IC-521MLLMs show asymmetric modality-specific perception, with Gemini Pro achieving 69.97% on visual-only questions but only 24.45% on audio-only, while Video-Chat outperforms ChatUniVi on audio despite worse visual scores
Using the synthetic subsets of MMWorld, the paper isolates audio and visual perception by generating QA pairs from a single modality. Gemini Pro performs best on visual-only questions (69.97% average) but drops to 24.45% on audio-only. Video-Chat shows better audio perception (38.82%) than ChatUniVi (31.82%) despite worse visual perception (39.07% vs 48.44%), which the authors attribute to Video-Chat's use of the Whisper speech recognition model. Video-LLaMA and Otter perform near or below random on both modalities.
Evidence
correlational
Key metric
Gemini Pro: 69.97% visual vs 24.45% audio; Video-Chat: 38.82% audio vs 39.07% visual; ChatUniVi: 31.82% audio vs 48.44% visual; random: 32.44% audio, 30.91% visual
Caveat
Only 5 models were evaluated on the synthetic subsets (Video-Chat, ChatUniVi, Video-LLaMA, Otter, Gemini Pro).