Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in open-ended conversation, generating more accurate and personalized responses. However, their abilities to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions within real-world scenarios remain underexplored. This paper introduces MMRC, a Multi-Modal Real-world Conversation benchmark for evaluating six core open-ended abilities of MLLMs: information extraction, multi-turn reasoning, information update, image management, memory recall, and answer refusal. With data collected from real-world scenarios, MMRC comprises 5,120 conversations and 28,720 corresponding manually labeled questions, posing a significant challenge to existing MLLMs. Evaluations on 20 MLLMs in MMRC indicate an accuracy drop during open-ended interactions. We identify four common failure patterns: long-term memory degradation, inadequacies in updating factual knowledge, accumulated assumption of error propagation, and reluctance to “say no.” To mitigate these issues, we propose a simple yet effective NOTE-TAKING strategy, which can record key information from the conversation and remind the model during its responses, enhancing conversational capabilities. Experiments across six MLLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements.

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as contextualizing literature, generating ideas, validating ideas, interpreting results, and planning new research. Scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured, making it difficult to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To meet this challenge, we introduce **MASSW**, a comprehensive dataset of **M**ulti-**A**spect **S**ummarization of **S**cientific **W**orkflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications – *context, key idea, method, outcome*, and *projected impact* – which correspond to five key steps in a research workflow. We show that these LLM-extract summaries have a comparable quality to human annotations, and they facilitate a variety of downstream tasks, corresponding to different types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. Overall, MASSW demonstrates decent utility as a pre-computed and trustful resource for the AI4Science community to create and benchmark a wide-range of new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation. Our code and datasets are made available anonymously: [link](https://osf.io/7ygrq/?view_only=3d8261a0ea09489fa67ece2c68235afa).