arXiv Computer Vision

MechReason: Benchmarking Multi-Image Multi-Hop Reasoning in Mechanical Engineering

MechReason is a new benchmark for multi-image, multi-hop reasoning in mechanical engineering, featuring 12,000 question-answer pairs with explicit reasoning chains and 21,000 visual items across nine evidence types. It covers eight task types—explanation, prediction, design, and diagnosis—within four reasoning dimensions, and is constructed through a four-stage pipeline that extracts engineering claims, generates verification-masked questions, and validates multimodal quality. Even state‑of‑the‑art models score only 62.89% on this dataset, highlighting its difficulty.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Evaluation of Small Vision-Language Models on Qualitative Mechanical Problems

arXiv:2608.22143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Qualitative mechanical problem-solving (QMPS) refers to solving qualitative problems from the mechanical domain. Qualitative problems can be solved wit...

By Henry Fordjour Ansah (Louisiana State University of New Orleans), Shreya Banerjee (Louisiana State University of New Orleans), Pranish Ghimire (Louisiana State University of New Orleans)
arXiv AI
Aug 11

MMArch: Benchmarking Multimodal Reasoning Grounded in Architectural Evidence

arXiv:2608. 09281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform strongly on engineering imagery, yet existing benchmarks mostly test drawing recognition, information extraction, or compliance checking, leaving open whether models can combine distributed visual evidence with engineering principles to reach a conclusion.

By Chenxu Du, Kang An, Tengyue Wang, Zhongyu Yang, Xinqi Yang, Yuanchi Zhu, Hebao Zhu, Ziliang Wang, Faqiang Qian, Yunli Yang, Qibing Ren
arXiv AI
Jun 3

VistaHop: Benchmarking Multi-hop Visual Reasoning for Visual DeepSearch

arXiv:2606. 03273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual DeepSearch requires multimodal large reasoning model (MLRM) agents to answer complex visual queries by repeatedly inspecting image regions, grounding intermediate reasoning in visual evidence, and connecting fine-grained clues across long reasoning chains.

By Hang He, Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong, Chengcheng Wan, Ting Su, Haiying Sun, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Guojun Yin
arXiv AI
Jun 10

V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions

arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.

By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
arXiv AI
Jun 8

MCERF: Advancing Multimodal LLM Evaluation of Engineering Documentation with Enhanced Retrieval

arXiv:2604. 09552v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Engineering rulebooks and technical standards contain multimodal information like dense text, tables, and illustrations that are challenging for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems.

By Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Hoang Anh Nguyen, Anna C. Doris, Amir Mohammad Vahedi, Daniele Grandi, Faez Ahmed, Hongyi Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.

By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

OmniPhys: A Unified Multimodal Benchmark for Physics Understanding and Generation from Chinese Educational Corpora

OmniPhys is a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate physics understanding and reasoning in models. It contains 15,246 questions and 19,850 images sourced from Chinese educational materials ranging from middle school to university level, with detailed annotations for fine-grained analysis. The benchmark also tests models’ ability to generate structured physics diagrams, a key component of authentic problem solving, and highlights gaps in current multimodal large language models.

By Hao Chen, Yumin Lin, Nadila Yushanjiang, Xin Lin, Min Zhang