Automatic understanding of figures in scientific papers is challenging since they often contain subfigures and subcaptions in complex layouts. In this paper, we propose FigEx, a vision-language model to extract aligned pairs of subfigures and subcaptions from scientific papers. We also release BioSci-Fig, a curated dataset of 7,174 compound figures with annotated subfigure bounding boxes and aligned subcaptions. On BioSci-Fig, FigEx improves subfigure detection AP^b over Grounding DINO by 0.023 and boosts caption separation BLEU over Llama-2-13B by 0.465. The source code is available at: https://github.com/Huang-AI4Medicine-Lab/FigEx.

Comprehensive pathway datasets are essential resources for advancing biological research, yet constructing these datasets is labor intensive. Recognizing the labor-intensive nature of constructing these critical resources, we present BioGraphia, a web-based annotation platform designed to facilitate collaborative pathway graph annotation. BioGraphia supports multi-user collaboration with real-time monitoring, curation, and interactive pathway graph visualization. It enables users to directly annotate the nodes and relations on the candidate graph, guided by detailed instructions. The platform is further enhanced with a large language model that automatically generates explainable and span-aligned pre-annotation to accelerate the annotation process. Its modular design allows flexible integration of external knowledge bases, and customization of the definition of annotation schema and, to support adaptation to other graph-based annotation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/BioGraphia