MAVEN: A Macro-Societal Value Evaluation Framework of Multimodal Content with Compact Aligned Evaluators
Zijuan Zhao, Zheren Fu, Hou Xia, Licheng Zhang, Yi Liu, Zhendong Mao
Abstract
Assessing whether multimodal content aligns with macro-societal values, such as peace, justice, and freedom, has become an increasingly urgent challenge. Existing frameworks are largely confined to safety-oriented taxonomies, text-only psychometric probes, or single-label classification. Therefore, we propose MAVEN, a hierarchical framework for macro-societal value evaluation of multimodal content, grounded in international human-rights instruments and cultural value theory. MAVEN organizes values into 6 primary dimensions and 72 secondary indicators, supporting multi-level quantitative scoring. Building on MAVEN, we construct a human-verified multimodal benchmark and a soft-match metric to evaluate VLMs' assessments across value dimensions. For evaluator optimization, we propose a span-adaptive variant of multi-level preference optimization for evaluator distillation, together with a training-free multi-role consensus strategy at inference time. We evaluate existing open- and closed-source VLMs on our benchmark, revealing shared tendencies and clear differences in macro-societal value judgments. Experiments show that our compact 2B evaluator matches its 8B counterpart in the same family and approaches frontier closed-source VLMs, offering a practical path toward scalable macro-societal value evaluation. Our SA-MDPO implementation and MacroValue-Bench are available at https://github.com/zzzzzzzzjj/MAVEN.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.