Yuanzhi Liu, Shousheng Zhao, Bo Zhou +2cs.CV cs.AI
Evaluation benchmarks are essential for assessing vision-language models (VLMs), but most multimodal benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to temporal staleness, data contamination, and costly maintenance. We present MMBench-Live, a continuously evolving multimodal benchmark built by a multi-agent-driven automated pipeline. Our framework treats benchmark evolution as task-guided dataset construction, integrating structured benchmark specification, feedback-controlled real-time data acquisition, and verifiable QA generation with executable reasoning. To maintain cross-version comparability, we introduce a distribution-consistent update strategy that extracts task-related visual patterns from the original benchmark to guide data collection and filtering. Instantiated from MMBench, MMBench-Live contains 5.9K newly generated evaluation instances with a high answer correctness rate, while each update costs about USD 30 and takes 1-2 hours. Extensive evaluations show that MMBench-Live preserves stable model rankings, maintains semantic alignment with the original benchmark, and exhibits weaker contamination-related memorization signals, suggesting a practical and scalable paradigm for sustainable multimodal benchmark evolution. The project is available at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/MMBench-Live.
Static visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks age quickly: Once the items leak into training corpora, scores can reflect memorization rather than genuine visual ability, thus obscuring real progress. Rebuilding high-quality benchmarks such as V*Bench requires substantial human annotation, yet each static release can quickly become another leaked artifact. We propose ReKey, a live benchmark protocol that randomly regenerates the answer-bearing local detail, or visual key, in real images at evaluation time. Using human-validated edit slots, ReKey samples fresh instances with new answers, construction-grounded labels, and controlled visual-search difficulty. On V*Bench, the ReKey regenerated benchmark reveals a sharp score jump across eight frontier vision-language models (VLMs): The original items score 9.5--18.8 percentage points higher than the regenerated variants. By making the visual key renewable, ReKey keeps evaluation fresh as models and training data evolve.