DMC-CF: Dynamic Multimodal CounterFactual QA benchmark for Causal Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
With the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), models have demonstrated increasingly powerful multimodal capabilities. However, whether MLLMs trained through statistical learning can truly understand the causal relationships underlying the real world remains a key research question. In recent years, numerous multimodal causal reasoning datasets have been proposed. Nevertheless, these datasets are either limited in scale or constructed from synthetic images and videos, cartoon-based content, or other non-realistic multimodal sources. To address these limitations, we collect real-world videos and construct DMC-CF-Static, a large-scale benchmark for multimodal causal counterfactual reasoning. Furthermore, to mitigate issues such as data contamination in traditional static evaluation, we represent causal events using causal graphs and propose the Dynamic Graph Intervention (DGI) framework to build the dynamic evaluation benchmark DMC-CF-Dynamic from DMC-CF-Static. Experimental results on the overall DMC-CF, which includes both static and dynamic evaluation benchmarks, demonstrate that the multimodal causal reasoning capabilities of current multimodal large language models in real-world scenarios still require substantial improvement.
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 9 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.
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9 of 18 references.
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- 2025CausalVQA: A Physically Grounded Causal Reasoning Benchmark for Video Models11 Jun
- 2025Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Model: Data Contamination and Dynamic Evaluation8 Jun
Other references · 7
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- 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
- 2023DyVal: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models for Reasoning Taskscited by 101
- 2024Dynamic Multimodal Evaluation with Flexible Complexity by Vision-Language Bootstrappingcited by 22
- 2025KBE-DME: Dynamic Multimodal Evaluation via Knowledge Enhanced Benchmark Evolutioncited by 2
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- 2024Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Vision Large Language Models to Discern Causal Links Across Modalities
- 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Models
- 2025CausalVLBench: Benchmarking Visual Causal Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models
- 2025VCRBench: Exploring Long-form Causal Reasoning Capabilities of Large Video Language Models
- 2026Better Think Thrice: Learning to Reason Causally with Double Counterfactual Consistency
- 2025ISO-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Causal Reasoning in Visual-Language Models through Procedural Plans
- 2023Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality
- 2025MDK12-Bench: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models