4D-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for 4D Object Understanding

Resource information

Authors

Wenxuan Zhu, Bing Li, Cheng Zheng, Jinjie Mai, Jun Chen, Letian Jiang, Abdullah Hamdi, Sara Rojas Martinez, Chia-Wen Lin, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Bernard Ghanem

Research area

Computer vision

Application domain

General AI research

AI methods

Large language models

Research topics

cs.CV

arXiv record date

2025-03-22

Publication date

2025-03-22

Publication

arXiv

Upstream last modified

Mar 25, 2025

Last record update

Nov 3, 2026

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive 2D image/video understanding capabilities. However, there are no publicly standardized benchmarks to assess the abilities of MLLMs in understanding the 4D objects (3D objects with temporal evolution over time). In this paper, we introduce 4D-Bench, the first benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs in 4D object understanding, featuring tasks in 4D object Question Answering (4D object QA) and 4D object captioning. 4D-Bench provides 4D objects with diverse categories, high-quality annotations, and tasks necessitating multi-view spatial-temporal understanding, different from existing 2D image/video-based benchmarks. With 4D-Bench, we evaluate a wide range of open-source and closed-source MLLMs. The results from the 4D object captioning experiment indicate that MLLMs generally exhibit weaker temporal understanding compared to their appearance understanding, notably, while open-source models approach closed-source performance in appearance understanding, they show larger performance gaps in temporal understanding. 4D object QA yields surprising findings: even with simple single-object videos, MLLMs perform poorly, with state-of-the-art GPT-4o achieving only 63% accuracy compared to the human baseline of 91%. These findings highlight a substantial gap in 4D object understanding and the need for further advancements in MLLMs.