Benchmark Almanac

Perception Test MCVQA

Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% leads since July 2025
VideoLLAMA3-7B 72.8% leads
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% leads since July 2025
Dropped

Models answer multiple-choice questions about real-world videos filmed to show perceptually interesting situations. Scored by top-1 accuracy.

Multiple-choice video QA task of the Perception Test benchmark.

Made by
Google DeepMind
Released
May 2023
Kind
Video understanding
Level
Everyday
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Multiple choice
Tasks
Public, plus a private test set
Strongest model tested
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 #96 on the capability index
Last in a launch post
January 2025, dropped before it saturated
Last model added
July 2025
Scores refreshed
November 12th, 2026

In the authors’ words

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, SeViLA, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a substantial gap in performance (91.4% vs 46.2%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baseline code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test

Abstract of Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models (arXiv:2305.13786, CC0)
6
Models scored in lab cards
1
Launch post lists it, from 1 lab
6
System cards report it, from 2 labs

Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 78.4% among models released by June 2025

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

VideoLLAMA3-7B leads with 72.8% across all independent runs

Best score per model across the official leaderboard, Epoch AI’s own runs and any board Epoch AI copied. Each bar and row names its source.

Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 78.4%, claims included

Best score per model from every source, including labs’ own numbers and claims Epoch AI collected from reports and papers. Labs pick their own settings, so a claim can beat an independent run of the same model.

The newest model with a score here came out in June 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4%
  2. 2 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1%
  3. 3 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2%
  4. 4 Gemma 3 27B 58.1%
  5. 5 Gemma 3 12B 54.9%
  6. 6 Gemma 3 4B 50.6%

Source: Labs’ model cards

Source: Official Perception Test MCVQA leaderboard

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% Jul 2025 Lab model card
2 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1% Jul 2025 Lab model card
3 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2% Jan 2025 Lab model card
4 Gemma 3 27B 58.1% Mar 2025 Lab model card
5 Gemma 3 12B 54.9% Mar 2025 Lab model card
6 Gemma 3 4B 50.6% Mar 2025 Lab model card
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 VideoLLAMA3-7B 72.8% Jan 2024 Official leaderboard
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% Jul 2025 Lab model card
2 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1% Jul 2025 Lab model card
3 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2% Jan 2025 Lab model card
4 VideoLLAMA3-7B 72.8% Jan 2024 Official leaderboard
5 Gemma 3 27B 58.1% Mar 2025 Lab model card
6 Gemma 3 12B 54.9% Mar 2025 Lab model card
7 Gemma 3 4B 50.6% Mar 2025 Lab model card

The benchmark's own leaderboard has 42 entries, 1 of them models we track. Switch the scores above to rank them together.

2 models have held number one in labs’ own numbers since its release in May 2023 Number one over time 3 models have held number one with claims included since its release in May 2023

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Qwen Google DeepMind
Lab claims Not tested since Jul 2025

Source: Labs’ model cards

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 Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) Gemini 2.5 Pro Qwen2.5-VL-72B VideoLLAMA3-7B 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) Gemini 2.5 Pro VideoLLAMA3-7B

Sources: Official Perception Test MCVQA leaderboard and labs’ model cards

No launch post has listed it since January 2025

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

Qwen
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
Jan 28, 2025 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2 PerceptionTest_test

6 system cards report it, from 2 labs

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
Jul 7, 2025 Gemini 2.5 Pro technical report 78.4 Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) Capabilities
Jul 7, 2025 Gemini 2.5 Flash technical report 75.1 Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 4B technical report 50.6 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 27B technical report 58.1 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
Mar 25, 2025 Gemma 3 12B technical report 54.9 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
Feb 19, 2025 Qwen2.5-VL-72B technical report 73.2 PerceptionTest test (Table 8) Capabilities

More in Audio and video

All 233 in Audio and video
  • Video-MMMU In use 300 expert-level lecture videos with questions testing perception, comprehension and adaptation of knowledge. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 88.7%
  • LVBench In use Hours-long video understanding with multiple-choice questions on reasoning, grounding and summarization. Gemini 4 Argon 91.7%
  • MMVU In use 3,000 expert-annotated questions on videos across 27 disciplines. Multiple-choice and open-ended accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 82.4%
  • MLVU In use Multi-task long video understanding (minutes to hours) with multiple-choice and generation tasks. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 90.8%
  • FLEURS In use Models transcribe read speech in 102 languages built from FLoRes-101 sentences. Model cards usually report word error rate, so lower scores are better. Phi-4-multimodal 4.00%
  • VoiceBench In use Spoken instructions with speaker, environment and content variation. Voice assistant responses scored by GPT judge or rules. Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus 93.1%