# MolRecBench-Wild: A Real-World Benchmark for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ChemVLM: Exploring the Power of Multimodal Large Language Models in Chemistry Area](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07246/) (2024)
- [MolScribe: Robust Molecular Structure Recognition with Image-To-Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14311/) (2022)
- [Molecular Structure Extraction From Documents Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04903/) (2018)
- [MolGrapher: Graph-based Visual Recognition of Chemical Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12234/) (2023)
- [MolParser: End-to-end Visual Recognition of Molecule Structures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11098/) (2024)
- [Logics-Parsing Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19760/) (2025)
- [MolNexTR: A Generalized Deep Learning Model for Molecular Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03691/) (2024)
- [ChemDFM-X: Towards Large Multimodal Model for Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13194/) (2024)
- [OCSU: Optical Chemical Structure Understanding for Molecule-centric Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15415/) (2025)
- [GTR-CoT: Graph Traversal as Visual Chain of Thought for Molecular Structure Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07553/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MinerU.Chem: A High-Precision System for Optical Chemical Structure and Reaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) aims to translate molecular diagrams in scientific literature into machine-readable formats, but current systems remain unreliable on real-world images due to substantial visual and chemical complexity. We introduce MOSAIC, a dual-dimensional difficulty framework with 37 fine-grained labels that jointly characterize visual interference and chemical semantic challenges in molecular diagrams. Based on this framework, we construct MolRecBench-Wild, a benchmark of 5,029 structures from 820 recent chemistry papers, covering the full difficulty spectrum observed in real publications. To enable faithful semantic evaluation beyond SMILES and MolFile, we propose CARBON, a representation language capable of expressing valence variations, icon-based groups, and other non-standard chemical semantics. We further adopt a dual-track evaluation protocol supporting both CARBON and SMILES outputs for broad model compatibility. Comprehensive experiments over 18 OCSR-capable models reveal severe performance degradation on MolRecBench-Wild, exposing a large gap between previous patent benchmarks and real-world academic scenarios.