On Path to Multimodal Generalist: General-Level and General-Bench
Authors: name: Hao Fei; name: Yuan Zhou; name: Juncheng Li; name: Xiangtai Li; name: Qingshan Xu; name: Bobo Li; name: Shengqiong Wu; name: Yaoting Wang; name: Junbao Zhou; name: Jiahao Meng; name: Qingyu Shi; name: Zhiyuan Zhou; name: Liangtao Shi; name: Minghe Gao; name: Daoan Zhang; name: Zhiqi Ge; name: Weiming Wu; name: Siliang Tang; name: Kaihang Pan; name: Yaobo Ye; name: Haobo Yuan; name: Tao Zhang; name: Tianjie Ju; name: Zixiang Meng; name: Shilin Xu; name: Liyu Jia; name: Wentao Hu; name: Meng Luo; name: Jiebo Luo; name: Tat-Seng Chua; name: Shuicheng Yan; name: Hanwang Zhang
Published: 2025-05-07 17:59:32

Abstract: The Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is currently experiencing rapid
growth, driven by the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Unlike earlier
specialists, existing MLLMs are evolving towards a Multimodal Generalist
paradigm. Initially limited to understanding multiple modalities, these models
have advanced to not only comprehend but also generate across modalities. Their
capabilities have expanded from coarse-grained to fine-grained multimodal
understanding and from supporting limited modalities to arbitrary ones. While
many benchmarks exist to assess MLLMs, a critical question arises: Can we
simply assume that higher performance across tasks indicates a stronger MLLM
capability, bringing us closer to human-level AI? We argue that the answer is
not as straightforward as it seems. This project introduces General-Level, an
evaluation framework that defines 5-scale levels of MLLM performance and
generality, offering a methodology to compare MLLMs and gauge the progress of
existing systems towards more robust multimodal generalists and, ultimately,
towards AGI. At the core of the framework is the concept of Synergy, which
measures whether models maintain consistent capabilities across comprehension
and generation, and across multiple modalities. To support this evaluation, we
present General-Bench, which encompasses a broader spectrum of skills,
modalities, formats, and capabilities, including over 700 tasks and 325,800
instances. The evaluation results that involve over 100 existing
state-of-the-art MLLMs uncover the capability rankings of generalists,
highlighting the challenges in reaching genuine AI. We expect this project to
pave the way for future research on next-generation multimodal foundation
models, providing a robust infrastructure to accelerate the realization of AGI.
Project page: https://generalist.top/