# EventBench: Towards Comprehensive Benchmarking of Event-based MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 62 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- 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, 30 of 62)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13181/) (2025)
- [Converting Static Image Datasets to Spiking Neuromorphic Datasets Using Saccades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07629/) (2015)
- [A Short Note on the Kinetics-700 Human Action Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06987/) (2019)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Learning to Detect Objects with a 1 Megapixel Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13436/) (2020)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [Charades-Ego: A Large-Scale Dataset of Paired Third and First Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09626/) (2018)
- [A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08499/) (2020)
- [N-ImageNet: Towards Robust, Fine-Grained Object Recognition with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01041/) (2021)
- [PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13180/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Event-based Vision: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08890/) (2023)
- [Object Tracking by Jointly Exploiting Frame and Event Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09052/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EventFlash: Towards Efficient MLLMs for Event-Based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03230/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in event-based vision, yet the comprehensive evaluation of their capabilities within a unified benchmark remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EventBench, a benchmark that offers eight diverse task metrics together with a large-scale event stream dataset. EventBench differs from existing event-based benchmarks in four key aspects: (1) openness in accessibility, releasing all raw event streams and task instructions across eight evaluation metrics; (2) diversity in task coverage, spanning understanding, recognition, and spatial reasoning tasks for comprehensive capability assessment; (3) integration in spatial dimensions, pioneering the design of 3D spatial reasoning tasks for event-based MLLMs; and (4) scale in data volume, with an accompanying training set of over one million event-text pairs supporting large-scale training and evaluation. Using EventBench, we evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5 Pro, leading open-source models including Qwen2.5-VL and InternVL3, and event-based MLLMs such as EventGPT that directly process raw event streams. Extensive evaluation reveals that while current event-based MLLMs demonstrate strong performance in event stream understanding, they continue to struggle with fine-grained recognition and spatial reasoning.