SCAFFOLD Dataset Boosts AI Understanding of CS Diagrams

Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Sudan Jha· September 2, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • Computer science diagrams are rich in information but lack dedicated datasets for AI training.
  • SCAFFOLD is a new large-scale dataset pairing figures with QA and Chain-of-Thought reasoning.
  • It enables training vision-language models to understand complex technical diagrams.
  • The dataset is available in multiple sizes, facilitating research and development in multimodal AI.

Who benefits

AI DevelopmentEdTechScientific ResearchPublishingSoftware Engineering

Summary

SCAFFOLD is a new large-scale structured dataset featuring computer science research figures paired with captions, context, questions, answers, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. This dataset is specifically designed to train vision-language models to comprehend complex diagrams found in academic papers.

Computer science research papers heavily rely on diagrams—such as architecture drawings, flowcharts, and schematics—which often convey more information than the accompanying text. However, there has been a significant lack of public datasets that combine these specific types of figures with their captions, surrounding context, relevant questions, answers, and step-by-step reasoning traces. Such a dataset is crucial for effectively training vision-language models to truly understand these complex visual elements. To address this gap, the SCAFFOLD dataset has been introduced. It is a large-scale, structured collection of computer science research figures. The dataset comprises tuples of (image, caption, context, question-answer, chain-of-thought) extracted from arXiv computer science papers. The creation process involved layout detection, PDF parsing, and AI-assisted question generation to ensure high quality and relevance. SCAFFOLD is available in various sizes: SCAFFOLD-157K (157,387 pairs from 3,058 papers), SCAFFOLD-37K (36,797 pairs), and SCAFFOLD-12K (12,000 pairs). Baseline experiments conducted with Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct on SCAFFOLD-12K demonstrate its utility for training models to interpret and reason about complex technical diagrams, paving the way for more sophisticated AI understanding of scientific literature.

Why it matters

For AI researchers and developers, this dataset is a critical resource for advancing multimodal AI capabilities, enabling models to extract and reason with information from complex technical diagrams, which is vital for scientific discovery and knowledge automation.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Integrate the SCAFFOLD dataset into your vision-language model training pipelines for improved diagram understanding.
  2. 2Develop and fine-tune multimodal models specifically designed to process and reason about technical schematics and flowcharts.
  3. 3Utilize the Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces within SCAFFOLD to enhance your models' explainability and reasoning capabilities.
  4. 4Explore applications of diagram-understanding AI in automating literature reviews, technical documentation, or educational content creation.
  5. 5Contribute to the dataset's expansion by annotating more figures or developing new question-generation techniques.

Original post by Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Sudan Jha

"arXiv:2609.00018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer science papers rely heavily on diagrams: architecture drawings, system flowcharts, and pipeline schematics that often carry more information than the text around them. There is currently no public dataset that pairs this sp…"

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Originally posted by Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Sudan Jha on X · view source

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