GENFIG1: Visual Summaries of Scholarly Work as a Challenge for Vision-Language Models

Text-to-image and multimodal generative models are increasingly used to produce scientific figures such as mechanism diagrams, experimental-design schematics, conceptual frameworks, and graphical abstracts. Yet existing image-generation benchmarks (e.g., GenEval, T2I-CompBench, DPG-Bench) evaluate natural images and measure compositionality, object counting, or photorealism. None of them measure what makes a generated scientific figure usable: correct and legible text labels, faithful depiction of entities and their relations, coherent diagrammatic structure, and adherence to disciplinary drawing conventions. We introduce SciDraw-Bench, a benchmark of 32 structured scientific-figure generation tasks spanning eight figure types and ten disciplines, where each task pairs a natural-language prompt with a machine-checkable specification of required labels, relations, components, conventions, and negative constraints. We propose a four-dimensional evaluation protocol: Text Fidelity (OCR-based label recall and character error rate), Semantic Correctness (vision-language-model judging against the specification), Structural Quality, and Convention Adherence, together with a meta-evaluation protocol and a preliminary inter-judge reliability analysis (human-rating validation is ongoing). We evaluate a domain-specific system, SciDraw AI, against representative general-purpose text-to-image models, and outline a code-to-figure baseline as a planned extension. In a pilot over all eight figure types, the domain-specific system substantially outperforms the general-purpose baselines on every dimension and figure type, with the largest gaps on semantic correctness and convention adherence; text fidelity remains the hardest dimension for all systems.

Modern multimodal generators can now produce scientific figures at near-publishable quality, creating a new challenge for visual forensics and research integrity. Unlike conventional AI-generated natural images, scientific figures are structured, text-dense, and tightly aligned with scholarly semantics, making them a distinct and difficult detection target. However, existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks and methods are almost entirely developed for open-domain imagery, leaving this setting largely unexplored. We present the first benchmark for AI-generated scientific figure detection. To construct it, we develop an agent-based data pipeline that retrieves licensed source papers, performs multimodal understanding of paper text and figures, builds structured prompts, synthesizes candidate figures, and filters them through a review-driven refinement loop. The resulting benchmark covers multiple figure categories, multiple generation sources and aligned real--synthetic pairs. We benchmark representative detectors under zero-shot, cross-generator, and degraded-image settings. Results show that current methods fail dramatically in zero-shot transfer, exhibit strong generator-specific overfitting, and remain fragile under common post-processing corruptions. These findings reveal a substantial gap between existing AIGI detection capabilities and the emerging distribution of high-quality scientific figures. We hope this benchmark can serve as a foundation for future research on robust and generalizable scientific-figure forensics. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Joyce-yoyo/SciFigDetect.

Scientific figures and tables encode essential experimental evidence, yet remain difficult for digital libraries and multimodal AI systems to retrieve and interpret. The ALD/E-ImageMiner benchmark and ICDAR 2026 Competition on Information Extraction from Atomic Layer Deposition/Etching Scientific Figures provide 1,951 figures from 205 publications, expert-annotated for classification, data table extraction, summarization, and visual question answering. In these companion proceedings, we present a forward-looking perspective on how the benchmark can guide future scientific-image challenges. We examine how its tasks probe capabilities from visual and quantitative reading to domain-grounded reasoning and evidential justification, and how Bloom-informed question design can support deeper scientific understanding. We propose "scientific conceptual understanding from images" as a long-term benchmark objective, with future directions including broader domains and figure types, contextual and cross-document synthesis, hypothesis evaluation, provenance, uncertainty, counterfactual grounding, and open-ended multimodal research. This perspective connects the ICDAR 2026 challenge to a broader agenda for machine-actionable scientific visual knowledge and verifiable multimodal scientific AI.