Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.

综合评估多模态模型的能力，包括基本技能、信息流和使用案例，通过30项任务进行全面实验，得出多模态互动、使用案例和需要推理和外部知识的任务的具有挑战性，数据和模型规模的益处，以及指导调整对性能的影响等方面的可操作见解。

HEMM: 综合评估多模态基础模型