Challenge: Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit significant limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark shows that existing MLLMs exhibit limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs.

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Forgotten Polygons: Multimodal Large Language Models are Shape-Blind (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models struggle with visual reasoning, despite strong performance on vision-language tasks.
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ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection.
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Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing image instruction fine-tuning datasets do not fully exploit visual information to enhance multimodal reasoning capabilities of Large language models (LLMs).
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Can Vision-Language Models Solve Visual Math Equations? (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on textual equations, but fail on visually grounded counterparts.
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Probing Logical Reasoning of MLLMs in Scientific Diagrams (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: logical reasoning is key to real-world applications like science education, environmental monitoring, and medical diagnostics.
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MathSight: A Benchmark Exploring Have Vision-Language Models Really Seen in University-Level Mathematical Reasoning? (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks rarely isolate how much visual information contributes to reasoning . a growing collection of benchmarks has catalyzed rapid progress in multimodal reasoning - but how much it contributes remains unclear .
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SpatialMath: Spatial Comprehension-Infused Symbolic Reasoning for Mathematical Problem-Solving (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Current models struggle to accurately decompose intricate visual inputs and connect perception with structured reasoning, leading to suboptimal performance.
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A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: This survey provides **the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models** . integrating large language model with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming significant as AI advances .
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MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams.
Approach: They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids .
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Protecting multimodal large language models against misleading visualizations (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: MLLMs are robust to misleading visualizations, i.e., charts that distort the underlying data, leading readers to draw inaccurate conclusions.
Approach: They propose to use table-based QA and redrawing the visualization to improve QA performance on misleading visualizations.
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