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.

This study intends to systematically disentangle pure logic reasoning and text understanding by investigating the contrast across abstract and contextualized logical problems from a comprehensive set of domains. We explore whether LLMs demonstrate genuine reasoning capabilities across various domains when the underlying logical structure remains constant. We focus on two main questions (1) Can abstract logical problems alone accurately benchmark LLMs’ reasoning ability in real-world scenarios, disentangled from contextual support in practical settings? (2) Does fine-tuning LLMs on abstract logic problems generalize to contextualized logic problems and vice versa? To investigate these questions, we focus on standard propositional logic, specifically propositional deductive and abductive logic reasoning. We construct datasets for both reasoning types with four difficulty levels across 12 distinct domains based on the Wikipedia categorization in addition to those with purely abstract variables. Our experiments aim to provide insights into disentangling context in logical reasoning, the genuine reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and their generalization potential. Coda and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ContextHub-957E.