EduIllustrate: Towards Scalable Automated Generation Of Multimodal Educational Content

The generation of mathematically precise diagrams from tex- tual prompts has emerged as a critical yet underexplored capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). This has been of interest to researchers in the areas of curriculum preparation, automated ranking of problem sets, and scientific publishing. For LLMs to achieve this, it requires per- fect coordination between Spatial Reasoning, Mathematical Reasoning, and Rendering systems. While existing benchmarks such as MathVision, MathVista are built for Math Reasoning or DiagramGenBenchmark, Mer- maidSeqBench on general purpose diagram generation, no prior work provides a standardized set of prompt, image pairs that can be used to evaluate the LLMs specifically on math diagram generation. This includes fields that span both both text-to-code and text-to-image paradigms. We introduce Math-Vision Diagrams, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on mathematical diagram generation, and the first to assess text-to-code and text-to-image generation paradigms together in a single unified setting, agnostic of the underlying coding lan- guage or model type. Building on the Math-Vision benchmark, we select a subset of 2920 images out of 3040 from high-quality competition problems with essential visual context. A novel pipeline combining an ensemble of LLMs with Subject Matter Expert (SME) curation is presented, together with a suite of evaluation metrics. Testing several leading models against this benchmark, we demonstrate that LLMs struggle with math diagram generation. All code, data, curation pipeline, and evaluation scripts will be fully open-sourced.

Educational diagrams -- labeled illustrations of biological processes, chemical structures, physical systems, and mathematical concepts -- are essential cognitive tools in K-12 instruction. Yet no existing method can generate them both accurately and engagingly. Open-source diffusion models produce visually rich images but catastrophically garble text labels. Code-based generation via LLMs guarantees label correctness but yields visually flat outputs. Closed-source APIs partially bridge this gap but remain unreliable and prohibitively expensive at educational scale. We quantify this accuracy-aesthetics dilemma across all three paradigms on 400 K-12 diagram prompts, measuring both label fidelity and visual quality through complementary automated and human evaluation protocols. To resolve it, we propose CAGE (Code-Anchored Generative Enhancement): an LLM synthesizes executable code producing a structurally correct diagram, then a diffusion model conditioned on the programmatic output via ControlNet refines it into a visually polished graphic while preserving label fidelity. We also introduce EduDiagram-2K, a collection of 2,000 paired programmatic-stylized diagrams enabling this pipeline, and present proof-of-concept results and a research agenda for the multimedia community.

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.