Title: ADAM: A Diverse Archive of Mankind for Multimodal Benchmarking and Enhancing LLMs’ Cognitive Skills in Biographical Contexts
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Biography, LLM-Capablities

Abstract: We introduce \textbf{ADAM} (A Diverse Archive of Mankind), a framework for evaluating and improving multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in biographical reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically examine LLM capabilities in biography, a critical yet underexplored dimension of factual knowledge. At its core, \textbf{AdamDB} is a multilingual and multimodal dataset covering over 4 million individuals across geography, time, and profession, while \textbf{AdamBench} provides cognitively structured evaluations based on Bloom’s taxonomy, spanning six reasoning levels in both English and native languages. To address hallucinations, particularly for lesser-known individuals, we propose \textbf{AdamRAG}, a retrieval-augmented generation system tailored to biographical contexts. Experiments show that AdamRAG substantially improves open-source models and modestly benefits closed-source ones, with the largest gains on lower-order reasoning. Popularity strongly mediates accuracy, and multimodal input via face images offers smaller, less consistent improvements than retrieval. ADAM establishes the first benchmark and framework for cognitively, culturally, and multimodally grounded biographical evaluation, advancing the development of multilingual, accurate, and hallucination-resistant MLLMs.