CircuitSense: A Hierarchical MLLM Benchmark Bridging Visual Comprehension and Symbolic Reasoning in Engineering Design Process

Engineering design operates through hierarchical abstraction from system specifications to component implementations, requiring visual understanding coupled with mathematical reasoning at each level. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at natural image tasks, their ability to extract mathematical models from technical diagrams remains unexplored. We present CircuitSense, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating circuit understanding across this hierarchy through 8,006+ problems spanning component-level schematics to system-level block diagrams. Our benchmark uniquely examines the complete engineering workflow: Perception, Analysis, and Design, with a particular emphasis on the critical but underexplored capability of deriving symbolic equations from visual inputs. We introduce a hierarchical synthetic generation pipeline consisting of a grid-based schematic generator and a block diagram generator with auto-derived symbolic equation labels. Comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both closed-source and open-source models, reveals fundamental limitations in visual-to-mathematical reasoning. Closed-source models achieve over 85% accuracy on perception tasks involving component recognition and topology identification, yet their performance on symbolic derivation and analytical reasoning falls below 19%, exposing a critical gap between visual parsing and symbolic reasoning. Models with stronger symbolic reasoning capabilities consistently achieve higher design task accuracy, confirming the fundamental role of mathematical understanding in circuit synthesis and establishing symbolic reasoning as the key metric for engineering competence.