The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has heightened the demand for AI-based scientific assistants capable of understanding scientific articles and figures. Despite progress, there remains a significant gap in evaluating models' comprehension of professional, graduate-level, and even PhD-level scientific content. Current datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on relatively simple scientific tasks and figures, lacking comprehensive assessments across diverse advanced scientific disciplines. To bridge this gap, we collected a multimodal, multidisciplinary dataset from open-access scientific articles published in Nature Communications journals. This dataset spans 72 scientific disciplines, ensuring both diversity and quality. We created benchmarks with various tasks and settings to comprehensively evaluate LMMs' capabilities in understanding scientific figures and content. Our evaluation revealed that these tasks are highly challenging: many open-source models struggled significantly, and even GPT-4V and GPT-4o faced difficulties. We also explored using our dataset as training resources by constructing visual instruction-following data, enabling the 7B LLaVA model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4V/o on our benchmark. Additionally, we investigated the use of our interleaved article texts and figure images for pre-training LMMs, resulting in improvements on the material generation task. The source dataset, including articles, figures, constructed benchmarks, and visual instruction-following data, is open-sourced.

Efficiently extracting data from tables in the scientific literature is pivotal for building large-scale databases. However, the tables reported in materials science papers exist in highly diverse forms; thus, rule-based extractions are an ineffective approach. To overcome this challenge, we present MaTableGPT, which is a GPT-based table data extractor from the materials science literature. MaTableGPT features key strategies of table data representation and table splitting for better GPT comprehension and filtering hallucinated information through follow-up questions. When applied to a vast volume of water splitting catalysis literature, MaTableGPT achieved an extraction accuracy (total F1 score) of up to 96.8%. Through comprehensive evaluations of the GPT usage cost, labeling cost, and extraction accuracy for the learning methods of zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning, we present a Pareto-front mapping where the few-shot learning method was found to be the most balanced solution owing to both its high extraction accuracy (total F1 score>95%) and low cost (GPT usage cost of 5.97 US dollars and labeling cost of 10 I/O paired examples). The statistical analyses conducted on the database generated by MaTableGPT revealed valuable insights into the distribution of the overpotential and elemental utilization across the reported catalysts in the water splitting literature.

Materials language processing (MLP) is one of the key facilitators of materials science research, as it enables the extraction of structured information from massive materials science literature. Prior works suggested high-performance MLP models for text classification, named entity recognition (NER), and extractive question answering (QA), which require complex model architecture, exhaustive fine-tuning and a large number of human-labelled datasets. In this study, we develop generative pretrained transformer (GPT)-enabled pipelines where the complex architectures of prior MLP models are replaced with strategic designs of prompt engineering. First, we develop a GPT-enabled document classification method for screening relevant documents, achieving comparable accuracy and reliability compared to prior models, with only small dataset. Secondly, for NER task, we design an entity-centric prompts, and learning few-shot of them improved the performance on most of entities in three open datasets. Finally, we develop an GPT-enabled extractive QA model, which provides improved performance and shows the possibility of automatically correcting annotations. While our findings confirm the potential of GPT-enabled MLP models as well as their value in terms of reliability and practicability, our scientific methods and systematic approach are applicable to any materials science domain to accelerate the information extraction of scientific literature.