Enginuity: A Dataset and Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding of Engineering Diagrams

Engineering diagrams pose a distinct challenge for vision-language models: unlike natural images or general documents, they encode information through dense spatial layouts, domain-specific symbols, and cross-references between visual callouts and structured parts tables. Despite their centrality to service, repair, and design workflows, there is no public benchmark for measuring VLM capabilities in this domain; existing datasets primarily focus on flowcharts, scientific figures, or business documents. To address this gap, we introduce Enginuity, the first open dataset and benchmark for evaluating VLMs on complex engineering diagrams. We define two tasks over a corpus of U.S. military service and repair manuals: structured parts-table extraction (Task 1) and free-form visual diagram question answering (VQA)(Task 2) for benchmarking. We evaluate four frontier VLMs (GPT-5.2 Chat, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemma 4, Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct) under zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting. On Task 1, models reach Recall@all of 0.61-0.87 but Token F1pen of only 0.03-0.18, exposing a systematic gap between part identification and description fidelity. Task 2 reveals a consistent factual-reasoning gap across all models. A supporting analysis shows that token-overlap metrics under-report model capability on technical descriptions by 2-6x relative to semantic similarity, motivating LLM-as-judge calibration for domain-specific evaluation. We release the dataset, annotations, evaluation harness, and per-sample model outputs to support a reproducible study of VLM capability on engineering content.

Enginuity: Building an Open Multi-Domain Dataset of Complex Engineering Diagrams

We propose Enginuity - the first open, large-scale, multi-domain engineering diagram dataset with comprehensive structural annotations designed for automated diagram parsing. By capturing hierarchical component relationships, connections, and semantic elements across diverse engineering domains, our proposed dataset would enable multimodal large language models to address critical downstream tasks including structured diagram parsing, cross-modal information retrieval, and AI-assisted engineering simulation. Enginuity would be transformative for AI for Scientific Discovery by enabling artificial intelligence systems to comprehend and manipulate the visual-structural knowledge embedded in engineering diagrams, breaking down a fundamental barrier that currently prevents AI from fully participating in scientific workflows where diagram interpretation, technical drawing analysis, and visual reasoning are essential for hypothesis generation, experimental design, and discovery.

Enhancing Scientific Visual Question Answering through Multimodal Reasoning and Ensemble Modeling

Technical reports and articles often contain valuable information in the form of semi-structured data like charts, and figures. Interpreting these and using the information from them is essential for downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Current approaches to visual question answering often struggle with the precision required for scientific data interpretation, particularly in handling numerical values, multi-step reasoning over visual elements, and maintaining consistency between visual observation and textual reasoning. We present our approach to the SciVQA 2025 shared task, focusing on answering visual and non-visual questions grounded in scientific figures from scholarly articles. We conducted a series of experiments using models with 5B to 8B parameters. Our strongest individual model, InternVL3, achieved ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L F1 scores of \textbf{0.740} and a BERTScore of \textbf{0.983} on the SciVQA test split. We also developed an ensemble model with multiple vision language models (VLMs). Through error analysis on the validation split, our ensemble approach improved performance compared to most individual models, though InternVL3 remained the strongest standalone performer. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of prompt optimization, chain-of-thought reasoning and ensemble modeling in improving the model's ability in visual question answering.