Scientists' First Exam: Probing Cognitive Abilities of MLLM via Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning

Yuhao Zhou, Yiheng Wang, Xuming He, Ruoyao Xiao, Zhiwei Li, Qiantai Feng, Zijie Guo, Yuejin Yang, Hao Wu, Wenxuan Huang, Jiaqi Wei, Dan Si, YAO XIUQI, Jia Bu, Haiwen Huang, Tianfan Fu, SHIXIANG TANG, Ben Fei, Dongzhan Zhou, Fenghua Ling et al. (7 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: scientific benchmark, scientific discoveries, MLLM

Abstract: Scientific discoveries increasingly rely on complex multimodal reasoning based on information-intensive scientific data and domain-specific expertise. Empowered by expert-level scientific benchmarks, scientific Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold the potential to significantly enhance this discovery process in realistic workflows. However, current scientific benchmarks mostly focus on evaluating the knowledge understanding capabilities of MLLMs, leading to an inadequate assessment of their perception and reasoning abilities. To address this gap, we present the Scientists’ First Exam (SFE) benchmark, designed to evaluate the scientific cognitive capacities of MLLMs through three interconnected levels: *scientific signal perception*, *scientific attribute understanding*, *scientific comparative reasoning*. Specifically, SFE comprises 830 expert-verified VQA pairs across three question types, spanning 66 multimodal tasks across five high-value disciplines. Extensive experiments reveal that current *state-of-the-art* GPT-o3 and InternVL-3 achieve only 34.08% and 26.52% on SFE, highlighting significant room for MLLMs to improve in scientific realms. We hope the insights obtained in SFE will facilitate further developments in AI-enhanced scientific discoveries.

Dataset URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/PrismaX/SFE

Code URL: https://github.com/PrismaX-Team/sfe

Primary Area: Datasets & Benchmarks for applications in language modeling and vision language modeling

Submission Number: 352