Benchmark Almanac

AVMeme Exam

Models answer questions about over one thousand iconic internet sounds and videos, from surface content to context, emotion, usage and world knowledge.

Accepted to COLM 2026. Clips cover speech, songs, music and sound effects in several languages. The scoring field is a guess.

In the authors’ words

Internet audio-visual clips convey meaning through time-varying sound and motion, which extend beyond what text alone can represent. To examine whether AI models can understand such signals in human cultural contexts, we introduce AVMeme Exam, a human-curated benchmark of over one thousand iconic Internet sounds and videos spanning speech, songs, music, and sound effects. Each meme is paired with a unique Q&A assessing levels of understanding from surface content to context and emotion to usage and world knowledge, along with metadata such as original year, transcript, summary, and sensitivity. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) alongside human participants using this benchmark. Our results reveal a consistent limitation: current models perform poorly on textless music and sound effects, and struggle to think in context and in culture compared to surface content. These findings highlight a key gap in human-aligned multimodal intelligence and call for models that can perceive contextually and culturally beyond the surface of what they hear and see. Project page: avmemeexam.github.io/public

Abstract of AVMeme Exam: A Multimodal Multilingual Multicultural Benchmark for LLMs' Contextual and Cultural Knowledge and Thinking (arXiv:2601.17645, CC0)
Made by Jiang et al. (AVMeme Exam team) Released Jan 2026 Audio understanding and voice Last in a launch post Apr 2026 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Apr 2026
Level
Everyday Most adults, without training
Scored
Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
Answers
Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
1
Model scored in lab cards
1
Launch post lists it, from 1 lab

Seed2.0 Lite (0428) leads with 69.5%

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

  1. 1 Seed2.0 Lite (0428) 69.5%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Seed2.0 Lite (0428) 69.5% Apr 2026 Model card

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) Seed2.0 Lite (0428) 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) Seed2.0 Lite (0428)

Labs headline it less often now, last in Apr 2026

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

ByteDance Seed
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
28 Apr 2026 Seed2.0 Lite (0428) 69.5 AVMeme

More in Audio and video

All 168 in Audio and video
  • Video-MMMU In use 300 expert-level lecture videos with questions testing perception, comprehension and adaptation of knowledge. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 88.7%
  • LVBench In use Hours-long video understanding with multiple-choice questions on reasoning, grounding and summarization. Gemini 4 Argon 91.7%
  • MMVU In use 3,000 expert-annotated questions on videos across 27 disciplines. Multiple-choice and open-ended accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 82.4%
  • MLVU In use Multi-task long video understanding (minutes to hours) with multiple-choice and generation tasks. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 90.8%
  • VoiceBench In use Spoken instructions with speaker, environment and content variation. Voice assistant responses scored by GPT judge or rules. Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus 93.1%
  • TVBench In use Models answer multiple-choice questions on 10 temporal video tasks, such as action counting and ordering, that static frames cannot solve. Scored by accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 81.9%