Junyong Lin

Xiaoyu Chen, Lu Dai, Hanqing Wang et al.

Structured tables are essential for conveying high-density information in professional domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Despite the progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), reasoning performance remains limited for complex tables with hierarchical layouts. In this paper, we identify a critical Perception Bottleneck through quantitative analysis. We find that as task complexity scales, the number of involved discrete visual regions increases disproportionately. This processing density leads to an internal "Perceptual Overload," where MLLMs struggle to maintain accurate spatial attention during implicit generation. To address this bottleneck, we introduce TableVision, a large-scale, trajectory-aware benchmark designed for spatially grounded reasoning. TableVision stratifies tabular tasks into three cognitive levels (Perception, Reasoning, and Analysis) across 13 sub-categories. By utilizing a rendering-based deterministic grounding pipeline, the dataset explicitly couples multi-step logical deductions with pixel-perfect spatial ground truths, comprising 6,799 high-fidelity reasoning trajectories. Our empirical results, supported by diagnostic probing, demonstrate that explicit spatial constraints significantly recover the reasoning potential of MLLMs. Furthermore, our two-stage decoupled framework achieves a robust 12.3% overall accuracy improvement on the test set. TableVision provides a rigorous testbed and a fresh perspective on the synergy between perception and logic in document understanding.

Junyong Lin, Lu Dai, Ruiqian Han et al.

Scientific researchers need intensive information about datasets to effectively evaluate and develop theories and methodologies. The information needs regarding datasets are implicitly embedded in particular research tasks, rather than explicitly expressed in search queries. However, existing scientific retrieval and question-answering (QA) datasets typically address straightforward questions, which do not align with the distribution of real-world research inquiries. To bridge this gap, we developed ScIRGen, a dataset generation framework for scientific QA \& retrieval that more accurately reflects the information needs of professional science researchers, and uses it to create a large-scale scientific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) dataset with realistic queries, datasets and papers. Technically, we designed a dataset-oriented information extraction method that leverages academic papers to augment the dataset representation. We then proposed a question generation framework by employing cognitive taxonomy to ensure the quality of synthesized questions. We also design a method to automatically filter synthetic answers based on the perplexity shift of LLMs, which is highly aligned with human judgment of answers' validity. Collectively, these methodologies culminated in the creation of the 61k QA dataset, ScIRGen-Geo. We benchmarked representative methods on the ScIRGen-Geo dataset for their question-answering and retrieval capabilities, finding out that current methods still suffer from reasoning from complex questions. This work advances the development of more sophisticated tools to support the intricate information needs of the scientific community.