Pufan Zeng

Minggui He, Mingchen Dai, Jian Zhang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise in generating plotting code from chart images, yet achieving structural fidelity remains challenging. Existing approaches largely rely on supervised fine-tuning, encouraging surface-level token imitation rather than faithful modeling of underlying chart structure, which often leads to hallucinated or semantically inconsistent outputs. We propose Chart Specification, a structured intermediate representation that shifts training from text imitation to semantically grounded supervision. Chart Specification filters syntactic noise to construct a structurally balanced training set and supports a Spec-Align Reward that provides fine-grained, verifiable feedback on structural correctness, enabling reinforcement learning to enforce consistent plotting logic. Experiments on three public benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches. With only 3K training samples, we achieve strong data efficiency, surpassing leading baselines by up to 61.7% on complex benchmarks, and scaling to 4K samples establishes new state-of-the-art results across all evaluated metrics. Overall, our results demonstrate that precise structural supervision offers an efficient pathway to high-fidelity chart-to-code generation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Mighten/chart-specification-paper

Pufan Zeng, Yilun Liu, Mingchen Dai et al.

Achieving cultural alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly depends on synthetic data generation. For such synthesis, the most vital initial step is seed curation; however, current methods lack quantifiable standards for selecting these seeds. Existing approaches rely on unscalable manual curation or bias-prone LLM extraction, treating cultural specificity as an abstract concept rather than a measurable signal. In this paper, we address this "quantification gap" by proposing C-Mining, an unsupervised framework that transforms the discovery of cultural seeds from a subjective selection process into a computable data mining formulation. Our approach exploits a novel geometric insight, leveraging the cross-lingual misalignment of cultural concepts within pre-trained embedding spaces as a quantifiable discovery signal. By systematically identifying these regions characterized by pronounced linguistic exclusivity and geometric isolation, while actively filtering out noise, C-Mining automatically extracts high-fidelity Culture Points (CPs) from raw multilingual corpora without reliance on human or LLM supervision, reducing preparation costs by more than 150-fold. We further leverage the mined knowledge to steer the synthesis of diverse instruction-tuning datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this seed-centric approach significantly enhances cultural understanding and reasoning capabilities, achieving a +6.03 point improvement on CulturalBench-Hard and surpassing state-of-the-art baselines, providing a scalable, quantifiable solution for high-quality cultural data synthesis.

Chunguang Zhao, Yilun Liu, Pufan Zeng et al.

Multilingual Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to generalize effectively across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. However, the scarcity of high-quality multilingual training data and corresponding building method remains a critical bottleneck. While data selection has shown promise in English settings, existing methods often fail to generalize across languages due to reliance on simplistic heuristics or language-specific assumptions. In this work, we introduce Multilingual Data Quality and Diversity (M-DaQ), a novel method for improving LLMs multilinguality, by selecting high-quality and semantically diverse multilingual IFT samples. We further conduct the first systematic investigation of the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (SAH) in multilingual setting. Empirical results across 18 languages demonstrate that models fine-tuned with M-DaQ method achieve significant performance gains over vanilla baselines over 60% win rate. Human evaluations further validate these gains, highlighting the increment of cultural points in the response. We release the M-DaQ code to support future research.