Title: VisioMath: Benchmarking Figure-based Mathematical Reasoning in LMMs
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Figure-based Mathematical Reasoning, Large Multimodal Models, Mathematical Benchmark

Abstract: arge Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable progress in integrating vision and language, enabling strong performance across perception, reasoning, and domain-specific tasks. However, their capacity to reason over multiple, visually similar inputs remains insufficiently explored. Such fine-grained comparative reasoning is central to real-world tasks, especially in mathematics and education, where learners must often distinguish between nearly identical diagrams to identify correct solutions.  To address this gap, we present VisioMath, a curated benchmark of 1,800 high-quality K–12 mathematics problems in which all candidate answers are diagrams with subtle visual similarities. A comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LMMs, covering both leading closed-source systems and widely adopted open-source models, reveals a consistent decline in accuracy as inter-image similarity increases. Analysis indicates that the dominant failure mode stems from image–text misalignment: rather than grounding reasoning in textual cues, models often resort to shallow positional heuristics, resulting in systematic errors. We further explore three alignment-oriented strategies, spanning training-free approaches and finetuning, and achieve substantial accuracy gains. We hope that VisioMath will serve as a rigorous benchmark and catalyst for developing LMMs toward deeper diagram understanding, precise comparative reasoning, and grounded multi-image–text integration.

TL;DR: We introduce VisioMath, the first benchmark for evaluating mathematical reasoning with image-based answer options, revealing that current large multimodal models struggle with fine-grained visual distinctions and achieve limited accuracy.