VisProve: Learning Typed Visual Provenance for Scientific Document Question Answering

arXiv:2611.10642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual citations show where an answer is supported, but not how the cited content contributes to it. In scientific document question answering, a model may read a value directly, compress several observations, or combine evidence to infer a conclusion. We study typed visual provenance, where a system generates an answer together with source regions and explicit support relations. We introduce ReViE, a dataset of 3,941 questions over complete scientific documents, with page, section, and region annotations labeled as Quotation, Compression, or Inference. We further propose VisProve, which augments joint answer and provenance generation with differentiable Spatial Evidence Reading and Evidence-Answer Relation Feedback. VisProve conditions next-token prediction on localized visual evidence and its estimated support relation through a gated norm-bounded residual. On the document-disjoint ReViE test set, VisProve improves Typed-F1 from 3.52 to 5.48 and Section-F1 from 45.99 to 53.24 over joint supervised fine-tuning with the same backbone, while Page-F1 changes only marginally. These results suggest that coupling visual grounding with support relation modeling mainly improves fine-grained provenance, while the low absolute Typed-F1 reveals a substantial gap between answer generation and precise visual evidence attribution.