The paper introduces SciGram, a large-scale dataset of 194K scientific diagrams paired with 1.4M visual instructions generated through a terminology‑grounded pipeline that extracts domain concepts, synthesizes facts, and retrieves relevant diagrams. Models fine‑tuned on SciGram show significant gains on diagram‑centric benchmarks such as TQA, ScienceQA, and AI2D, and when combined with existing models like LLaVA OneVision, set new state‑of‑the‑art performance. The authors release both the dataset and trained models to support further research in scientific diagram understanding.
By Raul Ortega, Jos\'e Manuel G\'omez-P\'erez
arXiv:2606. 28406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image and multimodal generative models are increasingly used to produce scientific figures such as mechanism diagrams, experimental-design schematics, conceptual frameworks, and graphical abstracts.
By Davie Chen
While Text-to-Image (T2I) models have shown remarkable success in generating photorealistic visual content, they still struggle with the rigorous semantic alignment and logical reasoning required for scientific imagery. Inspired by Peirce's Semiotic Triad, we introduce Scientific Image Reasoning (SciIR), a comprehensive resource for training and evaluation of scientific image generation.
arXiv:2606. 29667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The materials science literature encodes decades of experimental knowledge in figures, yet this visual record remains locked away and inaccessible to AI at scale.
By Subham Ghosh, Shubham Tiwari, Mohammad Ibrahim, Abhishek Tewari
arXiv:2511. 17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven remarkably effective for eliciting complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
By Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao, Chen Tang, Xiangyu Yue, Chenyu You
arXiv:2608. 03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long Document Visual Question Answering (LongDocVQA) requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to locate, integrate, and reason over heterogeneous document elements distributed across multiple pages.
By Le Xiang, Zhicheng Guan, Hong Chen, Xiaocong Lin, Zhenghua Lei, Teng Hu, Bolei He, Long Zeng
MatMMExtract is an open‑source pipeline that disassembles compound scientific figures into individual sub‑panels and generates structured, grounded image‑text pairs using a large language model guided by a materials science taxonomy. Applied to 14,810 open‑access articles, it produced 391,606 panel‑level pairs with sub‑captions, a two‑level visualisation category (19 classes, 100+ subtypes), and scientific summaries. The project also introduces MaterialScope, a 2,811‑figure detection dataset, and demonstrates that Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite yields high‑quality annotations with low hallucination, while a dual‑encoder baseline outperforms zero‑shot CLIP on the resulting MatSciFig dataset.
By Subham Ghosh, Shubham Tiwari, Mohammad Ibrahim, Abhishek Tewari
DocHop is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on integrated chart‑context reasoning within document‑style images. The benchmark presents narrative text that imposes multi‑step compositional constraints, while charts supply the data needed to answer questions grounded in semantic reference labels. It contains 2,074 examples across six task categories, generated via a stochastic logic‑first pipeline that controls reasoning depth and visual density, and shows a large performance gap between humans (over 90% accuracy) and the best models (62.83%).
By Zhuoran Yu, Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Jaden Park, Xinyi Gu, Zexue He, Soochahn Lee, Rogerio Feris, Yong Jae Lee
Text-to-image generation has reached photorealistic quality, yet state-of-the-art systems remain unreliable at producing scientific diagrams, whose value depends not on appearance but on physical faithfulness: correct force directions, valid coordinate systems, consistent thermodynamic states, and equations matching the depicted scenario. Trained on web imagery with physically shallow captions, generic models produce diagrams that look plausible but are physically wrong, harmful in education and scientific communication.
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:2604. 02371v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual long-document understanding is critical for enterprise, legal, and scientific applications, yet the best performing open recipes have not explored reasoning, a capability which has driven leaps in math and code performance.
By Austin Veselka
CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.
By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan