arXiv AI

Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Scientific Visualization Literacy

arXiv:2607. 15176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret visualizations, yet current evaluations remain largely chart-centric and provide limited evidence of understanding of scientific visualization (SciVis).

arXiv AI
Jun 30

SciVisAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Agents

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.

By Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Kaiyuan Tang, Nathaniel Gorski, Jianxin Sun, Guoxi Liu, Helgi I. Ingolfsson, David Lenz, Hanqi Guo, Hongfeng Yu, Teja Leburu, Michael Molash, Bei Wang, Tom Peterka, Chaoli Wang, Shusen Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Seeing or Knowing? Visual Context Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates why multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with vision‑centric tasks when visual evidence conflicts with pretrained language knowledge. Using image reconstruction and a new WhatIfVis benchmark, the authors show that MLLMs preserve coarse‑grained visual attributes but fail to consistently use them, and that supervised fine‑tuning and activation patching can improve controllability of visual context sensitivity. The study demonstrates that the main bottleneck lies in the models’ inability to reliably regulate their reliance on visual evidence rather than in visual perception itself.

By Jiaang Li, Chengzu Li, Zhaochong An, Yifei Yuan, Xi Liu, Serge Belongie, V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

SciMIF: Understanding Multimodal Instruction Following in Scientific Domains

SciMIF is a new benchmark that evaluates how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can follow complex scientific instructions. It is built on an analysis of 22 tasks across five scientific fields and introduces a taxonomy of 10 constraint groups that capture both general and discipline‑specific requirements. Experiments show large performance gaps between fields—chemistry is hardest—and that larger models do not necessarily improve constraint adherence, especially for fine‑grained, knowledge‑heavy instructions.

By Ye Shen, Yuting Zheng, Dun Pei, Zijian Chen, Wenlong Zhang, Qi Jia, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Aug 17

A Pathway to General-Purpose Scientific AI: Multimodal Comprehension of Scientific Images

arXiv:2608. 14075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific figures and tables encode essential experimental evidence, yet remain difficult for digital libraries and multimodal AI systems to retrieve and interpret.

By Jennifer D'Souza, Fahad Ahmed, Cecilia Andrea Bustamante Andrade, Lina Frolova, Poorani Gnanasambandan, Dilshad Hussain, Muhammad Uzair Khan, Nkembeng Kevin Nkengfoa, Paul Praveen J., Fabio Priante, Sjoerd Franciscus van der Werf, Thomas Frederik Jan van Roeden
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Seeing vs. Believing: Evaluating the Language Bias of Open-Source MLLMs in Counter-Intuitive Scenes

The paper introduces CAIT, a benchmark of 400 synthetic scenes featuring counter‑intuitive actions that challenge multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Human participants and proprietary models like Claude and Gemini perform well, but standard open‑source instruction‑tuned MLLMs fail, largely due to a strong language prior that overrides contradictory visual evidence. The study shows that Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning can help but introduces new issues, while targeted fine‑tuning and structured prompting can reduce reliance on language priors and improve visual grounding.

By Chen Ling, Tongwei Zhang, Hanqian Li, Nai Ding
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Science Edge Evaluation: SEE the Missing Step Toward Real Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2608. 06931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in scientific discovery, yet it remains unclear whether they can support complex real laboratory science.

By Taolin Han, Yuchen Zhang, Jinghang Wang, Yun Wu, Wai Yuet Chiu, Zhaohai Li, Yifei Zhang, Jinxin Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Chen Zhao, Jiajia Li, Jiaxin Li, Qile Jin, Kewei Sun, Shuang Wu, Weiqi Zhai, Renquan Lv, Junchao Li, Ruodan Chen, Qingteng Chen, Zhibo Yang, Hu Wei, Lin Qu, Shuai Bai, Bing Zhao