal documents from Wikipedia, synthetically generating high-level questions and answers, and validating them through rigorous criteria to ensure quality data. We evaluate our methodology by training models on our synthesized dataset and testing on two benchmarks, our results demonstrate that, with an equal sample size, models trained on our synthesized data outperform those trained on human-collected data by 1.9 in exact match (EM) on average. We believe our data synthesis method will serve as a strong foundation for training and evaluating multimodal multihop question answering models.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a range of multimodal tasks; however, their practical deployment is often constrained by high computational costs and prolonged inference times. Since the vision modality typically carries more information than the text modality, compressing visual prompts offers a promising solution to alleviate these challenges. Existing approaches predominantly focus on refining model architectures or directly reducing the number of visual tokens. However, these methods often compromise inference performance due to a lack of consideration for the unique spatial and temporal characteristics of visual data. In this work, we propose a token compression paradigm that operates on both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach includes a learning-free, plug-and-play compression pipeline that can be seamlessly integrated into most Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) frameworks. By leveraging this method, we enhance the model inference capability while simultaneously reducing its computational cost. Experimental results on the Video-QA task demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showcasing significant improvements in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align reliably with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. To address this, we present MMMG, a comprehensive and human-aligned benchmark for multimodal generation across 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio), with a focus on tasks that present significant challenges for generation models, while still enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 49 tasks (including 29 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 937 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human evaluation, achieving an average agreement of 94.3%. Benchmarking results on 24 multimodal generation models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 78.3% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on multimodal reasoning and interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable headroom for improvement in audio generation, highlighting an important direction for future research.

The remarkable multimodal capabilities demonstrated by OpenAI's GPT-4 have sparked significant interest in the development of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). A primary research objective of such models is to align visual and textual modalities effectively while comprehending human instructions. Current methodologies often rely on annotations derived from benchmark datasets to construct image-dialogue datasets for training purposes, akin to instruction tuning in LLMs. However, these datasets often exhibit domain bias, potentially constraining the generative capabilities of the models. In an effort to mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. This approach harnesses the power of generative models, marrying the abilities of ChatGPT and text-to-image generative models to yield a diverse and controllable dataset with varied image content. This not only provides greater flexibility compared to existing methodologies but also significantly enhances several model capabilities. Our research includes comprehensive experiments conducted on various datasets using the open-source LLAVA model as a testbed for our proposed pipeline. Our results underscore marked enhancements across more than ten commonly assessed capabilities,

Evaluating text-to-image models is notoriously difficult. A strong recent approach for assessing text-image faithfulness is based on QG/A (question generation and answering), which uses pre-trained foundational models to automatically generate a set of questions and answers from the prompt, and output images are scored based on whether these answers extracted with a visual question answering model are consistent with the prompt-based answers. This kind of evaluation is naturally dependent on the quality of the underlying QG and VQA models. We identify and address several reliability challenges in existing QG/A work: (a) QG questions should respect the prompt (avoiding hallucinations, duplications, and omissions) and (b) VQA answers should be consistent (not asserting that there is no motorcycle in an image while also claiming the motorcycle is blue). We address these issues with Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG), an empirically grounded evaluation framework inspired by formal semantics, which is adaptable to any QG/A frameworks. DSG produces atomic and unique questions organized in dependency graphs, which (i) ensure appropriate semantic coverage and (ii) sidestep inconsistent answers. With extensive experimentation and human evaluation on a range of model configurations (LLM, VQA, and T2I), we empirically demonstrate that DSG addresses the challenges noted above. Finally, we present DSG-1k, an open-sourced evaluation benchmark that includes 1,060 prompts, covering a wide range of fine-grained semantic categories with a balanced distribution. We release the DSG-1k prompts and the corresponding DSG questions.

Question answering (QA) models have shown rapid progress enabled by the availability of large, high-quality benchmark datasets. Such annotated datasets are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, making training QA systems in other languages challenging. An alternative to building large monolingual training datasets is to develop cross-lingual systems which can transfer to a target language without requiring training data in that language. In order to develop such systems, it is crucial to invest in high quality multilingual evaluation benchmarks to measure progress. We present MLQA, a multi-way aligned extractive QA evaluation benchmark intended to spur research in this area. MLQA contains QA instances in 7 languages, namely English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Hindi, Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese. It consists of over 12K QA instances in English and 5K in each other language, with each QA instance being parallel between 4 languages on average. MLQA is built using a novel alignment context strategy on Wikipedia articles, and serves as a cross-lingual extension to existing extractive QA datasets. We evaluate current state-of-the-art cross-lingual representations on MLQA, and also provide machine-translation-based baselines. In all cases, transfer results are shown to be significantly behind training-language performance.

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have significantly improved multimodal understanding and generation. However, these models still struggle to generate tightly interleaved image-text outputs, primarily due to the limited scale, quality and instructional richness of current training datasets. To address this, we introduce InterSyn, a large-scale multimodal dataset constructed using our Self-Evaluation with Iterative Refinement (SEIR) method. InterSyn features multi-turn, instruction-driven dialogues with tightly interleaved imagetext responses, providing rich object diversity and rigorous automated quality refinement, making it well-suited for training next-generation instruction-following LMMs. Furthermore, to address the lack of reliable evaluation tools capable of assessing interleaved multimodal outputs, we introduce SynJudge, an automatic evaluation model designed to quantitatively assess multimodal outputs along four dimensions: text content, image content, image quality, and image-text synergy. Experimental studies show that the SEIR method leads to substantially higher dataset quality compared to an otherwise identical process without refinement. Moreover, LMMs trained on InterSyn achieve uniform performance gains across all evaluation metrics, confirming InterSyn's utility for advancing multimodal systems.

Recent breakthroughs in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly advanced both text-to-image (T2I) generation and image-to-text (I2T) interpretation. However, many generated images still suffer from issues related to perceptual quality and text-image alignment. Given the high cost and inefficiency of manual evaluation, an automatic metric that aligns with human preferences is desirable. To this end, we present EvalMi-50K, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for evaluating large-multimodal image generation, which features (i) comprehensive tasks, encompassing 2,100 extensive prompts across 20 fine-grained task dimensions, and (ii) large-scale human-preference annotations, including 100K mean-opinion scores (MOSs) and 50K question-answering (QA) pairs annotated on 50,400 images generated from 24 T2I models. Based on EvalMi-50K, we propose LMM4LMM, an LMM-based metric for evaluating large multimodal T2I generation from multiple dimensions including perception, text-image correspondence, and task-specific accuracy. Extensive experimental results show that LMM4LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on EvalMi-50K, and exhibits strong generalization ability on other AI-generated image evaluation benchmark datasets, manifesting the generality of both the EvalMi-50K dataset and LMM4LMM metric. Both EvalMi-50K and LMM4LMM will be released at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/LMM4LMM.

Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and emerging omni-modal architectures, current benchmarks remain limited in scope and integration, suffering from incomplete modality coverage, restricted interaction to text-centric outputs, and weak interdependence and complementarity among modalities. To bridge these gaps, we introduce FysicsWorld, the first unified full-modality benchmark that supports bidirectional input-output across image, video, audio, and text, enabling comprehensive any-to-any evaluation across understanding, generation, and reasoning. FysicsWorld encompasses 16 primary tasks and 3,268 curated samples, aggregated from over 40 high-quality sources and covering a rich set of open-domain categories with diverse question types. We also propose the Cross-Modal Complementarity Screening (CMCS) strategy integrated in a systematic data construction framework that produces omni-modal data for spoken interaction and fusion-dependent cross-modal reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation of over 30 state-of-the-art baselines, spanning MLLMs, modality-specific models, unified understanding-generation models, and omni-modal language models, FysicsWorld exposes the performance disparities and limitations across models in understanding, generation, and reasoning. Our benchmark establishes a unified foundation and strong baselines for evaluating and advancing next-generation full-modality architectures.

Recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in general NLP AI assistants. Some studies have further explored the use of LLMs for planning and invoking models or APIs to address more general multi-modal user queries. Despite this progress, complex visual-based tasks still remain challenging due to the diverse nature of visual tasks. This diversity is reflected in two aspects: 1) Reasoning paths. For many real-life applications, it is hard to accurately decompose a query simply by examining the query itself. Planning based on the specific visual content and the results of each step is usually required. 2) Flexible inputs and intermediate results. Input forms could be flexible for in-the-wild cases, and involves not only a single image or video but a mixture of videos and images, e.g., a user-view image with some reference videos. Besides, a complex reasoning process will also generate diverse multimodal intermediate results, e.g., video narrations, segmented video clips, etc. To address such general cases, we propose a multi-modal AI assistant, AssistGPT, with an interleaved code and language reasoning approach called Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn (PEIL) to integrate LLMs with various tools. Specifically, the Planner is capable of using natural language to plan which tool in Executor should do next based on the current reasoning progress. Inspector is an efficient memory manager to assist the Planner to feed proper visual information into a specific tool. Finally, since the entire reasoning process is complex and flexible, a Learner is designed to enable the model to autonomously explore and discover the optimal solution. We conducted experiments on A-OKVQA and NExT-QA benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, showcases demonstrate the ability of our system to handle questions far more complex than those found in the benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, and their multimodal expansions (MLLMs) further unlock capabilities spanning images, videos, and other modalities beyond text. However, despite this shift, prompt optimization approaches, designed to reduce the burden of manual prompt crafting while maximizing performance, remain confined to text, ultimately limiting the full potential of MLLMs. Motivated by this gap, we introduce the new problem of multimodal prompt optimization, which expands the prior definition of prompt optimization to the multimodal space defined by the pairs of textual and non-textual prompts. To tackle this problem, we then propose the Multimodal Prompt Optimizer (MPO), a unified framework that not only performs the joint optimization of multimodal prompts through alignment-preserving updates but also guides the selection process of candidate prompts by leveraging earlier evaluations as priors in a Bayesian-based selection strategy. Through extensive experiments across diverse modalities that go beyond text, such as images, videos, and even molecules, we demonstrate that MPO outperforms leading text-only optimization methods, establishing multimodal prompt optimization as a crucial step to realizing the potential of MLLMs.

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a complex multi-modal reasoning task, demanding intelligent systems to accurately respond to natural language queries based on audio-video input pairs. Nevertheless, prevalent AVQA approaches are prone to overlearning dataset biases, resulting in poor robustness. Furthermore, current datasets may not provide a precise diagnostic for these methods. To tackle these challenges, firstly, we propose a novel dataset, MUSIC-AVQA-R, crafted in two steps: rephrasing questions within the test split of a public dataset (MUSIC-AVQA) and subsequently introducing distribution shifts to split questions. The former leads to a large, diverse test space, while the latter results in a comprehensive robustness evaluation on rare, frequent, and overall questions. Secondly, we propose a robust architecture that utilizes a multifaceted cycle collaborative debiasing strategy to overcome bias learning. Experimental results show that this architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on MUSIC-AVQA-R, notably obtaining a significant improvement of 9.32%. Extensive ablation experiments are conducted on the two datasets mentioned to analyze the component effectiveness within the debiasing strategy. Additionally, we highlight the limited robustness of existing multi-modal QA methods through the evaluation on our dataset. We also conduct experiments combining various baselines with our proposed strategy on two datasets to verify its plug-and-play capability. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/reml-group/MUSIC-AVQA-R.

Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (MMRAG) is a powerful approach to question-answering over multimodal documents. A key challenge with evaluating MMRAG is the paucity of high-quality datasets matching the question styles and modalities of interest. In light of this, we propose SMMQG, a synthetic data generation framework. SMMQG leverages interplay between a retriever, large language model (LLM) and large multimodal model (LMM) to generate question and answer pairs directly from multimodal documents, with the questions conforming to specified styles and modalities. We use SMMQG to generate an MMRAG dataset of 1024 questions over Wikipedia documents and evaluate state-of-the-art models using it, revealing insights into model performance that are attainable only through style- and modality-specific evaluation data. Next, we measure the quality of data produced by SMMQG via a human study. We find that the quality of our synthetic data is on par with the quality of the crowdsourced benchmark MMQA and that downstream evaluation results using both datasets strongly concur.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated commendable performance across a myriad of domains and tasks, existing LLMs still exhibit a palpable deficit in handling multimodal functionalities, especially for the Spoken Question Answering (SQA) task which necessitates precise alignment and deep interaction between speech and text features. To address the SQA challenge on LLMs, we initially curated the free-form and open-ended LibriSQA dataset from Librispeech, comprising Part I with natural conversational formats and Part II encompassing multiple-choice questions followed by answers and analytical segments. Both parts collectively include 107k SQA pairs that cover various topics. Given the evident paucity of existing speech-text LLMs, we propose a lightweight, end-to-end framework to execute the SQA task on the LibriSQA, witnessing significant results. By reforming ASR into the SQA format, we further substantiate our framework's capability in handling ASR tasks. Our empirical findings bolster the LLMs' aptitude for aligning and comprehending multimodal information, paving the way for the development of universal multimodal LLMs. The dataset and demo can be found at https://github.com/ZihanZhaoSJTU/LibriSQA.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on question-answering (QA) tasks because of their superior capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, LLM-based QA struggles with complex QA tasks due to poor reasoning capacity, outdated knowledge, and hallucinations. Several recent works synthesize LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs) for QA to address the above challenges. In this survey, we propose a new structured taxonomy that categorizes the methodology of synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA according to the categories of QA and the KG's role when integrating with LLMs. We systematically survey state-of-the-art advances in synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA and compare and analyze these approaches in terms of strength, limitations, and KG requirements. We then align the approaches with QA and discuss how these approaches address the main challenges of different complex QA. Finally, we summarize the advancements, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets and highlight open challenges and opportunities.

We present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals (i.e. text, image, video, audio, IMU motion sensor), and generates textual responses. AnyMAL inherits the powerful text-based reasoning abilities of the state-of-the-art LLMs including LLaMA-2 (70B), and converts modality-specific signals to the joint textual space through a pre-trained aligner module. To further strengthen the multimodal LLM's capabilities, we fine-tune the model with a multimodal instruction set manually collected to cover diverse topics and tasks beyond simple QAs. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis comprising both human and automatic evaluations, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal tasks.

Multimodal embedding models have gained significant attention for their ability to map data from different modalities, such as text and images, into a unified representation space. However, the limited labeled multimodal data often hinders embedding performance. Recent approaches have leveraged data synthesis to address this problem, yet the quality of synthetic data remains a critical bottleneck. In this work, we identify three criteria for high-quality synthetic multimodal data. First, broad scope ensures that the generated data covers diverse tasks and modalities, making it applicable to various downstream scenarios. Second, robust cross-modal alignment makes different modalities semantically consistent. Third, high fidelity ensures that the synthetic data maintains realistic details to enhance its reliability. Guided by these principles, we synthesize datasets that: (1) cover a wide range of tasks, modality combinations, and languages, (2) are generated via a deep thinking process within a single pass of a multimodal large language model, and (3) incorporate real-world images with accurate and relevant texts, ensuring fidelity through self-evaluation and refinement. Leveraging these high-quality synthetic and labeled datasets, we train a multimodal multilingual E5 model mmE5. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmE5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB Benchmark and superior multilingual performance on the XTD benchmark. Our codes, datasets and models are released in https://github.com/haon-chen/mmE5.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) aim to simulate human subjective perception of image visual quality and aesthetic appeal. Existing methods typically address these tasks independently due to distinct learning objectives. However, they neglect the underlying interconnectedness of both tasks, which hinders the learning of task-agnostic shared representations for human subjective perception. To confront this challenge, we propose Unified vision-language pre-training of Quality and Aesthetics (UniQA), to learn general perceptions of two tasks, thereby benefiting them simultaneously. Addressing the absence of text in the IQA datasets and the presence of textual noise in the IAA datasets, (1) we utilize multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate high-quality text descriptions; (2) the generated text for IAA serves as metadata to purify noisy IAA data. To effectively adapt the pre-trained UniQA to downstream tasks, we further propose a lightweight adapter that utilizes versatile cues to fully exploit the extensive knowledge of the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach attains a new state-of-the-art performance on both IQA and IAA tasks, while concurrently showcasing exceptional zero-shot and few-label image assessment capabilities. The source code will be available at https://github.com/zht8506/UniQA.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly depends on high-quality supervised data, yet existing instruction-tuning and RL datasets remain costly to curate and often rely on synthetic samples that introduce hallucination and limited diversity. At the same time, textbooks and exercise materials contain abundant, high-quality human-authored Question-Answer(QA) content that remains underexploited due to the difficulty of transforming raw PDFs into AI-ready supervision. Although modern OCR and vision-language models can accurately parse document structure, their outputs lack the semantic alignment required for training. We propose an automated pipeline that extracts well-formed QA and visual-QA (VQA) pairs from educational documents by combining layout-aware OCR with LLM-based semantic parsing. Experiments across diverse document types show that the method produces accurate, aligned, and low-noise QA/VQA pairs. This approach enables scalable use of real-world educational content and provides a practical alternative to synthetic data generation for improving reasoning-oriented LLM training. All code and data-processing pipelines are open-sourced at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/DataFlow.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities. However, current benchmarks predominantly focus on image comprehension in specific domains, and these benchmarks are labor-intensive to construct. Moreover, their answers tend to be brief, making it difficult to assess the ability of LMMs to generate detailed descriptions of images. To address these limitations, we propose the MMGenBench-Pipeline, a straightforward and fully automated evaluation pipeline. This involves generating textual descriptions from input images, using these descriptions to create auxiliary images via text-to-image generative models, and then comparing the original and generated images. Furthermore, to ensure the effectiveness of MMGenBench-Pipeline, we design MMGenBench-Test, evaluating LMMs across 13 distinct image patterns, and MMGenBench-Domain, focusing on generative image performance. A thorough evaluation involving over 50 popular LMMs demonstrates the effectiveness and reliability of both the pipeline and benchmark. Our observations indicate that numerous LMMs excelling in existing benchmarks fail to adequately complete the basic tasks related to image understanding and description. This finding highlights the substantial potential for performance improvement in current LMMs and suggests avenues for future model optimization. Concurrently, MMGenBench-Pipeline can efficiently assess the performance of LMMs across diverse domains using only image inputs.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

Combining pre-trained expert models offers substantial potential for scalable multimodal reasoning, but building a unified framework remains challenging due to the increasing diversity of input modalities and task complexity. For instance, medical diagnosis requires precise reasoning over structured clinical tables, while financial forecasting depends on interpreting plot-based data to make informed predictions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MEXA, a training-free framework that performs modality- and task-aware aggregation of multiple expert models to enable effective multimodal reasoning across diverse and distinct domains. MEXA dynamically selects expert models based on the input modality and the task-specific reasoning demands (i.e., skills). Each expert model, specialized in a modality task pair, generates interpretable textual reasoning outputs. MEXA then aggregates and reasons over these outputs using a Large Reasoning Model (LRM) to produce the final answer. This modular design allows flexible and transparent multimodal reasoning across diverse domains without additional training overhead. We extensively evaluate our approach on diverse multimodal benchmarks, including Video Reasoning, Audio Reasoning, 3D Understanding, and Medical QA. MEXA consistently delivers performance improvements over strong multimodal baselines, highlighting the effectiveness and broad applicability of our expert-driven selection and aggregation in diverse multimodal reasoning tasks.

The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enables the evaluation of image quality through natural language descriptions. This advancement allows for more detailed assessments. However, these MLLM-based IQA methods primarily rely on general contextual descriptions, sometimes limiting fine-grained quality assessment. To address this limitation, we introduce a new image quality assessment (IQA) task paradigm, grounding-IQA. This paradigm integrates multimodal referring and grounding with IQA to realize more fine-grained quality perception. Specifically, grounding-IQA comprises two subtasks: grounding-IQA-description (GIQA-DES) and visual question answering (GIQA-VQA). GIQA-DES involves detailed descriptions with precise locations (e.g., bounding boxes), while GIQA-VQA focuses on quality QA for local regions. To realize grounding-IQA, we construct a corresponding dataset, GIQA-160K, through our proposed automated annotation pipeline. Furthermore, we develop a well-designed benchmark, GIQA-Bench. The benchmark comprehensively evaluates the model grounding-IQA performance from three perspectives: description quality, VQA accuracy, and grounding precision. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed task paradigm, dataset, and benchmark facilitate the more fine-grained IQA application. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/Grounding-IQA.

The increasing availability of multimodal data across text, tables, and images presents new challenges for developing models capable of complex cross-modal reasoning. Existing methods for Multimodal Multi-hop Question Answering (MMQA) often suffer from limited reasoning capabilities, reliance on modality conversion, and inadequate alignment between visual and textual representations. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Vision-Language Multimodal Transformer (VLMT), a unified architecture that integrates a transformer-based vision encoder with a sequence-to-sequence language model. VLMT employs a direct token-level injection mechanism to fuse visual and textual inputs within a shared embedding space, eliminating the need for intermediate projection layers. To enhance cross-modal alignment and reasoning, a three-stage pretraining strategy is proposed to progressively align vision-language representations and improve the model's capacity for multimodal understanding. Based on the pretrained backbone, two task-specific modules are instantiated to form a two-stage MMQA framework: a multimodal reranker that predicts document relevance scores and utilizes a relative threshold with top-k strategy for context retrieval, and a multimodal question answering model that generates contextually grounded answers based on the retrieved evidence. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. On MultimodalQA validation set, VLMT-Large achieves 76.5% Exact Match and 80.1% F1, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by +9.1% in Exact Match and +8.8% in F1. On WebQA, it attains a QA score of 47.6, surpassing prior models such as PERQA by +3.2. These results highlight VLMT's strong capabilities in multimodal reasoning and its potential to advance real-world information retrieval and question answering systems.

While synthetic data has proven effective for improving scientific reasoning in the text domain, multimodal reasoning remains constrained by the difficulty of synthesizing scientifically rigorous images. Existing Text-to-Image (T2I) models often produce outputs that are visually plausible yet scientifically incorrect, resulting in a persistent visual-logic divergence that limits their value for downstream reasoning. Motivated by recent advances in next-generation T2I models, we conduct a systematic study of scientific image synthesis across generation paradigms, evaluation, and downstream use. We analyze both direct pixel-based generation and programmatic synthesis, and propose ImgCoder, a logic-driven framework that follows an explicit "understand - plan - code" workflow to improve structural precision. To rigorously assess scientific correctness, we introduce SciGenBench, which evaluates generated images based on information utility and logical validity. Our evaluation reveals systematic failure modes in pixel-based models and highlights a fundamental expressiveness-precision trade-off. Finally, we show that fine-tuning Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on rigorously verified synthetic scientific images yields consistent reasoning gains, with potential scaling trends analogous to the text domain, validating high-fidelity scientific synthesis as a viable path to unlocking massive multimodal reasoning capabilities.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks, achieving ever-increasing performance on various evaluation benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks are typically static and often overlap with pre-training datasets, leading to fixed complexity constraints and substantial data contamination issues. Meanwhile, manually annotated datasets are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and subject to human bias and inconsistency, leading to reliability and reproducibility issues. To address these problems, we propose a fully dynamic multimodal evaluation framework, named Open-ended Visual Puzzle Generation (OVPG), which aims to generate fresh, diverse, and verifiable evaluation data automatically in puzzle-solving tasks. Specifically, the OVPG pipeline consists of a raw material sampling module, a visual content generation module, and a puzzle rule design module, which ensures that each evaluation instance is primitive, highly randomized, and uniquely solvable, enabling continual adaptation to the evolving capabilities of LMMs. Built upon OVPG, we construct PuzzleBench, a dynamic and scalable benchmark comprising 11,840 VQA samples. It features six carefully designed puzzle tasks targeting three core LMM competencies, visual recognition, logical reasoning, and context understanding. PuzzleBench differs from static benchmarks that quickly become outdated. It enables ongoing dataset refreshing through OVPG and a rich set of open-ended puzzle designs, allowing seamless adaptation to the evolving capabilities of LMMs.

Recent advances in multi-modal generative models have driven substantial improvements in image editing. However, current generative models still struggle with handling diverse and complex image editing tasks that require implicit reasoning, underscoring the need for a comprehensive benchmark to systematically assess their performance across various reasoning scenarios. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-object attribute transformation in realistic scenarios, which, while effective, encounter two key challenges: (1) they largely overlook multi-object interactions as well as game-world scenarios that involve human-defined rules, which are common in real-life applications; (2) they only rely on textual references to evaluate the generated images, potentially leading to systematic misjudgments, especially in complex reasoning scenarios. To this end, this work proposes UniREditBench, a unified benchmark for reasoning-based image editing evaluation. It comprises 2,700 meticulously curated samples, covering both real- and game-world scenarios across 8 primary dimensions and 18 sub-dimensions. To improve evaluation reliability, we introduce multimodal dual-reference evaluation, providing both textual and ground-truth image references for each sample assessment. Furthermore, we design an automated multi-scenario data synthesis pipeline and construct UniREdit-Data-100K, a large-scale synthetic dataset with high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning annotations. We fine-tune Bagel on this dataset and develop UniREdit-Bagel, demonstrating substantial improvements in both in-domain and out-of-distribution settings. Through thorough benchmarking of both open-source and closed-source image editing models, we reveal their strengths and weaknesses across various aspects.

Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.

The success of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has been largely attributed to the large-scale training data. However, the training data of many MLLMs is unavailable due to privacy concerns. The expensive and labor-intensive process of collecting multi-modal data further exacerbates the problem. Is it possible to synthesize multi-modal training data automatically without compromising diversity and quality? In this paper, we propose a new method, Oasis, to synthesize high-quality multi-modal data with only images. Oasis breaks through traditional methods by prompting only images to the MLLMs, thus extending the data diversity by a large margin. Our method features a delicate quality control method which ensures the data quality. We collected over 500k data and conducted incremental experiments on LLaVA-NeXT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of MLLMs. The image-based synthesis also allows us to focus on the specific-domain ability of MLLMs. Code and data will be publicly available.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization across multimodal tasks, yet most evaluation benchmarks remain Western-centric, leaving open questions about their performance in culturally diverse and multilingual settings. To address this gap, we introduce IndicVisionBench, the first large-scale benchmark centered on the Indian subcontinent. Covering English and 10 Indian languages, our benchmark spans 3 multimodal tasks, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT), and Visual Question Answering (VQA), covering 6 kinds of question types. Our final benchmark consists of a total of ~5K images and 37K+ QA pairs across 13 culturally grounded topics. In addition, we release a paired parallel corpus of annotations across 10 Indic languages, creating a unique resource for analyzing cultural and linguistic biases in VLMs. We evaluate a broad spectrum of 8 models, from proprietary closed-source systems to open-weights medium and large-scale models. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps, underscoring the limitations of current VLMs in culturally diverse contexts. By centering cultural diversity and multilinguality, IndicVisionBench establishes a reproducible evaluation framework that paves the way for more inclusive multimodal research.

Synthetic data generation has gained significant attention recently for its utility in training large vision and language models. However, the application of synthetic data to the training of multimodal context-augmented generation systems has been relatively unexplored. This gap in existing work is important because existing vision and language models (VLMs) are not trained specifically for context-augmented generation. Resources for adapting such models are therefore crucial for enabling their use in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings, where a retriever is used to gather relevant information that is then subsequently provided to a generative model via context augmentation. To address this challenging problem, we generate SK-VQA: a large synthetic multimodal dataset containing over 2 million question-answer pairs which require external knowledge to determine the final answer. Our dataset is both larger and significantly more diverse than existing resources of its kind, possessing over 11x more unique questions and containing images from a greater variety of sources than previously-proposed datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our synthetic dataset can not only serve as a challenging benchmark, but is also highly effective for adapting existing generative multimodal models for context-augmented generation.

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly applied to scientific research, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably understand and reason over the multimodal complexity of papers. A central challenge lies in detecting and resolving inconsistencies across text, figures, tables, and equations, issues that are often subtle, domain-specific, and ultimately undermine clarity, reproducibility, and trust. Existing benchmarks overlook this issue, either isolating single modalities or relying on synthetic errors that fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce PRISMM-Bench (Peer-Review-sourced Inconsistency Set for Multimodal Models), the first benchmark grounded in real reviewer-flagged inconsistencies in scientific papers. Through a multi-stage pipeline of review mining, LLM-assisted filtering and human verification, we curate 262 inconsistencies from 242 papers. Based on this set, we design three tasks, namely inconsistency identification, remedy and pair matching, which assess a model's capacity to detect, correct, and reason over inconsistencies across different modalities. Furthermore, to address the notorious problem of choice-only shortcuts in multiple-choice evaluation, where models exploit answer patterns without truly understanding the question, we further introduce structured JSON-based answer representations that minimize linguistic biases by reducing reliance on superficial stylistic cues. We benchmark 21 leading LMMs, including large open-weight models (GLM-4.5V 106B, InternVL3 78B) and proprietary models (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5 with high reasoning). Results reveal strikingly low performance (26.1-54.2%), underscoring the challenge of multimodal scientific reasoning and motivating progress towards trustworthy scientific assistants.

Interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation, enabling models to produce and interpret both images and text in arbitrary sequences, have become a pivotal area in multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements, the evaluation of this capability remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks suffer from limitations in data scale, scope, and evaluation depth, while current evaluation metrics are often costly or biased, lacking in reliability for practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIE, a large-scale knowledge-intensive benchmark for evaluating interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). MMIE comprises 20K meticulously curated multimodal queries, spanning 3 categories, 12 fields, and 102 subfields, including mathematics, coding, physics, literature, health, and arts. It supports both interleaved inputs and outputs, offering a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended question formats to evaluate diverse competencies. Moreover, we propose a reliable automated evaluation metric, leveraging a scoring model fine-tuned with human-annotated data and systematic evaluation criteria, aimed at reducing bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and metrics in providing a comprehensive evaluation of interleaved LVLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight LVLMs, revealing that even the best models show significant room for improvement, with most achieving only moderate results. We believe MMIE will drive further advancements in the development of interleaved LVLMs. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://mmie-bench.github.io/.

Assistants on assembly tasks have a large potential to benefit humans from everyday tasks to industrial settings. However, no testbeds support application-oriented system evaluation in a practical setting, especially in assembly. To foster the development, we propose a new multimodal QA dataset on assembly activities. Our dataset, ProMQA-Assembly, consists of 391 QA pairs that require the multimodal understanding of human-activity recordings and their instruction manuals in an online-style manner. In the development, we adopt a semi-automated QA annotation approach, where LLMs generate candidates and humans verify them, as a cost-effective method, and further improve it by integrating fine-grained action labels to diversify question types. Furthermore, we create instruction task graphs for the target tasks of assembling toy vehicles. These newly created task graphs are used in our benchmarking experiment, as well as to facilitate the human verification process in the QA annotation. Utilizing our dataset, we benchmark models, including competitive proprietary multimodal models. Our results suggest great room for improvement for the current models. We believe our new evaluation dataset can contribute to the further development of procedural-activity assistants.

Cinematography, the fundamental visual language of film, is essential for conveying narrative, emotion, and aesthetic quality. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general visual understanding, their proficiency in comprehending the nuanced cinematic grammar embedded within individual shots remains largely unexplored and lacks robust evaluation. This critical gap limits both fine-grained visual comprehension and the precision of AI-assisted video generation. To address this, we introduce ShotBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for cinematic language understanding. It features over 3.5k expert-annotated QA pairs from images and video clips, meticulously curated from over 200 acclaimed (predominantly Oscar-nominated) films and spanning eight key cinematography dimensions. Our evaluation of 24 leading VLMs on ShotBench reveals their substantial limitations: even the top-performing model achieves less than 60% average accuracy, particularly struggling with fine-grained visual cues and complex spatial reasoning. To catalyze advancement in this domain, we construct ShotQA, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising approximately 70k cinematic QA pairs. Leveraging ShotQA, we develop ShotVL through supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization. ShotVL significantly outperforms all existing open-source and proprietary models on ShotBench, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. We open-source our models, data, and code to foster rapid progress in this crucial area of AI-driven cinematic understanding and generation.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in image-based question-answering (QA) tasks. However, due to data limitations, there has been much less work on video-based QA. In this paper, we present TVQA, a large-scale video QA dataset based on 6 popular TV shows. TVQA consists of 152,545 QA pairs from 21,793 clips, spanning over 460 hours of video. Questions are designed to be compositional in nature, requiring systems to jointly localize relevant moments within a clip, comprehend subtitle-based dialogue, and recognize relevant visual concepts. We provide analyses of this new dataset as well as several baselines and a multi-stream end-to-end trainable neural network framework for the TVQA task. The dataset is publicly available at http://tvqa.cs.unc.edu.

The rapid evolution of e-commerce has exposed the limitations of traditional product retrieval systems in managing complex, multi-turn user interactions. Recent advances in multimodal generative retrieval -- particularly those leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as retrievers -- have shown promise. However, most existing methods are tailored to single-turn scenarios and struggle to model the evolving intent and iterative nature of multi-turn dialogues when applied naively. Concurrently, test-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) performance through iterative inference-time refinement. Yet, its effectiveness typically relies on two conditions: (1) a well-defined problem space (e.g., mathematical reasoning), and (2) the model's ability to self-correct -- conditions that are rarely met in conversational product search. In this setting, user queries are often ambiguous and evolving, and MLLMs alone have difficulty grounding responses in a fixed product corpus. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel framework that introduces test-time scaling into conversational multimodal product retrieval. Our approach builds on a generative retriever, further augmented with a test-time reranking (TTR) mechanism that improves retrieval accuracy and better aligns results with evolving user intent throughout the dialogue. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show consistent improvements, with average gains of 14.5 points in MRR and 10.6 points in nDCG@1.

In the past year, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone substantial advancements, augmenting off-the-shelf LLMs to support MM inputs or outputs via cost-effective training strategies. The resulting models not only preserve the inherent reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs but also empower a diverse range of MM tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of MM-LLMs. Specifically, we first outline general design formulations for model architecture and training pipeline. Subsequently, we provide brief introductions of 26 existing MM-LLMs, each characterized by its specific formulations. Additionally, we review the performance of MM-LLMs on mainstream benchmarks and summarize key training recipes to enhance the potency of MM-LLMs. Lastly, we explore promising directions for MM-LLMs while concurrently maintaining a real-time tracking website for the latest developments in the field. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the MM-LLMs domain.

Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do not account for the errors that speech recognition models might introduce, nor do they consider the language variations (dialects) of the users. To address this gap, we augment an existing QA dataset to construct a multi-dialect, spoken QA benchmark on five languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Kiswahili, Korean) with more than 68k audio prompts in 24 dialects from 255 speakers. We provide baseline results showcasing the real-world performance of QA systems and analyze the effect of language variety and other sensitive speaker attributes on downstream performance. Last, we study the fairness of the ASR and QA models with respect to the underlying user populations. The dataset, model outputs, and code for reproducing all our experiments are available: https://github.com/ffaisal93/SD-QA.

Large Language Models (LLMs), enhanced through agent tuning, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and tool utilization, significantly surpassing the performance of standalone models. However, the multimodal domain still lacks a large-scale, high-quality agent tuning dataset to unlock the full potential of multimodal large language models. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMAT-1M, the first million-scale multimodal agent tuning dataset designed to support CoT, reflection, and dynamic tool usage. Our dataset is constructed through a novel four-stage data engine: 1) We first curate publicly available multimodal datasets containing question-answer pairs; 2) Then, leveraging GPT-4o, we generate rationales for the original question-answer pairs and dynamically integrate API calls and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) information through a multi-turn paradigm; 3) Furthermore, we refine the rationales through reflection to ensure logical consistency and accuracy, creating a multi-turn dialogue dataset with both Rationale and Reflection (RR); 4) Finally, to enhance efficiency, we optionally compress multi-turn dialogues into a One-turn Rationale and Reflection (ORR) format. By fine-tuning open-source multimodal models on the MMAT-1M, we observe significant performance gains. For instance, the InternVL2.5-8B-RR model achieves an average improvement of 2.7% across eight public benchmarks and 8.8% on the RAG benchmark Dyn-VQA, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness in enhancing multimodal reasoning and tool-based capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/VIS-MPU-Agent/MMAT-1M.

We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test audio-language models on interactive question-answering over diverse acoustic scenes. We describe the dataset composition (from marine mammal calls to soundscapes and complex real-world clips), the evaluation protocol (top-1 accuracy with answer-shuffling robustness), and baseline systems (Qwen2-Audio-7B, AudioFlamingo 2, Gemini-2-Flash). Preliminary results on the development set are compared, showing strong variation across models and subsets. This challenge aims to advance the audio understanding and reasoning capabilities of audio-language models toward human-level acuity, which are crucial for enabling AI agents to perceive and interact about the world effectively.

Perceiving and generating diverse modalities are crucial for AI models to effectively learn from and engage with real-world signals, necessitating reliable evaluations for their development. We identify two major issues in current evaluations: (1) inconsistent standards, shaped by different communities with varying protocols and maturity levels; and (2) significant query, grading, and generalization biases. To address these, we introduce MixEval-X, the first any-to-any real-world benchmark designed to optimize and standardize evaluations across input and output modalities. We propose multi-modal benchmark mixture and adaptation-rectification pipelines to reconstruct real-world task distributions, ensuring evaluations generalize effectively to real-world use cases. Extensive meta-evaluations show our approach effectively aligns benchmark samples with real-world task distributions and the model rankings correlate strongly with that of crowd-sourced real-world evaluations (up to 0.98). We provide comprehensive leaderboards to rerank existing models and organizations and offer insights to enhance understanding of multi-modal evaluations and inform future research.

We present MCQA, a learning-based algorithm for multimodal question answering. MCQA explicitly fuses and aligns the multimodal input (i.e. text, audio, and video), which forms the context for the query (question and answer). Our approach fuses and aligns the question and the answer within this context. Moreover, we use the notion of co-attention to perform cross-modal alignment and multimodal context-query alignment. Our context-query alignment module matches the relevant parts of the multimodal context and the query with each other and aligns them to improve the overall performance. We evaluate the performance of MCQA on Social-IQ, a benchmark dataset for multimodal question answering. We compare the performance of our algorithm with prior methods and observe an accuracy improvement of 4-7%.

Recent advances in Text-to-3D (T23D) generative models have enabled the synthesis of diverse, high-fidelity 3D assets from textual prompts. However, existing challenges restrict the development of reliable T23D quality assessment (T23DQA). First, existing benchmarks are outdated, fragmented, and coarse-grained, making fine-grained metric training infeasible. Moreover, current objective metrics exhibit inherent design limitations, resulting in non-representative feature extraction and diminished metric robustness. To address these limitations, we introduce T23D-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for compositional T23D generation. We define five components with twelve sub-components for compositional prompts, which are used to generate 3,600 textured meshes from ten state-of-the-art generative models. A large-scale subjective experiment is conducted to collect 129,600 reliable human ratings across different perspectives. Based on T23D-CompBench, we further propose Rank2Score, an effective evaluator with two-stage training for T23DQA. Rank2Score enhances pairwise training via supervised contrastive regression and curriculum learning in the first stage, and subsequently refines predictions using mean opinion scores to achieve closer alignment with human judgments in the second stage. Extensive experiments and downstream applications demonstrate that Rank2Score consistently outperforms existing metrics across multiple dimensions and can additionally serve as a reward function to optimize generative models. The project is available at https://cbysjtu.github.io/Rank2Score/.

Different modalities hold considerable gaps in optimization trajectories, including speeds and paths, which lead to modality laziness and modality clash when jointly training multimodal models, resulting in insufficient and imbalanced multimodal learning. Existing methods focus on enforcing the weak modality by adding modality-specific optimization objectives, aligning their optimization speeds, or decomposing multimodal learning to enhance unimodal learning. These methods fail to achieve both unimodal sufficiency and multimodal balance. In this paper, we, for the first time, address both concerns by proposing multimodal Data Remixing, including decoupling multimodal data and filtering hard samples for each modality to mitigate modality imbalance; and then batch-level reassembling to align the gradient directions and avoid cross-modal interference, thus enhancing unimodal learning sufficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can be seamlessly integrated with existing approaches, improving accuracy by approximately 6.50%uparrow on CREMAD and 3.41%uparrow on Kinetic-Sounds, without training set expansion or additional computational overhead during inference. The source code is available at https://github.com/MatthewMaxy/Remix_ICML2025.

Capability evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is increasingly shadowed by rising concerns of data contamination that cast doubts on whether static benchmarks measure genuine reasoning or mere memorization. We present an empirical study using an infinitely scalable framework to synthesize research-level QA directly from arXiv papers, harnessing the natural temporal structure of research publications where performance decay after knowledge cutoffs may indicate potential contamination. We evaluated 4 frontier model represented by 2 models of different knowledge cutoff dates per family on 1,643 multi-step reasoning questions synthesized from 20,277 arXiv papers stratified over 26 months, covering at least 6 months before and after all cutoff dates. Our results consistently showed a lack of significant performance decay near knowledge cutoff dates for models of various sizes, developers, and release dates. We further performed a comparative analysis with previous longitudinal studies that reported significant post-cutoff performance decay using directly retrieved questions based on public data. we hypothesize that the multi-step reasoning required by our synthesis pipeline offered additional complexity that goes deeper than shallow memorization, which effectively serves a mitigation strategy against benchmark contamination. We fully open source our code and dataset to aid reproducibility and advocate for a paradigm shift that prioritize reasoning-driven synthesis to construct benchmarks over simply collecting newly released questions periodically.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements, yet the generation of non-factual responses remains prevalent in fact-seeking question answering (QA). Current multimodal fact-seeking benchmarks primarily focus on comparing model outputs to ground truth answers, providing limited insights into the performance of modality-specific modules. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualSimpleQA, a multimodal fact-seeking benchmark with two key features. First, it enables streamlined and decoupled evaluation of LVLMs in visual and linguistic modalities. Second, it incorporates well-defined difficulty criteria to guide human annotation and facilitates the extraction of a challenging subset, VisualSimpleQA-hard. Experiments on 15 LVLMs show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve merely 60%+ correctness in multimodal fact-seeking QA on VisualSimpleQA and 30%+ on VisualSimpleQA-hard. Furthermore, the decoupled evaluation across these models highlights substantial opportunities for improvement in both visual and linguistic modules. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WYLing/VisualSimpleQA.

We present a Chain-of-Action (CoA) framework for multimodal and retrieval-augmented Question-Answering (QA). Compared to the literature, CoA overcomes two major challenges of current QA applications: (i) unfaithful hallucination that is inconsistent with real-time or domain facts and (ii) weak reasoning performance over compositional information. Our key contribution is a novel reasoning-retrieval mechanism that decomposes a complex question into a reasoning chain via systematic prompting and pre-designed actions. Methodologically, we propose three types of domain-adaptable `Plug-and-Play' actions for retrieving real-time information from heterogeneous sources. We also propose a multi-reference faith score (MRFS) to verify and resolve conflicts in the answers. Empirically, we exploit both public benchmarks and a Web3 case study to demonstrate the capability of CoA over other methods.

Visual reasoning over structured data such as tables is a critical capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), yet current benchmarks remain limited in scale, diversity, or reasoning depth, especially when it comes to rendered table images. Addressing this gap, we introduce Visual-TableQA, a large-scale, open-domain multimodal dataset specifically designed to evaluate and enhance visual reasoning over complex tabular data. Our generation pipeline is modular, scalable, and fully autonomous, involving multiple reasoning LLMs collaborating across distinct roles: generation, validation, and inspiration. Visual-TableQA comprises 2.5k richly structured LaTeX-rendered tables and 6k reasoning-intensive QA pairs, all produced at a cost of under USD 100. To promote diversity and creativity, our pipeline performs multi-model collaborative data generation via cross-model prompting ('inspiration') and LLM-jury filtering. Stronger models seed layouts and topics that weaker models elaborate, collectively distilling diverse reasoning patterns and visual structures into the dataset. Empirical results show that models fine-tuned on Visual-TableQA generalize robustly to external benchmarks, outperforming several proprietary models despite the dataset's synthetic nature. The full pipeline and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-4-Everyone/Visual-TableQA.

We introduce EgoTextVQA, a novel and rigorously constructed benchmark for egocentric QA assistance involving scene text. EgoTextVQA contains 1.5K ego-view videos and 7K scene-text aware questions that reflect real user needs in outdoor driving and indoor house-keeping activities. The questions are designed to elicit identification and reasoning on scene text in an egocentric and dynamic environment. With EgoTextVQA, we comprehensively evaluate 10 prominent multimodal large language models. Currently, all models struggle, and the best results (Gemini 1.5 Pro) are around 33\% accuracy, highlighting the severe deficiency of these techniques in egocentric QA assistance. Our further investigations suggest that precise temporal grounding and multi-frame reasoning, along with high resolution and auxiliary scene-text inputs, are key for better performance. With thorough analyses and heuristic suggestions, we hope EgoTextVQA can serve as a solid testbed for research in egocentric scene-text QA assistance. Our dataset is released at: https://github.com/zhousheng97/EgoTextVQA.

In this paper, we introduce FAMMA, an open-source benchmark for financial multilingual multimodal question answering (QA). Our benchmark aims to evaluate the abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in answering questions that require advanced financial knowledge and sophisticated reasoning. It includes 1,758 meticulously collected question-answer pairs from university textbooks and exams, spanning 8 major subfields in finance including corporate finance, asset management, and financial engineering. Some of the QA pairs are written in Chinese or French, while a majority of them are in English. These questions are presented in a mixed format combining text and heterogeneous image types, such as charts, tables, and diagrams. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art MLLMs on our benchmark, and our analysis shows that FAMMA poses a significant challenge for these models. Even advanced systems like GPT-4o and Claude-35-Sonnet achieve only 42\% accuracy. Additionally, the open-source Qwen2-VL lags notably behind its proprietary counterparts. Lastly, we explore GPT o1-style reasoning chains to enhance the models' reasoning capabilities, which significantly improve error correction. Our FAMMA benchmark will facilitate future research to develop expert systems in financial QA. The leaderboard is available at https://famma-bench.github.io/famma/ .

As language models improve and become capable of performing more complex tasks across modalities, evaluating them automatically becomes increasingly challenging. Developing strong and robust task-specific automatic metrics gets harder, and human-annotated test sets -- which are expensive to create -- saturate more quickly. A compelling alternative is to design reliable strategies to automate the creation of test data and evaluation, but previous attempts either rely on pre-existing data, or focus solely on individual tasks. We present Zero-shot Benchmarking (ZSB), a framework for creating high-quality benchmarks for any task by leveraging language models for both synthetic test data creation and evaluation. ZSB is simple and flexible: it requires only the creation of a prompt for data generation and one for evaluation; it is scalable to tasks and languages where collecting real-world data is costly or impractical; it is model-agnostic, allowing the creation of increasingly challenging benchmarks as models improve. To assess the effectiveness of our framework, we create benchmarks for five text-only tasks and a multi-modal one: general capabilities in four languages (English, Chinese, French, and Korean), translation, and general vision-language capabilities in English. We then rank a broad range of open and closed systems on our benchmarks. ZSB rankings consistently correlate strongly with human rankings, outperforming widely-adopted standard benchmarks. Through ablations, we find that strong benchmarks can be created with open models, and that judge model size and dataset variety are crucial drivers of performance. We release all our benchmarks, and code to reproduce our experiments and to produce new benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily trained on text-based datasets, exhibit exceptional proficiencies in understanding and executing complex linguistic instructions via text outputs. However, they falter when requests to generate non-text ones. Concurrently, modality conversion models, such as text-to-image, despite generating high-quality images, suffer from a lack of extensive textual pretraining. As a result, these models are only capable of accommodating specific image descriptions rather than comprehending more complex instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach, \methodname, from a modality conversion perspective that evolves a text-based LLM into a multi-modal one. We specifically employ a minimal dataset to instruct LLMs to recognize the intended output modality as directed by the instructions. Consequently, the adapted LLM can effectively summon various off-the-shelf modality conversion models from the model zoos to generate non-text responses. This circumvents the necessity for complicated pretraining that typically requires immense quantities of paired multi-modal data, while simultaneously inheriting the extensive knowledge of LLMs and the ability of high-quality generative models. To evaluate and compare the adapted multi-modal LLM with its traditional counterparts, we have constructed a multi-modal instruction benchmark that solicits diverse modality outputs. The experiment results reveal that, with minimal training, LLMs can be conveniently adapted to comprehend requests for non-text responses, thus achieving higher flexibility in multi-modal scenarios. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/xinke-wang/SwitchGPT.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often generate plausible but incorrect responses to visual queries. However, reliably quantifying the effect of such hallucinations in free-form responses to open-ended queries is challenging as it requires visually verifying each claim within the response. We propose Programmatic VLM Evaluation (PROVE), a new benchmarking paradigm for evaluating VLM responses to open-ended queries. To construct PROVE, we provide a large language model (LLM) with a high-fidelity scene-graph representation constructed from a hyper-detailed image caption, and prompt it to generate diverse question-answer (QA) pairs, as well as programs that can be executed over the scene graph object to verify each QA pair. We thus construct a benchmark of 10.5k challenging but visually grounded QA pairs. Next, to evaluate free-form model responses to queries in PROVE, we propose a programmatic evaluation strategy that measures both the helpfulness and truthfulness of a response within a unified scene graph-based framework. We benchmark the helpfulness-truthfulness trade-offs of a range of VLMs on PROVE, finding that very few are in-fact able to achieve a good balance between the two. Project page: https://prove-explorer.netlify.app/.

This research introduces DesignQA, a novel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending and applying engineering requirements in technical documentation. Developed with a focus on real-world engineering challenges, DesignQA uniquely combines multimodal data-including textual design requirements, CAD images, and engineering drawings-derived from the Formula SAE student competition. Different from many existing MLLM benchmarks, DesignQA contains document-grounded visual questions where the input image and input document come from different sources. The benchmark features automatic evaluation metrics and is divided into segments-Rule Comprehension, Rule Compliance, and Rule Extraction-based on tasks that engineers perform when designing according to requirements. We evaluate state-of-the-art models like GPT4 and LLaVA against the benchmark, and our study uncovers the existing gaps in MLLMs' abilities to interpret complex engineering documentation. Key findings suggest that while MLLMs demonstrate potential in navigating technical documents, substantial limitations exist, particularly in accurately extracting and applying detailed requirements to engineering designs. This benchmark sets a foundation for future advancements in AI-supported engineering design processes. DesignQA is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.

While thinking-aware generation aims to improve performance on complex tasks, we identify a critical failure mode where existing sequential, autoregressive approaches can paradoxically degrade performance due to error propagation. To systematically analyze this issue, we propose ParaBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both text and image output modalities. Our analysis using ParaBench reveals that this performance degradation is strongly correlated with poor alignment between the generated reasoning and the final image. To resolve this, we propose a parallel multimodal diffusion framework, MMaDA-Parallel, that enables continuous, bidirectional interaction between text and images throughout the entire denoising trajectory. MMaDA-Parallel is trained with supervised finetuning and then further optimized by Parallel Reinforcement Learning (ParaRL), a novel strategy that applies semantic rewards along the trajectory to enforce cross-modal consistency. Experiments validate that our model significantly improves cross-modal alignment and semantic consistency, achieving a 6.9\% improvement in Output Alignment on ParaBench compared to the state-of-the-art model, Bagel, establishing a more robust paradigm for thinking-aware image synthesis. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Extending these successes to multimodal reasoning remains challenging due to the increased complexity of integrating diverse input modalities and the scarcity of high-quality long CoT training data. Existing multimodal datasets and CoT synthesis methods still suffer from limited reasoning depth, modality conversion errors, and rigid generation pipelines, hindering model performance and stability. To this end, in this paper, we propose SynSelect, a novel three-stage Synthesis-Selection framework for generating high-quality long CoT data tailored to multimodal reasoning tasks. Specifically, SynSelect first leverages multiple heterogeneous multimodal LRMs to produce diverse candidate CoTs, and then applies both instance and batch level selection to filter high-quality CoTs that can effectively enhance the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that models supervised fine-tuned on SynSelect-generated data significantly outperform baselines and achieve further improvements after reinforcement learning post-training. Our results validate SynSelect as an effective approach for advancing multimodal LRMs reasoning capabilities.

Existing question answering (QA) systems owe much of their success to large, high-quality training data. Such annotation efforts are costly, and the difficulty compounds in the cross-lingual setting. Therefore, prior cross-lingual QA work has focused on releasing evaluation datasets, and then applying zero-shot methods as baselines. This work proposes a synthetic data generation method for cross-lingual QA which leverages indirect supervision from existing parallel corpora. Our method termed PAXQA (Projecting annotations for cross-lingual (x) QA) decomposes cross-lingual QA into two stages. First, we apply a question generation (QG) model to the English side. Second, we apply annotation projection to translate both the questions and answers. To better translate questions, we propose a novel use of lexically-constrained machine translation, in which constrained entities are extracted from the parallel bitexts. We apply PAXQA to generate cross-lingual QA examples in 4 languages (662K examples total), and perform human evaluation on a subset to create validation and test splits. We then show that models fine-tuned on these datasets outperform prior synthetic data generation models over several extractive QA datasets. The largest performance gains are for directions with non-English questions and English contexts. Ablation studies show that our dataset generation method is relatively robust to noise from automatic word alignments, showing the sufficient quality of our generations. To facilitate follow-up work, we release our code and datasets at https://github.com/manestay/paxqa .

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) requires not only question-based multimodal reasoning but also precise temporal grounding to capture subtle dynamics for accurate prediction. However, existing methods mainly use question information implicitly, limiting focus on question-specific details. Furthermore, most studies rely on uniform frame sampling, which can miss key question-relevant frames. Although recent Top-K frame selection methods aim to address this, their discrete nature still overlooks fine-grained temporal details. This paper proposes QA-TIGER, a novel framework that explicitly incorporates question information and models continuous temporal dynamics. Our key idea is to use Gaussian-based modeling to adaptively focus on both consecutive and non-consecutive frames based on the question, while explicitly injecting question information and applying progressive refinement. We leverage a Mixture of Experts (MoE) to flexibly implement multiple Gaussian models, activating temporal experts specifically tailored to the question. Extensive experiments on multiple AVQA benchmarks show that QA-TIGER consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/QA-TIGER/

The availability of large, high-quality datasets has been one of the main drivers of recent progress in question answering (QA). Such annotated datasets however are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, rendering QA technology inaccessible to underrepresented languages. An alternative to building large monolingual training datasets is to leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs) under a few-shot learning setting. Our approach, QAmeleon, uses a PLM to automatically generate multilingual data upon which QA models are trained, thus avoiding costly annotation. Prompt tuning the PLM for data synthesis with only five examples per language delivers accuracy superior to translation-based baselines, bridges nearly 60% of the gap between an English-only baseline and a fully supervised upper bound trained on almost 50,000 hand labeled examples, and always leads to substantial improvements compared to fine-tuning a QA model directly on labeled examples in low resource settings. Experiments on the TyDiQA-GoldP and MLQA benchmarks show that few-shot prompt tuning for data synthesis scales across languages and is a viable alternative to large-scale annotation.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, often assessed through multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that include an image, a question, and several options. However, many benchmarks used for such evaluations suffer from systematic biases. Remarkably, Large Language Models (LLMs) without any visual perception capabilities achieve non-trivial performance, undermining the credibility of these evaluations. To address this issue while maintaining the efficiency of MCQ evaluations, we propose MMEvalPro, a benchmark designed to avoid Type-I errors through a trilogy evaluation pipeline and more rigorous metrics. For each original question from existing benchmarks, human annotators augment it by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. MMEvalPro comprises 2,138 question triplets, totaling 6,414 distinct questions. Two-thirds of these questions are manually labeled by human experts, while the rest are sourced from existing benchmarks (MMMU, ScienceQA, and MathVista). Compared with the existing benchmarks, our experiments with the latest LLMs and LMMs demonstrate that MMEvalPro is more challenging (the best LMM lags behind human performance by 31.73%, compared to an average gap of 8.03% in previous benchmarks) and more trustworthy (the best LLM trails the best LMM by 23.09%, whereas the gap for previous benchmarks is just 14.64%). Our in-depth analysis explains the reason for the large performance gap and justifies the trustworthiness of evaluation, underscoring its significant potential for advancing future research.

Evaluation of QA systems is very challenging and expensive, with the most reliable approach being human annotations of correctness of answers for questions. Recent works (AVA, BEM) have shown that transformer LM encoder based similarity metrics transfer well for QA evaluation, but they are limited by the usage of a single correct reference answer. We propose a new evaluation metric: SQuArE (Sentence-level QUestion AnsweRing Evaluation), using multiple reference answers (combining multiple correct and incorrect references) for sentence-form QA. We evaluate SQuArE on both sentence-level extractive (Answer Selection) and generative (GenQA) QA systems, across multiple academic and industrial datasets, and show that it outperforms previous baselines and obtains the highest correlation with human annotations.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked great opportunities in complex data management tasks, particularly in question answering (QA) over complicated multi-table relational data. Despite significant progress, systematically evaluating LLMs on multi-table QA remains a critical challenge due to the inherent complexity of analyzing heterogeneous table structures and potential large scale of serialized relational data. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-table QA, failing to capture the intricacies of reasoning across multiple relational tables, as required in real-world domains such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. To address this gap, we present TQA-Bench, a new multi-table QA benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in tackling complex QA tasks over relational data. Our benchmark incorporates diverse relational database instances sourced from real-world public datasets and introduces a flexible sampling mechanism to create tasks with varying multi-table context lengths, ranging from 8K to 64K tokens. To ensure robustness and reliability, we integrate symbolic extensions into the evaluation framework, enabling the assessment of LLM reasoning capabilities beyond simple data retrieval or probabilistic pattern matching. We systematically evaluate a range of LLMs, both open-source and closed-source, spanning model scales from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Our extensive experiments reveal critical insights into the performance of LLMs in multi-table QA, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for advancing their application in complex, data-driven environments. Our benchmark implementation and results are available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/TQA-Bench.

The goal of this work is to build conversational Question Answering (QA) interfaces for the large body of domain-specific information available in FAQ sites. We present DoQA, a dataset with 2,437 dialogues and 10,917 QA pairs. The dialogues are collected from three Stack Exchange sites using the Wizard of Oz method with crowdsourcing. Compared to previous work, DoQA comprises well-defined information needs, leading to more coherent and natural conversations with less factoid questions and is multi-domain. In addition, we introduce a more realistic information retrieval(IR) scenario where the system needs to find the answer in any of the FAQ documents. The results of an existing, strong, system show that, thanks to transfer learning from a Wikipedia QA dataset and fine tuning on a single FAQ domain, it is possible to build high quality conversational QA systems for FAQs without in-domain training data. The good results carry over into the more challenging IR scenario. In both cases, there is still ample room for improvement, as indicated by the higher human upperbound.

The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models' abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models. Our benchmark and analysis will be available at https://scemqa.github.io/

We introduce AnyGPT, an any-to-any multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for the unified processing of various modalities, including speech, text, images, and music. AnyGPT can be trained stably without any alterations to the current large language model (LLM) architecture or training paradigms. Instead, it relies exclusively on data-level preprocessing, facilitating the seamless integration of new modalities into LLMs, akin to the incorporation of new languages. We build a multimodal text-centric dataset for multimodal alignment pre-training. Utilizing generative models, we synthesize the first large-scale any-to-any multimodal instruction dataset. It consists of 108k samples of multi-turn conversations that intricately interweave various modalities, thus equipping the model to handle arbitrary combinations of multimodal inputs and outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AnyGPT is capable of facilitating any-to-any multimodal conversation while achieving performance comparable to specialized models across all modalities, proving that discrete representations can effectively and conveniently unify multiple modalities within a language model. Demos are shown in https://junzhan2000.github.io/AnyGPT.github.io/

Question-answering for domain-specific applications has recently attracted much interest due to the latest advancements in large language models (LLMs). However, accurately assessing the performance of these applications remains a challenge, mainly due to the lack of suitable benchmarks that effectively simulate real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce two product question-answering (QA) datasets focused on Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop products to help evaluate the performance of existing models on domain-specific product QA tasks. Additionally, we propose a novel knowledge-driven RAG-QA framework to enhance the performance of the models in the product QA task. Our experiments demonstrated that inducing domain knowledge through query reformulation allowed for increased retrieval and generative performance when compared to standard RAG-QA methods. This improvement, however, is slight, and thus illustrates the challenge posed by the datasets introduced.

We present M^3-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating multimodal tool use under the Model Context Protocol. The benchmark targets realistic, multi-hop and multi-threaded workflows that require visual grounding and textual reasoning, cross-tool dependencies, and persistence of intermediate resources across steps. We introduce a similarity-driven alignment that serializes each tool call, embeds signatures with a sentence encoder, and performs similarity-bucketed Hungarian matching to obtain auditable one-to-one correspondences. On top of this alignment, we report interpretable metrics that decouple semantic fidelity from workflow consistency. The benchmark spans 28 servers with 231 tools, and provides standardized trajectories curated through an Executor & Judge pipeline with human verification; an auxiliary four large language models (LLMs) judge ensemble reports end-task Task Completion and information grounding. Evaluations of representative state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) reveal persistent gaps in multimodal MCP tool use, particularly in argument fidelity and structure consistency, underscoring the need for methods that jointly reason over images, text, and tool graphs. Our Benchmark's anonymous repository is at https://github.com/EtaYang10th/Open-M3-Bench

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) and their integration into large multimodal models (LMMs), there has been impressive progress in zero-shot completion of user-oriented vision-language tasks. However, a gap remains in the domain of chart image understanding due to the distinct abstract components in charts. To address this, we introduce a large-scale MultiModal Chart Instruction (MMC-Instruction) dataset comprising 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types. Leveraging this data, we develop MultiModal Chart Assistant (MMCA), an LMM that achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive evaluation of LMM chart understanding, we also propose a MultiModal Chart Benchmark (MMC-Benchmark), a comprehensive human-annotated benchmark with 9 distinct tasks evaluating reasoning capabilities over charts. Extensive experiments on MMC-Benchmark reveal the limitations of existing LMMs on correctly interpreting charts, even for the most recent GPT-4V model. Our work provides an instruction-tuning methodology and benchmark to advance multimodal understanding of charts.

Video QA has made significant strides by leveraging multimodal learning to align visual and textual modalities. However, current benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on questions answerable through explicit visual content - actions, objects & events directly observable within individual frames or short clips. In contrast, creative and cinematic videos - such as movies, TV shows, and narrative-driven content - employ storytelling techniques that deliberately omit certain depictions, requiring viewers to infer motives, causality, and relationships across discontinuous frames. Humans naturally excel at such implicit reasoning, seamlessly integrating information across time and context to construct coherent narratives. Current VideoQA systems and benchmarks fail to capture this essential dimension of human-like understanding. To bridge this gap, we present ImplicitQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to test models on implicit reasoning. It comprises 1K meticulously annotated QA pairs derived from 320+ high-quality creative video clips, systematically categorized into key reasoning dimensions: lateral and vertical spatial reasoning, depth and proximity, viewpoint and visibility, motion and trajectory, causal and motivational reasoning, social interactions, physical context, and inferred counting. These annotations are deliberately challenging, crafted by authors ensuring high-quality. Our extensive evaluations on leading VideoQA models reveals performance degradation, underscoring their reliance on surface-level visual cues and highlighting the difficulty of implicit reasoning. Performance variations across models further illustrate the complexity and diversity of the challenges presented by ImplicitQA. By releasing both the dataset and our data collection framework, we aim to stimulate further research and development in the community. https://huggingface.co/datasets/ucf-crcv/ImplicitQA.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides by integrating visual and textual modalities. A critical factor in training MLLMs is the quality of image-text pairs within multimodal pretraining datasets. However, de facto filter-based data quality enhancement paradigms often discard a substantial portion of high-quality image data due to inadequate semantic alignment between images and texts, leading to inefficiencies in data utilization and scalability. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive Image-Text Quality Enhancer (AITQE), a model that dynamically assesses and enhances the quality of image-text pairs. AITQE employs a text rewriting mechanism for low-quality pairs and incorporates a negative sample learning strategy to improve evaluative capabilities by integrating deliberately selected low-quality samples during training. Unlike prior approaches that significantly alter text distributions, our method minimally adjusts text to preserve data volume while enhancing quality. Experimental results demonstrate that AITQE surpasses existing methods on various benchmark, effectively leveraging raw data and scaling efficiently with increasing data volumes. We hope our work will inspire future works. The code and model are available at: https://github.com/hanhuang22/AITQE.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in text-to-image generation (T2I) and editing (TI2I), whether instantiated as assembled unified frameworks which couple powerful vision-language model (VLM) with diffusion-based generator, or as naive Unified Multimodal Models with an early fusion of understanding and generation modalities. We contend that in current unified frameworks, the crucial capability of multimodal generative reasoning which encompasses instruction understanding, grounding, and image referring for identity preservation and faithful reconstruction, is intrinsically entangled with high-fidelity synthesis. In this work, we introduce Query-Kontext, a novel approach that bridges the VLM and diffusion model via a multimodal ``kontext'' composed of semantic cues and coarse-grained image conditions encoded from multimodal inputs. This design delegates the complex ability of multimodal generative reasoning to powerful VLM while reserving diffusion model's role for high-quality visual synthesis. To achieve this, we propose a three-stage progressive training strategy. First, we connect the VLM to a lightweight diffusion head via multimodal kontext tokens to unleash the VLM's generative reasoning ability. Second, we scale this head to a large, pre-trained diffusion model to enhance visual detail and realism. Finally, we introduce a low-level image encoder to improve image fidelity and perform instruction tuning on downstream tasks. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive data pipeline integrating real, synthetic, and open-source datasets, covering diverse multimodal reference-to-image scenarios, including image generation, instruction-driven editing, customized generation, and multi-subject composition. Experiments show that our approach matches strong unified baselines and even outperforms task-specific state-of-the-art methods in several cases.

Rigorous and reproducible evaluation is critical for assessing the state of the art and for guiding scientific advances in Artificial Intelligence. Evaluation is challenging in practice due to several reasons, including benchmark saturation, lack of transparency in methods used for measurement, development challenges in extracting measurements for generative tasks, and, more generally, the extensive number of capabilities required for a well-rounded comparison across models. We make three contributions to alleviate the above challenges. First, we present Eureka, an open-source framework for standardizing evaluations of large foundation models beyond single-score reporting and rankings. Second, we introduce Eureka-Bench as an extensible collection of benchmarks testing capabilities that (i) are still challenging for state-of-the-art models and (ii) represent fundamental but overlooked language and multimodal capabilities. The inherent space for improvement in non-saturated benchmarks enables us to discover meaningful differences between models at a capability level. Third, using Eureka, we conduct an analysis of 12 state-of-the-art models, providing in-depth insights into failure understanding and model comparison, which can be leveraged to plan targeted improvements. In contrast to recent trends in reports and leaderboards showing absolute rankings and claims for one model or another to be the best, our analysis shows that there is no such best model. Different models have different strengths, but there are models that appear more often than others as best performers for some capabilities. Despite the recent improvements, current models still struggle with several fundamental capabilities including detailed image understanding, benefiting from multimodal input when available rather than fully relying on language, factuality and grounding for information retrieval, and over refusals.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial in this setting. We formulate and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We propose a reproducible evaluation framework for the task and benchmark a broad set of architectures. We take human annotations as a gold standard and show that a correlated automatic metric is suitable for development. Our experimental work gives concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third (How to build LLMs with attribution?).

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown great potential for video reasoning with textual Chain-of-Thought. However, they remain vulnerable to hallucinations, especially when processing long-form videos where evidence is sparse and temporally dispersed. Inspired by how humans comprehend long videos - by first skimming globally and then examining relevant clips for details - we introduce LongVT, an end-to-end agentic framework that enables "Thinking with Long Videos" via interleaved Multimodal Chain-of-Tool-Thought. Specifically, we exploit LMMs' inherent temporal grounding ability as a native video cropping tool to zoom in on a specific video clip and resample finer-grained video frames. This global-to-local reasoning loop continues until answers are grounded in retrieved visual evidence. Given the scarcity of fine-grained question-answering (QA) data for the long video reasoning task, we curate and will release a data suite named VideoSIAH to facilitate both training and evaluation. Specifically, our training dataset consists of 247.9K samples for tool-integrated cold-start supervised fine-tuning, 1.6K samples for agentic reinforcement learning, and 15.4K samples for agentic reinforcement fine-tuning, respectively. Our evaluation benchmark consists of 1,280 QA pairs that are carefully curated through a semi-automatic data pipeline with human-in-the-loop validation. With a meticulously designed three-stage training strategy and extensive empirical validation, LongVT consistently outperforms existing strong baselines across four challenging long-video understanding and reasoning benchmarks. Our codes, data, and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/LongVT .

Despite thousands of researchers, engineers, and artists actively working on improving text-to-image generation models, systems often fail to produce images that accurately align with the text inputs. We introduce TIFA (Text-to-Image Faithfulness evaluation with question Answering), an automatic evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of a generated image to its text input via visual question answering (VQA). Specifically, given a text input, we automatically generate several question-answer pairs using a language model. We calculate image faithfulness by checking whether existing VQA models can answer these questions using the generated image. TIFA is a reference-free metric that allows for fine-grained and interpretable evaluations of generated images. TIFA also has better correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Based on this approach, we introduce TIFA v1.0, a benchmark consisting of 4K diverse text inputs and 25K questions across 12 categories (object, counting, etc.). We present a comprehensive evaluation of existing text-to-image models using TIFA v1.0 and highlight the limitations and challenges of current models. For instance, we find that current text-to-image models, despite doing well on color and material, still struggle in counting, spatial relations, and composing multiple objects. We hope our benchmark will help carefully measure the research progress in text-to-image synthesis and provide valuable insights for further research.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process visual, acoustic, and textual inputs, addressing the limitations of single-modality LLMs. However, existing benchmarks often overlook tri-modal evaluation in Traditional Chinese and do not consider inference latency. To address this, we introduce Multi-TW, the first Traditional Chinese benchmark for evaluating the performance and latency of any-to-any multimodal models. Multi-TW includes 900 multiple-choice questions (image and text, audio and text pairs) sourced from official proficiency tests developed with the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu (SC-TOP). We evaluated various any-to-any models and vision-language models (VLMs) with audio transcription. Our results show that closed-source models generally outperform open-source ones across modalities, although open-source models can perform well in audio tasks. End-to-end any-to-any pipelines offer clear latency advantages compared to VLMs using separate audio transcription. Multi-TW presents a comprehensive view of model capabilities and highlights the need for Traditional Chinese fine-tuning and efficient multimodal architectures.

The hypothesis that pretrained large language models (LLMs) necessitate only minimal supervision during the fine-tuning (SFT) stage (Zhou et al., 2024) has been substantiated by recent advancements in data curation and selection research. However, their stability and generalizability are compromised due to the vulnerability to experimental setups and validation protocols, falling short of surpassing random sampling (Diddee & Ippolito, 2024; Xia et al., 2024b). Built upon LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs), combined with the sheer token volume and heightened heterogeneity of data sources, amplify both the significance and complexity of data selection. To harvest multi-modal instructional data in a robust and efficient manner, we re-define the granularity of the quality metric by decomposing it into 14 vision-language-related capabilities, and introduce multi-modal rich scorers to evaluate the capabilities of each data candidate. To promote diversity, in light of the inherent objective of the alignment stage, we take interaction style as diversity indicator and use a multi-modal rich styler to identify data instruction patterns. In doing so, our multi-modal rich scorers and styler (mmSSR) guarantee that high-scoring information is conveyed to users in diversified forms. Free from embedding-based clustering or greedy sampling, mmSSR efficiently scales to millions of data with varying budget constraints, supports customization for general or specific capability acquisition, and facilitates training-free generalization to new domains for curation. Across 10+ experimental settings, validated by 14 multi-modal benchmarks, we demonstrate consistent improvements over random sampling, baseline strategies and state-of-the-art selection methods, achieving 99.1% of full performance with only 30% of the 2.6M data.

The scope of neural code intelligence is rapidly expanding beyond text-based source code to encompass the rich visual outputs that programs generate. This visual dimension is critical for advanced applications like flexible content generation and precise, program-driven editing of visualizations. However, progress has been impeded by the scarcity of high-quality multimodal code data, a bottleneck stemming from challenges in synthesis and quality assessment. To address these challenges, we make contributions from both a data and modeling perspective. We first introduce a complete synthesis toolkit that leverages reciprocal synergies between data modalities to efficiently produce a large-scale, high-quality corpus spanning from standard charts to complex interactive web UIs and code-driven animations. Leveraging this toolkit, we construct JanusCode-800K, the largest multimodal code corpus to date. This powers the training of our models, JanusCoder and JanusCoderV, which establish a visual-programmatic interface for generating code from textual instructions, visual inputs, or a combination of both. Our unified model is a departure from existing approaches that build specialized models for isolated tasks. Extensive experiments on both text-centric and vision-centric coding tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the JanusCoder series, with our 7B to 14B scale models approaching or even exceeding the performance of commercial models. Furthermore, extensive analysis provides key insights into harmonizing programmatic logic with its visual expression. Our code and checkpoints will are available at https://github.com/InternLM/JanusCoder.

The generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding from static code to dynamic, interactive visual artifacts. This progress is bottlenecked by a critical evaluation gap: established benchmarks focus on algorithmic correctness and are blind to the visual fidelity and interactive integrity that define modern user experiences. To bridge this gap, we introduce ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark and paradigm for the automated, multimodal evaluation of visual code generation. Our framework programmatically renders each generated artifact and captures its dynamic behavior through temporal screenshots. This visual evidence, alongside the source code, is then assessed by a Multimodal LLM (MLLM)-as-Judge, which is rigorously guided by a fine-grained, per-task checklist to ensure holistic and reproducible scoring. We construct a new benchmark of 1,825 diverse tasks and evaluate over 30 leading LLMs. Our automated evaluation achieves a striking 94.4% ranking consistency with WebDev Arena, the gold-standard for human preference in web development, and over 90% pairwise agreement with human experts. This establishes ArtifactsBench as the first framework to reliably automate the assessment of human-perceived quality at scale. Our analysis provides a high-resolution map of the current SOTA, revealing that generalist models often outperform domain-specific ones. We open-source ArtifactsBench, including the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/, to provide the community with a scalable and accurate tool to accelerate the development of user-centric generative models.

Connecting text and visual modalities plays an essential role in generative intelligence. For this reason, inspired by the success of large language models, significant research efforts are being devoted to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate visual and textual modalities, both as input and output, while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent visual-based MLLMs, analyzing their architectural choices, multimodal alignment strategies, and training techniques. We also conduct a detailed analysis of these models across a wide range of tasks, including visual grounding, image generation and editing, visual understanding, and domain-specific applications. Additionally, we compile and describe training datasets and evaluation benchmarks, conducting comparisons among existing models in terms of performance and computational requirements. Overall, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, laying the groundwork for future MLLMs.

Zero-shot transfer learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle a variety of task-oriented dialogue domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this work, we propose to transfer the cross-task knowledge from general question answering (QA) corpora for the zero-shot DST task. Specifically, we propose TransferQA, a transferable generative QA model that seamlessly combines extractive QA and multi-choice QA via a text-to-text transformer framework, and tracks both categorical slots and non-categorical slots in DST. In addition, we introduce two effective ways to construct unanswerable questions, namely, negative question sampling and context truncation, which enable our model to handle "none" value slots in the zero-shot DST setting. The extensive experiments show that our approaches substantially improve the existing zero-shot and few-shot results on MultiWoz. Moreover, compared to the fully trained baseline on the Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset, our approach shows better generalization ability in unseen domains.

Controlling the format of outputs generated by large language models (LLMs) is a critical functionality in various applications. Current methods typically employ constrained decoding with rule-based automata or fine-tuning with manually crafted format instructions, both of which struggle with open-domain format requirements. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework for controlled generation in LLMs, leveraging user-provided, one-shot QA pairs. This study investigates LLMs' capabilities to follow open-domain, one-shot constraints and replicate the format of the example answers. We observe that this is a non-trivial problem for current LLMs. We also develop a dataset collection methodology for supervised fine-tuning that enhances the open-domain format control of LLMs without degrading output quality, as well as a benchmark on which we evaluate both the helpfulness and format correctness of LLM outputs. The resulting datasets, named OIFC-SFT, along with the related code, will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cofe-ai/OIFC.

Despite recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models, they often fail to faithfully render all elements of complex prompts, frequently omitting or misrepresenting specific objects and attributes. Test-time optimization has emerged as a promising approach to address this limitation by refining generation without the need for retraining. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained test-time optimization framework that enhances compositional faithfulness in T2I generation. Unlike most of prior approaches that rely solely on a global image/text similarity score, our method decomposes the input prompt into semantic concepts and evaluates alignment at both the global and concept levels. A fine-grained variant of CLIP is used to compute concept-level correspondence, producing detailed feedback on missing or inaccurate concepts. This feedback is fed into an iterative prompt refinement loop, enabling the large language model to propose improved prompts. Experiments on DrawBench and CompBench prompts demonstrate that our method significantly improves concept coverage and human-judged faithfulness over both standard test-time optimization and the base T2I model. Code is available at: https://github.com/AmirMansurian/NoConceptLeftBehind

The large-scale training of multi-modal models on data scraped from the web has shown outstanding utility in infusing these models with the required world knowledge to perform effectively on multiple downstream tasks. However, one downside of scraping data from the web can be the potential sacrifice of the benchmarks on which the abilities of these models are often evaluated. To safeguard against test data contamination and to truly test the abilities of these foundation models we propose LiveXiv: A scalable evolving live benchmark based on scientific ArXiv papers. LiveXiv accesses domain-specific manuscripts at any given timestamp and proposes to automatically generate visual question-answer pairs (VQA). This is done without any human-in-the-loop, using the multi-modal content in the manuscripts, like graphs, charts, and tables. Moreover, we introduce an efficient evaluation approach that estimates the performance of all models on the evolving benchmark using evaluations of only a subset of models. This significantly reduces the overall evaluation cost. We benchmark multiple open and proprietary Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) on the first version of our benchmark, showing its challenging nature and exposing the models true abilities, avoiding contamination. Lastly, in our commitment to high quality, we have collected and evaluated a manually verified subset. By comparing its overall results to our automatic annotations, we have found that the performance variance is indeed minimal (<2.5%). Our dataset is available online on HuggingFace, and our code will be available here.

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on the intersection of audio, vision, and text modalities, driving forward the advancements in multimodal research. However, strong bias that exists in any modality can lead to the model neglecting the others. Consequently, the model's ability to effectively reason across these diverse modalities is compromised, impeding further advancement. In this paper, we meticulously review each question type from the original dataset, selecting those with pronounced answer biases. To counter these biases, we gather complementary videos and questions, ensuring that no answers have outstanding skewed distribution. In particular, for binary questions, we strive to ensure that both answers are almost uniformly spread within each question category. As a result, we construct a new dataset, named MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, which is more challenging and we believe could better foster the progress of AVQA task. Furthermore, we present a novel baseline model that delves deeper into the audio-visual-text interrelation. On MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, this model surpasses all the existing benchmarks, improving accuracy by 2% on MUSIC-AVQA v2.0, setting a new state-of-the-art performance.

This paper presents an advancement in Question-Answering (QA) systems using a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to enhance information extraction from PDF files. Recognizing the richness and diversity of data within PDFs--including text, images, vector diagrams, graphs, and tables--poses unique challenges for existing QA systems primarily designed for textual content. We seek to develop a comprehensive RAG-based QA system that will effectively address complex multimodal questions, where several data types are combined in the query. This is mainly achieved by refining approaches to processing and integrating non-textual elements in PDFs into the RAG framework to derive precise and relevant answers, as well as fine-tuning large language models to better adapt to our system. We provide an in-depth experimental evaluation of our solution, demonstrating its capability to extract accurate information that can be applied to different types of content across PDFs. This work not only pushes the boundaries of retrieval-augmented QA systems but also lays a foundation for further research in multimodal data integration and processing.

Existing multimodal conversation agents have shown impressive abilities to locate absolute positions or retrieve attributes in simple scenarios, but they fail to perform well when complex relative positions and information alignments are involved, which poses a bottleneck in response quality. In this paper, we propose a Situated Conversation Agent Petrained with Multimodal Questions from INcremental Layout Graph (SPRING) with abilities of reasoning multi-hops spatial relations and connecting them with visual attributes in crowded situated scenarios. Specifically, we design two types of Multimodal Question Answering (MQA) tasks to pretrain the agent. All QA pairs utilized during pretraining are generated from novel Incremental Layout Graphs (ILG). QA pair difficulty labels automatically annotated by ILG are used to promote MQA-based Curriculum Learning. Experimental results verify the SPRING's effectiveness, showing that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both SIMMC 1.0 and SIMMC 2.0 datasets.

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) results in complex systems with numerous hyperparameters that directly affect performance. While such systems are increasingly common in retrieval-augmented generation, the role of systematic hyperparameter optimization remains underexplored. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of Cognee, a modular framework for end-to-end KG construction and retrieval. Using three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotPotQA, TwoWikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue) we optimize parameters related to chunking, graph construction, retrieval, and prompting. Each configuration is scored using established metrics (exact match, F1, and DeepEval's LLM-based correctness metric). Our results demonstrate that meaningful gains can be achieved through targeted tuning. While the gains are consistent, they are not uniform, with performance varying across datasets and metrics. This variability highlights both the value of tuning and the limitations of standard evaluation measures. While demonstrating the immediate potential of hyperparameter tuning, we argue that future progress will depend not only on architectural advances but also on clearer frameworks for optimization and evaluation in complex, modular systems.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world, agentic settings where outputs must not only be correct, but also conform to predefined data schemas. Despite recent progress in structured generation in textual domain, there is still no benchmark that systematically evaluates schema-grounded information extraction and reasoning over visual inputs. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of visual structural output capabilities for MLLMs with our carefully designed SO-Bench benchmark. Covering four visual domains, including UI screens, natural images, documents, and charts, SO-Bench is built from over 6.5K diverse JSON schemas and 1.8K curated image-schema pairs with human-verified quality. Benchmarking experiments on open-sourced and frontier proprietary models reveal persistent gaps in predicting accurate, schema compliant outputs, highlighting the need for better multimodal structured reasoning. Beyond benchmarking, we further conduct training experiments to largely improve the model's structured output capability. We plan to make the benchmark available to the community.

Humans apprehend the world through various sensory modalities, yet language is their predominant communication channel. Machine learning systems need to draw on the same multimodal richness to have informed discourses with humans in natural language; this is particularly true for systems specialized in visually-dense information, such as dialogue, recommendation, and search engines for clothing. To this end, we train a visual question answering (VQA) system to answer complex natural language questions about apparel in fashion photoshoot images. The key to the successful training of our VQA model is the automatic creation of a visual question-answering dataset with 168 million samples from item attributes of 207 thousand images using diverse templates. The sample generation employs a strategy that considers the difficulty of the question-answer pairs to emphasize challenging concepts. Contrary to the recent trends in using several datasets for pretraining the visual question answering models, we focused on keeping the dataset fixed while training various models from scratch to isolate the improvements from model architecture changes. We see that using the same transformer for encoding the question and decoding the answer, as in language models, achieves maximum accuracy, showing that visual language models (VLMs) make the best visual question answering systems for our dataset. The accuracy of the best model surpasses the human expert level, even when answering human-generated questions that are not confined to the template formats. Our approach for generating a large-scale multimodal domain-specific dataset provides a path for training specialized models capable of communicating in natural language. The training of such domain-expert models, e.g., our fashion VLM model, cannot rely solely on the large-scale general-purpose datasets collected from the web.

We introduce Generative Universal Verifier, a novel concept and plugin designed for next-generation multimodal reasoning in vision-language models and unified multimodal models, providing the fundamental capability of reflection and refinement on visual outcomes during the reasoning and generation process. This work makes three main contributions: (1) We build ViVerBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 16 categories of critical tasks for evaluating visual outcomes in multimodal reasoning. Results show that existing VLMs consistently underperform across these tasks, underscoring a substantial gap from human-level capability in reliable visual verification. (2) We design two automated pipelines to construct large-scale visual verification data and train OmniVerifier-7B, the first omni-capable generative verifier trained for universal visual verification and achieves notable gains on ViVerBench(+8.3). Through training, we identify three atomic capabilities in visual verification and demonstrate how they generalize and interact synergistically. (3) We propose OmniVerifier-TTS, a sequential test-time scaling paradigm that leverages the universal verifier to bridge image generation and editing within unified models, enhancing the upper bound of generative ability through iterative fine-grained optimization. Beyond generation, we extend universal verifier to broader world-modeling interleaved reasoning scenarios. Empirically, OmniVerifier-TTS achieves improvements on T2I-ReasonBench(+3.7), and GenEval++(+4.3), outperforming existing parallel test-time scaling methods, such as Best-of-N. By endowing multimodal reasoning with reliable visual verification, OmniVerifier advances both reliable reflection during generation and scalable test-time refinement, marking a step toward more trustworthy and controllable next-generation reasoning systems.

Comparative settings (e.g. pairwise choice, listwise ranking) have been adopted by a wide range of subjective studies for image quality assessment (IQA), as it inherently standardizes the evaluation criteria across different observers and offer more clear-cut responses. In this work, we extend the edge of emerging large multi-modality models (LMMs) to further advance visual quality comparison into open-ended settings, that 1) can respond to open-range questions on quality comparison; 2) can provide detailed reasonings beyond direct answers. To this end, we propose the Co-Instruct. To train this first-of-its-kind open-source open-ended visual quality comparer, we collect the Co-Instruct-562K dataset, from two sources: (a) LMM-merged single image quality description, (b) GPT-4V "teacher" responses on unlabeled data. Furthermore, to better evaluate this setting, we propose the MICBench, the first benchmark on multi-image comparison for LMMs. We demonstrate that Co-Instruct not only achieves 30% higher superior accuracy than state-of-the-art open-source LMMs, but also outperforms GPT-4V (its teacher), on both existing related benchmarks and the proposed MICBench. Our model is published at https://huggingface.co/q-future/co-instruct.

Multimodal language models that process both text and speech have a potential for applications in spoken dialogue systems. However, current models face two major challenges in response generation latency: (1) generating a spoken response requires the prior generation of a written response, and (2) speech sequences are significantly longer than text sequences. This study addresses these issues by extending the input and output sequences of the language model to support the parallel generation of text and speech. Our experiments on spoken question answering tasks demonstrate that our approach improves latency while maintaining the quality of response content. Additionally, we show that latency can be further reduced by generating speech in multiple sequences. Demo samples are available at https://rinnakk.github.io/research/publications/PSLM.

We propose a new benchmark evaluating the performance of multimodal large language models on rebus puzzles. The dataset covers 333 original examples of image-based wordplay, cluing 13 categories such as movies, composers, major cities, and food. To achieve good performance on the benchmark of identifying the clued word or phrase, models must combine image recognition and string manipulation with hypothesis testing, multi-step reasoning, and an understanding of human cognition, making for a complex, multimodal evaluation of capabilities. We find that proprietary models such as GPT-4V and Gemini Pro significantly outperform all other tested models. However, even the best model has a final accuracy of just 24%, highlighting the need for substantial improvements in reasoning. Further, models rarely understand all parts of a puzzle, and are almost always incapable of retroactively explaining the correct answer. Our benchmark can therefore be used to identify major shortcomings in the knowledge and reasoning of multimodal large language models.

The emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents promising opportunities for automation and enhancement in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). However, comprehensively evaluating these models in circuit design remains challenging due to the narrow scope of existing benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMCircuitEval, the first multimodal benchmark specifically designed to assess MLLM performance comprehensively across diverse EDA tasks. MMCircuitEval comprises 3614 meticulously curated question-answer (QA) pairs spanning digital and analog circuits across critical EDA stages - ranging from general knowledge and specifications to front-end and back-end design. Derived from textbooks, technical question banks, datasheets, and real-world documentation, each QA pair undergoes rigorous expert review for accuracy and relevance. Our benchmark uniquely categorizes questions by design stage, circuit type, tested abilities (knowledge, comprehension, reasoning, computation), and difficulty level, enabling detailed analysis of model capabilities and limitations. Extensive evaluations reveal significant performance gaps among existing LLMs, particularly in back-end design and complex computations, highlighting the critical need for targeted training datasets and modeling approaches. MMCircuitEval provides a foundational resource for advancing MLLMs in EDA, facilitating their integration into real-world circuit design workflows. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/MMCircuitEval.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter-efficient adaptation method for No- Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) using visual prompts optimized in pixel-space. Unlike full fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our approach trains only 600K parameters at most (< 0.01% of the base model), while keeping the underlying model fully frozen. During inference, these visual prompts are combined with images via addition and processed by mPLUG-Owl2 with the textual query "Rate the technical quality of the image." Evaluations across distortion types (synthetic, realistic, AI-generated) on KADID- 10k, KonIQ-10k, and AGIQA-3k demonstrate competitive performance against full finetuned methods and specialized NR-IQA models, achieving 0.93 SRCC on KADID-10k. To our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage pixel-space visual prompts for NR-IQA, enabling efficient MLLM adaptation for low-level vision tasks. The source code is publicly available at https: // github. com/ yahya-ben/ mplug2-vp-for-nriqa .

Text-to-image generative models excel in creating images from text but struggle with ensuring alignment and consistency between outputs and prompts. This paper introduces TextMatch, a novel framework that leverages multimodal optimization to address image-text discrepancies in text-to-image (T2I) generation and editing. TextMatch employs a scoring strategy powered by large language models (LLMs) and visual question-answering (VQA) models to evaluate semantic consistency between prompts and generated images. By integrating multimodal in-context learning and chain of thought reasoning, our method dynamically refines prompts through iterative optimization. This process ensures that the generated images better capture user intent of, resulting in higher fidelity and relevance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextMatch significantly improves text-image consistency across multiple benchmarks, establishing a reliable framework for advancing the capabilities of text-to-image generative models. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TextMatch-F55C/.

The rapid development of vision language models (VLMs) demands rigorous and reliable evaluation. However, current visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks often depend on open-ended questions, making accurate evaluation difficult due to the variability in natural language responses. To address this, we introduce AutoConverter, an agentic framework that automatically converts these open-ended questions into multiple-choice format, enabling objective evaluation while reducing the costly question creation process. Our experiments demonstrate that AutoConverter can generate correct and challenging multiple-choice questions, with VLMs demonstrating consistently similar or lower accuracy on these questions compared to human-created ones. Using AutoConverter, we construct VMCBench, a benchmark created by transforming 20 existing VQA datasets into a unified multiple-choice format, totaling 9,018 questions. We comprehensively evaluate 33 state-of-the-art VLMs on VMCBench, setting a new standard for scalable, consistent, and reproducible VLM evaluation.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multimodal understanding and generation, pushing forward advancements in text-to-image generation. However, achieving accurate text-image alignment for LMMs, particularly in compositional scenarios, remains challenging. Existing approaches, such as layout planning for multi-step generation and learning from human feedback or AI feedback, depend heavily on prompt engineering, costly human annotations, and continual upgrading, limiting flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic iterative self-improvement framework (SILMM) that can enable LMMs to provide helpful and scalable self-feedback and optimize text-image alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). DPO can readily applied to LMMs that use discrete visual tokens as intermediate image representations; while it is less suitable for LMMs with continuous visual features, as obtaining generation probabilities is challenging. To adapt SILMM to LMMs with continuous features, we propose a diversity mechanism to obtain diverse representations and a kernel-based continuous DPO for alignment. Extensive experiments on three compositional text-to-image generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superiority of SILMM, showing improvements exceeding 30% on T2I-CompBench++ and around 20% on DPG-Bench.

Question answering biases in video QA datasets can mislead multimodal model to overfit to QA artifacts and jeopardize the model's ability to generalize. Understanding how strong these QA biases are and where they come from helps the community measure progress more accurately and provide researchers insights to debug their models. In this paper, we analyze QA biases in popular video question answering datasets and discover pretrained language models can answer 37-48% questions correctly without using any multimodal context information, far exceeding the 20% random guess baseline for 5-choose-1 multiple-choice questions. Our ablation study shows biases can come from annotators and type of questions. Specifically, annotators that have been seen during training are better predicted by the model and reasoning, abstract questions incur more biases than factual, direct questions. We also show empirically that using annotator-non-overlapping train-test splits can reduce QA biases for video QA datasets.