mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MME-Unify: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models

arXiv 2504.03641 ↗First posted 4 Apr 2025cs.CVcited by 24

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

  1. 2025Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought13 Jan
  2. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul

Other references · 38

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  2. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  3. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,611
  4. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,261
  5. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,822
  6. 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1,652
  7. 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,413
  8. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 972
  9. 2024Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Modelscited by 927
  10. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 812
  11. 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 781
  12. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 752
26 more
  1. 2021Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGANcited by 658
  2. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 624
  3. 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 483
  4. 2024OmniGen: Unified Image Generationcited by 394
  5. 2023Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Taskscited by 324
  6. 2024VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 295
  7. 2024MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?cited by 292
  8. 2023Generating Images with Multimodal Language Modelscited by 260
  9. 2025VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interactioncited by 197
  10. 2023Making LLaMA SEE and Draw with SEED Tokenizercited by 185
  11. 2024MMBench-Video: A Long-Form Multi-Shot Benchmark for Holistic Video Understandingcited by 182
  12. 2024JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 163
  13. 2024ANOLE: An Open, Autoregressive, Native Large Multimodal Models for Interleaved Image-Text Generationcited by 114
  14. 2023SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 97
  15. 2025MM-RLHF: The Next Step Forward in Multimodal LLM Alignmentcited by 83
  16. 2023ImagenHub: Standardizing the evaluation of conditional image generation modelscited by 77
  17. 2024Beyond LLaVA-HD: Diving into High-Resolution Large Multimodal Modelscited by 76
  18. 2024MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMscited by 72
  19. 2024Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generationcited by 54
  20. 2024Vitron: A Unified Pixel-level Vision LLM for Understanding, Generating, Segmenting, Editingcited by 49
  21. 2024ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detectioncited by 37
  22. 2024MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokenscited by 24
  23. 2024PUMA: Empowering Unified MLLM with Multi-granular Visual Generationcited by 20
  24. 2025HermesFlow: Seamlessly Closing the Gap in Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 18
  25. 2025Aligning Multimodal LLM with Human Preference: A Surveycited by 13
  26. 2024TIP-I2V: A Million-Scale Real Text and Image Prompt Dataset for Image-to-Video Generationcited by 9

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 16.

24 papers.

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  1. 2025R1-Reward: Training Multimodal Reward Model Through Stable Reinforcement Learningcited by 65
  2. 2025RealUnify: Do Unified Models Truly Benefit from Unification? A Comprehensive Benchmarkcited by 33
  3. 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmarkcited by 29
  4. 2025Cross-Task Generalization Between Understanding and Generation in Unified Vision-Language Models: A Controlled Studycited by 15
  5. 2025ViC-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Capability in MLLMs with Free-Style Intermediate State Representationscited by 12
  6. 2026Quantifying the Gap between Understanding and Generation within Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 12
  7. 2026GENIUS: Generative Fluid Intelligence Evaluation Suitecited by 12
  8. 2025Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forwardcited by 10
  9. 2025GGBench: A Geometric Generative Reasoning Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 6
  10. 2026Learning Modal-Mixed Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Latent Embeddingscited by 6
  11. 2026Beyond Accuracy: Benchmarking Cross-Task Consistency in Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 5
  12. 2025Envision: Benchmarking Unified Understanding & Generation for Causal World Process Insightscited by 2
12 more
  1. 2026LatentRouter: Can We Choose the Right Multimodal Model Before Seeing Its Answer?cited by 2
  2. 2026When Does Visual Generation Help Visual Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models?cited by 2
  3. 2026Can Unified Generation and Understanding Models Maintain Semantic Equivalence Across Different Output Modalities?cited by 1
  4. 2026Pseudo-Unification: Entropy Probing Reveals Divergent Information Patterns in Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 1
  5. 2026Benchmarking and Evolving Reason-Reflect-Rectify for Reflective Visual Generationcited by 1
  6. 2026Thinking in Pictures: A Systematic Benchmark for Reasoning-driven Image Generationcited by 1
  7. 2026Agentic Visual Generation: From Generative Models to Agentic Controlcited by 1
  8. 2026Does Unification Come at a Cost? Uni-SafeBench: A Safety Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Large Modelscited by 0
  9. 2026IMUG-Bench: Benchmarking Unified Multimodal Models on Interleaved Understanding and Generationcited by 0
  10. 2026ROSE: Benchmarking the Perception-to-Action Gap in Multimodal Modelscited by 0
  11. 2026TORUS: A Test of Rendering-Understanding Self-Coherence for Unified Audio Modelscited by 0
  12. 2026Modality Maturity Index: A benchmark for assessing multimodal capabilities of omni modelscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Evaluating MLLMs with Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning Benchmark
  2. 2025ROVER: Benchmarking Reciprocal Cross-Modal Reasoning for Omnimodal Generation
  3. 2025LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
  4. 2025MMMG: a Comprehensive and Reliable Benchmark for Multitask Multimodal Generation
  5. 2026InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing
  6. 2024MM-InstructEval: Zero-Shot Evaluation of (Multimodal) Large Language Models on Multimodal Reasoning Tasks
  7. 2026UEval: A Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Generation
  8. 2025MDK12-Bench: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models