Benchmark Almanac

MM-NIAH

Gemini-1.5 (model unspecified) 55.3% tops its leaderboard Idefics2-8B 11.6% leads the models we track
Not in model cards

Vision-language models answer questions about long documents of interleaved images and text. Tasks are retrieval, counting and reasoning over needles hidden in the document.

Models did worst on image needles at release. VLMEvalKit supports the validation split.

Released
June 2024
Kind
Finding facts in long inputs
Level
Everyday
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Short answer
Tasks
All public
Last model added
April 2024
Scores refreshed
November 12th, 2026

In the authors’ words

With the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their evaluation has become increasingly comprehensive. However, understanding long multimodal content, as a foundational ability for real-world applications, remains underexplored. In this work, we present Needle In A Multimodal Haystack (MM-NIAH), the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate the capability of existing MLLMs to comprehend long multimodal documents. Our benchmark includes three types of evaluation tasks: multimodal retrieval, counting, and reasoning. In each task, the model is required to answer the questions according to different key information scattered throughout the given multimodal document. Evaluating the leading MLLMs on MM-NIAH, we observe that existing models still have significant room for improvement on these tasks, especially on vision-centric evaluation. We hope this work can provide a platform for further research on long multimodal document comprehension and contribute to the advancement of MLLMs. Code and benchmark are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/MM-NIAH.

Abstract of Needle In A Multimodal Haystack (arXiv:2406.07230, CC0)
7
Entries on its own leaderboard, 2 models we track

Gemini-1.5 (model unspecified) tops the leaderboard with 55.3%

Best score per entry from the benchmark's own leaderboard, read on November 12th, 2026. Where a model ran with several settings or harnesses, we keep its best. Names in gray aren't in our model list: fine-tunes, agent systems, products and older models. They don't count toward leaders. The best model we track is Idefics2-8B, at 11.6%.

  1. 1 Gemini-1.5 (model unspecified) 55.3%
  2. 2 InternVL-1.5 50.1%
  3. 3 LLaVA-1.6-34B 21.1%
  4. 4 LLaVA-1.6-13B 19.6%
  5. 5 VILA-13B 16.3%
  6. 6 Idefics2-8B 11.6%
  7. 7 Emu2-Chat 7.70%

Source: Official MM-NIAH leaderboard

#EntryScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini-1.5 (model unspecified) 55.3% Official leaderboard
2 InternVL-1.5 50.1% RAG Official leaderboard
3 LLaVA-1.6-34B 21.1% Official leaderboard
4 LLaVA-1.6-13B 19.6% Official leaderboard
5 VILA-13B 16.3% Official leaderboard
6 Idefics2-8B 11.6% Apr 2024 Official leaderboard
7 Emu2-Chat 7.70% Dec 2023 Official leaderboard

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

On the benchmark’s own leaderboard Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 Near the ceiling (85%) Idefics2-8B Emu2-Chat 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 Near the ceiling (85%) Idefics2-8B

Source: Official MM-NIAH leaderboard

No lab model card reports it yet

We read the headline results of 522 launch posts from 52 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.

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