--- license: mit language: - en pretty_name: open-mm-rl size_categories: - n<1K tags: - chemistry - physics - math - biology - science - RL task_categories: - question-answering configs: - config_name: default data_files: - split: train path: data/train-* dataset_info: features: - name: conversation_id dtype: string - name: domain dtype: string - name: subDomain dtype: string - name: author_id dtype: string - name: question dtype: string - name: answer dtype: string - name: format dtype: string - name: images list: image splits: - name: train num_bytes: 15515561 num_examples: 40 download_size: 15508201 dataset_size: 15515561 --- # Dataset Summary **Open-MM-RL** is a multimodal STEM reasoning dataset covering **Physics, Mathematics, Biology, and Chemistry**. It is designed for problems that require models to interpret visual information and combine it with step-by-step analytical reasoning. Compared with existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks, Open-MM-RL broadens the evaluation setting beyond standard single-image question answering by including multi-panel and multi-image tasks that require integrating information across more complex visual contexts. As rarely in real-life problems is context confined to a single image. Instead, the necessary information is often fragmented across multiple related images, requiring scientists to reason across them to find the solution. The dataset includes three multimodal input formats: * **Single-image problems**: one image paired with one question. * **Multi-panel problems**: a composite or panel-based visual paired with one question. * **Multi-image problems**: multiple separate images paired with one question. These formats increase task complexity by requiring models to reason not only from text, but also across visual layouts, multiple views, and distributed evidence. Across all formats, problems are constructed to be **self-contained, unambiguous, reasoning-intensive, and verifiable** making the dataset useful both as an evaluation benchmark and as a training resource for reasoning-focused models. A key distinguishing feature of this dataset is its focus on PhD-level STEM problem solving across all three multimodal formats. This makes it possible to assess both advanced subject-matter reasoning and a model's ability to synthesize information across increasingly complex visual inputs. Unlike scientific figure benchmarks that rely significantly on captions, examples in this dataset are designed to be answered directly from the provided image or images together with the question. ## Supported Tasks and Applications This dataset is intended for settings where reliable answer checking matters. In particular, it is well suited for: * Outcome-supervised training * Reinforcement learning for reasoning * Reward modeling * Automatic evaluation of multimodal reasoning systems * Benchmarking frontier model performance on verifiable STEM tasks Because each example has a deterministic target answer, the dataset supports training and evaluation pipelines that depend on objective correctness rather than subjective preference judgments. ## Why This Dataset Is Useful The dataset is designed to occupy a practical middle ground: difficult enough to expose reasoning failures, but structured enough that correctness can be measured automatically. This makes it useful both for benchmarking current models and for training future multimodal reasoning systems. Its coverage of single-image, multi-panel, and multi-image inputs also makes it possible to study how reasoning performance changes as visual evidence becomes more distributed and structurally complex. ## Task Format The task is to produce a final answer to a self-contained STEM question grounded in the provided visual input. Each problem consists of: * A question * One or more associated images * A deterministic ground-truth answer The dataset is focused on answer generation for verifiable STEM reasoning, rather than caption generation, retrieval, or free-form scientific description. ## Dataset Structure Each example typically contains the following components: | Field | Description | | ------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | `question` | The text of the STEM reasoning problem. | | `files` | The visual input associated with the problem. This may be a single image, a multi-panel image, or multiple separate images. | | `format` | The multimodal format label, such as `single_image`, `multi_panel`, or `multi_image`. | | `domain` | The scientific domain, such as `Physics`, `Mathematics`, `Biology`, or `Chemistry`. | | `subDomain` | The subdomain in `Physics`, `Mathematics`, `Biology`, or `Chemistry`. | | `answer` | The deterministic ground-truth final answer. | Exact field names may vary by release version. ### Example Instance ```json { "question": "Given the visual input, determine the final value of the requested quantity.", "files": ["image_001.png"], "format": "single_image", "domain": "Physics", "subDomain": "High-energy particle physics" "answer": "42", } ``` For multi-image examples, the `images` field may contain multiple image paths: ## Subject Coverage The dataset spans multiple STEM disciplines: * Physics * Mathematics * Biology * Chemistry This cross-domain coverage supports evaluation of both domain-specific reasoning and generalization across scientific problem types. The problems are designed to emphasize analytical reasoning, quantitative problem solving, symbolic manipulation, and integration of visual evidence. ## Difficulty Profile The tasks are designed to reflect advanced STEM reasoning at or near the PhD level. They are intended to require more than surface-level perception or direct extraction from the image, often involving multi-step derivations, symbolic manipulation, quantitative analysis, and synthesis of information across complex visual inputs. The dataset aims for a learning-efficient regime in which: * The problems are not easy enough to be saturated. * The success rate is not so low that all learning signals disappear. * Difficulty varies across examples and multimodal formats. * Stronger models can still make measurable progress. The inclusion of single-image, multi-panel, and multi-image questions creates a richer spread of difficulty and enables more targeted analysis of model strengths and weaknesses. ## Problem and Answer Design Each example is written so that the final response is deterministic and programmatically checkable. The focus is on tasks where evaluation depends on the correctness of the answer rather than subjective judgment. Typical answer formats include: * Numerical values * Symbolic expressions * Simplified algebraic forms * Short text * Identities or derived equations * Canonical LaTeX outputs Because the answers are deterministic, the dataset is especially appropriate for workflows that need stable reward signals or automatic grading at scale. ## Verifiability and Automatic Evaluation A core design principle of this dataset is objective verifiability. Each problem is constructed so that: * The final answer is deterministic. * Correctness can be evaluated programmatically. * No subjective interpretation is required. * There is a clear separation between reasoning process and final outcome. Depending on the task, answers can be evaluated using: * Normalized exact match * Symbolic equivalence checks * Numerical tolerance thresholds * Unit-aware validation, where applicable This makes the dataset well suited for reproducible benchmarking and scalable automated evaluation. ## Data Creation and Quality Control All problems are developed and reviewed with an emphasis on scientific correctness and benchmark reliability. Tasks undergo two rounds of expert review by PhD-level domain specialists. Review criteria include: * Correctness of the prompt * Correctness of the target answer * Clarity of the reasoning path implied by the problem * Absence of ambiguity in interpretation * Originality and resistance to trivial lookup * Identification of cases where models fail because of reasoning errors rather than annotation issues This process is intended to ensure that dataset difficulty comes from the task itself, not from noisy labeling or underspecified questions. ## Relevance for Reinforcement Learning The dataset is particularly useful for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning because each example supports an objective reward signal. A simple setup is: * **Input**: question and associated image(s) * **Model output**: final predicted answer * **Reward**: computed from agreement with the ground truth Possible reward schemes include: * Full credit for exact or equivalent answers * No credit for incorrect answers * Optional partial credit for numerically close or symbolically related outputs This structure supports training approaches where progress depends on measurable correctness rather than preference judgments. It is therefore a natural fit for: * Policy optimization * Reward-guided fine-tuning * Outcome-supervised learning * Iterative self-improvement pipelines ## Intended Uses This dataset is intended for: * Benchmarking multimodal STEM reasoning systems * Evaluating reasoning performance under verifiable answer supervision * Reinforcement learning and outcome-supervised training * Reward modeling and automated grading research * Studying failure modes across single-image, multi-panel, and multi-image settings ## Out-of-Scope Uses This dataset is not designed for: * Open-ended caption generation * Subjective evaluation of scientific writing quality * Conversational tutoring or pedagogical dialogue assessment * Retrieval-based figure understanding using captions or external metadata * Broad real-world safety judgments or non-verifiable open-ended reasoning Because the dataset emphasizes deterministic final answers, it is less informative for tasks that require subjective interpretation or unconstrained explanation quality. ## Limitations Open-MM-RL is intentionally focused on verifiable STEM reasoning. As a result: * It may not measure open-ended explanatory quality. * It may not capture all aspects of scientific communication. * It may not evaluate tutoring ability or interactive reasoning. * It is not intended as a complete measure of general scientific intelligence. * Automatic grading may require task-specific normalization for symbolic, numeric, or unit-bearing answers. The dataset is best interpreted as a benchmark for final-answer correctness under multimodal STEM reasoning constraints. ## Ethical Considerations The dataset is designed for scientific reasoning and model evaluation. It does not intentionally contain personal data, demographic labels, or sensitive personal information. Users should avoid applying the dataset outside its intended scope, especially for real-world scientific, medical, safety-critical, or educational decisions without additional expert validation. ## Planned Extensions Future versions of the dataset may introduce structured hinting or nudge-based augmentations for especially difficult problems. The motivation is straightforward: in online reinforcement learning, examples with near-zero success rates often produce little or no useful learning signal. In such cases, lightweight guidance can help convert otherwise unsolved samples into learnable ones without revealing the full solution. Possible future additions include: * High-level conceptual hints * Difficulty-controlled nudges * Conditional hinting for zero-pass examples * Augmented rollouts for frontier-level tasks The goal of these extensions is to preserve the dataset's verifiability while making it more useful for studying how models learn from extremely difficult reasoning problems. ## Citation If you use Open-MM-RL, please cite the dataset as follows: ```bibtex @dataset{ turing_2026_open_mm_rl, title = {Open-MM-RL: A Multimodal STEM Reasoning Dataset}, author = { Shukla, Chinmayee and Patil, Saurabh and Han, Kihwan and Tao, Charlotte and Tager, Tristan and Ukarde, Tejas Mohan and Bertollo, Amanda Gollo and Pande, Seetesh and Verma, Divya and Ramakrishnan, Pooja and Kumari, Surbhi and Seth, Harshita and Nazim, Muhammad and Zia, Muhammad Danish and Gupta, Rashi and K S, Tharangini and Yadav, Yogesh and Okayim, Paul and Jangra, Mandeep and Jhakad, Pooja and Panda, Biswajit and Jain, Priya }, year = {2026}, publisher = {Hugging Face}, url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/TuringEnterprises/Open-MM-RL/} } ```