LDU-Bench: Multimodal LLM Evaluation for Lithography Defect Understanding under Layout-Varying Circuit Backgrounds

Huanglong ji, Botong Zhao, Shujing Lyu, Yue Lu


Abstract
Multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong defect recognition capability in industrial anomaly detection. However, in lithography review, merely determining whether an image contains a defect is insufficient for engineering inspection; models must also understand defect morphology, spatial location, and the potential causes supported by visible evidence. To this end, this paper proposes LDU-Bench, a multi-task multimodal benchmark for lithography defect understanding. Constructed from real lithography and integrated-circuit review images, LDU-Bench decomposes the review workflow into four independent tasks: defect triage, morphology recognition, coarse localization, and image-conditioned cause analysis. It systematically evaluates models using task-level metrics, diagnostic readouts, and the Lithography Closure Score (LCS). Experimental results show that although existing MLLMs can perform defect triage relatively reliably, this ability does not stably transfer to downstream review stages. Morphology alignment, effective localization, and evidence-to-cause mapping remain the major bottlenecks. Further diagnostics indicate that this capability break is not a fluctuation of a single metric, but reflects insufficient structured understanding across semantic levels. Overall, LDU-Bench provides a quantifiable and diagnostic unified platform for evaluating the usability, failure points, and capability boundaries of industrial MLLMs in lithography review chains.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-industry.217
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pepa Atanasova, Gholamreza Haffari, Minghan Wang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3626–3637
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.217/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huanglong ji, Botong Zhao, Shujing Lyu, and Yue Lu. 2026. LDU-Bench: Multimodal LLM Evaluation for Lithography Defect Understanding under Layout-Varying Circuit Backgrounds. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 3626–3637, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LDU-Bench: Multimodal LLM Evaluation for Lithography Defect Understanding under Layout-Varying Circuit Backgrounds (ji et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.217.pdf