Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities
Chi-Min Chan, Yujin Zhou, Pengcheng Wen, Boqin Yin, Jiaming Ji, Juntao Dai, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
Abstract
The rise of Omni-modality Large Language Models (OLLMs) capable of jointly processing text, audio, and visual inputs marks a major step toward general intelligence. Ensuring their alignment with human preferences requires effective Omni-modality Reward Models (ORMs), which serve as surrogates for human judgment to guide OLLMs behavior. However, ORMs evaluation remains underdeveloped in the previous literature. Existing benchmarks are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks, restricting comprehensive assessment for ORMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. In short, our contributions are threefold: (1) a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data; (2) extensive experiments on 20+ models, including inherently omni-modal and modality-bridged systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that current OLLMs fall short as reward models, revealing several common failure modes such as perception failure, modality dominance failure, and cross-modal fusion failure; and (3) strong correlations between Omni-RewardBench scores and downstream performance (IID r = 0.94, OOD r = 0.72), validating its reliability as a predictor of real-world capability and alignment quality.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.636
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 13962–13984
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.636/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Chi-Min Chan, Yujin Zhou, Pengcheng Wen, Boqin Yin, Jiaming Ji, Juntao Dai, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, and Yike Guo. 2026. Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13962–13984, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities (Chan et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.636.pdf