arXiv Computation and Language

SciFigBench: A Benchmark for Scientific Method Figure Understanding

SciFigBench is a new benchmark for evaluating Vision Language Models on scientific method figure understanding. It focuses on three fine‑grained capabilities—dense content perception, visual relation comprehension, and information‑flow tracing—using 4,352 curated figures and 40,670 QA pairs. The authors also introduce SciFigCue, a training‑free visual prompting module that improves performance on several tasks without updating model parameters.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

From Terminology to Diagrams: Visual-Instruction Generation for Scientific Diagram Understanding

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.

By Raul Ortega, Jos\'e Manuel G\'omez-P\'erez
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FigAct: Turning Scientific Figures into Active Canvases for Explanation

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.

By Shishi Xiao, Zichao Wang, Alexa Siu, David H. Laidlaw, Jennifer Healey
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.

By Cristian Sbrolli, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Matteo Matteucci
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

SciDiagBench: A Type-Specific Benchmark for Human-Aligned Evaluation of Scientific Diagrams

SciDiagBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate scientific diagram generation in a way that mirrors human peer‑review practices. It provides a dataset of 165 diagrams from 10 domains, systematically classified into 11 distinct types such as graphical abstracts and technical roadmaps. The benchmark also introduces a preference‑guided calibration method that incorporates human preferences into type‑specific evaluation criteria, aiming to improve the reliability of automated assessments.

By Hao Wang, Zixuan Li, Long Bai, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Tat-Seng Chua, Tian Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

OneSearch-VL: Unified Multimodal Deep Research Agent for Image and Video

OneSearch‑VL is a unified multimodal deep research agent that handles single‑image, multi‑image, and video tasks by leveraging a Visually Grounded Evidence Graph (VGEG) to encode dependencies among visual anchors, entity relations, facts, and answer‑producing operations. The VGEG‑based data engine builds and verifies questions, filters expert trajectories, and supports supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) with the Evidence‑aware Visual‑Grounded Rubric reward (EVGR). Experiments demonstrate that OneSearch‑VL‑8B outperforms Qwen3‑VL‑8B with tool access by 20.2 and 17.6 percentage points on new multimodal benchmarks, while also achieving significant gains across seven image benchmarks and VideoDR.

By Hongyu Li, Manyuan Zhang, Kaituo Feng, Shu Chen, Dian Zheng, Hao Li, Hao Yu, Zhangquan Chen, Zoey Guo, Ray Zhang, Shaofei Huang, Tianrui Hui, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

MatMMExtract: An Open-Source Pipeline for Panel-Level Extraction of Grounded Image-Text Pairs from Materials Science Literature

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.

By Subham Ghosh, Shubham Tiwari, Mohammad Ibrahim, Abhishek Tewari