Pseudo Contrastive Learning for Diagram Comprehension in Multimodal Models

System-level diagrams encode the architectural blueprint of chip design, specifying module functions, dataflows, and interface protocols. However, non-standardized symbols and the scarcity of structured training data hinder existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) from recognizing these diagrams. To address this gap, we introduce DiagramNet, the first multimodal dataset for system-level diagrams, comprising 10,977 connection annotations and 15,515 chain-of-thought QA pairs across four tasks: Listing, Localization, Connection, and Circuit QA. Building on this dataset, we propose a progressive training pipeline together with a decoupled multi-agent workflow that decomposes complex visual reasoning into Perception, Reasoning, and Knowledge stages. On the DiagramNet benchmark, integrating our 3B-parameter model with the proposed workflow surpasses the 2025 EDA Elite Challenge winner and outperforms GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4, and Gemini-2.5-Pro by over 2x in end-to-end evaluation. Notably, the workflow generalizes beyond our model, boosting Task 1 performance by 128.7x for Gemini-2.5-Pro and 12.4x for GPT-5. Furthermore, with only 60 images for detector adaptation, the method transfers effectively to AMSBench, achieving zero-shot connectivity reasoning on par with GPT-5 and Claude-Sonnet-4 while surpassing the AMS state-of-the-art method Netlistify.

Visual design is an essential application of state-of-the-art multi-modal AI systems. Improving these systems requires high-quality vision-language data at scale. Despite the abundance of internet image and text data, knowledge-rich and well-aligned image-text pairs are rare. In this paper, we present a scalable diagram generation pipeline built with our agent, Feynman. To create diagrams, Feynman first enumerates domain-specific knowledge components (''ideas'') and performs code planning based on the ideas. Given the plan, Feynman translates ideas into simple declarative programs and iterates to receives feedback and visually refine diagrams. Finally, the declarative programs are rendered by the Penrose diagramming system. The optimization-based rendering of Penrose preserves the visual semantics while injecting fresh randomness into the layout, thereby producing diagrams with visual consistency and diversity. As a result, Feynman can author diagrams along with grounded captions with very little cost and time. Using Feynman, we synthesized a dataset with more than 100k well-aligned diagram-caption pairs. We also curate a visual-language benchmark, Diagramma, from freshly generated data. Diagramma can be used for evaluating the visual reasoning capabilities of vision-language models. We plan to release the dataset, benchmark, and the full agent pipeline as an open-source project.

Diagram question answering (DQA) requires models to interpret structured visual representations such as charts, maps, infographics, circuit schematics, and scientific diagrams. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) often achieve high answer accuracy on these tasks, yet correct answers do not guarantee that models ground their reasoning in the diagram regions that support the prediction. Models may instead rely on textual correlations or dataset artifacts without identifying the visual evidence required to verify the answer. This limitation prevents reliable evaluation of diagram reasoning and reduces interpretability. We introduce DRAGON, a benchmark for evaluating evidence-grounded visual reasoning in diagrams. Given a diagram, a question, and the correct answer, a model must predict bounding boxes that correspond to the visual elements required to justify the answer. These evidence regions may include answer-bearing components, textual labels, legends, axes, connectors, and other supporting structures involved in the reasoning process. The DRAGON dataset contains 11,664 annotated question instances from six diagram QA datasets: ChartQA, Circuit-VQA, InfographicsVQA, MapIQ, MapWise, and AI2D, with a 2,445-instance test set carrying human-verified evidence annotations and a standardized evaluation framework. Our evaluation on recent VLMs reveals that even Claude Opus 4.6 achieves a Grounding IoU of only 23.8% on AI2D, showing that faithful visual grounding remains an open challenge. DRAGON supports future research on models that ground their predictions in visual evidence.