想自动给论文图表打分？SciFigAlign比顶级大模型裁判准59%，还能区分同论文哪张图更好——审稿人能省大事。
研究者构建了包含3,857个科学图表的标注数据集，每个图表按Clarity、Relevance、Informativeness、Structure四个同行评审维度评分。提出SciFigAlign模型，端到端微调CLIP和SciBERT，结合跨模态注意力与CubeMLP融合，并联合优化SmoothL1回归与论文内排名hinge损失。在论文级别划分的测试集（n=396）上，模型macro MAE为0.3524，论文内成对比对准确率达81.64%，相比最佳LLM裁判基线（MAE 0.864）实现59%的相对误差降低。消融实验证明，基于手稿、引用上下文去噪和排名监督均对评估至关重要。
SciFigAlign: Scoring Scientific Figures by Fine-tuned Alignment of Visuals with Manuscript Evidence
Scientific figure assessment in peer review differs fundamentally from general image quality evaluation: a figure must be visually legible, faithfully support the manuscript's claims, and communicate evidence with a clear visual hierarchy. However, if we apply traditional image assessment methods to scientific figure quality assessment, limitations emerge: classic IQA models capture perceptual quality or aesthetics but cannot judge whether a figure serves the paper's scientific argument; CLIP-based methods assess generic image-text correspondence, yet lack understanding of manuscript context; and zero-shot LLM/VLM judges, when repurposed for figure scoring, often yield overly concentrated scores with limited fusion of visual and textual evidence. We introduce an annotated dataset of 3,857 scientific figures from peer-reviewed conference papers, each rated along four peer-review-oriented dimensions: Clarity, Relevance, Informativeness, and Structure. We propose SciFigAlign, a fine-tuned multimodal scorer that grounds figure quality assessment in manuscript evidence. Given a figure crop, caption, citing paragraphs, and light paper context, SciFigAlign fine-tunes CLIP and SciBERT end-to-end with per-modality cross-attention and CubeMLP fusion, jointly optimizing SmoothL1 regression with a within-paper ranking hinge loss. Under paper-level splits, SciFigAlign achieves a macro MAE of 0.3524 and a within-paper pairwise accuracy of 81.64% on the test set with n = 396, a 59% relative error reduction over the best LLM-as-judge baseline with MAE 0.864. Ablations confirm that manuscript-grounded inputs, citing-context denoising, and ranking supervision are all critical, showing that scientific figure assessment requires learned alignment between visual content and manuscript evidence rather than prompting alone, even with state-of-the-art VLMs.