Perception Test MCVQA
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
- 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
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:
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- GPT-6.1 Terra
- GPT-6.1 Sol
- and 16 more
- 1
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 78.4%
- 2
Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 75.1%
- 3
Qwen2.5-VL-72B 73.2%
- 4
Gemma 3 27B 58.1%
- 5
Gemma 3 12B 54.9%
- 6
Gemma 3 4B 50.6%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 78.4% | Jul 2025 | Model card | |
| 2 | | 75.1% | Jul 2025 | Model card | |
| 3 | | 73.2% | Jan 2025 | Model card | |
| 4 | | 58.1% | Mar 2025 | Model card | |
| 5 | | 54.9% | Mar 2025 | Model card | |
| 6 | | 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.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
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.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Jan 2025 | 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.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Jul 2025 | | 78.4 | Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) | Capabilities |
| 7 Jul 2025 | | 75.1 | Perception Test, test, 0-shot, visual-only (Table 6) | Capabilities |
| 25 Mar 2025 | | 50.6 | Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) | Capabilities |
| 25 Mar 2025 | | 58.1 | Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) | Capabilities |
| 25 Mar 2025 | | 54.9 | Perception Test MCVQA, IT, 0-shot, 16 frames, top-1 accuracy (Table 17) | Capabilities |
| 19 Feb 2025 | | 73.2 | PerceptionTest test (Table 8) | Capabilities |
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