MMLONGCITE: A Benchmark for Evaluating Faithfulness of Long-Context Vision-Language Models

📢 News

• [May, 2026] Major update to MMLongCite: we extend the benchmark up to 128K tokens and refine the task taxonomy for more comprehensive faithfulness evaluation.

• [October, 2025] Code and data of MMLongCite are now publicly available.

🚀 Quick Navigation

• 🔍 Benchmark Overview
• ⚙️ Preparation
  • Environment Setup
  • Data Preparation
• 🤖️ Inference & Evaluation
  • Inference
  • Evaluation
• 📝 Citation
• 🏷️ License

🔍 Benchmark Overview

MMLongCite is a benchmark for evaluating the faithfulness of long-context vision-language models (LCVLMs) through multimodal citation generation. The benchmark contains 2,280 examples across 8 tasks, covering image-only, image-text interleaved, and video-only contexts. Context lengths span from 8K to 128K tokens. We also introduce MMLongCite-HR, a high-resolution setting that evaluates fine-grained visual grounding in dense stitched-image inputs. MMLongCite-HR provides two modes: the easy mode stitches 4 images into a single large image with an average resolution of 1K–2K, while the hard mode stitches 16 images into a single large image with an average resolution of 2K–4K.

Figure 1: Task format in MMLongCite.

Figure 2: Statistics of tasks in MMLongCite.

⚙️ Preparation

Environment

Make sure you are in this project folder and then run:

conda activate /your/env_name 
pip install -r requirements.txt

Data Prepare

You can download MMLongCite data from 🤗 Hugging face. Once downloaded, place the data in the root directory of the repository.

The folder structure is organized as follows:

project/
├── data/                     # Downloaded from Huggingface
│   ├── mmlongcite/           
│   └── mmlongcite-hr/ 
│       ├── easy/             
│       └── hard/             
├── images/                   # Downloaded from Huggingface
│   ├── mmlongcite/           
│   └── mmlongcite-hr/ 
│       ├── easy/             
│       └── hard/             
├── scripts/                      
│   ├── infer.sh                  
│   └── eval.sh                   
├── src/                      # Source code
├── results/                  # Benchmark inference outputs
└── readme.md                 # Documentation

All data in MMLongCite follows the format below:

• id: A unique identifier for the data sample.

• context: A list containing all the contextual information (e.g., images, text) needed to answer the question.

• question: A list containing the specific question to be answered, which may include text and multiple-choice options.

• ground_truth: The correct answer for the question.

• meta: A dictionary containing additional information for each case, including:

  • text_length: The length of text content within the context.

  • mm_length: The length of multi-modal content within the context.

  • evidence_ids: A list of position identifiers indicating where the supporting evidence is located within the long context.

Here is an example:

{
    "id": 7,
    "context": [
        {
            "type": "image",
            "image": "image/mmlongcite/longdocurl/4120884_59.png"
        },
        ...
    ],
    "question": [
        {
            "type": "text",
            "text": "Which para title discusses non-GAAP financial measures in the document?"
        }
    ]
    "ground_truth": "Non-US. GAAP Financial Measures",
    "meta": {
      "text_length": 0,
      "mm_length": 11760,
      "evidence_ids": [
        7,
        12
      ]
    }
}

🤖️ Inference & Evaluation

Inference

We provide a vLLM-based inference script in src/infer_vllm.py. Run inference on the main MMLongCite benchmark:

python src/infer_vllm.py \
  --model <model_name> \
  --dataset longdocurl mmlongbench-doc slidevqa 2wikimultihopqa mm-niah visual-haystack video-mme longvideobench

Run inference on MMLongCite-HR:

python src/infer_vllm.py \
  --model <model_name> \
  --dataset longdocurl-hr-easy longdocurl-hr-hard \
            2wikimultihopqa-hr-easy 2wikimultihopqa-hr-hard \
            visual-haystack-hr-easy visual-haystack-hr-hard \
            longvideobench-hr-easy longvideobench-hr-hard

For models with thinking mode enabled:

python src/infer_vllm.py \
  --model <model_name> \
  --dataset longdocurl mmlongbench-doc slidevqa 2wikimultihopqa mm-niah visual-haystack video-mme longvideobench \
  --thinking

Prediction files are saved to:

results/<dataset>/<model_name>.json
results/<dataset>/<model_name>_thinking.json

You can also refer to the example script:

bash script/infer.sh

Evaluation

MMLongCite evaluates both citation quality and answer correctness. We use GPT-5.2 as the judge model, and the evaluation scripts support passing in multiple API keys to accelerate evaluation.

Citation Evaluation

python src/eval_cite.py \
  --model <model_name> \
  --task <dataset_name> \
  --api_keys <key1> <key2> \
  --api_base_url <api_base_url>

This produces:

results/<dataset_name>/<model_name>_citation_result.json
results/<dataset_name>/<model_name>_citation_score.json

Correctness Evaluation

python src/eval_correct.py \
  --model <model_name> \
  --task <dataset_name> \
  --api_keys <key1> <key2> \
  --api_base_url <api_base_url>

This produces:

results/<dataset_name>/<model_name>_correctness_result.json
results/<dataset_name>/<model_name>_correctness_score.json

Among the outputs, citation_result.json and correctness_result.json store per-case metrics for every example, while citation_score.json and correctness_score.json store the overall aggregated metrics for each task. Example evaluation commands are provided in:

bash script/eval.sh

📝 Citation

If you find our work helpful, please cite our paper:

@article{zhou2025mmlongcite,
  title={MMLongCite: A Benchmark for Evaluating Fidelity of Long-Context Vision-Language Models},
  author={Zhou, Keyan and Tang, Zecheng and Ming, Lingfeng and Zhou, Guanghao and Chen, Qiguang and Qiao, Dan and Yang, Zheming and Qin, Libo and Qiu, Minghui and Li, Juntao and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13276},
  year={2025}
}

🏷️ License

All code within this repository is under Apache License 2.0.