DeepVitminC at Sci-ImageMiner 2026 Tasks 3&4: Structured Context Augmentation for Scientific Figure Reasoning

Abstract

Scientific figures encode critical experimental findings that are often not fully captured in textual descriptions. Despite recent advances in MLLMs, their performance on domain-specific scientific figures remains limited due to insufficient grounding in relevant context. In this work, we focus on in Task 3 (summarization) and Task 4 (visual question answering) of the Sci-ImageMiner 2026 challenge. We propose a structured context augmentation approach that improves model performance by providing relevant and well-organized contextual inputs. Our method extracts figure-centric and cross-referenced textual evidence from scientific papers and integrates them into structured prompts for model training. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves performance across both tasks. We achieve first place in both Task 3 and Task 4, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured contextual inputs for scientific figure reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/yuanjun0416/SciImageMiner34