Multimodal QUD: Inquisitive Questions from Scientific Figures

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

High-resolution pixels and crop or zoom tools give multimodal large language models the ability to inspect an image, but they do not provide a reliable task-conditioned policy for deciding where to inspect. Q-CueGraph makes this decision explicit. It maps a question and an image representation to budgeted, coordinate-level observations for a frozen reader. Text-rich images use a reusable OCR/layout graph; natural-image search instantiates query-conditioned visual nodes behind the same selection, composition, and budgeting interface. Optional utility refinement learns which candidate crops the frozen reader can use from training-answer correctness, without region-box supervision. With a frozen Qwen2.5-VL-7B reader, Q-CueGraph reaches 0.833 accuracy on V*Bench versus 0.696 for full-image inference from a 19% image-area budget, and reaches 92% of full-image ANLS on InfographicVQA from about half the image area. Across six benchmarks, explicit observation is most valuable when evidence is localizable, the question discriminates its location, and resolution limits full-image reading.

Scientific reasoning is a key aspect of human intelligence, requiring the integration of multimodal inputs, domain expertise, and multi-step inference across various subjects. Existing benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often fail to capture the complexity and traceability of reasoning processes necessary for rigorous evaluation. To fill this gap, we introduce SciVQR, a multimodal benchmark covering 54 subfields in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy, and biology. SciVQR includes domain-specific visuals, such as equations, charts, and diagrams, and challenges models to combine visual comprehension with reasoning. The tasks range from basic factual recall to complex, multi-step inferences, with 46% including expert-authored solutions. SciVQR not only evaluates final answers but also examines the reasoning process, providing insights into how models reach their conclusions. Our evaluation of leading MLLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models, reveals significant limitations in handling complex multimodal reasoning tasks, underscoring the need for improved multi-step reasoning and better integration of interdisciplinary knowledge in advancing MLLMs toward true scientific intelligence. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/SciVQR.