Abstract:Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown substantial potential in visual understanding and graphic code generation, editing scientific figures through code presents a greater challenge: a model must jointly recover visual structure, ground the requested change, generate compilable code, and preserve all unrelated content. While existing TikZ benchmarks mainly focus on figure reconstruction and generation, few systematically evaluate instruction-guided scientific figure editing with compilable code. We introduce Edit2TikZ, a comprehensive benchmark for scientific figure editing tasks, featuring 1,548 diverse and high-quality samples. Edit2TikZ combines real-world and controlled synthetic edit cases, supports both textual and visual localization request, and contains multi-step editing, each with step-level annotations. We further construct a human-aligned evaluation framework to measure whether a requested edit is completed while irrelevant content is preserved. Utilizing Edit2TikZ, we evaluate 14 mainstream MLLMs and find that current systems remain unreliable: on average, proprietary models achieve a compilation success rate of merely 75% and remain limited in both figure restoration and edit correctness, while compact models below 9B struggle further with instruction following and complete figure generation. Therefore, we build a mixed training set TikZEditMix and adopt reconstruction-then-editing curriculum learning for compact models. On Qwen3.5-4B, this training improves the compilation success rate from 45.35% to 83.40% and yields an average improvement of 18.7 points across our proposed evaluation metrics. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/Solunny/Edit2TikZ.
Abstract:Offline root-cause-analysis (RCA) benchmarks commonly rank methods by a single pooled top-1 accuracy across multiple subsystems, and engineers often read the pooled winner as a recommendation for their own subsystem. We audit that reading on three public RCA benchmark families -- OpenRCA, RCAEval, and PetShop -- covering 11 subsystems and 778 matched scoring units. To keep pairwise comparisons on identical cases, the main analysis retains four methods or comparators with complete coverage: BARO, a CD-1min adapter, max-$|Z|$, and per-service alert-count. All six pairwise comparisons show subsystem-level effects of both signs, every random-effects 95\% prediction interval crosses zero, and case-level interaction tests reject exchangeability in 5 of 6 pairs. Leave-one-system-out selection picks the lower-scoring method on up to 5 of 11 held-out subsystems, with regret reaching 24.8 pp on RCAEval / Sock-Shop. We release a 320-line audit module; given a matched RCA benchmark score table, it recomputes the same per-subsystem stability checks alongside pooled scores.