ACL2026

MMTutorBench: The First Multimodal Benchmark for AI Math Tutoring

Tengchao Yang, Sichen Guo, Mengzhao Jia, Jiaming Su, Yuanyang Liu, Zhihan Zhang, Meng Jiang

2 citations

Abstract

Effective math tutoring requires not only solving problems but also diagnosing students' difficulties and guiding them step by step. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise, existing benchmarks largely overlook these tutoring skills. We introduce MMTutorBench, the first benchmark for AI math tutoring, consisting of 770 problems built around pedagogically significant keysteps. Each problem is paired with problemspecific rubrics that enable fine-grained evaluation across six dimensions, and structured into three tasks-Insight Discovery, Operation Formulation, and Operation Execution. We evaluate 12 leading MLLMs and find clear performance gaps between proprietary and opensource systems, substantial room compared to human tutors, and consistent trends across input variants: OCR pipelines degrade tutoring quality, few-shot prompting yields limited gains, and our rubric-based LLM-as-a-Judge proves highly reliable. These results highlight both the difficulty and diagnostic value of MMTutor-Bench for advancing AI tutoring. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ TangciuYueng/MMTutorBench .