Incomplete14%Harbor: pendingMultimodalKnowledge & Reasoning

MS-Bench

We introduce MS-Bench, a benchmark for ancient manuscript analysis, revealing how LMMs handle philological tasks, highlighting the potential for future human-AI collaboration.

How to run

ltb · ms-bench
$ npm i -g lettokenburn-cli
$ ltb bench info ms-bench

External harness. No Harbor adapter has been generated for this benchmark yet. `ltb bench info` prints the known links.

Runs happen on your machine with your own subscription; only the score summary is pushed. CLI docs

Scores

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Every number links to where it was published. Low-confidence rows are muted and need per-cell verification.

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About

Analyzing ancient manuscripts has traditionally been a labor-intensive and time-consuming task for philologists. While recent advancements in LMMs have demonstrated their potential across diverse domains, their effectiveness in manuscript study remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce MS-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark co-developed with archaeologists, comprising 5,076 high-resolution images from 4th to 14th century and 9,982 expert-curated questions across nine sub-tasks aligned with archaeological workflows. Through four prompting strategies, we systematically evaluate 32 LMMs on their effectiveness, robustness, and cultural contextualization. Our analysis reveals scale-driven performance and reliability improvements, prompting strategies' impact on performance (CoT has two-sides effect, while visual retrieval-augmented prompts provide consistent boost), and task-specific preferences depending on LMM’s visual capabilities. Although current LMMs are not yet capable of replacing domain expertise, they demonstrate promising potential to accelerate manuscript research through future human–AI collaboration.