Can Argus Judge Them All? Comparing VLMs Across Domains
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in industry VLM applications such as retrieval systems, content generation platforms, and decision-support workflows, where model selection is commonly guided by benchmark rankings. These rankings are largely determined by retrieval, captioning, and reasoning downstream tasks; however, models with similar task performance often show substantially different behavior across datasets. This creates a Capability-Reliability Gap between benchmark performance and observed model stability. We present ARGUS-EVAL, a capability-reliability-oriented evaluation framework for VLMs that characterizes model behavior through Benchmark Capability P(M), Cross-Dataset Consistency CDC(M), Robustness Retention RR(M), and Efficiency E(M). We evaluate CLIP, BLIP, LXMERT, Gemma-3-4B, and Qwen-2.5VL-3B-Instruct across retrieval, captioning, and reasoning downstream tasks. The results reveal notable differences between capability-oriented and reliability-oriented rankings. Qwen-2.5VL-3BInstruct achieves the strongest overall capability (R@1 = 82.7%, BLEU-4 = 47.2%, CIDEr = 141.6, CDC = 0.91), whereas CLIP records the lowest latency (31 ms) and memory footprint (0.9 GB).
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.
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Other references · 25
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
- 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,307
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- 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,080
- 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1,652
- 2017Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inferencecited by 1,593
- 2019LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformerscited by 1,553
13 more
- 2016CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoningcited by 1,457
- 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,413
- 2021BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Modelscited by 1,252
- 2023MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilitiescited by 1,239
- 2023SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehensioncited by 940
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- 2023The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)cited by 681
- 2020RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmarkcited by 661
- 2018From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoningcited by 556
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- 2024EVA-CLIP-18B: Scaling CLIP to 18 Billion Parameterscited by 99
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