[CFP] Sci-ImageMiner Competition 2026: Scientific Figure Understanding

[Jennifer D'Souza]

The 1st Sci-ImageMiner Competition: Information Extraction from Scientific Figures in Materials Science
Focus: Quantitative plots from Atomic Layer Deposition and Etching (ALD/E) research

Organized as part of the ICDAR 2026 Competition track https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/
ICDAR 2026 — The 20th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
30 Aug – 04 Sep 2026 | Vienna, Austria

Sci-ImageMiner 2026 Competition Website: https://sites.google.com/view/sci-imageminer/

Overview

Scientific figures often contain critical results that never appear explicitly in the text. Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models, most existing benchmarks rely on generic or synthetic visuals. Sci-ImageMiner addresses this gap by introducing a curated benchmark grounded in authentic scientific figures from a specialized scientific domain.

Tasks

The competition hosts four tasks:

1. Figure Classification – identify the chart or figure type | Codabench leaderboard https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12901/ (now accepting practice phase submissions)

2. Data Table Extraction – reconstruct the underlying tabular data from quantitative plots | Codabench leaderbaord https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12902/ (now accepting practice phase submissions)

3. Figure Summarization – generate concise, factual summaries of key trends | Codabench leaderboard coming soon ...

4. Visual Question Answering (VQA) – answer scientific questions requiring reasoning over figure content | Codabench leaderboard coming soon ...

Teams may participate in any subset of tasks (including all four).

Data & Evaluation

• The training dataset is released

• To enable practice phase submissions, a small sample of the blind test dataset is also released.

• All evaluations will be conducted on Codabench, with per-task leaderboards.

Important Dates (selected)

• Evaluation start: 16 March 2026

• Evaluation end: 3 April 2026

• Paper submission deadline: 17 April 2026

• Camera-ready deadline: 4 May 2026

We encourage teams to join early and start developing during the practice phase. Please also join our Google Group for questions and for announcements (e.g., new data releases and evaluation updates). The competition google group can be found on the website.