FigEx2: Visual-Conditioned Panel Detection and Captioning for Scientific Compound Figures

ArXi:2601.08026v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Scientific compound figures combine multiple labeled panels into a single image. However, in a PMC-scale crawl of 346,567 compound figures, 16.3% have no caption and 1.8% only have captions shorter than ten words, causing them to be discarded by existing caption-decomposition pipelines. We propose FigEx2, a visual-conditioned framework that localizes panels and generates panel-wise captions directly from the image, converting otherwise unusable figures into aligned panel-text pairs for downstream pre