Previous work has evaluated physics reasoning in foundation models using synthetic or semi-synthetic scenes and visual question-answering tasks. However, these benchmarks emphasize high-level events and lack the visual fidelity required to assess true low-level Newtonian understanding.
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:2602. 08058v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of occlusions and measurement noise, geometrically accurate scene reconstructions -- which fit the sensor data -- can still be physically incorrect.
By Xihang Yu, Rajat Talak, Lorenzo Shaikewitz, Luca Carlone
arXiv:2601. 11729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as DINO and CLIP, excel in semantic understanding of images but exhibit limited spatial reasoning capabilities, which limits their applicability to embodied systems.
By Turhan Can Kargin, Wojciech Jasi\'nski, Adam Pardyl, Bartosz Zieli\'nski, Marcin Przewi\k{e}\'zlikowski
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:2606. 07529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to 3D vision-language (3D-VL) tasks, which require spatial reasoning to identify target objects relative to anchors.
By Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Guanhua Chen, Feng Zheng
arXiv:2405. 03650v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study Generated Contents Enrichment (GCE), a conditional image-generation task in which a sparse scene description is first enriched through an explicit scene representation and then rendered into semantically richer visual content.
By Mahdi Naseri, Jiayan Qiu, Zhou Wang
arXiv:2607. 10190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on video understanding and visual question answering, yet they remain unreliable in reasoning about physical plausibility, where understanding object interactions, causal dynamics, and fundamental physical principles is essential.
By Wenyuan Wang, Lianyu Hu, Hao Wang, Yang Liu
The precise pixel-level localization of 2D material flakes is crucial for high-throughput screening. However, traditional fully supervised methods rely on dense annotations, which are costly and time-consuming, severely limiting the practical deployment of segmentation models.
arXiv:2608. 15006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although visual reasoning is crucial for solving complex geometry tasks, existing vision-language models rely heavily on text-only reasoning.
By Penghao Yin, Haomin Wang, Qihong Tang, Xiaoye Qu, Hongjie Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang
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: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