TechING: Towards Real World Technical Image Understanding via VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nadeem, Tafazzul, Shangari, Bhavik, Rai, Manish, Gupta, Gagan Raj, Modi, Ashutosh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Nadeem, Tafazzul
Shangari, Bhavik
Rai, Manish
Gupta, Gagan Raj
Modi, Ashutosh
author_facet Nadeem, Tafazzul
Shangari, Bhavik
Rai, Manish
Gupta, Gagan Raj
Modi, Ashutosh
contents Professionals working in technical domain typically hand-draw (on whiteboard, paper, etc.) technical diagrams (e.g., flowcharts, block diagrams, etc.) during discussions; however, if they want to edit these later, it needs to be drawn from scratch. Modern day VLMs have made tremendous progress in image understanding but they struggle when it comes to understanding technical diagrams. One way to overcome this problem is to fine-tune on real world hand-drawn images, but it is not practically possible to generate large number of such images. In this paper, we introduce a large synthetically generated corpus (reflective of real world images) for training VLMs and subsequently evaluate VLMs on a smaller corpus of hand-drawn images (with the help of humans). We introduce several new self-supervision tasks for training and perform extensive experiments with various baseline models and fine-tune Llama 3.2 11B-instruct model on synthetic images on these tasks to obtain LLama-VL-TUG, which significantly improves the ROUGE-L performance of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 2.14x and achieves the best all-round performance across all baseline models. On real-world images, human evaluation reveals that we achieve minimum compilation errors across all baselines in 7 out of 8 diagram types and improve the average F1 score of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 6.97x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TechING: Towards Real World Technical Image Understanding via VLMs
Nadeem, Tafazzul
Shangari, Bhavik
Rai, Manish
Gupta, Gagan Raj
Modi, Ashutosh
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Professionals working in technical domain typically hand-draw (on whiteboard, paper, etc.) technical diagrams (e.g., flowcharts, block diagrams, etc.) during discussions; however, if they want to edit these later, it needs to be drawn from scratch. Modern day VLMs have made tremendous progress in image understanding but they struggle when it comes to understanding technical diagrams. One way to overcome this problem is to fine-tune on real world hand-drawn images, but it is not practically possible to generate large number of such images. In this paper, we introduce a large synthetically generated corpus (reflective of real world images) for training VLMs and subsequently evaluate VLMs on a smaller corpus of hand-drawn images (with the help of humans). We introduce several new self-supervision tasks for training and perform extensive experiments with various baseline models and fine-tune Llama 3.2 11B-instruct model on synthetic images on these tasks to obtain LLama-VL-TUG, which significantly improves the ROUGE-L performance of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 2.14x and achieves the best all-round performance across all baseline models. On real-world images, human evaluation reveals that we achieve minimum compilation errors across all baselines in 7 out of 8 diagram types and improve the average F1 score of Llama 3.2 11B-instruct by 6.97x.
title TechING: Towards Real World Technical Image Understanding via VLMs
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18238