# M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08322/) (2023)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers with Informal Proofs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12283/) (2022)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01431/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10020/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06474/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19736/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18105/) (2024)
- [How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18815/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16790/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Reasoning Abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Survey on Emerging Trends in Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06805/) (2024)
- [CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08833/) (2023)
- [SeaLLMs -- Large Language Models for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00738/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17092/) (2023)
- [SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04766/) (2023)
- [MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15296/) (2024)
- [Pangea: A Fully Open Multilingual Multimodal LLM for 39 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16153/) (2024)
- [Meta CLIP 2: A Worldwide Scaling Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22062/) (2025)
- [CTIBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07599/) (2024)
- [All Languages Matter: Evaluating LMMs on Culturally Diverse 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16508/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15769/) (2024)
- [EXAMS-V: A Multi-Discipline Multilingual Multimodal Exam Benchmark for Evaluating Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10378/) (2024)
- [CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08588/) (2023)
- [Benchmarks as Microscopes: A Call for Model Metrology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16711/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Multilingual LLM Pretraining with Model-Based Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10361/) (2025)
- [Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02871/) (2025)
- [CMMU: A Benchmark for Chinese Multi-modal Multi-type Question Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14011/) (2024)
- [A Fast Optimization View: Reformulating Single Layer Attention in LLM Based on Tensor and SVM Trick, and Solving It in Matrix Multiplication Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07418/) (2023)
- [Typhoon: Thai Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13951/) (2023)
- [Parrot: Multilingual Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02539/) (2024)
- [SPRIG: Improving Large Language Model Performance by System Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14826/) (2024)
- [Toward Generalizable Evaluation in the LLM Era: A Survey Beyond Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18838/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the existence of various benchmarks for evaluating natural language processing models, we argue that human exams are a more suitable means of evaluating general intelligence for large language models (LLMs), as they inherently demand a much wider range of abilities such as language understanding, domain knowledge, and problem-solving skills. To this end, we introduce M3Exam, a novel benchmark sourced from real and official human exam questions for evaluating LLMs in a multilingual, multimodal, and multilevel context. M3Exam exhibits three unique characteristics: (1) multilingualism, encompassing questions from multiple countries that require strong multilingual proficiency and cultural knowledge; (2) multimodality, accounting for the multimodal nature of many exam questions to test the model's multimodal understanding capability; and (3) multilevel structure, featuring exams from three critical educational periods to comprehensively assess a model's proficiency at different levels. In total, M3Exam contains 12,317 questions in 9 diverse languages with three educational levels, where about 23% of the questions require processing images for successful solving. We assess the performance of top-performing LLMs on M3Exam and find that current models, including GPT-4, still struggle with multilingual text, particularly in low-resource and non-Latin script languages. Multimodal LLMs also perform poorly with complex multimodal questions. We believe that M3Exam can be a valuable resource for comprehensively evaluating LLMs by examining their multilingual and multimodal abilities and tracking their development. Data and evaluation code is available at urlhttps://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/M3Exam.