MME-Unify: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Existing MLLM benchmarks face significant challenges in evaluating Unified MLLMs (U-MLLMs) due to: 1) lack of standardized benchmarks for traditional tasks, leading to inconsistent comparisons; 2) absence of benchmarks for mixed-modality generation, which fails to assess multimodal reasoning capabilities. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to systematically assess U-MLLMs. Our benchmark includes: Standardized Traditional Task Evaluation. We sample from 12 datasets, covering 10 tasks with 30 subtasks, ensuring consistent and fair comparisons across studies." 2. Unified Task Assessment. We introduce five novel tasks testing multimodal reasoning, including image editing, commonsense QA with image generation, and geometric reasoning. 3. Comprehensive Model Benchmarking. We evaluate 12 leading U-MLLMs, such as Janus-Pro, EMU3, VILA-U, and Gemini2-flash, alongside specialized understanding (e.g., Claude-3.5-Sonnet) and generation models (e.g., DALL-E-3). Our findings reveal substantial performance gaps in existing U-MLLMs, highlighting the need for more robust models capable of handling mixed-modality tasks effectively. The code and evaluation data can be found in https://mme-unify.github.io/.
Key facts. Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 40 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2025.
Builds on
40 of 47 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought13 Jan
- 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
Other references · 38
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- 2024MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokenscited by 24
- 2024PUMA: Empowering Unified MLLM with Multi-granular Visual Generationcited by 20
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- 2024TIP-I2V: A Million-Scale Real Text and Image Prompt Dataset for Image-to-Video Generationcited by 9
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 16.
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- 2026Pseudo-Unification: Entropy Probing Reveals Divergent Information Patterns in Unified Multimodal Models13 Apr 2026
- 2026Learning Modal-Mixed Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Latent Embeddings31 Jan 2026
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- 2026TORUS: A Test of Rendering-Understanding Self-Coherence for Unified Audio Models30 Jul 2026
- 2026IMUG-Bench: Benchmarking Unified Multimodal Models on Interleaved Understanding and Generation8 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Accuracy: Benchmarking Cross-Task Consistency in Unified Multimodal Models27 Apr 2026
- 2026Does Unification Come at a Cost? Uni-SafeBench: A Safety Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Large Models1 Apr 2026
- 2026GENIUS: Generative Fluid Intelligence Evaluation Suite11 Feb 2026
- 2026Quantifying the Gap between Understanding and Generation within Unified Multimodal Models2 Feb 2026
- 2025Envision: Benchmarking Unified Understanding & Generation for Causal World Process Insights1 Dec 2025
- 2025Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward25 Nov 2025
- 2025GGBench: A Geometric Generative Reasoning Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Models14 Nov 2025
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