Benchmark Almanac

Perception Test MCVQA

Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% leads since Jul 2025 Dropped

Models answer multiple-choice questions about real-world videos filmed to show perceptually interesting situations. Scored by top-1 accuracy.

Multiple-choice video QA task of the Perception Test benchmark.

In the authors’ words

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, SeViLA, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a substantial gap in performance (91.4% vs 46.2%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baseline code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test

Abstract of Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models (arXiv:2305.13786, CC0)
Made by Google DeepMind Released May 2023 Video understanding Public tasks plus a private test set Last in a launch post Jan 2025 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Jul 2025 Scores refreshed 2 Nov 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
Multiple choice
6
Models scored in lab cards
1
Launch post lists it, from 1 lab
6
System cards report it, from 2 labs

Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 78.4% among models released by Jun 2025

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.

The newest model with a score here came out in Jun 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4%
  2. 2 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1%
  3. 3 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2%
  4. 4 Gemma 3 27B 58.1%
  5. 5 Gemma 3 12B 54.9%
  6. 6 Gemma 3 4B 50.6%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4% Jul 2025 Model card
2 Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1% Jul 2025 Model card
3 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2% Jan 2025 Model card
4 Gemma 3 27B 58.1% Mar 2025 Model card
5 Gemma 3 12B 54.9% Mar 2025 Model card
6 Gemma 3 4B 50.6% Mar 2025 Model card

The benchmark's own leaderboard has 42 entries, 1 of them models we track. We plot every source in the charts below.

2 models have held number one since its release in May 2023

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Qwen Google DeepMind
Lab claims Not tested since Jul 2025

Scores over time

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

On the benchmark’s own leaderboard Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) Gemini 2.5 Pro Qwen2.5-VL-72B VideoLLAMA3-7B 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2024 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) Gemini 2.5 Pro VideoLLAMA3-7B

No launch post has listed it since Jan 2025

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.

Qwen
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
28 Jan 2025 Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2 PerceptionTest_test

6 system cards report it, from 2 labs

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
7 Jul 2025 Gemini 2.5 Pro technical report 78.4 Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) Capabilities
7 Jul 2025 Gemini 2.5 Flash technical report 75.1 Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) Capabilities
25 Mar 2025 Gemma 3 4B technical report 50.6 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
25 Mar 2025 Gemma 3 27B technical report 58.1 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
25 Mar 2025 Gemma 3 12B technical report 54.9 Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) Capabilities
19 Feb 2025 Qwen2.5-VL-72B technical report 73.2 PerceptionTest test (Table 8) Capabilities

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%