Multimodal RewardBench 2: Evaluating Omni Reward Models for Interleaved Text and Image
Yushi Hu, Reyhane Askari Hemmat, Melissa Hall, Emily Dinan, Luke Zettlemoyer, Marjan Ghazvininejad
Abstract
Reward models (RMs) are essential for training large language models (LLMs), but remain underexplored for omni models that handle interleaved image and text sequences. We introduce Multimodal RewardBench 2 (MMRB2), the first comprehensive benchmark for reward models on multimodal understanding and (interleaved) generation. MMRB2 spans four tasks: text-to-image, image editing, interleaved generation, and multimodal reasoning ("thinking-with-images"), providing 1,000 expert-annotated preference pairs per task from 23 models and agents across 21 source tasks. MMRB2 is designed with: (1) practical but challenging prompts; (2) responses from state-of-the-art models and agents; and (3) preference pairs with strong human-expert consensus, curated via an ensemble filtering strategy. Using MMRB2, we study existing judges for each subtask, including multimodal LLM-as-a-judge and models trained with human preferences. The latest Gemini 3 Pro attains 75-80% accuracy. GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro reach 66-75% accuracy, compared to >90% for humans, yet surpass the widely used GPT-4o (59%). The best performing open-source model Qwen3-VL-32B achieves similar accuracies as Gemini 2.5 Flash (64%). We also show that MMRB2 performance strongly correlates with downstream task success using Best-of-N sampling and conduct an in-depth analysis that shows key areas to improve the reward models going forward.
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Cited by top-tier papers4
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- Multi-Crit: Benchmarking Multimodal Judges on Pluralistic Criteria-FollowingTianyi Xiong, Yi Ge, Ming Li, Zuolong Zhang et al.CVPR 2026 · 16 citations
- SpatialReward: Bridging the Perception Gap in Online RL for Image Editing via Explicit Spatial ReasoningYancheng Long, Yankai Yang, Hongyang Wei, Wei Chen et al.ICML 2026 · 6 citations
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- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- Let's Verify Step by StepHunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yuri Burda, Harrison Edwards et al.ICLR 2024 · 3,045 citations
- ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image GenerationJiazheng Xu, Xiao Liu, Yuchen Wu, Yuxuan Tong et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,310 citations
- Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image GenerationYuval Kirstain, Adam Polyak, Uriel Singer, Shahbuland Matiana et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 1,192 citations
- CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image CaptioningJack Hessel, Ari Holtzman, Maxwell Forbes, Ronan Le Bras et al.EMNLP 2021 · 937 citations
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