# Evaluating and Advancing Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception Ability Lens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14725/

## 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 28 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 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, 28 of 28)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12772/) (2024)
- [MANTIS: Interleaved Multi-Image Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01483/) (2024)
- [MuirBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robust Multi-image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09411/) (2024)
- [Ovis: Structural Embedding Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20797/) (2024)
- [NVLM: Open Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11402/) (2024)
- [Non-Determinism of "Deterministic" LLM Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04667/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multi-Image Understanding in Vision and Language Models: Perception, Knowledge, Reasoning, and Multi-Hop Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12742/) (2024)
- [UniBench: Visual Reasoning Requires Rethinking Vision-Language Beyond Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04810/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Tapestry of Consistency in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14156/) (2024)
- [Eureka: Evaluating and Understanding Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10566/) (2024)
- [POINTS: Improving Your Vision-language Model with Affordable Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04828/) (2024)
- [Unearthing Skill-Level Insights for Understanding Trade-Offs of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13826/) (2024)
- [Bounding Box Stability against Feature Dropout Reflects Detector Generalization across Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13803/) (2024)

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

- [CountQA: How Well Do MLLMs Count in the Wild?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06585/) (2025)
- [WebDevJudge: Evaluating (M)LLMs as Critiques for Web Development Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18560/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance rapidly, rigorous evaluation has become essential, providing further guidance for their development. In this work, we focus on a unified and robust evaluation of vision perception abilities, the foundational skill of MLLMs. We find that existing perception benchmarks, each focusing on different question types, domains, and evaluation metrics, introduce significant evaluation variance, complicating comprehensive assessments of perception abilities when relying on any single benchmark. To address this, we introduce AbilityLens, a unified benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs in six key perception abilities (ranging from counting, OCR, to understanding structural data), focusing on both accuracy and stability, with each ability encompassing diverse types of questions, domains, and metrics. With the assistance of AbilityLens, we: (1) identify the strengths and weaknesses of current main-stream MLLMs, highlighting stability patterns and revealing a notable performance gap between state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models; (2) uncover interesting ability conflict and early convergence phenomena during MLLM training; (3) reveal the primary reason of ability conflict is data mixing ratio and LLM model size; and (4) discuss the effectiveness of some straightforward strategies eg, fine-tuning and model merging, to solve the ability conflict. The benchmark and online leaderboard is released in https://github.com/Chenfeng1271/AbilityLens.