OmniBench: Towards The Future of Universal Omni-Language Models

Yizhi LI, Ge Zhang, Yinghao Ma, Ruibin Yuan, King Zhu, Hangyu Guo, Yiming Liang, Jiaheng Liu, Noah Wang, Jian Yang, Siwei Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jinjie Shi, Xinyue Zhang, Zhenzhu Yang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Ruibo Liu, Emmanouil Benetos, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin

Keywords: Multimodal Reasoning, MLLM Benchmark, Text, Audio, Image

Abstract:

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have aimed to integrate and interpret data across diverse modalities. However, the capacity of these models to concurrently process and reason about multiple modalities remains inadequately explored, partly due to the lack of comprehensive modality-wise benchmarks.
We introduce **OmniBench**, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate models' ability to recognize, interpret, and reason across **visual**, **acoustic**, and **textual** inputs simultaneously. We define models capable of such tri-modal processing as omni-language models (OLMs).
OmniBench is distinguished by high-quality human annotations, ensuring that accurate responses require integrated understanding and reasoning across all three modalities. Our main findings reveal that: *i)* open-source OLMs exhibit critical limitations in instruction-following and reasoning capabilities within tri-modal contexts; and *ii)* most baselines models perform poorly (below 50\% accuracy) even when provided with alternative textual representations of images or/and audio.
These results suggest that the ability to construct a consistent context from text, image, and audio is often overlooked in existing MLLM training paradigms.
To address this gap, we curate an instruction tuning dataset of 84.5K training samples, **OmniInstruct**, for training OLMs to adapt to multimodal contexts.
We advocate for future research to focus on developing more robust tri-modal integration techniques and training strategies to enhance OLM performance across diverse modalities.
Codes and datasets are uploaded at [our repository](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Omni-Bench-EA9B).

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 10548