Format Matters: The Robustness of Multimodal LLMs in Reviewing Evidence from Tables and Charts

With the growing number of submitted scientific papers, there is an increasing demand for systems that can assist reviewers in evaluating research claims. Experimental results are a core component of scientific work, often presented in varying formats such as tables or charts. Understanding how robust current multimodal large language models (multimodal LLMs) are at verifying scientific claims across different evidence formats remains an important and underexplored challenge. In this paper, we design and conduct a series of experiments to assess the ability of multimodal LLMs to verify scientific claims using both tables and charts as evidence. To enable this evaluation, we adapt two existing datasets of scientific papers by incorporating annotations and structures necessary for a multimodal claim verification task. Using this adapted dataset, we evaluate 12 multimodal LLMs and find that current models perform better with table-based evidence while struggling with chart-based evidence. We further conduct human evaluations and observe that humans maintain strong performance across both formats, unlike the models. Our analysis also reveals that smaller multimodal LLMs (under 8B) show weak correlation in performance between table-based and chart-based tasks, indicating limited cross-modal generalization. These findings highlight a critical gap in current models' multimodal reasoning capabilities. We suggest that future multimodal LLMs should place greater emphasis on improving chart understanding to better support scientific claim verification.

Table-Text Alignment: Explaining Claim Verification Against Tables in Scientific Papers

Scientific claim verification against tables typically requires predicting whether a claim is supported or refuted given a table. However, we argue that predicting the final label alone is insufficient: it reveals little about the model's reasoning and offers limited interpretability. To address this, we reframe table-text alignment as an explanation task, requiring models to identify the table cells essential for claim verification. We build a new dataset by extending the SciTab benchmark with human-annotated cell-level rationales. Annotators verify the claim label and highlight the minimal set of cells needed to support their decision. After the annotation process, we utilize the collected information and propose a taxonomy for handling ambiguous cases. Our experiments show that (i) incorporating table alignment information improves claim verification performance, and (ii) most LLMs, while often predicting correct labels, fail to recover human-aligned rationales, suggesting that their predictions do not stem from faithful reasoning.

LinearAPT: An Adaptive Algorithm for the Fixed-Budget Thresholding Linear Bandit Problem

In this study, we delve into the Thresholding Linear Bandit (TLB) problem, a nuanced domain within stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, focusing on maximizing decision accuracy against a linearly defined threshold under resource constraints. We present LinearAPT, a novel algorithm designed for the fixed budget setting of TLB, providing an efficient solution to optimize sequential decision-making. This algorithm not only offers a theoretical upper bound for estimated loss but also showcases robust performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our contributions highlight the adaptability, simplicity, and computational efficiency of LinearAPT, making it a valuable addition to the toolkit for addressing complex sequential decision-making challenges.