SCAFFOLD: A Large-Scale Structured Dataset of Computer Science Research Figures with Diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Traces
arXiv:2609.00018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer science papers rely heavily on diagrams: architecture drawings, system flowcharts, and pipeline schematics that often carry more information than the text around them. There is currently no public dataset that pairs this specific kind of figure with captions, context, questions, answers, and step-by-step reasoning, which is exactly what is needed to train a vision-language model to understand them. We present \textbf{SCAFFOLD}\footnote{https://github.com/theranjitraut/scaffold}, a large-scale structured dataset of computer science research figures with diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. This dataset consists of (image, caption, context, question-answer, chain-of-thought) tuples from arXiv computer science papers prepared using layout detection and PDF parsing, with an AI-assisted question-generation step. The resulting large-sized SCAFFOLD-157K dataset spans 3,058 papers with 29,887 figures (157,387 pairs), a medium-sized SCAFFOLD-37K dataset (36,797 pairs), and a small-sized SCAFFOLD-12K dataset (12,000 pairs). We used SCAFFOLD-12K for baseline experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct.
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[Submitted on 20 Aug 2026]
Title:SCAFFOLD: A Large-Scale Structured Dataset of Computer Science Research Figures with Diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Traces
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Abstract:Computer science papers rely heavily on diagrams: architecture drawings, system flowcharts, and pipeline schematics that often carry more information than the text around them. There is currently no public dataset that pairs this specific kind of figure with captions, context, questions, answers, and step-by-step reasoning, which is exactly what is needed to train a vision-language model to understand them. We present \textbf{SCAFFOLD}\footnote{this https URL}, a large-scale structured dataset of computer science research figures with diagram QA and Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. This dataset consists of (image, caption, context, question-answer, chain-of-thought) tuples from arXiv computer science papers prepared using layout detection and PDF parsing, with an AI-assisted question-generation step. The resulting large-sized SCAFFOLD-157K dataset spans 3,058 papers with 29,887 figures (157,387 pairs), a medium-sized SCAFFOLD-37K dataset (36,797 pairs), and a small-sized SCAFFOLD-12K dataset (12,000 pairs). We used SCAFFOLD-12K for baseline experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct.
Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.00018 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.00018v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00018
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Ranjit Raut [view email] [v1] Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:21:42 UTC (879 KB)
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