M3SciQA: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Scientific QA Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models

Chuhan Li, Ziyao Shangguan, Yilun Zhao, Deyuan Li, Yixin Liu, Arman Cohan

M3SciQA: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Scientific QA Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models: 16 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #15 of 18 papers on 2024-11-08. Day-by-day upvote history.

Existing benchmarks for evaluating foundation models mainly focus on single-document, text-only tasks. However, they often fail to fully capture the complexity of research workflows, which typically involve interpreting non-textual data and gathering information across multiple documents. To address this gap, we introduce M3SciQA, a multi-modal, multi-document scientific question answering benchmark designed for a more comprehensive evaluation of foundation models. M3SciQA consists of 1,452 expert-annotated questions spanning 70 natural language processing paper clusters, where each cluster represents a primary paper along with all its cited documents, mirroring the workflow of comprehending a single paper by requiring multi-modal and multi-document data. With M3SciQA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 foundation models. Our results indicate that current foundation models still significantly underperform compared to human experts in multi-modal information retrieval and in reasoning across multiple scientific documents. Additionally, we explore the implications of these findings for the future advancement of applying foundation models in multi-modal scientific literature analysis.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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