PlotGround: Grounding Plot Digitization in Real Scientific Figures and Their Source Data

Abstract:Scientific figures often encode quantitative results that are not readily available in machine-readable form, making accurate plot digitization important for verifying and reusing published findings. Yet it remains unclear how accurately current models recover plotted values from real scientific figures, as existing benchmarks rely largely on synthetic charts or cover only a limited range of chart types. We introduce PlotGround, an automated pipeline for building plot digitization benchmarks from real scientific figures and their author-released source data. PlotGround maps figures to source tables, identifies reconstructable panels, and generates quantitative questions with source-grounded reference values. We use PlotGround to construct PlotGround-1k, a human-verified benchmark of 1,119 questions from 1,066 bioRxiv preprints. Across sixteen multimodal models, the best reaches 87.5% accuracy at a $\pm 5\%$ relative-error tolerance. Tightening the tolerance to $\pm 2\%$ lowers every model's accuracy by 11-24 percentage points, revealing a gap between approximate visual reading and precise quantitative recovery. PlotGround's paired figure-source structure lets us compare how accurately the same values are recovered from figures and from source tables. Providing source tables instead of figures raises a coding agent's accuracy from 90.0% to 97.4% while cutting cost by 72%.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2610.06825 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.06825v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06825 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.