# Deeply Interleaved Text-Image Contexts for Multimodal LLMs Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02573/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 15 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [Kimi-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07491/) (2025)
- [Gemma 4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02770/) (2026)
- [Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26583/) (2025)
- [CityFlow-NL: Tracking and Retrieval of Vehicles at City Scale by Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04741/) (2021)
- [Evaluating MLLMs with Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04280/) (2025)
- [More Images, More Problems? A Controlled Analysis of VLM Failure Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07812/) (2026)
- [MMR-Life: Piecing Together Real-life Scenes for Multimodal Multi-image Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02024/) (2026)
- [M-DocSum: Do LVLMs Genuinely Comprehend Interleaved Image-Text in Document Summarization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21839/) (2025)
- [Premier: Personalized Preference Modulation with Learnable User Embedding in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20725/) (2026)
- [Full-Pipeline Inference Optimization for MiMo-V2.5 Series: Pushing Hybrid SWA Efficiency to the Limit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13095/) (2026)
- [Illuminating Unified Multimodal Model for Free-form Interleaved Text-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30054/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current evaluations and training of multimodal models predominantly focus on multi-image tasks, largely overlooking interleaved text-image scenarios. In such multi-image tasks, text typically serves merely as task instructions, lacking deep semantic interaction with the visual content. In contrast, realworld applications like text-image co-creation, character tracking, and spatial reconstruction require constant interaction between text and images. Consequently, models must possess a deep understanding of these interleaved contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark, TIC-Bench (deeply interleaved Text-Image Contexts), designed to evaluate the capability of models to integrate text-image clues and recover the ground truth facts within deeply interleaved contexts. This benchmark encompasses three core domains: Logical, Temporal, and Spatial Association, which are further categorized into eight specific types, comprising a total of 2,280 questions. We evaluated 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs and observed a substantial performance gap compared to human experts, together with persistent difficulties in integrating evidence distributed across interleaved visual and textual inputs. Ultimately, this benchmark provides a valuable analytical tool for assessing and advancing the ability of multimodal models to effectively integrate text and image information in deeply interleaved contexts. TIC-Bench is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pino10010/TIC-Bench