SIN-Bench: Tracing Native Evidence Chains in Long-Context Multimodal Scientific Interleaved Literature

Junjie Wang, Yiming Ren, Yuxin Meng, Yihang Shi, Zhiqiang Lin, Yulin Song, Ruihang Chu, Yiran Xu, Ziming Li, Yunfei Zhao, Zihan Wang, Yu Qiao, Ruiming Tang, Minghao Liu, Yujiu Yang


Abstract
Evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on long-form scientific papers requires measuring not only answer correctness, but also whether answers are supported by traceable cross-modal evidence. Existing answer-only metrics and synthetic “Needle-In-A-Haystack” tests mainly assess answer matching or isolated retrieval, leaving evidence-grounded support under-examined. We introduce “Fish-in-the-Ocean” (FITO), an evidence-chain evaluation lens for native scientific documents, and instantiate it with SIN-Data, a scientific interleaved corpus that preserves text–figure coupling. Built on SIN-Data, SIN-Bench comprises four evidence-auditing tasks: evidence discovery, hypothesis verification, grounded QA, and evidence-anchored synthesis. We further propose “No Evidence, No Score”, which credits predictions only when linked to verifiable anchors and diagnoses evidence quality through matching, relevance, and logic. Experiments on 10 MLLMs show a clear correctness–grounding gap: Gemini-3-pro obtains the best average overall score (0.566), while GPT-5 reaches the highest SIN-QA answer accuracy (0.767) but lower evidence-aligned scores. Code and data are available at https://github.com/IIGROUP/sin-bench .
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1052
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
22278–22302
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1052/
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Cite (ACL):
Junjie Wang, Yiming Ren, Yuxin Meng, Yihang Shi, Zhiqiang Lin, Yulin Song, Ruihang Chu, Yiran Xu, Ziming Li, Yunfei Zhao, Zihan Wang, Yu Qiao, Ruiming Tang, Minghao Liu, and Yujiu Yang. 2026. SIN-Bench: Tracing Native Evidence Chains in Long-Context Multimodal Scientific Interleaved Literature. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 22278–22302, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SIN-Bench: Tracing Native Evidence Chains in Long-Context Multimodal Scientific Interleaved Literature (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1052.pdf