MechReason is a new benchmark for multi-image, multi-hop reasoning in mechanical engineering, featuring 12,000 question-answer pairs with explicit reasoning chains and 21,000 visual items across nine evidence types. It covers eight task types—explanation, prediction, design, and diagnosis—within four reasoning dimensions, and is constructed through a four-stage pipeline that extracts engineering claims, generates verification-masked questions, and validates multimodal quality. Even state‑of‑the‑art models score only 62.89% on this dataset, highlighting its difficulty.
By Tengyue Wang, Kang An, Chenxu Du, Zhongyu Yang, Yuanchi Zhu, Xinqi Yang, Hebao Zhu, Ziliang Wang, FaQiang Qian, Yunli Yang, Qibing Ren
arXiv:2607. 15418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce DrawingVQA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on real-world construction drawings -- a core media in architecture, civil, and many other engineering practices.
By Yoonhwa Jung, Junryu Fu, Mani Golparvar-Fard
arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.
By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2511. 01650v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly entering specialized, safety-critical engineering workflows governed by strict quantitative standards and immutable physical laws, making rigorous evaluation of their reasoning capabilities imperative.
By Ayesha Gull, Muhammad Usman Safder, Rania Elbadry, Fan Zhang, Veselin Stoyanov, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
arXiv:2511. 17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven remarkably effective for eliciting complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
By Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao, Chen Tang, Xiangyu Yue, Chenyu You
The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."
By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang