# MARINER: A 3E-Driven Benchmark for Fine-Grained Perception and Complex Reasoning in Open-Water Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08615/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 18 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

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

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- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
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- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Benchmarks of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08632/) (2024)
- [Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning: Evaluation and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07999/) (2025)
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- [MMAD: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09453/) (2024)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-grained visual understanding and high-level reasoning in real-world open-water environments remain under-explored due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks. We introduce MARINER, a comprehensive benchmark built under the novel Entity-Environment-Event (3E) paradigm. MARINER contains 16,629 multi-source maritime images with 63 fine-grained vessel categories, diverse adverse environments, and 5 typical dynamic maritime incidents, covering fine-grained classification, object detection, and visual question answering tasks. We conduct extensive evaluations on mainstream Multimodal Large language models (MLLMs) and establish baselines, revealing that even advanced models struggle with fine-grained discrimination and causal reasoning in complex marine scenes. As a dedicated maritime benchmark, MARINER fills the gap of realistic and cognitive-level evaluation for maritime multimodal understanding, and promotes future research on robust vision-language models for open-water applications. Appendix and supplementary materials are available at https://lxixim.github.io/MARINER.
