SciDocBench is a workflow-centered benchmark for scientific document understanding that includes 124 expert-authored questions across seven capability groups and 19 subtasks in five scientific domains. Each question is evaluated under four conditions—English or Chinese, all-images-first or interleaved document representations—resulting in 496 evaluation instances. The benchmark is paired with SciDocIR, a typed evidence-graph representation, and SciDocDataset, a collection of 15K fine-tuning and 8K reinforcement-learning samples, forming an evaluation-to-training framework for scientific-document assistants.
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.
arXiv:2608. 13505v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery increasingly requires AI systems that can reason over scientific evidence of heterogeneous modalities, interact with scientific tools and environments, and sustain progress across long task horizons.
DocPilot is an agentic framework for long visual document understanding that orchestrates evidence seeking through page-level navigation and fine-grained localization, integrating visual inspection, code-based numerical reasoning, and cross-modal reasoning. It employs curriculum-based agentic training to enable small language models to learn complex document solving, progressing from single-ability learning to adaptive orchestration. Experiments on benchmarks such as MMLongBench-Doc, DocBench, FinRAGBench-V, and MADQA show that DocPilot achieves strong gains with frontier VLM backbones, and its 4B variant competes with much larger models, demonstrating effectiveness and generalization across diverse long-document reasoning tasks.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset. However, existing multimodal RAG pipelines primarily face two critical challenges: first, standard semantic similarity retrievers frequently fetch topically overlapping yet answer-void distractor pages that mislead downstream generation; second, rigid single-pass pipelines heavily depend on initial retrieval success, where any omission of core evidence inevitably causes cascading errors.
arXiv:2607. 04625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) streamlines long-document understanding by leveraging retrieval mechanisms to restrict input images to a highly curated subset.
arXiv:2603. 29139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems to translate natural-language intent into executable scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks.
DocXEval is the first comprehensive framework that adapts existing explainable AI methods and evaluation metrics to multimodal document understanding, covering text, layout, and image modalities. The authors systematically evaluate 13 XAI methods across 3 tasks, 8 datasets, 4 models, and 17 metrics, finding that Occlusion consistently performs best in faithfulness and interpretability. The study also provides meta‑evaluation insights, diagnostic analyses of modality contributions, spatial attribution patterns, and potential dataset biases, offering a benchmark and practical guide for future research.
arXiv:2606. 13020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction.
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.
arXiv:2606. 21005v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific discovery workflows often depend on structured curation from the literature.
VELD-QA is a large-scale benchmark for visual evidence grounding and question answering in long documents, comprising 15,000 human-authored question-answer pairs across 5,859 PDFs with 372,445 pages. The dataset includes detailed annotations of supporting pages, visual evidence elements, and descriptions of cited visual content, enabling separate evaluation of retrieval, localization, and interpretation. Experiments on nine vision-language models and various retrieval-augmented systems reveal significant gaps in evidence localization and visual interpretation, with oracle accuracy peaking at 81.7% and enrichment of visual-element annotations narrowing performance gaps by 17–24%.
Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.