FigAct transforms static scientific figures into question‑conditioned visual presentations by acting directly on existing graphical elements. The framework generates short narrations, grounds each narration in visual evidence, and applies visual actions to guide viewer attention, mimicking a human presenter. A hierarchical search strategy reduces token usage by about 40×, and FigAct‑8B is trained with rewards for grounding accuracy, search efficiency, and rendering quality, evaluated on a human‑verified benchmark of real‑world scientific figures.
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.
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.
TikZilla is a new approach to generating TikZ code from textual descriptions, built on a larger, higher‑quality dataset called DaTikZ‑V4 that includes LLM‑generated figure descriptions. The method uses a two‑stage pipeline: supervised fine‑tuning of small Qwen models (3B and 8B) followed by reinforcement learning with an image encoder that provides semantically faithful reward signals. Human evaluations show that TikZilla outperforms its base models by 1.5–2 points on a 5‑point scale, beats GPT‑4o by 0.5 points, and matches GPT‑5 in image‑based tests while remaining much smaller.
arXiv:2607. 15272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Editing the figures in a research paper is a routine and time-consuming part of everyday research practice: authors relabel components, rearrange panels, and restyle visuals as they revise their manuscripts.
The paper introduces “FigTree”, a multi-agent system that automatically converts a scientific paper into a structured vector figure by recursively constructing SVG programs. It decomposes figures into hierarchical regions, generates each region as a short SVG program, and assembles them, using a render‑critic refinement loop to trace and repair visual defects. Evaluations show that “FigTree” produces high‑quality figures and allows more effective editing than raster‑based methods.
arXiv:2510. 04514v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts.
Scientific methodology figures are essential for communicating complex methods clearly, yet creating them remains labor-intensive and typically requires multiple rounds of refinement. Recent image-gen...
arXiv:2601. 04390v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-quality methodology figures are central to scientific communication, yet they remain difficult and time-consuming to create.
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.
arXiv:2607. 25537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the age of foundation models, a model is only as good as its prompt.
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.
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.