VFIG: Vectorizing Complex Figures in SVG with Vision-Language Models

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are essential for technical illustration and digital design, offering resolution independence and semantic editability. In practice, original vector files are frequently lost, leaving only rasterized versions (e.g., PNG, JPEG) that resist modification, while manual reconstruction is prohibitively expensive. Progress on automating raster-to-SVG conversion has been bottlenecked by two gaps: existing SVG datasets are dominated by icons and decorative graphics that lack the complexity of professional diagrams, and existing benchmarks rely on pixel- or embedding-level similarity that fails to capture structural correctness (e.g., broken connectivity, misplaced arrows). We close both gaps with paired contributions targeting diagram-centric figures (e.g., model architectures, flowcharts, schematics). For training, we introduce VFIG-Data, the largest figure-to-SVG dataset of its kind at 66K pairs, combining real paper figures converted via a describe-and-generate pipeline with programmatic diagrams that supply noise-free supervision over arrow styles, fonts, and geometry. For evaluation, we introduce VFIG-Bench, a structure-aware evaluation suite, paired with VFIG-Bench-OOD, an out-of-distribution set of figures manually curated from highly cited arXiv papers. Beyond pixel and embedding similarity, our protocol reports rubric-based VLM-Judge scores and Elo ratings from pairwise human preference evaluation. Built on these contributions, VFIG is a VLM family trained with a simple-to-complex SFT curriculum followed by RL with rendering-aware rewards. VFIG achieves state-of-the-art open-source performance, outperforming the best open-source VLM baseline by over 30%, and matches Claude Sonnet 4.6 on VFIG-BENCH: Gemini-Judge 78.2% vs. 76.7% and GPT-Judge 87.5% vs. 87.4%. It remains slightly behind the strongest proprietary models GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.