Scientific Reasoning: Assessment of Multimodal Generative LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) can answer questions and reason about complex tasks, also from the scientific domain. We assess several multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) on ScienceQA and find that Gemini models show the highest accuracy with little context, and the highest textual similarity to human explanations with richer context. Adapter-tuning of smaller MLLMs did not lead to any reliable performance. Training from Gemini outputs consistently underperformed training from the original data.