# MMESGBench: Pioneering Multimodal Understanding and Complex Reasoning Benchmark for ESG Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 18 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08295/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07726/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [The Faiss library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08281/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)
- [FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11944/) (2023)
- [LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18424/) (2024)
- [ClimateGPT: Towards AI Synthesizing Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09646/) (2024)
- [TableQA: a Large-Scale Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset for Table-Aware SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06434/) (2020)
- [ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01646/) (2025)
- [SusGen-GPT: A Data-Centric LLM for Financial NLP and Sustainability Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10906/) (2024)
- [Advancing Sustainability via Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07658/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Retrieval for ESGLLM via ESG-CID -- A Disclosure Content Index Finetuning Dataset for Mapping GRI and ESRS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10674/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [See the Forest for the Trees: Loosely Speculative Decoding via Visual-Semantic Guidance for Efficient Inference of Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05650/) (2026)
- [ESGLens: An LLM-Based RAG Framework for Interactive ESG Report Analysis and Score Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19779/) (2026)
- [Advancing ESG Intelligence: An Expert-level Agent and Comprehensive Benchmark for Sustainable Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08676/) (2026)
- [SSKG Hub: An Expert-Guided Platform for LLM-Empowered Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports are essential for evaluating sustainability practices, ensuring regulatory compliance, and promoting financial transparency. However, these documents are often lengthy, structurally diverse, and multimodal, comprising dense text, structured tables, complex figures, and layout-dependent semantics. Existing AI systems often struggle to perform reliable document-level reasoning in such settings, and no dedicated benchmark currently exists in ESG domain. To fill the gap, we introduce MMESGBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark dataset targeted to evaluate multimodal understanding and complex reasoning across structurally diverse and multi-source ESG documents. This dataset is constructed via a human-AI collaborative, multi-stage pipeline. First, a multimodal LLM generates candidate question-answer (QA) pairs by jointly interpreting rich textual, tabular, and visual information from layout-aware document pages. Second, an LLM verifies the semantic accuracy, completeness, and reasoning complexity of each QA pair. This automated process is followed by an expert-in-the-loop validation, where domain specialists validate and calibrate QA pairs to ensure quality, relevance, and diversity. MMESGBench comprises 933 validated QA pairs derived from 45 ESG documents, spanning across seven distinct document types and three major ESG source categories. Questions are categorized as single-page, cross-page, or unanswerable, with each accompanied by fine-grained multimodal evidence. Initial experiments validate that multimodal and retrieval-augmented models substantially outperform text-only baselines, particularly on visually grounded and cross-page tasks. MMESGBench is publicly available as an open-source dataset at https://github.com/Zhanglei1103/MMESGBench.