Ling Li

Li Ling, Jun Zhang, Nils Bore et al.

Deep learning has shown promising results for multiple 3D point cloud registration datasets. However, in the underwater domain, most registration of multibeam echo-sounder (MBES) point cloud data are still performed using classical methods in the iterative closest point (ICP) family. In this work, we curate and release DotsonEast Dataset, a semi-synthetic MBES registration dataset constructed from an autonomous underwater vehicle in West Antarctica. Using this dataset, we systematically benchmark the performance of 2 classical and 4 learning-based methods. The experimental results show that the learning-based methods work well for coarse alignment, and are better at recovering rough transforms consistently at high overlap (20-50%). In comparison, GICP (a variant of ICP) performs well for fine alignment and is better across all metrics at extremely low overlap (10%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to benchmark both learning-based and classical registration methods on an AUV-based MBES dataset. To facilitate future research, both the code and data are made available online.

Junkai Zhang, Jingru Gan, Xiaoxuan Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in scientific reasoning, yet their reasoning capabilities in materials science remain underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce MatSciBench, a comprehensive college-level benchmark comprising 1,340 problems that span the essential subdisciplines of materials science. MatSciBench features a structured and fine-grained taxonomy that categorizes materials science questions into 6 primary fields and 31 sub-fields, and includes a three-tier difficulty classification based on the reasoning length required to solve each question. MatSciBench provides detailed reference solutions enabling precise error analysis and incorporates multimodal reasoning through visual contexts in numerous questions. Evaluations of leading models reveal that even the highest-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves under 80% accuracy on college-level materials science questions, highlighting the complexity of MatSciBench. Our systematic analysis of different reasoning strategie--basic chain-of-thought, tool augmentation, and self-correction--demonstrates that no single method consistently excels across all scenarios. We further analyze performance by difficulty level, examine trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy, highlight the challenges inherent in multimodal reasoning tasks, analyze failure modes across LLMs and reasoning methods, and evaluate the influence of retrieval-augmented generation. MatSciBench thus establishes a comprehensive and solid benchmark for assessing and driving improvements in the scientific reasoning capabilities of LLMs within the materials science domain.