MAC: A Live Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Scientific Understanding

Mohan Jiang, Jin Gao, Jiahao Zhan, Dequan Wang

Keywords: MLLM, Benchmark, Scientific Understanding Capabilities

TL;DR: A Live Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Scientific Understanding

Abstract: As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) grow increasingly capable, fixed benchmarks are gradually losing their effectiveness in evaluating high-level scientific understanding. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Academic Cover benchmark (MAC), a live benchmark that could continuously evolve with scientific advancement and model progress. MAC leverages over 25,000 image-text pairs sourced from issues of top-tier scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell, challenging MLLMs to reason across abstract visual and textual scientific content. Experiments on our most recent yearly snapshot, MAC-2025, reveal that while MLLMs demonstrate strong perceptual abilities, their cross-modal scientific reasoning remains limited. To bridge this gap, we propose DAD, a lightweight inference-time approach that enhances MLLMs by extending MLLM visual features with language space reasoning, achieving performance improvements of up to 11%. Finally, we highlight the live nature of MAC through experiments on updating journal covers and models for curation, illustrating its potential to remain aligned with the frontier of human knowledge. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/mhjiang0408/MAC_Bench.

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Submission Number: 708