Paper Detail

ERUnderstand: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Structured ER Diagrams

Ali Ansari, Yasmin Mohammadi, Farnoush Nili, Parsa Esmaeilkhani, Longin Jan Latecki, Eduard Dragut

arxiv Score 15.3

Published 2026-07-27 · First seen 2026-07-28

General AI

Abstract

Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are central to conceptual database design, yet they are typically available only as rendered images rather than machine-readable schemas, limiting AI-assisted database engineering. We introduce ERUnderstand, the first large-scale benchmark for structured understanding of ER diagrams, comprising 2,960 diagrams collected from curated educational sources, real-world schemas, and synthetically generated examples spanning diverse domains, notations, complexity levels, and Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) constructs. Each diagram is paired with a standardized machine-readable representation for fine-grained evaluation of schema elements. Evaluating state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we find that while common ERD elements are recovered reliably (F1 > 0.74), performance drops sharply on weak entities (as low as 0.28 F1), multivalued attributes (0.14 F1), and N-ary relationships (0.07 F1). Reasoning-augmented models improve overall performance by 15-25% but remain sensitive to linguistic priors and increasing diagram complexity. ERUnderstand provides a standardized benchmark for evaluating multimodal understanding of conceptual database schemas. The benchmark, dataset, evaluation toolkit, and generation code are publicly available at https://github.com/salinaria/ERUnderstand.

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BibTeX

@article{ansari2026erunderstand,
  title = {ERUnderstand: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Structured ER Diagrams},
  author = {Ali Ansari and Yasmin Mohammadi and Farnoush Nili and Parsa Esmaeilkhani and Longin Jan Latecki and Eduard Dragut},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are central to conceptual database design, yet they are typically available only as rendered images rather than machine-readable schemas, limiting AI-assisted database engineering. We introduce ERUnderstand, the first large-scale benchmark for structured understanding of ER diagrams, comprising 2,960 diagrams collected from curated educational sources, real-world schemas, and synthetically generated examples spanning diverse domains, notations, complexity leve},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24707},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.DB},
  eprint = {2607.24707},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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