In this paper, we present a pipeline for domain-adaptive pre-training and cross-lingual transfer of scientific language models from English to non-English languages. Starting from the multilingual scientific corpus SciLaD, we construct a cleaned English pre-training split and continually pre-train a T5-base encoder–decoder model, resulting in EN-T5-Sci. Our model achieves consistent zero-shot improvements on the Global-MMLU English benchmark, outperforming its base model, with particularly strong gains in STEM and Social Sciences. Despite its moderate size, it performs comparably to the much larger BLOOM model on scientific categories. Building on EN-T5-Sci, we transfer scientific knowledge to German, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese using the WECHSEL method. Our approach reinitializes language-specific embedding layers via aligned static embeddings while retaining the pre-trained Transformer weights, yielding six monolingual scientific T5 models. In zero-shot evaluation in each respective language, the transferred models generally outperform monolingual baselines. These results demonstrate that scientific domain knowledge acquired through English pre-training can be effectively transferred across languages, enabling competitive non-English scientific language models without training large multilingual systems from scratch.

This paper provides an overview of the First Scientific Visual Question Answering (SciVQA) shared task conducted as part of the Fifth Scholarly Document Processing workshop (SDP 2025). SciVQA aims to explore the capabilities of current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in reasoning over figures from scholarly publications for question answering (QA). The main focus of the challenge is on closed-ended visual and non-visual QA pairs. We developed the novel SciVQA benchmark comprising 3,000 images of figures and a total of 21,000 QA pairs. The shared task received seven submissions, with the best performing system achieving an average F1 score of approx. 0.86 across ROUGE-1, ROUGE-L, and BertScore metrics. Participating teams explored various fine-tuning and prompting strategies, as well as augmenting the SciVQA dataset with out-of-domain data and incorporating relevant context from source publications. The findings indicate that while MLLMs demonstrate strong performance on SciVQA, they face challenges in visual reasoning and still fall behind human judgments.