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
- 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.
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.
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 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.
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.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Apr 2026 | 69.5 | AVMeme |
More in Audio and video
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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.
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- 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%