MMVU: Measuring Expert-Level Multi-Discipline Video Understanding
Abstract
We introduce MMVU, a comprehensive expert-level, multi-discipline benchmark for evaluating foundation models in video understanding. MMVU includes 3,000 expert-annotated questions spanning 27 subjects across four core disciplines: Science, Healthcare, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Engineering. Compared to prior benchmarks, MMVU features three key advancements. First, it challenges models to apply domain-specific knowledge and perform expert-level reasoning to analyze specialized-domain videos, moving beyond the basic visual perception typically assessed in current video benchmarks. Second, each example is annotated by human experts from scratch. We implement strict data quality controls to ensure the high quality of the dataset. Finally, each example is enriched with expert-annotated reasoning rationals and relevant domain knowledge, facilitating in-depth analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 32 frontier multimodal foundation models on MMVU. The latest System-2-capable models, o1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, achieve the highest performance among the tested models. However, they still fall short of matching human expertise. Through in-depth error analyses and case studies, we offer actionable insights for future advancements in expert-level, knowledge-intensive video understanding for specialized domains.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.12380,
title = {MMVU: Measuring Expert-Level Multi-Discipline Video Understanding},
author = {Yilun Zhao and Lujing Xie and Haowei Zhang and Guo Gan and Yitao Long and Zhiyuan Hu and Tongyan Hu and Weiyuan Chen and Chuhan Li and Junyang Song and Zhijian Xu and Chengye Wang and Weifeng Pan and Ziyao Shangguan and Xiangru Tang and Zhenwen Liang and Yixin Liu and Chen Zhao and Arman Cohan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12380},
year = {2025}
}