Zhiyuan Chen
Publications
SciEval: A Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of K-12 Science Instructional Materials
The need to evaluate instructional materials for K-12 science education has become increasingly important, as more educators use generative AI to create instructional materials. However, the review of instructional materials is time-consuming, expertise-intensive, and difficult to scale, motivating interest in automated evaluation approaches. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on general evaluation tasks, their performance and reliability on instructional materials remain unclear. To address this gap, we formulate Automatic Instructional Materials Evaluation (AIME) as a generative AI task that predicts scores and evidence using the rubric designed by the educator. We create a benchmark dataset and develop baseline models for AIME. First, we curate the first AIME dataset, SciEval, consisting of instructional materials annotated with pedagogy-aligned evaluation scores and evidence-based rationales. Expert annotations achieve high inter-rater reliability, resulting in a dataset of 273 lesson-level instructional materials evaluated across 13 criteria (N=3549) using the EQuIP rubric. Second, we test mainstream LLMs (GPT, Gemini, Llama, and Qwen) on SciEval and find that none achieve strong performance. Then we fine-tune Qwen3 on SciEval. Results on a held-out test set show that domain-aligned fine-tuning can achieve up to 11 percent performance gains, highlighting the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning for AIME and facilitating the use of LLMs in other educational tasks.
ICDAR 2025 Competition on End-to-End Document Image Machine Translation Towards Complex Layouts
Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) seeks to translate text embedded in document images from one language to another by jointly modeling both textual content and page layout, bridging optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP). The DIMT 2025 Challenge advances research on end-to-end document image translation, a rapidly evolving area within multimodal document understanding. The competition features two tracks, OCR-free and OCR-based, each with two subtasks for small (less than 1B parameters) and large (greater than 1B parameters) models. Participants submit a single unified DIMT system, with the option to incorporate provided OCR transcripts. Running from December 10, 2024 to April 20, 2025, the competition attracted 69 teams and 27 valid submissions in total. Track 1 had 34 teams and 13 valid submissions, while Track 2 had 35 teams and 14 valid submissions. In this report, we present the challenge motivation, dataset construction, task definitions, evaluation protocol, and a summary of results. Our analysis shows that large-model approaches establish a promising new paradigm for translating complex-layout document images and highlight substantial opportunities for future research.