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/
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Bibkey:
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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.636.pdf
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