UEval: A Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Generation
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce UEval, a benchmark to evaluate unified models, i.e., models capable of generating both images and text. UEval comprises 1,000 expert-curated questions that require both images and text in the model output, sourced from 8 real-world tasks. Our curated questions cover a wide range of reasoning types, from step-by-step guides to textbook explanations. Evaluating open-ended multimodal generation is non-trivial, as simple LLM-as-a-judge methods can miss the subtleties. Different from previous works that rely on multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to rate image quality or text accuracy, we design a rubric-based scoring system in UEval. For each question, reference images and text answers are provided to a MLLM to generate an initial rubric, consisting of multiple evaluation criteria, and human experts then refine and validate these rubrics. In total, UEval contains 10,417 validated rubric criteria, enabling scalable and fine-grained automatic scoring. UEval is challenging for current unified models: GPT-5-Thinking scores only 66.4 out of 100, while the best open-source model reaches merely 49.1. We observe that reasoning models often outperform non-reasoning ones, and transferring reasoning traces from a reasoning model to a non-reasoning model significantly narrows the gap. This suggests that reasoning may be important for tasks requiring complex multimodal understanding and generation.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 62 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2026.
Builds on
62 of 68 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
- 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
- 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning19 Mar
Other references · 59
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
- 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learningcited by 4,337
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuningcited by 2,855
38 more
- 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,689
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2016Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answeringcited by 2,498
- 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
- 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1,624
- 2015Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Servercited by 1,447
- 2015Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Modelscited by 1,352
- 2020DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Imagescited by 1,288
- 2019OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledgecited by 1,114
- 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
- 2024Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Modelscited by 904
- 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
- 2024Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMscited by 822
- 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
- 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 761
- 2023Instruction Tuning with GPT-4cited by 676
- 2024BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceivecited by 529
- 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 468
- 2024Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generationcited by 465
- 2024Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 447
- 2025HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Healthcited by 385
- 2025BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Datasetcited by 363
- 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Modelscited by 321
- 2023DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creationcited by 296
- 2024VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generationcited by 290
- 2025Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 242
- 2025MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Modelscited by 241
- 2024MetaMorph: Multimodal Understanding and Generation via Instruction Tuningcited by 205
- 2024TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 200
- 2025WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 196
- 2024AuroraCap: Efficient, Performant Video Detailed Captioning and a New Benchmarkcited by 137
- 2025Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learnerscited by 119
- 2021Dive into Deep Learningcited by 111
- 2025Envisioning Beyond the Pixels: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Visual Editingcited by 97
- 2025Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 81
- 2024Dual Diffusion for Unified Image Generation and Understandingcited by 76
- 2025Muddit: Liberating Generation Beyond Text-to-Image with a Unified Discrete Diffusion Modelcited by 52
- 2025FUDOKI: Discrete Flow-based Unified Understanding and Generation via Kinetic-Optimal Velocitiescited by 46
50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 32
- 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generationcited by 16
- 2026From Holistic Evaluation to Structured Criteria: Rubrics Across the Evolving LLM Landscapecited by 4
- 2026TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-trainingcited by 2
- 2026InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generationcited by 2
- 2026LatentUMM: Dual Latent Alignment for Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 1
- 2026Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipescited by 1
- 2026Thinking in Pictures: A Systematic Benchmark for Reasoning-driven Image Generationcited by 0
- 2026PixelUMM: Encoder-Free Unified Image and Video Understanding and Generationcited by 0
- 2026PixelUMM: Encoder-Free Unified Image and Video Understanding and Generation29 Sep 2026
- 2026Thinking in Pictures: A Systematic Benchmark for Reasoning-driven Image Generation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes5 Aug 2026
- 2026InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation11 Jun 2026
- 2026From Holistic Evaluation to Structured Criteria: Rubrics Across the Evolving LLM Landscape7 Jun 2026
- 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generation27 May 2026
- 2026LatentUMM: Dual Latent Alignment for Unified Multimodal Models18 May 2026
- 2026TorchUMM: A Unified Multimodal Model Codebase for Evaluation, Analysis, and Post-training12 Apr 2026
- 2026Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining3 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation
- 2025MME-Unify: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models
- 2024MM-InstructEval: Zero-Shot Evaluation of (Multimodal) Large Language Models on Multimodal Reasoning Tasks
- 2025UPME: An Unsupervised Peer Review Framework for Multimodal Large Language Model Evaluation
- 2025FlagEvalMM: A Flexible Framework for Comprehensive Multimodal Model Evaluation
- 2023SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2025LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
- 2025UniGen: Enhanced Training & Test-Time Strategies for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation