Rui Sheng

Yanjie Zhang, Yafei Li, Rui Sheng et al.

Despite the success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), misleading charts remain a significant challenge due to their deceptive visual structures and distorted data representations. We present ChartCynics, an agentic dual-path framework designed to unmask visual deception via a "skeptical" reasoning paradigm. Unlike holistic models, ChartCynics decouples perception from verification: a Diagnostic Vision Path captures structural anomalies (e.g., inverted axes) through strategic ROI cropping, while an OCR-Driven Data Path ensures numerical grounding. To resolve cross-modal conflicts, we introduce an Agentic Summarizer optimized via a two-stage protocol: Oracle-Informed SFT for reasoning distillation and Deception-Aware GRPO for adversarial alignment. This pipeline effectively penalizes visual traps and enforces logical consistency. Evaluations on two benchmarks show that ChartCynics achieves 74.43% and 64.55% accuracy, providing an absolute performance boost of ~29% over the Qwen3-VL-8B backbone, outperforming state-of-the-art proprietary models. Our results demonstrate that specialized agentic workflows can grant smaller open-source models superior robustness, establishing a new foundation for trustworthy chart interpretation.

Shuo Yan, Xiaolin Wen, Shaolun Ruan et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agentic systems have shown growing promise in tackling complex, multi-step tasks through autonomous planning, reasoning, and interaction with external environments. However, the stochastic nature of LLM generation introduces intrinsic behavioral inconsistency: the same agent may succeed in one execution but fail in another under identical inputs. Diagnosing such inconsistencies remains a major challenge for developers, as agent execution logs are often lengthy, unstructured, and difficult to compare across runs. Existing debugging and evaluation tools primarily focus on inspecting single executions, offering limited support for understanding how and why agent behaviors diverge across repeated runs. To address this challenge, we introduce InconLens, a visual analytics system designed to support interactive diagnosis of LLM-based agentic systems with a particular focus on cross-run behavioral analysis. InconLens introduces information nodes as an intermediate abstraction that captures canonical informational milestones shared across executions, enabling semantic alignment and inspection of agent reasoning trajectories across multiple runs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of InconLens through a detailed case study and further validate its usability and analytical value via expert interviews. Our results show that InconLens enables developers to more efficiently identify divergence points, uncover latent failure modes, and gain actionable insights into improving the reliability and stability of agentic systems.

Xingbo Wang, Samantha L. Huey, Rui Sheng et al.

The explosion of scientific literature has made the efficient and accurate extraction of structured data a critical component for advancing scientific knowledge and supporting evidence-based decision-making. However, existing tools often struggle to extract and structure multimodal, varied, and inconsistent information across documents into standardized formats. We introduce SciDaSynth, a novel interactive system powered by large language models (LLMs) that automatically generates structured data tables according to users' queries by integrating information from diverse sources, including text, tables, and figures. Furthermore, SciDaSynth supports efficient table data validation and refinement, featuring multi-faceted visual summaries and semantic grouping capabilities to resolve cross-document data inconsistencies. A within-subjects study with nutrition and NLP researchers demonstrates SciDaSynth's effectiveness in producing high-quality structured data more efficiently than baseline methods. We discuss design implications for human-AI collaborative systems supporting data extraction tasks. The system code is available at https://github.com/xingbow/SciDaEx