Benchmark Almanac

VATEX

Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 71.3 leads since July 2025
Fading

Models write English or Chinese captions for short video clips from a set of over 41,000 videos. Scored by CIDEr.

Released
April 2019
Kind
Video captioning
Level
Everyday
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Open-ended
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
March 2026, dropped before it saturated
Last model added
May 2026

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)
5
Models scored in lab cards
3
Launch posts list it, from 1 lab
3
System cards report it, from 1 lab

Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 71.3 among models released by March 2026

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 March 2026, 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 71.3
  2. 2 Gemini Embedding 2 68.8
  3. 3 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 65.2
  4. 4 Gemini 1.5 Pro May 2024 64.6
  5. 5 Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 2024 63.0

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 71.3 Jul 2025 Lab model card
2 Gemini Embedding 2 68.8 Mar 2026 Lab model card
3 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 65.2 Jul 2025 Lab model card
4 Gemini 1.5 Pro May 2024 64.6 May 2024 Lab model card
5 Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 2024 63.0 Feb 2024 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 May 2026

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
62.0 64.0 66.0 68.0 70.0 72.0 2024 2025 2026 62.0 64.0 66.0 68.0 70.0 72.0 2024 2025 2026

Source: Labs’ model cards

Labs headline it less often now, last in March 2026

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
Mar 10, 2026 Gemini Embedding 2 68.8 Gemini Embedding 2, text to video VATEX nDCG@10
May 14, 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro 64.6 VATEX (test), 4-shot (CIDEr)
Feb 15, 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro 63 VATEX (test), 4-shot (CIDEr)

3 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
May 1, 2026 Gemini Embedding 2 technical report 68.8 Gemini Embedding 2, text to video VATEX nDCG@10 Other
Jul 7, 2025 Gemini 2.5 Pro technical report 71.3 VATEX, test, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) Capabilities
Jul 7, 2025 Gemini 2.5 Flash technical report 65.2 VATEX, test, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) Capabilities

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