SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), building upon the foundation of powerful large language models (LLMs), have recently demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating not only texts but also images given in-terleaved multimodal inputs (acting like a combination of GPT-4V and DALL-E 3). However, existing MLLM benchmarks remain limited to assessing only models' comprehension ability of single image-text inputs, failing to keep up with the strides made in MLLMs. A comprehensive benchmark is imperative for investigating the progress and uncovering the limitations of current MLLMs. In this work, we categorize the capabilities of MLLMs into hierarchical levels from L0 to L4 based on the modalities they can ac-cept and generate, and propose SEED-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the hierarchical capa-bilities of MLLMs. Specifically, SEED-Bench comprises 24K multiple-choice questions with accurate human annotations, which span 27 dimensions, including the evaluation of both text and image generation. Multiple-choice questions with ground truth options derived from human annotation enable an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 22 prominent open-source MLLMs and summarize valuable observations. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through extensive evaluations, we aim for SEED-Bench to provide insights that will mo-tivate future research toward the goal of General Artificial Intelligence. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-Bench.