mmJEE-Eval: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

TL;DR

mmJEE-Eval is a bilingual multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate scientific reasoning in vision-language models, revealing significant gaps in reasoning capabilities beyond pattern-matching on complex JEE questions.

Contribution

The paper introduces mmJEE-Eval, a novel bilingual benchmark with complex science questions, to better assess true reasoning in vision-language models beyond existing benchmarks.

Findings

State-of-the-art models achieve high accuracy on simple questions.

Open-source models plateau at 37-45% accuracy on complex questions.

Closed models like GPT-5 show limited error correction under increased reasoning load.

Abstract

Contemporary vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks (78-85\% accuracy on MMMU, MathVista). Yet, these results fail to sufficiently distinguish true scientific reasoning articulation capabilities from pattern-matching. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{mmJEE-Eval}, a multimodal bilingual (English and Hindi) benchmark comprising 1,460 questions from India's JEE Advanced examination (2019-2025) spanning pre-college Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics domains. Our evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art models reveals that while frontier VLMs (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash) achieve 77-84\% accuracy on held-out 2025 questions, open-source models plateau at 37-45\% despite scaling to 400B parameters, a significant difference not observed on existing benchmarks. While closed frontiers from Google and OpenAI show high problem-solving accuracies (up to 100\% pass@3 scores), they fully collapse when the reasoning load is increased meta-cognitively (GPT-5 fixes just 5.2\% errors). Systematic ablations show mmJEE-Eval's difficulty stems from complexity and reasoning depth rather than memorization. Effectively, our benchmark segregates superior training and reasoning methodologies where alternatives fail. We publicly release our code and data: https://mmjee-eval.github.io