The Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is currently experiencing rapid growth, driven by the advanced capabilities of language-based LLMs. Unlike their specialist predecessors, existing MLLMs are evolving towards a Multimodal Generalist paradigm. Initially limited to understanding multiple modalities, these models have advanced to not only comprehend but also generate across modalities. Their capabilities have expanded from coarse-grained to fine-grained multimodal understanding and from supporting singular modalities to accommodating a wide array of or even arbitrary modalities. To assess the capabilities of various MLLMs, a diverse array of benchmark test sets has been proposed. This leads to a critical question: Can we simply assume that higher performance across tasks indicates a stronger MLLM capability, bringing us closer to human-level AI? We argue that the answer is not as straightforward as it seems. In this project, we introduce an evaluation framework to delineate the capabilities and behaviors of current multimodal generalists. This framework, named General-Level, establishes 5-scale levels of MLLM performance and generality, offering a methodology to compare MLLMs and gauge the progress of existing systems towards more robust multimodal generalists and, ultimately, towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Central to our framework is the use of Synergy as the evaluative criterion, categorizing capabilities based on whether MLLMs preserve synergy across comprehension and generation, as well as across multimodal interactions. To evaluate the comprehensive abilities of various generalists, we present a massive multimodal benchmark, General-Bench, which encompasses a broader spectrum of skills, modalities, formats, and capabilities, including over 700 tasks and 325,800 instances. The evaluation results that involve over 100 existing state-of-the-art MLLMs uncover the capability rankings of generalists, highlighting the challenges in reaching genuine AI. We expect this project to pave the way for future research on next-generation multimodal foundation models, providing a robust infrastructure to accelerate the realization of AGI. Project Page: https://generalist.top/, Leaderboard: https://generalist.top/leaderboard/, Benchmark: https://huggingface.co/General-Level/.

Empathetic Response Generation (ERG) is one of the key tasks of the affective computing area, which aims to produce emotionally nuanced and compassionate responses to user's queries. However, existing ERG research is predominantly confined to the singleton text modality, limiting its effectiveness since human emotions are inherently conveyed through multiple modalities. To combat this, we introduce an avatar-based Multimodal ERG (MERG) task, entailing rich text, speech, and facial vision information. We first present a large-scale high-quality benchmark dataset, AvaMERG, which extends traditional text ERG by incorporating authentic human speech audio and dynamic talking-face avatar videos, encompassing a diverse range of avatar profiles and broadly covering various topics of real-world scenarios. Further, we deliberately tailor a system, named Empatheia, for MERG. Built upon a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with multimodal encoder, speech and avatar generators, Empatheia performs end-to-end MERG, with Chain-of-Empathetic reasoning mechanism integrated for enhanced empathy understanding and reasoning.Finally, we devise a list of empathetic-enhanced tuning strategies, strengthening the capabilities of emotional accuracy and content, avatar-profile consistency across modalities. Experimental results on AvaMERG data demonstrate that Empatheia consistently shows superior performance than baseline methods on both textual ERG and MERG. All data and code are open at https://AvaMERG.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now being considered as judges of high efficiency to evaluate the quality of answers generated by candidate models. However, their judgments may be influenced by complex scenarios and inherent biases, raising concerns about their reliability. This study aims to bridge this gap by introducing four unexplored factors and examining the performance of LLMs as judges, namely answer quantity, inducing statements, judging strategy, and judging style. Additionally, we introduce a new dimension of question difficulty to provide a more comprehensive understanding of LLMs’ judgments across varying question intricacies. We employ ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude-2 as judges and conduct experiments on Vicuna Benchmark and MT-bench. Our study reveals that LLMs’ judging abilities are susceptible to the influence of these four factors, and analyzing from the newly proposed dimension of question difficulty is highly necessary. We also provide valuable insights into optimizing LLMs’ performance as judges, enhancing their reliability and adaptability across diverse evaluation scenarios.

Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models, which either compute mention similarity directly or enhance mention representation by extracting event arguments (such as location, time, agent, and patient), lackingmthe ability to utilize document-level information. As a result, they struggle to capture long-distance dependencies. This shortcoming leads to their underwhelming performance in determining coreference for the events where their argument information relies on long-distance dependencies. In light of these limitations, we propose the construction of document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model the structural and semantic information of documents. Subsequently, cross-document heterogeneous graphs are constructed and GAT is utilized to learn the representations of events. Finally, a pair scorer calculates the similarity between each pair of events and co-referred events can be recognized using standard clustering algorithm. Additionally, as the existing cross-document event coreference datasets are limited to English, we have developed a large-scale Chinese cross-document event coreference dataset to fill this gap, which comprises 53,066 event mentions and 4,476 clusters. After applying our model on the English and Chinese datasets respectively, it outperforms all baselines by large margins.

With the increasing popularity of live streaming, the interactions from viewers during a live streaming can provide more specific and constructive feedback for both the streamer and platform. In such scenario, the primary and most direct feedback method from the audience is through comments. Thus, mining these live streaming comments to unearth the intentions behind them and, in turn, aiding streamers to enhance their live streaming quality is significant for the well development of live streaming ecosystem. To this end, we introduce the MMLSCU dataset, containing 50,129 intention-annotated comments across multiple modalities (text, images, vi-deos, audio) from eight streaming domains. Using multimodal pretrained large model and drawing inspiration from the Chain of Thoughts (CoT) concept, we implement an end-to-end model to sequentially perform the following tasks: viewer comment intent detection ➛ intent cause mining ➛ viewer comment explanation ➛ streamer policy suggestion. We employ distinct branches for video and audio to process their respective modalities. After obtaining the video and audio representations, we conduct a multimodal fusion with the comment. This integrated data is then fed into the large language model to perform inference across the four tasks following the CoT framework. Experimental results indicate that our model outperforms three multimodal classification baselines on comment intent detection and streamer policy suggestion, and one multimodal generation baselines on intent cause mining and viewer comment explanation. Compared to the models using only text, our multimodal setting yields superior outcomes. Moreover, incorporating CoT allows our model to enhance comment interpretation and more precise suggestions for the streamers. Our proposed dataset and model will bring new research attention on multimodal live streaming comment understanding.