SciIR: A Large-scale Training Dataset and Benchmark for Scientific Image Reasoning Generation

We present S1-VL, a multimodal reasoning model for scientific domains that natively supports two complementary reasoning paradigms: Scientific Reasoning, which relies on structured chain-of-thought, and Thinking-with-Images, which enables the model to actively manipulate images through Python code execution during reasoning. In the Thinking-with-Images mode, the model generates and executes image-processing code in a sandbox environment, obtains intermediate visual results, and continues reasoning in a multi-turn iterative manner. This design is particularly effective for challenging scenarios such as high-resolution scientific chart interpretation, microscopic image understanding, and geometry-assisted reasoning. To construct the training data, we collect scientific multimodal datasets spanning six disciplines: mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, and biology. We further develop a six-dimensional quality filtering framework for reasoning trajectories. To mitigate redundant, ineffective, and erroneous visual operations commonly found in existing datasets, we propose a multi-stage filtering pipeline together with an adaptive data routing strategy. This strategy converts samples with low visual information gain into pure Reasoning-mode data, enabling the model to learn when image operations are truly necessary. S1-VL is trained through a four-stage progressive pipeline: scientific multimodal SFT, Thinking-with-Images cold-start SFT, and two stages of reinforcement learning with SAPO. We build S1-VL-32B on top of Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking and evaluate it on 13 benchmarks. Experimental results show that S1-VL-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five Thinking-with-Images benchmarks, including HRBench-4K, HRBench-8K, MME-RealWorld-CN, MME-RealWorld-Lite, and V*, and outperforms compared systems on scientific reasoning benchmarks such as Physics and VRSBench.

Scientific illustrations are essential tools for communicating research findings, especially in natural science, where they visualize complex concepts and processes. As Text-to-Image (T2I) models become increasingly capable, researchers have started to use them for scientific illustration generation. However, existing benchmarks often assess outputs at a holistic level, overlooking fine-grained elements, while scientific reasoning ability and output conciseness remain under-quantified. We introduce FEPBench, a benchmark built from carefully selected high-quality scientific illustrations across multiple disciplines and layout types. With the assistance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and human experts, we provide fine-grained atom set annotations and systematically evaluate T2I models along three dimensions: instruction faithfulness, reasoning enrichment, and semantic precision. Our evaluation further decomposes model performance across visual, textual, relation, and layout elements. Results show that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source models, such as GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro, still suffer from text-rendering bottlenecks, limited reasoning enrichment, and difficulty balancing generation richness with precision. These findings provide practical guidance for improving and deploying T2I models in scientific illustration generation. Benchmark data, atom set annotations, and evaluation code will be released by us.

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in photorealistic synthesis and instruction following. However, their reliability in knowledge-intensive settings remains largely unexplored. Unlike natural image generation, knowledge visualization requires not only semantic alignment but also strict adherence to domain knowledge, structural constraints, and symbolic conventions, exposing a critical gap between visual plausibility and scientific correctness. To systematically study this problem, we introduce KVBench, a curriculum-grounded benchmark for evaluating knowledge-intensive T2I generation. KVBench covers six senior high-school subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History, Mathematics, and Physics. The benchmark consists of 1,800 expert-curated prompts derived from over 30 authoritative textbooks. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 14 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source models, revealing substantial deficiencies in logical reasoning, symbolic precision, and multilingual robustness, with open-source models consistently underperforming proprietary systems. To address these limitations, we further propose KE-Check, a two-stage framework that improves scientific fidelity via (1) Knowledge Elaboration for structured prompt enrichment, and (2) Checklist-Guided Refinement for explicit constraint enforcement through violation identification and constraint-guided editing. KE-Check effectively mitigates scientific hallucinations, narrowing the performance gap between open-source and leading closed-source models. Data and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zhaoran66/KVBench.