Chengjun Pan


2026

Evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is becoming increasingly expensive as benchmarks grow in scale and cross-modality complexity. Inspired by structuralism in cognitive psychology, we tackle this difficulty with an adaptive evaluation framework for efficient benchmarking, namely AutoJudger. Instead of passively scoring on a fixed test set, AutoJudger treats evaluation as an interview-like process by keeping a hypothesized ability structure of the evaluated model and actively selecting the informative questions so as to refine these ability boundaries. Specifically, AutoJudger has three core components: ability decomposition to organize evaluation along meaningful capability dimensions, ability estimation to maintain an up-to-date quantitative profile of the model competence, and adaptive question selection to choose the most informative questions. To operationalize this paradigm, we introduce A2-Judger, a novel MLLM-based Agentic instantiation of AutoJudger equipped with semantic-aware retrieval and dynamic memory. Experiments on four representative multimodal benchmarks show that A2-Judger significantly improves sample efficiency while maintaining reliable evaluation results.