Title: DaVinci: Reinforcing Visual-Structural Syntax in MLLMs for Generalized Scientific Diagram Parsing
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Scientific diagram parsing, multimodal large language model

Abstract: Parsing raster-based scientific diagrams into structured representations is critical for editability and reusability. However, existing multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) struggle with the diverse visual primitives, complex structural layouts, and strict syntax involved. To address this, we introduce DaVinci, a novel MLLM that learns diagram parsing based on a two-stage framework—supervised learning of visual primitives followed by reinforcement learning of their structural relationships. Our model learns visual-structural syntax through supervised training on TikZ30K, a newly curated dataset of high-quality diagram-TikZ code pairs that features abundant visual primitives and structurally optimized drawing sequences. We further refine the model via reinforcement learning, guided by a hybrid reward function that jointly optimizes for visual fidelity, structural consistency, and code correctness. Extensive experiments show that DaVinci significantly outperforms existing open-source MLLMs and surpasses leading proprietary models like GPT-5 and Claude-Sonnet-4.