Benchmark Almanac

VATEX ZH

Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 59.7 leads since July 2025
Dropped

Models write Chinese captions for short videos of human activities from the VATEX dataset. Captions are scored with CIDEr against human references.

Released
April 2019
Kind
Video captioning
Level
Everyday
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Open-ended
Tasks
All public
Strongest model tested
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 #96 on the capability index
Last in a launch post
May 2024, dropped before it saturated
Last model added
July 2025

In the authors’ words

We present a new large-scale multilingual video description dataset, VATEX, which contains over 41,250 videos and 825,000 captions in both English and Chinese. Among the captions, there are over 206,000 English-Chinese parallel translation pairs. Compared to the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset, VATEX is multilingual, larger, linguistically complex, and more diverse in terms of both video and natural language descriptions. We also introduce two tasks for video-and-language research based on VATEX: (1) Multilingual Video Captioning, aimed at describing a video in various languages with a compact unified captioning model, and (2) Video-guided Machine Translation, to translate a source language description into the target language using the video information as additional spatiotemporal context. Extensive experiments on the VATEX dataset show that, first, the unified multilingual model can not only produce both English and Chinese descriptions for a video more efficiently, but also offer improved performance over the monolingual models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spatiotemporal video context can be effectively utilized to align source and target languages and thus assist machine translation. In the end, we discuss the potentials of using VATEX for other video-and-language research.

Abstract of VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research (arXiv:1904.03493, CC0)
4
Models scored in lab cards
2
Launch posts list it, from 1 lab
2
System cards report it, from 1 lab

Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 59.7 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.

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 59.7
  2. 2 Gemini 1.5 Pro May 2024 55.3
  3. 3 Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 2024 54.9
  4. 4 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 43.9

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 59.7 Jul 2025 Lab model card
2 Gemini 1.5 Pro May 2024 55.3 May 2024 Lab model card
3 Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 2024 54.9 Feb 2024 Lab model card
4 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 43.9 Jul 2025 Lab model card

3 models have held number one in labs’ own numbers since 2023

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

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.

Reported by the lab in its model card
40.0 45.0 50.0 55.0 60.0 2024 2025 40.0 45.0 50.0 55.0 60.0 2024 2025

Source: Labs’ model cards

No launch post has listed it since May 2024

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.

Google DeepMind
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
May 14, 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro 55.3 VATEX ZH (val), 4-shot (CIDEr)
Feb 15, 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro 54.9 VATEX ZH (val), 4-shot (CIDEr)

2 system cards report it, from 1 lab

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 59.7 VATEX-ZH, val, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) Capabilities
Jul 7, 2025 Gemini 2.5 Flash technical report 43.9 VATEX-ZH, val, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) Capabilities

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