TL;DR.
1. Gen → Und: Better images lead to better reasoning.
2. Und → Gen: Understanding drives visual correctness.
3. Intermediates matter: Even imperfect “working visuals” help.
4. Current landscape: Understanding-heavy, generation-bottlenecked.
TL;DR.
1. Gen → Und: Better images lead to better reasoning.
2. Und → Gen: Understanding drives visual correctness.
3. Intermediates matter: Even imperfect “working visuals” help.
4. Current landscape: Understanding-heavy, generation-bottlenecked.
Unified multimodal models aim to jointly enable visual understanding and generation, yet current benchmarks rarely examine their true integration. Existing evaluations either treat the two abilities in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. To address this gap, we present Uni-MMMU, a comprehensive and discipline-aware benchmark that systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains, including science, coding, mathematics, and puzzles. Each task is bidirectionally coupled, demanding models to (i) leverage conceptual understanding to guide precise visual synthesis, or (ii) utilize generation as a cognitive scaffold for analytical reasoning. Uni-MMMU incorporates verifiable intermediate reasoning steps, unique ground truths, and a reproducible scoring protocol for both textual and visual outputs. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art unified, generation-only, and understanding-only models, we reveal substantial performance disparities and cross-modal dependencies, offering new insights into when and how these abilities reinforce one another, and establishing a reliable foundation for advancing unified models.
| MMU | Gen&Edit | Multi-Turn | Dual Eval | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMMU | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ |
| WISE | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ |
| RISEBench | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ |
| OpenING | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ |
| MME-Unify | ✔ | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ |
| UniEval | ✔ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ |
| Uni-MMMU | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
We compare across four key dimensions: multimodal understanding (MMU), generation and editing (Gen&Edit), multi-turn evaluation (Multi-Turn), and dual evaluation of the process and result (Dual Eval).
| Model | Generation aids Understanding | Understanding aids Generation | Avg. | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jigsaw (Image) | Jigsaw (Text) | Maze Nav. (Image) | Maze Nav. (Text) | Sliding (Image) | Sliding (Text) | Math (Image) | Math (Text) | Science (Reasoning) | Science (Text) | Science (Image) | Code (Text) | Code (Shape&Color) | Code (Position) | ||
| Bagel | 56.0 | 48.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 5.6/1.2 | 8.5 | 32.8 | 63.1 | 57.3 | 28.0 | 53.0 | 2.2 | 1.8 | 22.0 |
| OmniGen2 | 70.3 | 48.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 4.2 | 5.7 | 42.0 | 33.1 | 8.9 | 17.0 | 13.2 | 13.3 | 16.0 |
| Ovis-U1 | 57.0 | 53.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 12.5/0 | 0.0/0.0 | 0.0/0.0 | 7.1 | 3.5 | 42.7 | 36.3 | 24.8 | 18.0 | 8.0 | 10.5 | 16.5 |
| Qwen-Image-Edit | 72.0 | 43.3 | 0.0/0.0 | 13.8/0.7 | 0.0/0.0 | 3.6/0.0 | 12.8 | 8.5 | 61.1 | 50.3 | 26.7 | 36.0 | 23.5 | 20.3 | 26.3 |
| nano-banana | 48.9 | 57.0 | 1.8/0.0 | 23.3/4.7 | 1.0/0.0 | 6.2/0.0 | 21.4 | 47.8 | 91.7 | 79.6 | 43.9 | 75.0 | 36.5 | 33.7 | 37.3 |
| GPT4.1 + GPT-image | 80.7 | 80.0 | 0.8/0.7 | 49.0/18.1 | 8.4/0.0 | 25.1/1.2 | 25.7 | 17.1 | 93.6 | 91.1 | 61.8 | 71.6 | 83.6 | 68.6 | 44.1 |
All scores are normalized to a [0, 100] scale for consistency. For multi-step tasks (Maze Navigation, Sliding Puzzle), scores in the format a/b represent step-level accuracy / sample-level accuracy.
Maze Navigation
Code Rendering
Science
Math
Sliding Puzzles
If you find our work useful, please consider citing our paper:
@article{zou2025unimmmumassivemultidisciplinemultimodal,
title={{Uni-MMMU}: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark},
author = {Kai Zou and Ziqi Huang and Yuhao Dong and Shulin Tian and Dian Zheng and Hongbo Liu and Jingwen He and Bin Liu and Yu Qiao and Ziwei Liu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13759},
year = {2025}
}