aiqbench analysis
The MMBU benchmark introduces a critical evaluation framework for vision-language models by covering 35 biomedical submodalities, addressing the current inability of existing tests to accurately assess fine-grained visual perception in clinical contexts. Analysis of 17 models reveals that high accuracy on established benchmarks often masks significant deficiencies in domain generalization and subtle feature interpretation across diverse imaging scales. This resource is essential for researchers aiming to validate the robustness of VLMs before deploying them in real-world biomedical imaging workflows.
MMBU: A Massive Multi-modal Biomedical Understanding Benchmark to Probe the Perception Capabilities of Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2606.06696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision and language models (VLMs) hold immense promise to transform biomedical imaging workflows, from detecting lesions in chest X-rays to profiling cellular features in microscopy. Realizing this potential, however, requires robust and fine-grained visual perception. Models need to correctly interpret subtle features in images, and they must do so across diverse biomedical modalities, scales, and contexts. Nevertheless, current benchmarks remain limited. To address these gaps, we introduce the Massive Multimodal Biomedical Understanding (MMBU) benchmark. It is the largest biomedical vision and language benchmark to date, covering 35 submodalities with rich structured metadata. It includes both open and closed versions of ungrounded classification, grounded classification, and object detection, enabling systematic evaluation of model performance across biological scales, clinical settings, and imaging modalities. Evaluating 15 open-weight and 2 frontier VLMs, we find that while medical adaptation provides measurable gains for some models, the high accuracy often reported on established benchmarks can mask deficiencies in visual perception and domain generalization.
Authors:Ryan D'Cunha, Alejandro Lozano, Xiaoxiao Sun, Daniel Vela Jarquin, Min Woo Sun, Josiah Aklilu, James Burgess, Yuhui Zhang, Ryan Nayebi, Paola Avila, Robayo, Jin Ye, Ming Hu, Zhongying Deng, Junjun He, Xin Chen, Yue Yao, Robert Tibshirani, Jeffrey J. Nirschl, Serena Yeung-Levy
Abstract:Vision and language models (VLMs) hold immense promise to transform biomedical imaging workflows, from detecting lesions in chest X-rays to profiling cellular features in microscopy. Realizing this potential, however, requires robust and fine-grained visual perception. Models need to correctly interpret subtle features in images, and they must do so across diverse biomedical modalities, scales, and contexts. Nevertheless, current benchmarks remain limited. To address these gaps, we introduce the Massive Multimodal Biomedical Understanding (MMBU) benchmark. It is the largest biomedical vision and language benchmark to date, covering 35 submodalities with rich structured metadata. It includes both open and closed versions of ungrounded classification, grounded classification, and object detection, enabling systematic evaluation of model performance across biological scales, clinical settings, and imaging modalities. Evaluating 15 open-weight and 2 frontier VLMs, we find that while medical adaptation provides measurable gains for some models, the high accuracy often reported on established benchmarks can mask deficiencies in visual perception and domain generalization.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2606.06696 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2606.06696v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06696 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 223 words
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