MMBU: A Massive Multi-modal Biomedical Understanding Benchmark to Probe the Perception Capabilities of Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Vision and language models (VLMs) hold immense promise to transform biomedical imaging workflows, from detecting lesions in chest X-rays to profiling cellular features in microscopy. Realizing this potential, however, requires robust and fine-grained visual perception. Models need to correctly interpret subtle features in images, and they must do so across diverse biomedical modalities, scales, and contexts. Nevertheless, current benchmarks remain limited. To address these gaps, we introduce the Massive Multimodal Biomedical Understanding (MMBU) benchmark. It is the largest biomedical vision and language benchmark to date, covering 35 submodalities with rich structured metadata. It includes both open and closed versions of ungrounded classification, grounded classification, and object detection, enabling systematic evaluation of model performance across biological scales, clinical settings, and imaging modalities. Evaluating 16 open-weight and 5 frontier VLMs in the main comparison, we find that while medical adaptation provides measurable gains for some models, the high accuracy often reported on established benchmarks can mask deficiencies in visual perception and domain generalization. We further define an open-ended MMBU hard set, split into a released public subset and a held-out private subset, to stress-test frontier models.