CHROMIC: Chronological Reasoning Across Multi-Panel Comics

AbstractLarge-scale vision–language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on various reasoning tasks. However, most studies focus on natural photographic images and pay limited attention to multi-panel visual narratives such as comics. This leaves a clear gap in our understanding of how well LVLMs perform chronological reasoning across comic panels. To address this, we introduce **ChrOMIC**, a new benchmark dataset for **chro**nological reasoning in multi-panel **comic**s. It covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles. To ensure high-quality annotations, we customized a human–AI collaborative annotation process tailored to the characteristics of the two comic styles. We further introduce three core tasks: Description Reordering and Panel Reordering, which jointly assess models’ ability to understand chronological order in panel sequences, and Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA), which evaluates narrative-level reasoning. We evaluate a range of open-source and commercial LVLMs on ChrOMIC, and find that even the leading models struggle with panel-based chronological reasoning. Further analysis reveals key limitations, including weak visual action understanding and frequent hallucinations in fine-grained visual interpretation.