VLM-Bench 1.0: Real-World Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation

Evaluate VLMs on realistic business and STEM tasks using multimodal prompts, open-ended outputs, and LLM-as-judge scoring. VLM-Bench 1.0 measures how well today’s frontier models interpret, reason, and decide from complex visual and textual inputs.

Start Hillclimb

Download Report

Advancing VLM evaluation with real-world utility

Most public benchmarks test trivial image captioning or textbook knowledge. VLM-Bench 1.0 closes that gap by focusing on how models perform in real professional workflows. Each task mirrors what analysts, engineers, or scientists do daily: read charts, interpret diagrams, and make data-driven decisions.

Core VLM-Bench 1.0 capabilities

Each prompt is built to simulate a real-world scenario and scored using a reproducible LLM-as-a-judge method.

Domain-grounded multimodal tasks

700+ image-text prompts covering finance, engineering, chemistry, marketing, and more. Every prompt requires cross-referencing structured visuals (tables, charts, schematics) with textual context.

Evaluator-calibrated difficulty

Only tasks that consistently defeated top VLMs like GPT-4o and Claude 3.7 were included. The “HARD” subset excludes any prompt that received >50% accuracy from any model.

Capability coverage

Prompts target core VLM weaknesses, including spatial, numerical, logical, contextual, abstract, counterfactual, and multi-step reasoning. Each task is tagged by capability and scored independently.

Open-ended generation and scoring

Models produce free-form answers scored by an LLM-as-a-judge, with 5 independent generations per prompt for variance control.

Rigorous validation pipeline

Each prompt-image pair passes three levels of review: generalist screening, domain expert check, and final editorial approval, along with research-led spot checks.

Audit-ready scoring

Accuracy is computed with 95% confidence intervals and validated on a 300-sample subset with expert human QA (99% agreement).

Evaluating VLMs On Real Business And STEM Tasks

Download benchmark report

View detailed performance breakdowns, capability-level scores, and error charts from current VLM-Bench 1.0 runs. Compare leading VLMs across reasoning types, domain tasks, and HARD vs ALL subsets to track real-world readiness.

Download Report

Subjects

STEM (math, AI, chemistry, earth sciences, civil & structure engineering, aerospace engineering, electronics engineering), Business (finance, analytics, operations, HR, accounting, marketing, sales).