ReactBench: A Benchmark for Topological Reasoning in MLLMs on Chemical Reaction Diagrams
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at recognizing individual visual elements and reasoning over simple linear diagrams. However, when faced with complex topological structures involving branching paths, converging flows, and cyclic dependencies, their reasoning capabilities degrade sharply, even on tasks as basic as counting endpoints. Existing benchmarks fail to probe this gap, focusing on semantic comprehension rather than structural reasoning. We introduce ReactBench, a benchmark that reveals fundamental limitations in structural reasoning through chemical reaction diagrams. These real-world scientific diagrams offer an ideal testbed because they naturally span diverse stru...
| Authors | Qiang Xu, Shengyuan Bai, Yu Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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