Explain with Visual Keypoints Like a Real Mentor! A Benchmark for Multimodal Solution Explanation

With the rapid advancement of mathematical reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), AI systems are increasingly being adopted in educational settings to support students' comprehension of problem-solving processes. However, a critical component remains underexplored in current LLM-generated explanations: visual explanation. In real-world instructional contexts, human tutors routinely employ visual aids - such as diagrams, markings, and highlights - to enhance conceptual clarity. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task of visual solution explanation, which requires generating explanations that incorporate newly introduced visual elements essential for understanding (e.g., auxiliary lines, annotations, or geometric constructions). To evaluate model performance on this task, we propose MathExplain, a multimodal benchmark consisting of 997 math problems annotated with visual keypoints and corresponding explanatory text that references those elements. Our empirical results show that while some closed-source models demonstrate promising capabilities on visual solution-explaining, current open-source general-purpose models perform inconsistently, particularly in identifying relevant visual components and producing coherent keypoint-based explanations. We expect that visual solution-explaining and the MathExplain dataset will catalyze further research on multimodal LLMs in education and advance their deployment as effective, explanation-oriented AI tutors. Code and data will be released publicly.

Benchmarking Foundation Models on Exceptional Cases: Dataset Creation and Validation

Foundation models (FMs) have achieved significant success across various tasks, leading to research on benchmarks for reasoning abilities. However, there is a lack of studies on FMs performance in exceptional scenarios, which we define as out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning tasks. This paper is the first to address these cases, developing a novel dataset for evaluation of FMs across multiple modalities, including graphic novels, calligraphy, news articles, and lyrics. It includes tasks for instance classification, character recognition, token prediction, and text generation. The paper also proposes prompt engineering techniques like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and CoT+Few-Shot to enhance performance. Validation of FMs using various methods revealed improvements. The code repository is accessible at: https://github.com/MLAI-Yonsei/ExceptionalBenchmark