# Automatic benchmarking of large multimodal models via iterative experiment programming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12321 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12321/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 44 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09842/) (2023)
- [OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16527/) (2023)
- [On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16934/) (2023)
- [What's "up" with vision-language models? Investigating their struggle with spatial reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19785/) (2023)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11713/) (2023)
- [TALM: Tool Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12255/) (2022)
- [Are Multimodal Transformers Robust to Missing Modality?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05454/) (2022)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [Data Determines Distributional Robustness in Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01397/) (2022)
- [No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04125/) (2024)
- [Visual Programming for Zero-shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15383/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [From Reasoning to Learning: A Survey on Hypothesis Discovery and Rule Learning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21935/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Assessing the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) often requires the creation of ad-hoc evaluations. Currently, building new benchmarks requires tremendous amounts of manual work for each specific analysis. This makes the evaluation process tedious and costly. In this paper, we present APEx, Automatic Programming of Experiments, the first framework for automatic benchmarking of LMMs. Given a research question expressed in natural language, APEx leverages a large language model (LLM) and a library of pre-specified tools to generate a set of experiments for the model at hand, and progressively compile a scientific report. The report drives the testing procedure: based on the current status of the investigation, APEx chooses which experiments to perform and whether the results are sufficient to draw conclusions. Finally, the LLM refines the report, presenting the results to the user in natural language. Thanks to its modularity, our framework is flexible and extensible as new tools become available. Empirically, APEx reproduces the findings of existing studies while allowing for arbitrary analyses and hypothesis testing.