MS-Bench: Evaluating LMMs in Ancient Manuscript Study through a Dunhuang Case Study

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.