Scientific figures give research ideas a visual form through choices of abstraction, composition, and emphasis. Generative AI offers new ways to realize these choices, raising questions about explanat...
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
arXiv:2607. 18514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual diagrams, figures, and tables are central to scientific papers, and convey information beyond what is captured in text.
By Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Lucy Lu Wang, Joseph Chee Chang, Jonathan Bragg
ReFigBench is a benchmark that evaluates how well multimodal coding agents can transform scientific overview figures into editable PowerPoint slides, preserving text, layout, and document structure. The study uses 1,000 real figures from arXiv, testing agents from four model families across two workflows—direct code generation and a specialized PPTX workflow—within ten different harness configurations. Evaluation combines deterministic artifact checks, automated scoring by judges, and blinded human comparisons, revealing that workflow and harness choices significantly affect reconstruction quality and that even the best agents fall short of the ideal rubric.
By Liyang Fan, Chi Wei, Yitai Li, Xinping Bi, Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Haoxiang Yang, Qingwen Li, Kai Yan, Hong Li, Bo Li
arXiv:2607. 03006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-rich image models can now design poster-scale layouts, but we lack ways to measure whether they honor scientific communication contracts: legible labels, prescribed aspect ratios, and -- above all -- abstaining from fabricated scientific figures.
By Tianyi Yang, Dawei Fu, Youpeng Wu, Zixun Kou, Linrui Chen, Ruobing Jiang, Zijian Wang, Qiang Li
arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.
By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
arXiv:2608. 14405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Art style is a signature of professional digital artists that develops through repeated experimentation, reflection, and adaptation.
By Wen-Fan Wang, TsaiHsuan Lin, Chi-Lan Yang, An-Ru Cheng, Bing-Yu Chen
arXiv:2608.10706v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent vision-language models demonstrate impressive general visual understanding, yet their art interpretation remains shallow: they describe surf...
By Shuai Wang, Wangyuan Ding, Yixian Shen, Jia-Hong Huang, Stevan Rudinac, Monika Kackovic, Nachoem Wijnberg, Marcel Worring
arXiv:2610.14173v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Digital libraries increasingly host scientific publications whose figures encode primary research findings, yet making this visual content searchable...
By Daniel J. Evans, J. P. Naiman, JooYoung Seo, J. Stephen Downie
Scientific images are the core elements of presenting experimental conclusions, elaborating system architecture, and supporting comparative arguments in scientific papers. However, existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods are predominantly designed for natural photographs or AI-generated content, which cannot be directly applied to scientific papers.
The paper introduces VMetaphor-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating visual metaphor generation in text-to-image models, comprising 1,500 curated metaphors across three levels and ten categories, each paired with two prompts of varying specificity. It proposes a hybrid evaluation framework using a multiple-choice question protocol and dimension-based scoring to assess metaphorical fidelity. Experiments on 11 T2I models show that even top proprietary models struggle with compositional structuring and cross-domain mapping, underscoring the need for further research in this area.
By Chuer Chen, Zichen Wang, Yi He, Zhengxi Yu, Nan Cao
arXiv:2607. 27066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific figure assessment in peer review differs fundamentally from general image quality evaluation: a figure must be visually legible, faithfully support the manuscript's claims, and communicate evidence with a clear visual hierarchy.
By Chuanzhi Xu, Zihan Deng, Huiqi Liang, Chengkun Yue, Zhanlin Cui, Pengfei Ye, Weidong Cai