Qiang Xu
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Qiang Xu
2026
ReactBench: A Benchmark for Topological Reasoning in MLLMs on Chemical Reaction Diagrams
Qiang Xu | Shengyuan Bai | Yu Wang | He Cao | Leqingchen | Yuanyuan Liu | Bin Feng | Zijing Liu | Yu Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qiang Xu | Shengyuan Bai | Yu Wang | He Cao | Leqingchen | Yuanyuan Liu | Bin Feng | Zijing Liu | Yu Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at recognizing individual visual elements and reasoning over simple linear diagrams. However, when faced with complex topological structures involving branching paths, converging flows, and cyclic dependencies, their reasoning capabilities degrade sharply, even on tasks as basic as counting endpoints. Existing benchmarks fail to probe this gap, focusing on semantic comprehension rather than structural reasoning. We introduce **ReactBench**, a benchmark that reveals fundamental limitations in structural reasoning through chemical reaction diagrams. These real-world scientific diagrams offer an ideal testbed because they naturally span diverse structures from linear chains to cyclic graphs, while requiring both precise local recognition and coherent global reasoning. Our benchmark comprises 1,618 expert-annotated QA pairs across four hierarchical task dimensions. Extensive evaluation across 24 MLLMs reveals a significant performance gap exceeding 30% between anchor-based tasks and holistic structural reasoning tasks.