A Large-Scale Multi-Disciplinary Scientific Multimodal Dataset
S1-MMAlign is a large-scale, multi-disciplinary multimodal dataset comprising over 15.5 million high-quality image-text pairs derived from 2.5 million open-access scientific papers.
Multimodal learning has revolutionized general domain tasks, yet its application in scientific discovery is hindered by the profound semantic gap between complex scientific imagery and sparse textual descriptions. S1-MMAlign aims to bridge this gap. Unlike simple "image-reading," scientific understanding requires traversing multiple semantic layers involving variables, structures, hypotheses, and inferences. This dataset is built to address this "short board" in current data resources.
The dataset captures diverse visual modalitiesβincluding experimental setups, heatmaps, and microscopic imageryβspanning major disciplines such as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Computer Science.
We anticipate that researchers and enthusiasts will utilize this dataset for training foundational AI for Science models, advancing scientific reasoning, and improving cross-modal understanding in specialized domains.
Dataset Information
Total Image-Text Pairs: > 15,500,000
Source Papers: ~ 2,500,000
Disciplines Covered: 9 Major STEM Fields
Alignment Improvement: +18.21% (CLIP Score vs. Raw Data)
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
How was the data processed?
To address the pervasive issue of weak alignment in raw scientific captions, we introduced an AI-ready semantic enhancement pipeline. We utilized the Qwen-VL multimodal large model series to recaption images by synthesizing context from paper abstracts and citation contexts.
Technical validation demonstrates significant quality improvements: SciBERT-based pseudo-perplexity metrics show reduced semantic ambiguity, while CLIP scores indicate an 18.21% improvement in image-text alignment.
Recommendation: Please use the recaption field for model training.
image_path: The relative path to the image file.
recaption (Recommended): The AI-enhanced caption generated by our pipeline (Qwen-VL). It synthesizes context from the paper abstract and citations to provide a semantically rich description, significantly outperforming the raw caption in alignment and quality.
caption: The original, raw caption extracted from the paper figures (often noisy or sparse).
metadata: Additional information including source paper arxiv_id and title.
Note on File Structure
The relative paths of the images provided in the jsonl file must follow the file structure we provide in order to be used correctly. Please ensure you maintain the directory hierarchy after downloading and decompressing the dataset. Do not flatten the folder structure, as the metadata relies on specific relative paths.
Citation
If you find this dataset useful, please cite our work:
bibtex
@article{s1mmalign2026,
title={S1-MMAlign: A Large-Scale, Multi-Disciplinary Dataset for Scientific FigureβText Understanding},
author={He Wang and Longteng Guo and Pengkang Huo and Xuanxu Lin and Yichen Yuan and Jie Jiang and Jing Liu},
journal={ArXiv preprint},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00264},
year={2026}
}
License and Copyright
This dataset is released under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license for research and non-commercial use only.
Non-Commercial: Commercial use of the dataset or any images is strictly prohibited.
Copyrights: The images contained in this dataset are extracted from publicly accessible scientific publications. All copyrights of the original figures remain with their original authors or publishers.
Compliance: Users must ensure their use complies with the copyrights of the original publications.