MUCAR: Benchmarking Multilingual Cross-Modal Ambiguity Resolution for Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant advances across numerous vision-language tasks. MLLMs have shown promising capability in aligning visual and textual modalities, allowing them to process image-text pairs with clear and explicit meanings. However, resolving the inherent ambiguities present in real-world language and visual contexts remains a challenge. Existing multimodal benchmarks typically overlook linguistic and visual ambiguities, relying mainly on unimodal context for disambiguation and thus failing to exploit the mutual clarification potential between modalities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MUCAR, a novel and challenging benchmark designed explicitly for evaluating multimodal ambiguity resolution across multilingual and cross-modal scenarios. MUCAR includes first a multilingual dataset where ambiguous textual expressions are uniquely resolved by corresponding visual contexts, and second a dual-ambiguity dataset that systematically pairs ambiguous images with ambiguous textual contexts, with each combination carefully constructed to yield a single, clear interpretation through mutual disambiguation. Extensive evaluations involving 19 state-of-the-art multimodal models--encompassing both open-source and proprietary architectures--reveal substantial gaps compared to human-level performance, highlighting the need for future research into more sophisticated cross-modal ambiguity comprehension methods, further pushing the boundaries of multimodal reasoning.