Every Part Matters: Integrity Verification of Scientific Figures Based on Multimodal Large Language Models
This work addresses the challenge of accurately interpreting complex scientific figures for researchers and practitioners in fields relying on multimodal data, representing an incremental advancement over prior methods focused on simpler visualizations.
The paper tackles the problem of fine-grained alignment between text and scientific figures by introducing a new task called Figure Integrity Verification, and it shows that their proposed EPM framework and Figure-seg dataset substantially improve upon existing methods for more precise analysis of complex figures.
This paper tackles a key issue in the interpretation of scientific figures: the fine-grained alignment of text and figures. It advances beyond prior research that primarily dealt with straightforward, data-driven visualizations such as bar and pie charts and only offered a basic understanding of diagrams through captioning and classification. We introduce a novel task, Figure Integrity Verification, designed to evaluate the precision of technologies in aligning textual knowledge with visual elements in scientific figures. To support this, we develop a semi-automated method for constructing a large-scale dataset, Figure-seg, specifically designed for this task. Additionally, we propose an innovative framework, Every Part Matters (EPM), which leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to not only incrementally improve the alignment and verification of text-figure integrity but also enhance integrity through analogical reasoning. Our comprehensive experiments show that these innovations substantially improve upon existing methods, allowing for more precise and thorough analysis of complex scientific figures. This progress not only enhances our understanding of multimodal technologies but also stimulates further research and practical applications across fields requiring the accurate interpretation of complex visual data.