Paper Detail

Diagram-MMU: A Multi-Modal Benchmark for Scientific Diagrams

Weihao Bo, Shan Zhang, Yanpeng Sun, Jie Liu, Yongke Yao, Jinhao Du, Wei He, Kai Zou, Zechao Li, Jingdong Wang

arxiv Score 20.2

Published 2026-08-12 · First seen 2026-08-13

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Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been growing the capability for scientific writing and collaboration. For example, OpenAI Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration. One important feature in Prism is turning scientific diagrams directly into LaTeX TikZ code. In this paper, we build a benchmark, Diagram-MMU, a multi-modal benchmark designed to assess MLLMs' ability for scientific diagram parsing and understanding. Diagram-MMU features 3.7k curated diagrams and 18.3k human-validated questions across six domains. It evaluates MLLMs on three tasks common in vibe writing workspaces: diagram-to-code parsing, diagram-to-code editing, and diagram question answering, alongside agentic settings per task. The evaluation of 12 MLLMs reveals that diagram-to-code tasks are more challenging than diagram question answering: models can reason well over diagrams but struggle to parse and edit them, underscoring the need for methods to enhance MLLMs' capability in diagram-to-code generation. Under agentic settings, most models improve parsing and editing performance but degrade on question answering, while Claude-4.6 Opus consistently improves across all three tasks. Project Page: https://vi-ocean.github.io/projects/diagram-mmu.

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BibTeX

@article{bo2026diagram,
  title = {Diagram-MMU: A Multi-Modal Benchmark for Scientific Diagrams},
  author = {Weihao Bo and Shan Zhang and Yanpeng Sun and Jie Liu and Yongke Yao and Jinhao Du and Wei He and Kai Zou and Zechao Li and Jingdong Wang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been growing the capability for scientific writing and collaboration. For example, OpenAI Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration. One important feature in Prism is turning scientific diagrams directly into LaTeX TikZ code. In this paper, we build a benchmark, Diagram-MMU, a multi-modal benchmark designed to assess MLLMs' ability for scientific diagram parsing and understanding. Diagram-MMU features 3.7k curated diagrams an},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12262},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2608.12262},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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