Revisiting Multi-Modal LLM Evaluation

Jian Lu, Shikhar Srivastava, Junyu Chen, Robik Shrestha, Manoj Acharya, Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) Workshops, 2025, pp. 555-564

With the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), datasets used for visual question answering (VQA) and referring expression comprehension have seen a resurgence. However, the most popular datasets used to evaluate MLLMs are some of the earliest ones created (VQAv2, GQA, TextVQA et al.) and they have many known problems, including extreme bias, spurious correlations, and an inability to permit fine-grained analysis. In this paper, we pioneer evaluating recent MLLMs (LLaVA-OneVision, MiniGemini, CogVLM, GPT-4V et al.) on datasets designed to address weaknesses in earlier ones. We assess three VQA datasets: 1) TDIUC, which permits fine-grained analysis on 12 question types; 2) TallyQA, which has simple and complex counting questions; and 3) DVQA, which requires optical character recognition for chart understanding. We also study VQDv1, a dataset that crucially requires identifying all image regions that satisfy a given query. Our experiments reveal the weaknesses of many MLLMs that have not previously been reported. Project webpage: https://shikhar-srivastava.github.io/MLLM_Evaluations