Beyond RGB: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Hyperspectral Image Understanding via Training-Free Reasoning Framework

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on RGB image understanding, yet their ability to use spectral evidence beyond the visible range remains largely unexplored. Hyperspectral imagery (HSI) provides dense spectral measurements that reveal material and environmental cues unavailable in RGB, but current MLLMs cannot directly ingest high-dimensional HSI. To study this gap, we introduce HM-Bench, an evidence-grounded benchmark for hyperspectral image understanding with MLLMs. HM-Bench contains 19,337 question--answer pairs from 2,178 hyperspectral samples across 13 task categories, covering general perception, spectral reasoning, and spatial--spectral reasoning. To make HSI accessible to the native image--text interfaces of existing MLLMs, we further propose VSR2, a training-free Visual--Spectral--Report Reasoning framework. VSR2 represents each HSI sample with three aligned views: an RGB image for visual semantics and spatial context, a PCA-based image for dominant spectral variation, and a structured report for quantitative spectral--spatial evidence. Under a controlled RGB-only versus VSR2 evaluation protocol, experiments on 17 representative MLLMs show that HSI information improves average accuracy from 38.26% to 40.35%, with gains varying substantially across models and task categories. These results indicate that HSI information (beyond RGB) is useful for current MLLMs, while robust hyperspectral reasoning remains an open challenge.