# Not Search, But Scan: Benchmarking MLLMs on Scan-Oriented Academic Paper Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28651 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28651/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 8 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Document understanding and multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/document-understanding-and-multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

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- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19437/) (2024)
- [MMCR: Advancing Visual Language Model in Multimodal Multi-Turn Contextual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18533/) (2025)
- [FinMMDocR: Benchmarking Financial Multimodal Reasoning with Scenario Awareness, Document Understanding, and Multi-Step Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24903/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), AI already performs well at literature retrieval and certain reasoning tasks, serving as a capable assistant to human researchers, yet it remains far from autonomous research. The fundamental reason is that current work on academic paper reasoning is largely confined to a search-oriented paradigm centered on pre-specified targets, with reasoning grounded in relevance retrieval, which struggles to support researcher-style full-document understanding, reasoning, and verification. To bridge this gap, we propose ScholScan, a new benchmark for academic paper reasoning. ScholScan introduces a scan-oriented task setting that asks models to read and cross-check entire papers like human researchers, scanning the document to identify consistency issues. The benchmark comprises 1,800 carefully annotated questions drawn from nine error categories across 13 natural-science domains and 715 papers, and provides detailed annotations for evidence localization and reasoning traces, together with a unified evaluation protocol. We assessed 15 models across 24 input configurations and conducted a fine-grained analysis of MLLM capabilities for all error categories. Across the board, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods yield no significant improvements, revealing systematic deficiencies of current MLLMs on scan-oriented tasks and underscoring the challenge posed by ScholScan. We expect ScholScan to be the leading and representative work of the scan-oriented task paradigm.