arXiv AI September 21, 2026 By Wayner Barrios, SouYoung Jin

Beyond Final Answers: CRYSTAL Benchmark for Transparent Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation

CRYSTAL is a diagnostic benchmark comprising 6,372 multimodal reasoning instances that assess models through verifiable intermediate steps. It introduces two metrics—Match F1 and Ordered Match F1—to evaluate step-level precision, recall, and order. The benchmark, built via a Delphi-inspired pipeline with four independent MLLMs, reveals systematic failures in current models, such as cherry‑picking and disordered reasoning, and proposes a Causal Process Reward and CPR‑Curriculum to improve reasoning performance.

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