mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MM-IQ: Benchmarking Human-Like Abstraction and Reasoning in Multimodal Models

arXiv 2502.00698 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2025cs.AI cs.CVcited by 29

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 22 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

IQ testing has served as a foundational methodology for evaluating human cognitive capabilities, deliberately decoupling assessment from linguistic background, language proficiency, or domain-specific knowledge to isolate core competencies in abstraction and reasoning. Yet, artificial intelligence research currently lacks systematic benchmarks to quantify these critical cognitive capabilities in multimodal systems. To address this crucial gap, we propose MM-IQ, a comprehensive evaluation framework, which comprises a large-scale training set with 4,776 visual reasoning problems and 2,710 meticulously curated test items spanning 8 distinct reasoning paradigms. Through systematic evaluation of existing open-source and proprietary multimodal models, our benchmark reveals striking limitations: even state-of-the-art architectures achieve only marginally superior performance to random chance (33.17% vs. 25% baseline accuracy). This substantial performance chasm highlights the inadequacy of current multimodal models in approximating fundamental human reasoning capacities, underscoring the need for paradigm-shifting advancements to bridge this cognitive divide. Moreover, inspired by the recent surge of large reasoning models, we also release a multimodal reasoning model as the baseline that is trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward functions, reaching competitive performance to the state-of-the-art with a notably smaller model size.

Key facts. Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2025.

Builds on

22 of 39 references.

References · 22

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  5. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  6. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?cited by 2,141
  7. 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,080
  8. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contextscited by 1,614
  9. 2025Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMscited by 1,210
  10. 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 909
  11. 2024DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermismcited by 642
  12. 2019RAVEN: A Dataset for Relational and Analogical Visual rEasoNingcited by 226
10 more
  1. 2020Retrieve, Program, Repeat: Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Alternate Meta-learningcited by 216
  2. 2020Bongard-LOGO: A New Benchmark for Human-Level Concept Learning and Reasoningcited by 63
  3. 2024CMMMU: A Chinese Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmarkcited by 56
  4. 2019Learning to Make Analogies by Contrasting Abstract Relational Structurecited by 53
  5. 2022Deep Learning Methods for Abstract Visual Reasoning: A Survey on Raven's Progressive Matricescited by 37
  6. 2020Learning Representations that Support Extrapolationcited by 36
  7. 2022A Review of Emerging Research Directions in Abstract Visual Reasoningcited by 33
  8. 2024MARVEL: Multidimensional Abstraction and Reasoning through Visual Evaluation and Learningcited by 30
  9. 2023Link-Context Learning for Multimodal LLMscited by 24
  10. 2020Machine Number Sense: A Dataset of Visual Arithmetic Problems for Abstract and Relational Reasoningcited by 18

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 17; 2026: 12.

29 papers.

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  1. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 665
  2. 2025From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 320
  3. 2025Reinforced MLLM: A Survey on RL-Based Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 44
  4. 2025MMR1: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Variance-Aware Sampling and Open Resourcescited by 39
  5. 2025MME-Reasoning: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Logical Reasoning in MLLMscited by 33
  6. 2025VL-Cogito: Progressive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Multimodal Reasoningcited by 26
  7. 2025Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoningcited by 22
  8. 2025MIRAGE: Assessing Hallucination in Multimodal Reasoning Chains of MLLMcited by 17
  9. 2025Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Powers Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 14
  10. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Large Model: A Surveycited by 9
  11. 2025Boosting Vulnerability Detection of LLMs via Curriculum Preference Optimization with Synthetic Reasoning Datacited by 8
  12. 2025MMMG: a Comprehensive and Reliable Benchmark for Multitask Multimodal Generationcited by 6
17 more
  1. 2026Learning Modal-Mixed Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Latent Embeddingscited by 6
  2. 2026Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open Agentic Multimodal Generation via Understanding under a Minimal Budgetcited by 6
  3. 2025IQBench: How "Smart'' Are Vision-Language Models? A Study with Human IQ Testscited by 5
  4. 2025LogicOCR: Do Your Large Multimodal Models Excel at Logical Reasoning on Text-Rich Images?cited by 4
  5. 2026VRIQ: Benchmarking and Analyzing Visual-Reasoning IQ of VLMscited by 4
  6. 2026Visual Reasoning Benchmark: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Classroom-Authentic Visual Problems from Primary Educationcited by 2
  7. 2026Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoningcited by 2
  8. 2025Human-Aligned Bench: Fine-Grained Assessment of Reasoning Ability in MLLMs vs. Humanscited by 1
  9. 2025Reasoning in machine vision by learning fast and slow thinkingcited by 1
  10. 2026LASER: A Corrective Lens for LVLMs via Visual Attention Preservation and Sink Suppressioncited by 1
  11. 2025On the Measure of a Model: From Intelligence to Generalitycited by 0
  12. 2026The Abstraction Gap in Vision-Language Causal Reasoningcited by 0
  13. 2026StemBind: When MLLMs Get Lost Between Rules and Instances in Abstract Visual Reasoningcited by 0
  14. 2026The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modescited by 0
  15. 2026ComplexityWorld: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Verifiable Visual Decision Makingcited by 0
  16. 2026MCD: Causal Distillation of Multimodal In-Context Learning in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  17. 2026Can machines reason non-verbally?cited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025The Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Examination: A Survey on the Evolution of Multimodal Evaluation from Recognition to Reasoning
  2. 2026Mind's Eye: A Benchmark of Visual Abstraction, Transformation and Composition for Multimodal LLMs
  3. 2025MME-CC: A Challenging Multi-Modal Evaluation Benchmark of Cognitive Capacity
  4. 2025MDK12-Bench: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
  5. 2026MMR-Life: Piecing Together Real-life Scenes for Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning
  6. 2025Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models
  7. 2025VERIFY: A Benchmark of Visual Explanation and Reasoning for Investigating Multimodal Reasoning Fidelity
  8. 2024MM-InstructEval: Zero-Shot Evaluation of (Multimodal) Large Language Models on Multimodal Reasoning Tasks