# HG-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Page Handwritten Answer-Region Grounding in Automated Homework Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25491/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 40 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

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- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated homework assessment depends not only on recognizing student answers, but also on accurately locating where each answer and each intermediate reasoning step appears in noisy, multi-page handwritten work. This paper addresses the missing evaluation setting of page-aware, two-level answer-region grounding: given a sequence of homework page images, a model must localize complete answer regions and their ordered step-level subregions. We introduce HG-Bench, a benchmark of 500 human-annotated K-12 homework samples curated from a 1,489,278-image source pool, with question-level and step-level boxes linked by a hierarchical containment constraint. HG-Bench is paired with a page-aware evaluation protocol that separately measures complete-answer localization (FA) and step-level decomposition (FSm), revealing whether models truly ground the spatial structure of student reasoning rather than merely parse visible text. Across frontier closed-source APIs and competitive open-weight VLMs, no zero-shot system exceeds 55.22% on FA or 48.22% on FSm, while a GLM-4.6V 9B reference model fine-tuned on ~10k in-domain examples reaches 74.97/72.26. These results identify step-level handwritten grounding as a concrete capability gap and provide a reproducible benchmark, evaluation protocol, and trained reference point for future work on automated homework assessment.