ADAM: A Diverse Archive of Mankind for Evaluating and Enhancing LLMs in Biographical Reasoning
This addresses the critical yet underexplored problem of factual knowledge in biographies for AI researchers and developers, establishing the first benchmark and framework for cognitively, culturally, and multimodally grounded evaluation.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating and improving multimodal large language models in biographical reasoning by introducing ADAM, a framework with a multilingual multimodal dataset covering over 4 million individuals and a cognitively structured benchmark. Experiments showed that their retrieval-augmented generation system (AdamRAG) substantially improved open-source models and modestly benefited closed-source ones, with the largest gains on lower-order reasoning.
We introduce ADAM (A Diverse Archive of Mankind), a framework for evaluating and improving multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in biographical reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically examine LLM capabilities in biography, a critical yet underexplored dimension of factual knowledge. At its core, AdamDB is a multilingual and multimodal dataset covering over 4 million individuals across geography, time, and profession, while AdamBench provides cognitively structured evaluations based on Bloom's taxonomy, spanning six reasoning levels in both English and native languages. To address hallucinations, particularly for lesser-known individuals, we propose AdamRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation system tailored to biographical contexts. Experiments show that AdamRAG substantially improves open-source models and modestly benefits closed-source ones, with the largest gains on lower-order reasoning. Popularity strongly mediates accuracy, and multimodal input via face images offers smaller, less consistent improvements than retrieval. ADAM establishes the first benchmark and framework for cognitively, culturally, and multimodally grounded biographical evaluation, advancing the development of multilingual, accurate, and hallucination-resistant MLLMs.