# From Easy to Hard: The MIR Benchmark for Progressive Interleaved Multi-Image Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 17 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [MuirBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robust Multi-image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09411/) (2024)
- [Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16198/) (2024)
- [MME-CoT: Benchmarking Chain-of-Thought in Large Multimodal Models for Reasoning Quality, Robustness, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09621/) (2025)
- [Survey on Large Language Model-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning: Concept, Taxonomy, and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00282/) (2024)
- [NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14669/) (2024)
- [MileBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Long Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18532/) (2024)
- [MM-Interleaved: Interleaved Image-Text Generative Modeling via Multi-modal Feature Synchronizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10208/) (2024)
- [MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10139/) (2024)
- [Img-Diff: Contrastive Data Synthesis for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04594/) (2024)
- [MMRA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Granularity and Multi-Image Relational Association Capabilities in Large Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17379/) (2024)
- [MIR-Bench: Can Your LLM Recognize Complicated Patterns via Many-Shot In-Context Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09933/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07510/) (2026)
- [Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10741/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking PhD-Level Coding in 3D Geometric Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.30038/) (2026)
- [TraceAV-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Trajectory Reasoning over Long Audio-Visual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07593/) (2026)
- [DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18915/) (2026)
- [CLBench-V: Evaluating Multimodal Context Learning from Grounding to Knowledge Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25294/) (2026)
- [Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25343/) (2026)
- [DiCoBench: Benchmarking Multi-Image Fine-Grained Perception via Differential and Commonality Visual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26602/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-image Interleaved Reasoning aims to improve Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) ability to jointly comprehend and reason across multiple images and their associated textual contexts, introducing unique challenges beyond single-image or non-interleaved multi-image tasks. While current multi-image benchmarks overlook interleaved textual contexts and neglect distinct relationships between individual images and their associated texts, enabling models to reason over multi-image interleaved data may significantly enhance their comprehension of complex scenes and better capture cross-modal correlations. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark MIR, requiring joint reasoning over multiple images accompanied by interleaved textual contexts to accurately associate image regions with corresponding texts and logically connect information across images. To enhance MLLMs ability to comprehend multi-image interleaved data, we introduce reasoning steps for each instance within the benchmark and propose a stage-wise curriculum learning strategy. This strategy follows an "easy to hard" approach, progressively guiding models from simple to complex scenarios, thereby enhancing their ability to handle challenging tasks. Extensive experiments benchmarking multiple MLLMs demonstrate that our method significantly enhances models reasoning performance on MIR and other established benchmarks. We believe that MIR will encourage further research into multi-image interleaved reasoning, facilitating advancements in MLLMs capability to handle complex inter-modal tasks.