mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MME-Reasoning: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Logical Reasoning in MLLMs

arXiv 2505.21327 ↗First posted 27 May 2025cs.AI cs.CVcited by 33

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

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Abstract (arXiv)

Logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and an essential capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Despite the significant advancement in multimodal reasoning, existing benchmarks fail to comprehensively evaluate their reasoning abilities due to the lack of explicit categorization for logical reasoning types and an unclear understanding of reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce MME-Reasoning, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning ability of MLLMs, which covers all three types of reasoning (i.e., inductive, deductive, and abductive) in its questions. We carefully curate the data to ensure that each question effectively evaluates reasoning ability rather than perceptual skills or knowledge breadth, and extend the evaluation protocols to cover the evaluation of diverse questions. Our evaluation reveals substantial limitations of state-of-the-art MLLMs when subjected to holistic assessments of logical reasoning capabilities. Even the most advanced MLLMs show limited performance in comprehensive logical reasoning, with notable performance imbalances across reasoning types. In addition, we conducted an in-depth analysis of approaches such as ``thinking mode'' and Rule-based RL, which are commonly believed to enhance reasoning abilities. These findings highlight the critical limitations and performance imbalances of current MLLMs in diverse logical reasoning scenarios, providing comprehensive and systematic insights into the understanding and evaluation of reasoning capabilities.

Key facts. Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 53 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

Builds on

53 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 23

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025VisualPuzzles: Decoupling Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation from Domain Knowledge14 Apr
  2. 2025VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning10 Apr
  3. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model10 Apr
  4. 2025Kimi-VL Technical Report10 Apr
  5. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar
  6. 2025OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles21 Mar
  7. 2025SciVerse: Unveiling the Knowledge Comprehension and Visual Reasoning of LMMs on Multi-modal Scientific Problems13 Mar
  8. 2025R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization13 Mar
  9. 2025LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RL10 Mar
  10. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar
  11. 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement9 Mar
  12. 2025R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model7 Mar
11 more
  1. 2025Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning3 Mar
  2. 2025MME-CoT: Benchmarking Chain-of-Thought in Large Multimodal Models for Reasoning Quality, Robustness, and Efficiency13 Feb
  3. 2025LlamaV-o1: Rethinking Step-by-step Visual Reasoning in LLMs10 Jan
  4. 2025Can MLLMs Reason in Multimodality? EMMA: An Enhanced MultiModal ReAsoning Benchmark9 Jan
  5. 2025Virgo: A Preliminary Exploration on Reproducing o1-like MLLM3 Jan
  6. 2024Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models13 Jun
  7. 2024PuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Abstract Visual Patterns20 Mar
  8. 2024ChartX & ChartVLM: A Versatile Benchmark and Foundation Model for Complicated Chart Reasoning19 Feb
  9. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct
  10. 2023Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models2 Feb
  11. 2023See, Think, Confirm: Interactive Prompting Between Vision and Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Reasoning12 Jan

Other references · 30

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  3. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  4. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,879
  5. 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,719
  6. 2024Qwen2 Technical Reportcited by 2,120
  7. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
  8. 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1,652
  9. 2016CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoningcited by 1,457
  10. 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,413
  11. 2024OpenAI o1 System Cardcited by 1,244
  12. 2025Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMscited by 1,210
18 more
  1. 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,136
  2. 2023Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Modelscited by 872
  3. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spacescited by 611
  4. 2024MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmarkcited by 512
  5. 2021ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Datacited by 454
  6. 2025Seed1.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 373
  7. 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 329
  8. 2025R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 301
  9. 2024Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 175
  10. 2025Logical Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 55
  11. 2024AV-Odyssey Bench: Can Your Multimodal LLMs Really Understand Audio-Visual Information?cited by 47
  12. 2025MM-IQ: Benchmarking Human-Like Abstraction and Reasoning in Multimodal Modelscited by 29
  13. 2023Thinking Like an Expert:Multimodal Hypergraph-of-Thought (HoT) Reasoning to boost Foundation Modalscited by 24
  14. 2024GeoX: Geometric Problem Solving Through Unified Formalized Vision-Language Pre-trainingcited by 23
  15. 2025OmniCaptioner: One Captioner to Rule Them Allcited by 20
  16. 2024RapGuard: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models via Rationale-aware Defensive Promptingcited by 19
  17. 2025PuzzleBench: A Fully Dynamic Evaluation Framework for Large Multimodal Models on Puzzle Solvingcited by 17
  18. 2024Chimera: Improving Generalist Model with Domain-Specific Expertscited by 11

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 14; 2026: 19.

33 papers.

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  1. 2025OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Videocited by 56
  2. 2025AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videoscited by 21
  3. 2025Skywork-R1V3 Technical Reportcited by 16
  4. 2025MMReason: An Open-Ended Multi-Modal Multi-Step Reasoning Benchmark for MLLMs Toward AGIcited by 14
  5. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Large Model: A Surveycited by 9
  6. 2026What Does Vision Tool-Use Reinforcement Learning Really Learn? Disentangling Tool-Induced and Intrinsic Effects for Crop-and-Zoomcited by 9
  7. 2026MMR-Life: Piecing Together Real-life Scenes for Multimodal Multi-image Reasoningcited by 9
  8. 2025MSR-Align: Policy-Grounded Multimodal Alignment for Safety-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Modelscited by 7
  9. 2025Video-R4: Reinforcing Text-Rich Video Reasoning with Visual Ruminationcited by 6
  10. 2025Do Language Models Follow Occam's Razor? An Evaluation of Parsimony in Inductive and Abductive Reasoningcited by 4
  11. 2026Skill Neologisms: Towards Skill-based Continual Learningcited by 4
  12. 2026Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 4
21 more
  1. 2026TRON: Targeted Rule-Verifiable Online Environments for Visual Reasoning RLcited by 3
  2. 2025DaMo: Data Mixing Optimizer in Fine-tuning Multimodal LLMs for Mobile Phone Agentscited by 2
  3. 2025VCU-Bridge: Hierarchical Visual Connotation Understanding via Semantic Bridgingcited by 2
  4. 2026Reasoning or Pattern Matching? Probing Large Vision-Language Models with Visual Puzzlescited by 2
  5. 2026Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoningcited by 2
  6. 2026GraphVerse: A Comprehensive Visual Graph Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 2
  7. 2025MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlookcited by 1
  8. 2025OmniQuality-R: Advancing Reward Models Through All-Encompassing Quality Assessmentcited by 1
  9. 2025From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1
  10. 2026M3MAD-Bench: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Multi-Agent Debate Across Domains and Modalitiescited by 1
  11. 2026Trace: A Taxonomy-Guided Environment for Multidomain Visual Reasoningcited by 1
  12. 2025BAR Conjecture: the Feasibility of Inference Budget-Constrained LLM Services with Authenticity and Reasoningcited by 0
  13. 2026Explicit Logic Channel for Validation and Enhancement of MLLMs on Zero-Shot Taskscited by 0
  14. 2026Think 360deg: Evaluating the Width-centric Reasoning Capability of MLLMs Beyond Depthcited by 0
  15. 2026Interpretable Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension with Query-driven Scene Graphscited by 0
  16. 2026PluraMath: Extending Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation Beyond High-Resource Languagescited by 0
  17. 2026Blind-Spots-Bench: Evaluating Blind Spots in Multimodal Modelscited by 0
  18. 2026OCR-MetaReasoning Benchmark: Evaluating the Meta-Reasoning Ability of MLLMs in Text-Rich Image Understandingcited by 0
  19. 2026TTRSD: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distillation for Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  20. 2026DREAM: Dynamic Resolution Assignment For Multimodal Multi-agent Debatecited by 0
  21. 2026ActICL: Post-Training for Agentic Multimodal In-Context Learningcited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2025MMLU-Reason: Benchmarking Multi-Task Multi-modal Language Understanding and Reasoning
  2. 2024Exploring the Reasoning Abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Survey on Emerging Trends in Multimodal Reasoning
  3. 2023InfiMM-Eval: Complex Open-Ended Reasoning Evaluation For Multi-Modal Large Language Models
  4. 2025MDK12-Bench: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
  5. 2025Human-Level Reasoning: A Comparative Study of Large Language Models on Logical and Abstract Reasoning
  6. 2025MME-SCI: A Comprehensive and Challenging Science Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models
  7. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey
  8. 2024LogicVista: Multimodal LLM Logical Reasoning Benchmark in Visual Contexts