MuSciClaims: Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification

Yash Kumar Lal, Manikanta Bandham, Mohammad Saqib Hasan, Apoorva Kashi, Mahnaz Koupaee, Niranjan Balasubramanian


Abstract
Assessing scientific claims requires identifying, extracting, and reasoning with multimodal data expressed in information-rich figures in scientific literature. Despite the large body of work in scientific QA, figure captioning, and other multimodal reasoning tasks over chart-based data, there are no readily usable multimodal benchmarks that directly test claim verification abilities. To remedy this gap, we introduce a new benchmark MuSciClaims accompanied by diagnostics tasks. We automatically extract supported claims from scientific articles, which we manually perturb to produce contradicted claims. The perturbations are designed to test for a specific set of claim verification capabilities. We also introduce a suite of diagnostic tasks that help understand model failures. Our results show most vision-language models are poor (~0.3-0.5 F1), with even the best model only achieving 0.72 F1. They are also biased towards judging claims as supported, likely misunderstanding nuanced perturbations within the claims. Our diagnostics show models are bad at localizing correct evidence within figures, struggle with aggregating information across modalities, and often fail to understand basic components of the figure.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.175
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3285–3307
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.175/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yash Kumar Lal, Manikanta Bandham, Mohammad Saqib Hasan, Apoorva Kashi, Mahnaz Koupaee, and Niranjan Balasubramanian. 2025. MuSciClaims: Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3285–3307, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MuSciClaims: Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification (Lal et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.175.pdf