# S1-MMAlign: A Large-Scale, Multi-Disciplinary Dataset for Scientific Figure-Text Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00264/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 24 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Chart understanding and anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/chart-understanding-and-anomaly-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08163/) (2018)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [PlotQA: Reasoning over Scientific Plots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00997/) (2019)
- [FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07300/) (2017)
- [Multimodal ArXiv: A Dataset for Improving Scientific Comprehension of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00231/) (2024)
- [Can MLLMs Reason in Multimodality? EMMA: An Enhanced MultiModal ReAsoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05444/) (2025)
- [SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11624/) (2021)
- [SciFIBench: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Scientific Figure Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08807/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal learning has revolutionized general domain tasks, yet its application in scientific discovery is hindered by the profound semantic gap between complex scientific imagery and sparse textual descriptions. We present S1-MMAlign, a large-scale, multi-disciplinary multimodal dataset comprising over 15.5 million high-quality image-text pairs derived from 2.5 million open-access scientific papers. Spanning disciplines from physics and biology to engineering, the dataset captures diverse visual modalities including experimental setups, heatmaps, and microscopic imagery. To address the pervasive issue of weak alignment in raw scientific captions, we introduce an AI-ready semantic enhancement pipeline that leverages advanced multimodal large language models to recaption images, by synthesizing comprehensive context from paper abstracts and the citation contexts of corresponding figures. Technical validation confirms that our enhancement pipeline markedly improves data quality via reduced SciBERT pseudo-perplexity and enhanced CLIP image-text alignment, while also significantly boosting multimodal large language models performance in zero-shot scientific captioning, multi-domain scientific reasoning, and visual instruction tuning. S1-MMAlign provides a pivotal foundational resource for cross-modal scientific understanding in the AI for Science era, supporting the development of scientific foundation models and a wide range of downstream scientific intelligence applications. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ScienceOne-AI/S1-MMAlign.