BEAR-Bench is a bilingual benchmark for multimodal large language models, featuring 1,000 human‑annotated questions derived from text‑rich business and scientific documents in English and Russian. It evaluates 16 MLLMs, including Gemini 3.1 Pro and Qwen3.5‑397B, revealing significant performance gaps even for the strongest systems. The benchmark also serves to compare hallucination‑detection methods by analyzing model failures on these complex documents.
arXiv:2506. 03922v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to advance a broad range of domains.
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.
arXiv:2606. 05531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence.
The paper introduces a new perspective on entity rarity in multimodal entity linking by using knowledge‑graph structural metrics instead of popularity metrics, revealing many rare entities previously overlooked. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art models suffer a 15.4–39.9% accuracy drop on these rare‑entity slices. The authors propose a training‑free framework that combines reasoning and retrieval with a vision‑language model, achieving a 6.9% overall accuracy gain and up to 23.3% improvement on rare entities, and release a new benchmark MERLIN‑Rare for focused evaluation.
DocHop is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on integrated chart‑context reasoning within document‑style images. The benchmark presents narrative text that imposes multi‑step compositional constraints, while charts supply the data needed to answer questions grounded in semantic reference labels. It contains 2,074 examples across six task categories, generated via a stochastic logic‑first pipeline that controls reasoning depth and visual density, and shows a large performance gap between humans (over 90% accuracy) and the best models (62.83%).
SciDocBench is a workflow-centered benchmark for scientific document understanding that includes 124 expert-authored questions across seven capability groups and 19 subtasks in five scientific domains. Each question is evaluated under four conditions—English or Chinese, all-images-first or interleaved document representations—resulting in 496 evaluation instances. The benchmark is paired with SciDocIR, a typed evidence-graph representation, and SciDocDataset, a collection of 15K fine-tuning and 8K reinforcement-learning samples, forming an evaluation-to-training framework for scientific-document assistants.
arXiv:2607. 05614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document comprehension is a challenging yet impactful task for Multimodal Large Language Models, especially as these systems see growing adoption in real-world, human-centric applications.
The paper introduces the first large‑scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, along with a synthetic multiple‑choice question set for idiom meaning identification. It evaluates recent large language models on three idiom‑related tasks—paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and meaning identification—using zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Results show significant variability across models, with Phi‑4‑mini‑instruct best at paraphrasing, Kimi‑K2‑32b‑instruct excelling at span detection, and Gemini‑2.5‑flash leading in meaning identification.
arXiv:2606.30943v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Russian and Arabic are among the major languages of scientific communication. Language barriers impede the exchange of research results between the...
The ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains introduced a new Visual Question Answering benchmark that tests reasoning over documents from eight distinct domains such as business reports, scientific papers, and engineering drawings. Twenty valid submissions from eight teams were evaluated, featuring approaches ranging from zero‑shot vision‑language models to multi‑agent ensembles and fine‑tuned multimodal systems. Results indicate that the most effective systems employ structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components rather than single‑pass prompting.
Russian and Arabic are among the major languages of scientific communication. Language barriers impede the exchange of research results between these communities, which affects international collaboration and the progress of sustainability-related research.