Needle In A Multimodal Haystack

Weiyun Wang, Shuibo Zhang, Yiming Ren, Yuchen Duan, Tiantong Li, Shuo Liu, Mengkang Hu, Zhe Chen, Kaipeng Zhang, Lewei Lu, Xizhou Zhu, Ping Luo, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai, Wenqi Shao, Wenhai Wang

Keywords: Evaluation, Multimodal, Large Language Model, Long Context

TL;DR: We present Needle In A Multimodal Haystack (MM-NIAH), the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the comprehension capability for long multimodal documents.

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their evaluation has become increasingly comprehensive. However, understanding long multimodal content, as a foundational ability for real-world applications, remains underexplored. In this work, we present Needle In A Multimodal Haystack (MM-NIAH), the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate the capability of existing MLLMs to comprehend long multimodal documents. Our benchmark includes three types of evaluation tasks: multimodal retrieval, counting, and reasoning. In each task, the model is required to answer the questions according to different key information scattered throughout the given multimodal document. Evaluating the leading MLLMs on MM-NIAH, we observe that existing models still have significant room for improvement on these tasks, especially on vision-centric evaluation. We hope this work can provide a platform for further research on long multimodal document comprehension and contribute to the advancement of MLLMs. Code and benchmark are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/MM-NIAH.

Submission Number: 1036