This report synthesises findings from 16 peer-reviewed papers addressing the following research question: How do multimodal frontier models perform on reasoning benchmarks that require integrating visual diagrams with text-based scientific questions compared to text-only architectures. 7 claims were extracted from source literature; 7 were independently verified against retrieved documents. An automated multi-reviewer quality assessment produced a score of 8.8/10. This report is a machine-generated literature synthesis and does not constitute original research. Research goal: How do multimodal frontier models perform on reasoning benchmarks that require integrating visual diagrams with text-based scientific questions compared to text-only architectures? Autonomous literature synthesis. Automated review score: 8.8/10. Full text and citation available at Assignee Research.