WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various visionlanguage tasks. However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored. We introduce Wild-Score, the first in-the-wild multimodal symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs' capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy, comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies. Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering, enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs' symbolic music understanding. Empirical benchmarking of state-ofthe-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis. We release the dataset 1 and code 2 .