Paper Detail

Edit2TikZ: A Comprehensive and Challenging Benchmark for Scientific Figure Editing with TikZ

Zongyun Zhang, Jiacheng Ruan, Xian Gao, Ruizhu Zhou, Lingcheng Meng, Lining Hu, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu

arxiv Score 15.8

Published 2026-08-13 · First seen 2026-08-14

General AI

Abstract

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown substantial potential in visual understanding and graphic code generation, editing scientific figures through code presents a greater challenge: a model must jointly recover visual structure, ground the requested change, generate compilable code, and preserve all unrelated content. While existing TikZ benchmarks mainly focus on figure reconstruction and generation, few systematically evaluate instruction-guided scientific figure editing with compilable code. We introduce Edit2TikZ, a comprehensive benchmark for scientific figure editing tasks, featuring 1,548 diverse and high-quality samples. Edit2TikZ combines real-world and controlled synthetic edit cases, supports both textual and visual localization request, and contains multi-step editing, each with step-level annotations. We further construct a human-aligned evaluation framework to measure whether a requested edit is completed while irrelevant content is preserved. Utilizing Edit2TikZ, we evaluate 14 mainstream MLLMs and find that current systems remain unreliable: on average, proprietary models achieve a compilation success rate of merely 75% and remain limited in both figure restoration and edit correctness, while compact models below 9B struggle further with instruction following and complete figure generation. Therefore, we build a mixed training set TikZEditMix and adopt reconstruction-then-editing curriculum learning for compact models. On Qwen3.5-4B, this training improves the compilation success rate from 45.35% to 83.40% and yields an average improvement of 18.7 points across our proposed evaluation metrics. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/Solunny/Edit2TikZ.

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BibTeX

@article{zhang2026edit2tikz,
  title = {Edit2TikZ: A Comprehensive and Challenging Benchmark for Scientific Figure Editing with TikZ},
  author = {Zongyun Zhang and Jiacheng Ruan and Xian Gao and Ruizhu Zhou and Lingcheng Meng and Lining Hu and Ting Liu and Yuzhuo Fu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown substantial potential in visual understanding and graphic code generation, editing scientific figures through code presents a greater challenge: a model must jointly recover visual structure, ground the requested change, generate compilable code, and preserve all unrelated content. While existing TikZ benchmarks mainly focus on figure reconstruction and generation, few systematically evaluate instruction-guided scientific figure editin},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13441},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2608.13441},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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