Ryan Rossi

Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Yao Hsu, Ryan Rossi et al.

Good figure captions help paper readers understand complex scientific figures. Unfortunately, even published papers often have poorly written captions. Automatic caption generation could aid paper writers by providing good starting captions that can be refined for better quality. Prior work often treated figure caption generation as a vision-to-language task. In this paper, we show that it can be more effectively tackled as a text summarization task in scientific documents. We fine-tuned PEGASUS, a pre-trained abstractive summarization model, to specifically summarize figure-referencing paragraphs (e.g., "Figure 3 shows...") into figure captions. Experiments on large-scale arXiv figures show that our method outperforms prior vision methods in both automatic and human evaluations. We further conducted an in-depth investigation focused on two key challenges: (i) the common presence of low-quality author-written captions and (ii) the lack of clear standards for good captions. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/Crowd-AI-Lab/Generating-Figure-Captions-as-a-Text-Summarization-Task.

Namyong Park, Ryan Rossi, Eunyee Koh et al.

Given entities and their interactions in the web data, which may have occurred at different time, how can we find communities of entities and track their evolution? In this paper, we approach this important task from graph clustering perspective. Recently, state-of-the-art clustering performance in various domains has been achieved by deep clustering methods. Especially, deep graph clustering (DGC) methods have successfully extended deep clustering to graph-structured data by learning node representations and cluster assignments in a joint optimization framework. Despite some differences in modeling choices (e.g., encoder architectures), existing DGC methods are mainly based on autoencoders and use the same clustering objective with relatively minor adaptations. Also, while many real-world graphs are dynamic, previous DGC methods considered only static graphs. In this work, we develop CGC, a novel end-to-end framework for graph clustering, which fundamentally differs from existing methods. CGC learns node embeddings and cluster assignments in a contrastive graph learning framework, where positive and negative samples are carefully selected in a multi-level scheme such that they reflect hierarchical community structures and network homophily. Also, we extend CGC for time-evolving data, where temporal graph clustering is performed in an incremental learning fashion, with the ability to detect change points. Extensive evaluation on real-world graphs demonstrates that the proposed CGC consistently outperforms existing methods.

Minh Nguyen, Franck Dernoncourt, Seunghyun Yoon et al.

We introduce an approach to identifying speaker names in dialogue transcripts, a crucial task for enhancing content accessibility and searchability in digital media archives. Despite the advancements in speech recognition, the task of text-based speaker identification (SpeakerID) has received limited attention, lacking large-scale, diverse datasets for effective model training. Addressing these gaps, we present a novel, large-scale dataset derived from the MediaSum corpus, encompassing transcripts from a wide range of media sources. We propose novel transformer-based models tailored for SpeakerID, leveraging contextual cues within dialogues to accurately attribute speaker names. Through extensive experiments, our best model achieves a great precision of 80.3\%, setting a new benchmark for SpeakerID. The data and code are publicly available here: \url{https://github.com/adobe-research/speaker-identification}

Namyong Park, Ryan Rossi, Nesreen Ahmed et al.

Given a graph learning task, such as link prediction, on a new graph, how can we select the best method as well as its hyperparameters (collectively called a model) without having to train or evaluate any model on the new graph? Model selection for graph learning has been largely ad hoc. A typical approach has been to apply popular methods to new datasets, but this is often suboptimal. On the other hand, systematically comparing models on the new graph quickly becomes too costly, or even impractical. In this work, we develop the first meta-learning approach for evaluation-free graph learning model selection, called MetaGL, which utilizes the prior performances of existing methods on various benchmark graph datasets to automatically select an effective model for the new graph, without any model training or evaluations. To quantify similarities across a wide variety of graphs, we introduce specialized meta-graph features that capture the structural characteristics of a graph. Then we design G-M network, which represents the relations among graphs and models, and develop a graph-based meta-learner operating on this G-M network, which estimates the relevance of each model to different graphs. Extensive experiments show that using MetaGL to select a model for the new graph greatly outperforms several existing meta-learning techniques tailored for graph learning model selection (up to 47% better), while being extremely fast at test time (~1 sec).

Hanjia Lyu, Ryan Rossi, Xiang Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enhance the effectiveness of enriching item descriptions, thereby improving the accuracy of recommendation systems. However, most existing approaches either rely on text-only prompting or employ basic multimodal strategies that do not fully exploit the complementary information available from both textual and visual modalities. This paper introduces a novel framework, Cross-Reflection Prompting, termed X-Reflect, designed to address these limitations by prompting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly identify and reconcile supportive and conflicting information between text and images. By capturing nuanced insights from both modalities, this approach generates more comprehensive and contextually rich item representations. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing prompting baselines in downstream recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we identify a U-shaped relationship between text-image dissimilarity and recommendation performance, suggesting the benefit of applying multimodal prompting selectively. To support efficient real-time inference, we also introduce X-Reflect-keyword, a lightweight variant that summarizes image content using keywords and replaces the base model with a smaller backbone, achieving nearly 50% reduction in input length while maintaining competitive performance. This work underscores the importance of integrating multimodal information and presents an effective solution for improving item understanding in multimodal recommendation systems.

Sneha Gathani, Sirui Zeng, Diya Patel et al. · mit

What-if analysis (WIA) is an iterative, multi-step process where users explore and compare hypothetical scenarios by adjusting parameters, applying constraints, and scoping data through interactive interfaces. Current tools fall short of supporting effective interactive WIA: spreadsheet and BI tools require time-consuming and laborious setup, while LLM-based chatbot interfaces are semantically fragile, frequently misinterpret intent, and produce inconsistent results as conversations progress. To address these limitations, we present a two-stage workflow that translates natural language (NL) WIA questions into interactive visual interfaces via an intermediate representation, powered by the Praxa Specification Language (PSL): first, LLMs generate PSL specifications from NL questions capturing analytical intent and logic, enabling validation and repair of erroneous specifications; and second, the specifications are compiled into interactive visual interfaces with parameter controls and linked visualizations. We benchmark this workflow with 405 WIA questions spanning 11 WIA types, 5 datasets, and 3 state-of-the-art LLMs. The results show that across models, half of specifications (52.42%) are generated correctly without intervention. We perform an analysis of the failure cases and derive an error taxonomy spanning non-functional errors (specifications fail to compile) and functional errors (specifications compile but misrepresent intent). Based on the taxonomy, we apply targeted repairs on the failure cases using few-shot prompts and improve the success rate to 80.42%. Finally, we show how undetected functional errors propagate through compilation into plausible but misleading interfaces, demonstrating that the intermediate specification is critical for reliably bridging NL and interactive WIA interface in LLM-powered WIA systems.

Yuhang Yao, Jianyi Zhang, Junda Wu et al.

Large language models are rapidly gaining popularity and have been widely adopted in real-world applications. While the quality of training data is essential, privacy concerns arise during data collection. Federated learning offers a solution by allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train LLMs without sharing local data. However, FL introduces new challenges, such as model convergence issues due to heterogeneous data and high communication costs. A comprehensive study is required to address these challenges and guide future research. This paper surveys Federated learning for LLMs (FedLLM), highlighting recent advances and future directions. We focus on two key aspects: fine-tuning and prompt learning in a federated setting, discussing existing work and associated research challenges. We finally propose potential directions for federated LLMs, including pre-training, federated agents, and LLMs for federated learning.

Mohamed Elmoghany, Liangbing Zhao, Xiaoqian Shen et al. · allen-ai

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.

Shawn Li, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim et al.

Generative models, such as diffusion and autoregressive approaches, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in editing natural images. However, applying these tools to scientific charts rests on a flawed assumption: a chart is not merely an arrangement of pixels but a visual representation of structured data governed by a graphical grammar. Consequently, chart editing is not a pixel-manipulation task but a structured transformation problem. To address this fundamental mismatch, we introduce \textit{FigEdit}, a large-scale benchmark for scientific figure editing comprising over 30,000 samples. Grounded in real-world data, our benchmark is distinguished by its diversity, covering 10 distinct chart types and a rich vocabulary of complex editing instructions. The benchmark is organized into five distinct and progressively challenging tasks: single edits, multi edits, conversational edits, visual-guidance-based edits, and style transfer. Our evaluation of a range of state-of-the-art models on this benchmark reveals their poor performance on scientific figures, as they consistently fail to handle the underlying structured transformations required for valid edits. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that traditional evaluation metrics (e.g., SSIM, PSNR) have limitations in capturing the semantic correctness of chart edits. Our benchmark demonstrates the profound limitations of pixel-level manipulation and provides a robust foundation for developing and evaluating future structure-aware models. By releasing \textit{FigEdit} (https://github.com/adobe-research/figure-editing), we aim to enable systematic progress in structure-aware figure editing, provide a common ground for fair comparison, and encourage future research on models that understand both the visual and semantic layers of scientific charts.

April Chen, Ryan Rossi, Nedim Lipka et al.

Learning fair graph representations for downstream applications is becoming increasingly important, but existing work has mostly focused on improving fairness at the global level by either modifying the graph structure or objective function without taking into account the local neighborhood of a node. In this work, we formally introduce the notion of neighborhood fairness and develop a computational framework for learning such locally fair embeddings. We argue that the notion of neighborhood fairness is more appropriate since GNN-based models operate at the local neighborhood level of a node. Our neighborhood fairness framework has two main components that are flexible for learning fair graph representations from arbitrary data: the first aims to construct fair neighborhoods for any arbitrary node in a graph and the second enables adaption of these fair neighborhoods to better capture certain application or data-dependent constraints, such as allowing neighborhoods to be more biased towards certain attributes or neighbors in the graph.Furthermore, while link prediction has been extensively studied, we are the first to investigate the graph representation learning task of fair link classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed neighborhood fairness framework for a variety of graph machine learning tasks including fair link prediction, link classification, and learning fair graph embeddings. Notably, our approach achieves not only better fairness but also increases the accuracy in the majority of cases across a wide variety of graphs, problem settings, and metrics.

Ting-Yao Hsu, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ryan Rossi et al.

There is growing interest in systems that generate captions for scientific figures. However, assessing these systems output poses a significant challenge. Human evaluation requires academic expertise and is costly, while automatic evaluation depends on often low-quality author-written captions. This paper investigates using large language models (LLMs) as a cost-effective, reference-free method for evaluating figure captions. We first constructed SCICAP-EVAL, a human evaluation dataset that contains human judgments for 3,600 scientific figure captions, both original and machine-made, for 600 arXiv figures. We then prompted LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-3 to score (1-6) each caption based on its potential to aid reader understanding, given relevant context such as figure-mentioning paragraphs. Results show that GPT-4, used as a zero-shot evaluator, outperformed all other models and even surpassed assessments made by Computer Science and Informatics undergraduates, achieving a Kendall correlation score of 0.401 with Ph.D. students rankings

Arman Zarei, Samyadeep Basu, Mobina Pournemat et al.

Instruction-based image editing models have recently achieved impressive performance, enabling complex edits to an input image from a multi-instruction prompt. However, these models apply each instruction in the prompt with a fixed strength, limiting the user's ability to precisely and continuously control the intensity of individual edits. We introduce SliderEdit, a framework for continuous image editing with fine-grained, interpretable instruction control. Given a multi-part edit instruction, SliderEdit disentangles the individual instructions and exposes each as a globally trained slider, allowing smooth adjustment of its strength. Unlike prior works that introduced slider-based attribute controls in text-to-image generation, typically requiring separate training or fine-tuning for each attribute or concept, our method learns a single set of low-rank adaptation matrices that generalize across diverse edits, attributes, and compositional instructions. This enables continuous interpolation along individual edit dimensions while preserving both spatial locality and global semantic consistency. We apply SliderEdit to state-of-the-art image editing models, including FLUX-Kontext and Qwen-Image-Edit, and observe substantial improvements in edit controllability, visual consistency, and user steerability. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore and propose a framework for continuous, fine-grained instruction control in instruction-based image editing models. Our results pave the way for interactive, instruction-driven image manipulation with continuous and compositional control.

Puja Trivedi, Ryan Rossi, David Arbour et al.

Most real-world networks are noisy and incomplete samples from an unknown target distribution. Refining them by correcting corruptions or inferring unobserved regions typically improves downstream performance. Inspired by the impressive generative capabilities that have been used to correct corruptions in images, and the similarities between "in-painting" and filling in missing nodes and edges conditioned on the observed graph, we propose a novel graph generative framework, SGDM, which is based on subgraph diffusion. Our framework not only improves the scalability and fidelity of graph diffusion models, but also leverages the reverse process to perform novel, conditional generation tasks. In particular, through extensive empirical analysis and a set of novel metrics, we demonstrate that our proposed model effectively supports the following refinement tasks for partially observable networks: T1: denoising extraneous subgraphs, T2: expanding existing subgraphs and T3: performing "style" transfer by regenerating a particular subgraph to match the characteristics of a different node or subgraph.

Vipula Rawte, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable fluency and versatility across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. This limitation poses significant risks in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific communication, where trust and verifiability are paramount. In this paper, we introduce DAVinCI - a Dual Attribution and Verification framework designed to enhance the factual reliability and interpretability of LLM outputs. DAVinCI operates in two stages: (i) it attributes generated claims to internal model components and external sources; (ii) it verifies each claim using entailment-based reasoning and confidence calibration. We evaluate DAVinCI across multiple datasets, including FEVER and CLIMATE-FEVER, and compare its performance against standard verification-only baselines. Our results show that DAVinCI significantly improves classification accuracy, attribution precision, recall, and F1-score by 5-20%. Through an extensive ablation study, we isolate the contributions of evidence span selection, recalibration thresholds, and retrieval quality. We also release a modular DAVinCI implementation that can be integrated into existing LLM pipelines. By bridging attribution and verification, DAVinCI offers a scalable path to auditable, trustworthy AI systems. This work contributes to the growing effort to make LLMs not only powerful but also accountable.

Peijun Qing, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka et al.

General-purpose embedding models excel at recognizing semantic similarities but fail to capture the characteristics of texts specified by user instructions. In contrast, instruction-tuned embedders can align embeddings with textual instructions yet cannot autonomously infer latent corpus structures, such as determining the optimal number of clusters. To address both limitations, we reframe instruction-following clustering as a generative task and train large reasoning models (LRMs) as autonomous clustering agents. Our reasoning-driven training pipeline enables LRMs to interpret high-level clustering instructions and then infer the corresponding latent groupings. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ReasonCluster, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 28 diverse tasks spanning daily dialogue, legal cases, and financial reports. Experiments across diverse datasets and clustering scenarios show that our approach consistently outperforms strong embedding-based methods and LRM baselines, demonstrating that explicit reasoning fosters more faithful and interpretable instruction-based clustering.

Jian Chen, Ruiyi Zhang, Yufan Zhou et al.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding various types of image, including text-rich images. Most existing text-rich image benchmarks are simple extraction-based question answering, and many LMMs now easily achieve high scores. This means that current benchmarks fail to accurately reflect performance of different models, and a natural idea is to build a new benchmark to evaluate their complex reasoning and spatial understanding abilities. In this work, we propose the Multi-Modal Reading (MMR) benchmark in 11 diverse tasks to evaluate LMMs for text-rich image understanding. MMR is the first text-rich image benchmark built on human annotations with the help of language models. By evaluating several state-of-the-art LMMs, including GPT-4o, it reveals the limited capabilities of existing LMMs underscoring the value of our benchmark.

Samyadeep Basu, Keivan Rezaei, Priyatham Kattakinda et al.

Identifying layers within text-to-image models which control visual attributes can facilitate efficient model editing through closed-form updates. Recent work, leveraging causal tracing show that early Stable-Diffusion variants confine knowledge primarily to the first layer of the CLIP text-encoder, while it diffuses throughout the UNet.Extending this framework, we observe that for recent models (e.g., SD-XL, DeepFloyd), causal tracing fails in pinpointing localized knowledge, highlighting challenges in model editing. To address this issue, we introduce the concept of Mechanistic Localization in text-to-image models, where knowledge about various visual attributes (e.g., "style", "objects", "facts") can be mechanistically localized to a small fraction of layers in the UNet, thus facilitating efficient model editing. We localize knowledge using our method LocoGen which measures the direct effect of intermediate layers to output generation by performing interventions in the cross-attention layers of the UNet. We then employ LocoEdit, a fast closed-form editing method across popular open-source text-to-image models (including the latest SD-XL)and explore the possibilities of neuron-level model editing. Using Mechanistic Localization, our work offers a better view of successes and failures in localization-based text-to-image model editing. Code will be available at https://github.com/samyadeepbasu/LocoGen.

Leitian Tao, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation but require significant resources and often over-generalize, limiting their task-specific efficiency. Fine-tuning smaller, open-source LLMs provides a cost-effective alternative. However, standard supervised approaches rely only on correct examples, missing valuable insights from failures. We introduce CodeLutra, a framework that leverages both correct and incorrect code attempts. Instead of using only correct solutions, CodeLutra applies iterative preference-based refinement, comparing successful and failed outputs to better approximate desired results. This approach narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art larger models without requiring massive datasets or auxiliary models. For instance, on a challenging data science coding task, using only 500 samples improved Llama-3-8B's accuracy from 28.2% to 48.6%, approaching GPT-4's level. By learning from both successes and mistakes, CodeLutra provides a scalable and efficient path to high-quality code generation, making smaller open-source models more competitive with leading closed-source alternatives.

Jaeyoung Kim, Jongho Lee, Hong-Jun Choi et al.

Scientific figure captioning is a complex task that requires generating contextually appropriate descriptions of visual content. However, existing methods often fall short by utilizing incomplete information, treating the task solely as either an image-to-text or text summarization problem. This limitation hinders the generation of high-quality captions that fully capture the necessary details. Moreover, existing data sourced from arXiv papers contain low-quality captions, posing significant challenges for training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a framework called Multi-LLM Collaborative Figure Caption Generation (MLBCAP) to address these challenges by leveraging specialized LLMs for distinct sub-tasks. Our approach unfolds in three key modules: (Quality Assessment) We utilize multimodal LLMs to assess the quality of training data, enabling the filtration of low-quality captions. (Diverse Caption Generation) We then employ a strategy of fine-tuning/prompting multiple LLMs on the captioning task to generate candidate captions. (Judgment) Lastly, we prompt a prominent LLM to select the highest quality caption from the candidates, followed by refining any remaining inaccuracies. Human evaluations demonstrate that informative captions produced by our approach rank better than human-written captions, highlighting its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/teamreboott/MLBCAP

Tiankai Yang, Jiate Li, Yi Nian et al.

LLM-based agents increasingly operate across repeated sessions, maintaining task states to ensure continuity. In many deployments, a single agent serves multiple users within a team or organization, reusing a shared knowledge layer across user identities. This shared persistence expands the failure surface: information that is locally valid for one user can silently degrade another user's outcome when the agent reapplies it without regard for scope. We refer to this failure mode as unintentional cross-user contamination (UCC). Unlike adversarial memory poisoning, UCC requires no attacker; it arises from benign interactions whose scope-bound artifacts persist and are later misapplied. We formalize UCC through a controlled evaluation protocol, introduce a taxonomy of three contamination types, and evaluate the problem in two shared-state mechanisms. Under raw shared state, benign interactions alone produce contamination rates of 57--71%. A write-time sanitization is effective when shared state is conversational, but leaves substantial residual risk when shared state includes executable artifacts, with contamination often manifesting as silent wrong answers. These results indicate that shared-state agents need artifact-level defenses beyond text-level sanitization to prevent silent cross-user failures.

Namyong Park, Ryan Rossi, Xing Wang et al.

The choice of a graph learning (GL) model (i.e., a GL algorithm and its hyperparameter settings) has a significant impact on the performance of downstream tasks. However, selecting the right GL model becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming as more and more GL models are developed. Accordingly, it is of great significance and practical value to equip users of GL with the ability to perform a near-instantaneous selection of an effective GL model without manual intervention. Despite the recent attempts to tackle this important problem, there has been no comprehensive benchmark environment to evaluate the performance of GL model selection methods. To bridge this gap, we present GLEMOS in this work, a comprehensive benchmark for instantaneous GL model selection that makes the following contributions. (i) GLEMOS provides extensive benchmark data for fundamental GL tasks, i.e., link prediction and node classification, including the performances of 366 models on 457 graphs on these tasks. (ii) GLEMOS designs multiple evaluation settings, and assesses how effectively representative model selection techniques perform in these different settings. (iii) GLEMOS is designed to be easily extended with new models, new graphs, and new performance records. (iv) Based on the experimental results, we discuss the limitations of existing approaches and highlight future research directions. To promote research on this significant problem, we make the benchmark data and code publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/glemos.

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu et al.

Table question answering is a popular task that assesses a model's ability to understand and interact with structured data. However, the given table often does not contain sufficient information for answering the question, necessitating the integration of external knowledge. Existing methods either convert both the table and external knowledge into text, which neglects the structured nature of the table; or they embed queries for external sources in the interaction with the table, which complicates the process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information in a given table. Our method first constructs an augmenting table containing the missing information and then generates a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Augment_tableQA.

Namyong Park, Xing Wang, Antoine Simoulin et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, such as recommendation, drug discovery, and question answering. Behind the success of GNNs lies the backpropagation (BP) algorithm, which is the de facto standard for training deep neural networks (NNs). However, despite its effectiveness, BP imposes several constraints, which are not only biologically implausible, but also limit the scalability, parallelism, and flexibility in learning NNs. Examples of such constraints include storage of neural activities computed in the forward pass for use in the subsequent backward pass, and the dependence of parameter updates on non-local signals. To address these limitations, the forward-forward algorithm (FF) was recently proposed as an alternative to BP in the image classification domain, which trains NNs by performing two forward passes over positive and negative data. Inspired by this advance, we propose ForwardGNN in this work, a new forward learning procedure for GNNs, which avoids the constraints imposed by BP via an effective layer-wise local forward training. ForwardGNN extends the original FF to deal with graph data and GNNs, and makes it possible to operate without generating negative inputs (hence no longer forward-forward). Further, ForwardGNN enables each layer to learn from both the bottom-up and top-down signals without relying on the backpropagation of errors. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness and generality of the proposed forward graph learning framework. We release our code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/forwardgnn.

Zihao Zhou, Xingyi Yang, Ryan Rossi et al.

Learning the dynamics of spatiotemporal events is a fundamental problem. Neural point processes enhance the expressivity of point process models with deep neural networks. However, most existing methods only consider temporal dynamics without spatial modeling. We propose Deep Spatiotemporal Point Process (\ours{}), a deep dynamics model that integrates spatiotemporal point processes. Our method is flexible, efficient, and can accurately forecast irregularly sampled events over space and time. The key construction of our approach is the nonparametric space-time intensity function, governed by a latent process. The intensity function enjoys closed form integration for the density. The latent process captures the uncertainty of the event sequence. We use amortized variational inference to infer the latent process with deep networks. Using synthetic datasets, we validate our model can accurately learn the true intensity function. On real-world benchmark datasets, our model demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data can be found at the https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/DeepSTPP.

Shawn Li, Chenxiao Yu, Han Wang et al.

Large language model agents increasingly operate through an intermediate skill layer that mediates between user intent and concrete task execution. This layer is widely treated as an organizational abstraction, but we argue it is also a privilege boundary that current models routinely exceed. We present \textbf{FORTIS}, a benchmark that evaluates over-privilege in agent skills across two stages: whether a model selects the minimally sufficient skill from a large overlapping library, and whether it executes that skill without expanding into broader tools or actions than the skill permits. Across ten frontier models and three domains, we find that over-privileged behavior is the norm rather than the exception. Models consistently reach for higher-privilege skills and tools than the task requires, failing at both stages at rates that remain high even for the strongest available models. Failure is especially severe under the ordinary conditions of real user interaction: incomplete specification, convenience framing, and proximity to skill boundaries. None of these requires adversarial construction. The results indicate that the skill layer, far from containing agent behavior, is itself a primary source of privilege escalation in current systems.

Jae Young Choi, Seon Gyeom Kim, Hyungjun Yoon et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as foundation models for IoT applications such as human activity recognition (HAR). However, directly applying high-frequency and multi-dimensional sensor data, such as eye-tracking data, leads to information loss and high token costs. To mitigate this, we investigate a visual prompting strategy that transforms sensor signals into data visualization images as an input to multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) using eye-tracking data. We conducted a systematic evaluation of MLLM-based HAR across three public eye-tracking datasets using three visualization types of timeline, heatmap, and scanpath, under varying temporal window sizes. Our findings suggest that visual prompting provides a token-efficient and scalable representation for eye-tracking data, highlighting its potential to enable MLLMs to effectively reason over high-frequency sensor signals in IoT contexts.

Bo Ni, Zheyuan Liu, Leyao Wang et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an advanced technique designed to address the challenges of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). By integrating context retrieval into content generation, RAG provides reliable and up-to-date external knowledge, reduces hallucinations, and ensures relevant context across a wide range of tasks. However, despite RAG's success and potential, recent studies have shown that the RAG paradigm also introduces new risks, including robustness issues, privacy concerns, adversarial attacks, and accountability issues. Addressing these risks is critical for future applications of RAG systems, as they directly impact their trustworthiness. Although various methods have been developed to improve the trustworthiness of RAG methods, there is a lack of a unified perspective and framework for research in this topic. Thus, in this paper, we aim to address this gap by providing a comprehensive roadmap for developing trustworthy RAG systems. We place our discussion around five key perspectives: reliability, privacy, safety, fairness, explainability, and accountability. For each perspective, we present a general framework and taxonomy, offering a structured approach to understanding the current challenges, evaluating existing solutions, and identifying promising future research directions. To encourage broader adoption and innovation, we also highlight the downstream applications where trustworthy RAG systems have a significant impact.

Jian Chen, Ruiyi Zhang, Yufan Zhou et al.

Controllable layout generation refers to the process of creating a plausible visual arrangement of elements within a graphic design (e.g., document and web designs) with constraints representing design intentions. Although recent diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art FID scores, they tend to exhibit more pronounced misalignment compared to earlier transformer-based models. In this work, we propose the $\textbf{LA}$yout $\textbf{C}$onstraint diffusion mod$\textbf{E}$l (LACE), a unified model to handle a broad range of layout generation tasks, such as arranging elements with specified attributes and refining or completing a coarse layout design. The model is based on continuous diffusion models. Compared with existing methods that use discrete diffusion models, continuous state-space design can enable the incorporation of differentiable aesthetic constraint functions in training. For conditional generation, we introduce conditions via masked input. Extensive experiment results show that LACE produces high-quality layouts and outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Lincan Li, Jiaqi Li, Catherine Chen et al.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in political science tasks such as election prediction, sentiment analysis, policy impact assessment, and misinformation detection. Meanwhile, the need to systematically understand how LLMs can further revolutionize the field also becomes urgent. In this work, we--a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and political science--present the first principled framework termed Political-LLM to advance the comprehensive understanding of integrating LLMs into computational political science. Specifically, we first introduce a fundamental taxonomy classifying the existing explorations into two perspectives: political science and computational methodologies. In particular, from the political science perspective, we highlight the role of LLMs in automating predictive and generative tasks, simulating behavior dynamics, and improving causal inference through tools like counterfactual generation; from a computational perspective, we introduce advancements in data preparation, fine-tuning, and evaluation methods for LLMs that are tailored to political contexts. We identify key challenges and future directions, emphasizing the development of domain-specific datasets, addressing issues of bias and fairness, incorporating human expertise, and redefining evaluation criteria to align with the unique requirements of computational political science. Political-LLM seeks to serve as a guidebook for researchers to foster an informed, ethical, and impactful use of Artificial Intelligence in political science. Our online resource is available at: http://political-llm.org/.

Tiankai Yang, Yi Nian, Shawn Li et al.

Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. Within natural language processing (NLP), AD helps detect issues like spam, misinformation, and unusual user activity. Although large language models (LLMs) have had a strong impact on tasks such as text generation and summarization, their potential in AD has not been studied enough. This paper introduces AD-LLM, the first benchmark that evaluates how LLMs can help with NLP anomaly detection. We examine three key tasks: (i) zero-shot detection, using LLMs' pre-trained knowledge to perform AD without tasks-specific training; (ii) data augmentation, generating synthetic data and category descriptions to improve AD models; and (iii) model selection, using LLMs to suggest unsupervised AD models. Through experiments with different datasets, we find that LLMs can work well in zero-shot AD, that carefully designed augmentation methods are useful, and that explaining model selection for specific datasets remains challenging. Based on these results, we outline six future research directions on LLMs for AD.

Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Xunyi Jiang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including intermediate reasoning steps and optional tool or environment interactions, determines the data the optimizer learns from, yet rollout design is often underreported. This survey provides an optimizer-agnostic view of rollout strategies for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs. We formalize rollout pipelines with unified notation and introduce Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR), a lifecycle taxonomy that decomposes rollout pipelines into four modular stages: Generate proposes candidate trajectories and topologies; Filter constructs intermediate signals via verifiers, judges, critics; Control allocates compute and makes continuation/branching/stopping decisions under budgets; and Replay retains and reuses artifacts across rollouts without weight updates, including self-evolving curricula that autonomously generate new training tasks. We complement GFCR with a criterion taxonomy of reliability, coverage, and cost sensitivity that characterizes rollout trade-offs. Using this framework, we synthesize methods spanning RL with verifiable rewards, process supervision, judge-based gating, guided and tree/segment rollouts, adaptive compute allocation, early-exit and partial rollouts, throughput optimization, and replay/recomposition for self-improvement. We ground the framework with case studies in math, code/SQL, multimodal reasoning, tool-using agents, and agentic skill benchmarks that evaluate skill induction, reuse, and cross-task transfer. Finally, we provide a diagnostic index that maps common rollout pathologies to GFCR modules and mitigation levers, alongside open challenges for building reproducible, compute-efficient, and trustworthy rollout pipelines.

Kanika Goswami, Puneet Mathur, Ryan Rossi et al.

Scientific data visualization is pivotal for transforming raw data into comprehensible visual representations, enabling pattern recognition, forecasting, and the presentation of data-driven insights. However, novice users often face difficulties due to the complexity of selecting appropriate tools and mastering visualization techniques. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated potential in assisting code generation, though they struggle with accuracy and require iterative debugging. In this paper, we propose PlotGen, a novel multi-agent framework aimed at automating the creation of precise scientific visualizations. PlotGen orchestrates multiple LLM-based agents, including a Query Planning Agent that breaks down complex user requests into executable steps, a Code Generation Agent that converts pseudocode into executable Python code, and three retrieval feedback agents - a Numeric Feedback Agent, a Lexical Feedback Agent, and a Visual Feedback Agent - that leverage multimodal LLMs to iteratively refine the data accuracy, textual labels, and visual correctness of generated plots via self-reflection. Extensive experiments show that PlotGen outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 4-6 percent improvement on the MatPlotBench dataset, leading to enhanced user trust in LLM-generated visualizations and improved novice productivity due to a reduction in debugging time needed for plot errors.

Ting-Yao Hsu, Chieh-Yang Huang, Shih-Hong Huang et al.

Crafting effective captions for figures is important. Readers heavily depend on these captions to grasp the figure's message. However, despite a well-developed set of AI technologies for figures and captions, these have rarely been tested for usefulness in aiding caption writing. This paper introduces SciCapenter, an interactive system that puts together cutting-edge AI technologies for scientific figure captions to aid caption composition. SciCapenter generates a variety of captions for each figure in a scholarly article, providing scores and a comprehensive checklist to assess caption quality across multiple critical aspects, such as helpfulness, OCR mention, key takeaways, and visual properties reference. Users can directly edit captions in SciCapenter, resubmit for revised evaluations, and iteratively refine them. A user study with Ph.D. students indicates that SciCapenter significantly lowers the cognitive load of caption writing. Participants' feedback further offers valuable design insights for future systems aiming to enhance caption writing.

Zhehao Zhang, Ryan Rossi, Tong Yu et al.

While vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks combining textual and visual information, they continue to struggle with fine-grained visual perception tasks that require detailed pixel-level analysis. Effectively eliciting comprehensive reasoning from VLMs on such intricate visual elements remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present VipAct, an agent framework that enhances VLMs by integrating multi-agent collaboration and vision expert models, enabling more precise visual understanding and comprehensive reasoning. VipAct consists of an orchestrator agent, which manages task requirement analysis, planning, and coordination, along with specialized agents that handle specific tasks such as image captioning and vision expert models that provide high-precision perceptual information. This multi-agent approach allows VLMs to better perform fine-grained visual perception tasks by synergizing planning, reasoning, and tool use. We evaluate VipAct on benchmarks featuring a diverse set of visual perception tasks, with experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across all tasks. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies reveal the critical role of multi-agent collaboration in eliciting more detailed System-2 reasoning and highlight the importance of image input for task planning. Additionally, our error analysis identifies patterns of VLMs' inherent limitations in visual perception, providing insights into potential future improvements. VipAct offers a flexible and extensible framework, paving the way for more advanced visual perception systems across various real-world applications.

Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Yiran Shen et al.

Personalized preference alignment for large language models (LLMs), the process of tailoring LLMs to individual users' preferences, is an emerging research direction spanning the area of NLP and personalization. In this survey, we present an analysis of works on personalized alignment and modeling for LLMs. We introduce a taxonomy of preference alignment techniques, including training time, inference time, and additionally, user-modeling based methods. We provide analysis and discussion on the strengths and limitations of each group of techniques and then cover evaluation, benchmarks, as well as open problems in the field.

Ruijie Ye, Jiayi Zhang, Zhuoxin Liu et al.

We study instruction-based image editing under professional workflows and identify three persistent challenges: (i) editors often over-edit, modifying content beyond the user's intent; (ii) existing models are largely single-turn, while multi-turn edits can alter object faithfulness; and (iii) evaluation at around 1K resolution is misaligned with real workflows that often operate on ultra high-definition images (e.g., 4K). We propose Agent Banana, a hierarchical agentic planner-executor framework for high-fidelity, object-aware, deliberative editing. Agent Banana introduces two key mechanisms: (1) Context Folding, which compresses long interaction histories into structured memory for stable long-horizon control; and (2) Image Layer Decomposition, which performs localized layer-based edits to preserve non-target regions while enabling native-resolution outputs. To support rigorous evaluation, we build HDD-Bench, a high-definition, dialogue-based benchmark featuring verifiable stepwise targets and native 4K images (11.8M pixels) for diagnosing long-horizon failures. On HDD-Bench, Agent Banana achieves the best multi-turn consistency and background fidelity (e.g., IC 0.871, SSIM-OM 0.84, LPIPS-OM 0.12) while remaining competitive on instruction following, and also attains strong performance on standard single-turn editing benchmarks. We hope this work advances reliable, professional-grade agentic image editing and its integration into real workflows.

Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are identified as being susceptible to indirect prompt injection attack, where the model undesirably deviates from user-provided instructions by executing tasks injected in the prompt context. This vulnerability stems from LLMs' inability to distinguish between data and instructions within a prompt. In this paper, we propose CachePrune that defends against this attack by identifying and pruning task-triggering neurons from the KV cache of the input prompt context. By pruning such neurons, we encourage the LLM to treat the text spans of input prompt context as only pure data, instead of any indicator of instruction following. These neurons are identified via feature attribution with a loss function induced from an upperbound of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) objective. We show that such a loss function enables effective feature attribution with only a few samples. We further improve on the quality of feature attribution, by exploiting an observed triggering effect in instruction following. Our approach does not impose any formatting on the original prompt or introduce extra test-time LLM calls. Experiments show that CachePrune significantly reduces attack success rates without compromising the response quality. Note: This paper aims to defend against indirect prompt injection attacks, with the goal of developing more secure and robust AI systems.

Zhenghao Zeng, David Arbour, Avi Feller et al.

In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not completely at random), analyses based on fully observed samples alone may be biased. Incorporating surrogates, which are fully observed post-treatment variables related to the primary outcome, can improve estimation in this case. In this paper, we study the role of surrogates in estimating continuous treatment effects and propose a doubly robust method to efficiently incorporate surrogates in the analysis, which uses both labeled and unlabeled data and does not suffer from the above selection bias problem. Importantly, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator and show possible improvements on the variance compared with methods that solely use labeled data. Extensive simulations show our methods enjoy appealing empirical performance.

Mohsen Fayyaz, Ali Modarressi, Hanieh Deilamsalehy et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) routes each token through a subset of specialized Feed-Forward Networks (FFN), known as experts. We present SteerMoE, a framework for steering MoE models by detecting and controlling behavior-linked experts. Our detection method identifies experts with distinct activation patterns across paired inputs exhibiting contrasting behaviors. By selectively (de)activating such experts during inference, we control behaviors like faithfulness and safety without retraining or modifying weights. Across 11 benchmarks and 6 LLMs, our steering raises safety by up to +20% and faithfulness by +27%. In adversarial attack mode, it drops safety by -41% alone, and -100% when combined with existing jailbreak methods, bypassing all safety guardrails and exposing a new dimension of alignment faking hidden within experts.

Jian Chen, Ming Li, Jihyung Kil et al.

Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.

Hui Wei, Dong Yoon Lee, Shubham Rohal et al.

Foundation models have gained growing interest in the IoT domain due to their reduced reliance on labeled data and strong generalizability across tasks, which address key limitations of traditional machine learning approaches. However, most existing foundation model based methods are developed for specific IoT tasks, making it difficult to compare approaches across IoT domains and limiting guidance for applying them to new tasks. This survey aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of current methodologies and organizing them around four shared performance objectives by different domains: efficiency, context-awareness, safety, and security & privacy. For each objective, we review representative works, summarize commonly-used techniques and evaluation metrics. This objective-centric organization enables meaningful cross-domain comparisons and offers practical insights for selecting and designing foundation model based solutions for new IoT tasks. We conclude with key directions for future research to guide both practitioners and researchers in advancing the use of foundation models in IoT applications.

Branislav Kveton, Xintong Li, Julian McAuley et al.

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a form of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where the policy is learned directly from preferential feedback. Although many models of human preferences exist, the critical task of selecting the most informative feedback for training them is under-explored. We propose an active learning framework for DPO, which can be applied to collect human feedback online or to choose the most informative subset of already collected feedback offline. We propose efficient algorithms for both settings. The key idea is to linearize the DPO objective at the last layer of the neural network representation of the optimized policy and then compute the D-optimal design to collect preferential feedback. We prove that the errors in our DPO logit estimates diminish with more feedback. We show the effectiveness of our algorithms empirically in the setting that matches our theory and also on large language models.

Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Viet Dac Lai, Raghavendra Addanki et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models (LLMs). We recast the problem as reward-weighted fine-tuning, which can be solved using similar techniques to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). To showcase the value of our approach, we apply it to learning short-horizon question-answering policies of a fixed length, where the agent reasons about potential answers or asks clarifying questions. Our work stands in a stark contrast to state-of-the-art methods in this domain, based on SFT and direct preference optimization, which have additional hyper-parameters and do not directly optimize for rewards. We compare to them empirically, and report major gains in both optimized rewards and language quality.

Chan-Wei Hu, Yueqi Wang, Shuo Xing et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, visual grounding, and complex reasoning. However, they remain limited by static training data, susceptibility to hallucinations, and inability to verify claims against up-to-date, external evidence, compromising their performance in dynamic real-world applications. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a practical solution to mitigate these challenges by allowing the LVLMs to access large-scale knowledge databases via retrieval mechanisms, thereby grounding model outputs in factual, contextually relevant information. Here in this paper, we conduct the first systematic dissection of the multimodal RAG pipeline for LVLMs, explicitly investigating (1) the retrieval phase: on the modality configurations and retrieval strategies, (2) the re-ranking stage: on strategies to mitigate positional biases and improve the relevance of retrieved evidence, and (3) the generation phase: we further investigate how to best integrate retrieved candidates into the final generation process. Finally, we extend to explore a unified agentic framework that integrates re-ranking and generation through self-reflection, enabling LVLMs to select relevant evidence and suppress irrelevant context dynamically. Our full-stack exploration of RAG for LVLMs yields substantial insights, resulting in an average performance boost of 5% without any fine-tuning.

Seon Gyeom Kim, Jae Young Choi, Ryan Rossi et al.

The field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has made remarkable progress in visual understanding tasks, presenting a vast opportunity to predict the perceptual and emotional impact of charts. However, it also raises concerns, as many applications of LLMs are based on overgeneralized assumptions from a few examples, lacking sufficient validation of their performance and effectiveness. We introduce Chart-to-Experience, a benchmark dataset comprising 36 charts, evaluated by crowdsourced workers for their impact on seven experiential factors. Using the dataset as ground truth, we evaluated capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs on two tasks: direct prediction and pairwise comparison of charts. Our findings imply that MLLMs are not as sensitive as human evaluators when assessing individual charts, but are accurate and reliable in pairwise comparisons.

Ting-Yao E. Hsu, Yi-Li Hsu, Shaurya Rohatgi et al.

Since the SciCap datasets launch in 2021, the research community has made significant progress in generating captions for scientific figures in scholarly articles. In 2023, the first SciCap Challenge took place, inviting global teams to use an expanded SciCap dataset to develop models for captioning diverse figure types across various academic fields. At the same time, text generation models advanced quickly, with many powerful pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs) emerging that showed impressive capabilities in various vision-and-language tasks. This paper presents an overview of the first SciCap Challenge and details the performance of various models on its data, capturing a snapshot of the fields state. We found that professional editors overwhelmingly preferred figure captions generated by GPT-4V over those from all other models and even the original captions written by authors. Following this key finding, we conducted detailed analyses to answer this question: Have advanced LMMs solved the task of generating captions for scientific figures?

Reuben A. Luera, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt et al.

In an ideal design pipeline, user interface (UI) design is intertwined with user research to validate decisions, yet studies are often resource-constrained during early exploration. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising opportunity to act as early evaluators, helping designers narrow options before formal testing. Unlike prior work that emphasizes user behavior in narrow domains such as e-commerce with metrics like clicks or conversions, we focus on subjective user evaluations across varied interfaces. We investigate whether MLLMs can mimic human preferences when evaluating individual UIs and comparing them. Using data from a crowdsourcing platform, we benchmark GPT-4o, Claude, and Llama across 30 interfaces and examine alignment with human judgments on multiple UI factors. Our results show that MLLMs approximate human preferences on some dimensions but diverge on others, underscoring both their potential and limitations in supplementing early UX research.

Vinay Shukla, Prachee Sharma, Ryan Rossi et al.

The ability to embed watermarks in images is a fundamental problem of interest for computer vision, and is exacerbated by the rapid rise of generated imagery in recent times. Current state-of-the-art techniques suffer from computational and statistical challenges such as the slow execution speed for practical deployments. In addition, other works trade off fast watermarking speeds but suffer greatly in their robustness or perceptual quality. In this work, we propose WaterFlow (WF), a fast and extremely robust approach for high fidelity visual watermarking based on a learned latent-dependent watermark. Our approach utilizes a pretrained latent diffusion model to encode an arbitrary image into a latent space and produces a learned watermark that is then planted into the Fourier Domain of the latent. The transformation is specified via invertible flow layers that enhance the expressivity of the latent space of the pre-trained model to better preserve image quality while permitting robust and tractable detection. Most notably, WaterFlow demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on general robustness and is the first method capable of effectively defending against difficult combination attacks. We validate our findings on three widely used real and generated datasets: MS-COCO, DiffusionDB, and WikiArt.

Kanika Goswami, Puneet Mathur, Ryan Rossi et al.

Chart visualizations, while essential for data interpretation and communication, are predominantly accessible only as images in PDFs, lacking source data tables and stylistic information. To enable effective editing of charts in PDFs or digital scans, we present PlotEdit, a novel multi-agent framework for natural language-driven end-to-end chart image editing via self-reflective LLM agents. PlotEdit orchestrates five LLM agents: (1) Chart2Table for data table extraction, (2) Chart2Vision for style attribute identification, (3) Chart2Code for retrieving rendering code, (4) Instruction Decomposition Agent for parsing user requests into executable steps, and (5) Multimodal Editing Agent for implementing nuanced chart component modifications - all coordinated through multimodal feedback to maintain visual fidelity. PlotEdit outperforms existing baselines on the ChartCraft dataset across style, layout, format, and data-centric edits, enhancing accessibility for visually challenged users and improving novice productivity.

Ghazi Shazan Ahmad, Shubham Agarwal, Subrata Mitra et al.

Automated visualization recommendations (vis-rec) help users to derive crucial insights from new datasets. Typically, such automated vis-rec models first calculate a large number of statistics from the datasets and then use machine-learning models to score or classify multiple visualizations choices to recommend the most effective ones, as per the statistics. However, state-of-the art models rely on very large number of expensive statistics and therefore using such models on large datasets become infeasible due to prohibitively large computational time, limiting the effectiveness of such techniques to most real world complex and large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement-learning (RL) based framework that takes a given vis-rec model and a time-budget from the user and identifies the best set of input statistics that would be most effective while generating the visual insights within a given time budget, using the given model. Using two state-of-the-art vis-rec models applied on three large real-world datasets, we show the effectiveness of our technique in significantly reducing time-to visualize with very small amount of introduced error. Our approach is about 10X times faster compared to the baseline approaches that introduce similar amounts of error.