mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

UEval: A Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Generation

arXiv 2601.22155 ↗First posted 29 Jan 2026cs.CV cs.CLcited by 9

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

  1. 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
  2. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
  3. 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning19 Mar

Other references · 59

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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

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  3. 2024MM-InstructEval: Zero-Shot Evaluation of (Multimodal) Large Language Models on Multimodal Reasoning Tasks
  4. 2025UPME: An Unsupervised Peer Review Framework for Multimodal Large Language Model Evaluation
  5. 2025FlagEvalMM: A Flexible Framework for Comprehensive Multimodal Model Evaluation
  6. 2023SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models
  7. 2025LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
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