arXiv · 2608.12262
Diagram-MMU: A Multi-Modal Benchmark for Scientific Diagrams
Abstract
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.
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Weihao Bo, Shan Zhang, Yanpeng Sun, Jie Liu, Yongke Yao, Jinhao Du, Wei He, Kai Zou, Zechao Li, Jingdong Wang. 2026-08-12. Diagram-MMU: A Multi-Modal Benchmark for Scientific Diagrams. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12262
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