# SciFigDetect: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Scientific Figure Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08211/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [What makes fake images detectable? Understanding properties that generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10588/) (2020)
- [On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01717/) (2019)
- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06998/) (2022)
- [Multimodal ArXiv: A Dataset for Improving Scientific Comprehension of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00231/) (2024)
- [ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05630/) (2021)
- [CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14126/) (2023)
- [SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11624/) (2021)
- [BiHPF: Bilateral High-Pass Filters for Robust Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00911/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Perturbations Fool Deepfake Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10596/) (2020)
- [SciFIBench: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Scientific Figure Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08807/) (2024)
- [From Words to Structured Visuals: A Benchmark and Framework for Text-to-Diagram Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11916/) (2024)
- [PaperBanana: Automating Academic Illustration for AI Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23265/) (2026)
- [AutoFigure: Generating and Refining Publication-Ready Scientific Illustrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03828/) (2026)
- [SciDoc2Diagrammer-MAF: Towards Generation of Scientific Diagrams from Documents guided by Multi-Aspect Feedback Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19242/) (2024)
- [AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06674/) (2026)
- [Can Multimodal Foundation Models Understand Schematic Diagrams? An Empirical Study on Information-Seeking QA over Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10787/) (2025)
- [SciFig: Towards Automating Editable Figure Generation for Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04390/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TextFake: Benchmarking AI-Generated Image Detection on Text-Rich Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01050/) (2026)
- [TextRich: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Text-Rich Images from GPT-Image-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19259/) (2026)
- [AI-generated Images Challenge Visual Trust in High-risk Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22745/) (2026)
- [The Emerging AI Paper-Review Arms Race: Adversarial Co-Evolution in Scholarly Publishing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern multimodal generators can now produce scientific figures at near-publishable quality, creating a new challenge for visual forensics and research integrity. Unlike conventional AI-generated natural images, scientific figures are structured, text-dense, and tightly aligned with scholarly semantics, making them a distinct and difficult detection target. However, existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks and methods are almost entirely developed for open-domain imagery, leaving this setting largely unexplored. We present the first benchmark for AI-generated scientific figure detection. To construct it, we develop an agent-based data pipeline that retrieves licensed source papers, performs multimodal understanding of paper text and figures, builds structured prompts, synthesizes candidate figures, and filters them through a review-driven refinement loop. The resulting benchmark covers multiple figure categories, multiple generation sources and aligned real--synthetic pairs. We benchmark representative detectors under zero-shot, cross-generator, and degraded-image settings. Results show that current methods fail dramatically in zero-shot transfer, exhibit strong generator-specific overfitting, and remain fragile under common post-processing corruptions. These findings reveal a substantial gap between existing AIGI detection capabilities and the emerging distribution of high-quality scientific figures. We hope this benchmark can serve as a foundation for future research on robust and generalizable scientific-figure forensics. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Joyce-yoyo/SciFigDetect.