---
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train-*
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: image
    dtype: image
  - name: UUID
    dtype: string
  - name: Image ID
    dtype: string
  - name: Paper DOI
    dtype: string
  - name: Paper Title
    dtype: string
  - name: Image Caption
    dtype: string
  - name: Image Authors
    dtype: string
  - name: References DOIs
    list: string
  - name: Citing DOIs
    list: string
  splits:
  - name: train
    num_bytes: 56943467858
    num_examples: 94233
  download_size: 72360746667
  dataset_size: 56943467858
license: mit
task_categories:
- image-text-to-text
language:
- en
tags:
- astronomy
- multimodal
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
---

# AstroCLIMB:
## Astronomy Citation Linking from Illustrations: a Multimodal Benchmark

AstroCLIMB is the shared task for [4th WASP: Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/WIESP/2026/shared_task).

### Motivation
Scientists rely on figures to share their discoveries, but this makes the information contained in the figures hard to parse, archive, and search. Recent multimodal neural-network models promise to extract this information, but have not yet been widely tested and adopted by the astronomy community.
In partnership with [astroexplorer.org](https://www.astroexplorer.org/), we offer a novel dataset and an associated task as a benchmark to evaluate a model’s multimodal capabilities. The task is to partially reconstruct the citation graph of astronomy papers from their figures and captions.

![AstroCLIMB image: these figures come from the same astronomy paper. Courtesy of astroexplorer.org](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/WIESP/2026/AstroCLIMB_001.png)

### Dataset Description
The dataset consists of over 100K figure+caption pairs from the [astroexplorer.org](https://www.astroexplorer.org/) from recent open access astronomy papers. More details to come.
```
Dataset({
    features: ['image', 'UUID', 'Image ID', 'Paper DOI', 'Paper Title', 'Image Caption', 'Image Authors', 'References DOIs', 'Citing DOIs'],
    num_rows: 94233
})
```
(test set  to be released in November 2026)
- `images` are stored as PIL PNG objects.
- `Image Caption` are English language text.
- `UUID`, `Image ID`, `Paper DOI`, `Paper Title` are metadata.

A more complete descriptions of the dataset can be found on the WASP2026 website [here](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/WIESP/2026/shared_task_labels).

### Task Description
The goal of the task is single-class classification.
The inputs are pairs of figures, a figure and a caption, or a pair of captions.
The possible output classes are:
- `same paper`
- `related papers` (references or citing)
- `unrelated papers` (neither references nor citing)
- `same figure` (only for figure+caption pairs)

The challenge is being evaluated on Kaggle [here](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/astroclimb/overview).

### Contact
For inquiries, contact Felix Grezes at [felix.grezes@cfa.harvard.edu](mailto:felix.grezes@cfa.harvard.edu).