Mathias Zinnen, Alisha Mund, Sabine Lang +3cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.DL
For provenance research and art market studies, auction catalogs are an essential resource to trace specific objects over time and space. While historical auction catalogs follow established domain conventions, their internal formatting remains highly variable, and their large-scale analysis is currently restricted by the lack of machine-readable representations of the auction lots. We propose a pipeline to automatically extract structured lot-level metadata from German Sales, a large database of historical auction and sales catalogs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Using a manually annotated test set of representative catalog pages, we evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under varying prompt strategies and constrained decoding frameworks. To reflect the practical constraints faced by cultural heritage institutions, including budget, compute resources, and data privacy requirements, we benchmark the methods across different deployment modes ranging from commercial providers to locally hosted, quantized models. We find that commercial endpoints establish the performance ceiling, while institutional gateways offer a viable, privacy-preserving alternative. Local deployments remain feasible, but strictly require enforcing the output structure during generation to guarantee a valid JSON format. While varying degrees of human-in-the-loop correction are still necessary, this work demonstrates that a VLM-based pipeline can successfully unlock historical auction catalogs for large-scale automated analysis.
In domain-specific multimodal long documents, images and text jointly convey complex knowledge that cannot be fully captured by plain text alone. However, existing paradigms like DocVQA primarily focus on generating textual answers or localizing evidence regions, rather than outputting query-specific textual attribute values and corresponding images. To address this gap, we propose query-driven image-text joint extraction from long documents, requiring models to output query-requested textual attribute values and corresponding image bounding boxes. Based on challenges related to both user intent and document content, we designed a two-level taxonomy that operates at the query and instance levels. Further, we construct ITJoint, the first high-quality, manually annotated benchmark for this new task, comprising 2,455 pages of domain-specific documents with numerous non-decorative images, 316 queries, and 910 answer instances. Finally, we evaluate representative standalone Vision-Language Models from different providers and further design Q2IT, a multi-agent collaborative framework consisting of three progressively collaborating agents for evidence collection, page selection, and target-image localization. Using a joint evaluation approach that assesses both text extraction and image localization, our experiments show that standalone VLMs struggle with this task, while Q2IT significantly improves performance on ITJoint, although a substantial gap remains toward perfect results.
Financial document validation in production, such as payroll auditing, tax compliance, and loan underwriting, demands exceptional accuracy, consistency, and reproducibility under strict enterprise constraints. In practice, documents arrive with heterogeneous layouts and formats, semantically rich and context-dependent content, and embedded business rules that current pipelines struggle to process reliably. We introduce LAVA (Logic-Aware Validation and Augmentation), a modular, backbone-agnostic pipeline built on multimodal large language models, that integrates a four-stage design: document-rule retrieval, layout-preserving information extraction, auxiliary metadata enrichment, and auditable symbolic/arithmetic verification. LAVA supports robust rule grounding, fine-grained error attribution, and consistent, traceable end-to-end execution, capabilities essential for high-stakes deployment. Evaluated on a large real-world benchmark with diverse financial documents and dozens of expert-curated validation rules, LAVA outperforms baselines in hallucination control and edge-case handling while maintaining efficient token usage, demonstrating practicality for high-volume, time-critical validation.
Jennifer D'Souza, Fahad Ahmed, Cecilia Andrea Bustamante Andrade +9cs.AI cs.CV cs.DL
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.
Scientific figure comprehension and reasoning using multimodal AI requires integrating visual perception with domain-specific reasoning to extract meaningful knowledge, often not presented in the text of a research publication. The Sci-ImageMiner benchmark dataset, accompanied by a community-driven competition, raises the bar over prior scientific competitions by curating a comprehensive, expert-annotated dataset across four end-to-end complementary tasks. The competition attracted 68 active participants and 1,263 public/private submissions from 9th January 2026 to 8th April 2026. Our results show that state-of-the-art multimodal models perform well on classification and summarization tasks but struggle with data extraction and scientific reasoning, particularly in visual question-answering. These findings reveal key limitations and highlight challenges and opportunities for improving domain-aware multimodal AI systems. Overall, the Sci-ImageMiner benchmark and competition establish a rigorous platform for advancing research in scientific figure comprehension and reasoning and demonstrate the potential of state-of-the-art approaches for a challenging and complex research area.
This technical report presents our approach to Challenge Track~3: SeePhys Pro at the 3rd AI for Math Workshop, where the task is to answer college-level physics questions whose statement and figure may be given partly or entirely as an image. Visual physics problems become substantially harder for large language models when the decisive information resides in a figure rather than in the text, and this modality gap widens as more of the problem migrates into the image. We address the task with a two-stage framework: a visual information extraction stage that re-expresses figure content as solver-readable text to close the modality gap, and a reasoning stage that orchestrates three heterogeneous solvers through multi-agent debate. Our analysis yields two findings: the gain from orchestration comes from reliable answer selection rather than from additional debate, and the value of a figure aid scales with how much of the problem is locked inside the image. The resulting pipeline improves overall accuracy over a single-agent baseline from 0.643 to 0.802 on the public split, and won 1st place on both the public and the private leaderboard (private overall 0.743).