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ChartEdit: How Far Are MLLMs From Automating Chart Analysis? Evaluating MLLMs' Capability via Chart Editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in generating chart rendering code, editing charts via code presents a greater challenge. This task demands MLLMs to integrate chart understanding and reasoning capacities, which are labor-intensive. While many MLLMs claim such editing capabilities, current evaluations rely on limited case studies, highlighting the urgent need for a comprehensive evaluation framework. In this work, we propose \textsc{ChartEdit}, a novel benchmark designed for chart editing tasks, featuring $1405$ diverse editing instructions applied to $233$ real-world charts, each manually annotated and validated for accuracy. Utilizing \textsc{ChartEdit}, we evaluate the performance of 10 mainstream MLLMs across two types of experiments at both the code and chart levels. The results suggest that large-scale models can generate code to produce images that partially match the reference images. However, their ability to generate accurate edits according to the instructions remains limited. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) model achieves a score of only $59.96$, highlighting significant challenges in precise modification. In contrast, small-scale models, including chart-domain models, struggle both with following editing instructions and generating overall chart images, underscoring the need for further development in this area. Code is available at https://github.com/xxlllz/ChartEdit.


Prompting Large Language Models for Training-Free Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) aims to disaggregate total electricity consumption into individual appliance usage, thus enabling more effective energy management. While deep learning has advanced NILM, it remains limited by its dependence on labeled data, restricted generalization, and lack of explainability. This paper introduces the first prompt-based NILM framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning. We design and evaluate prompt strategies that integrate appliance features, contextual information, and representative time-series examples through extensive case studies. Extensive experiments on the REDD and UK-DALE datasets show that LLMs guided solely by prompts deliver only basic NILM capabilities, with performance that lags behind traditional deep-learning models in complex scenarios. However, the experiments also demonstrate strong generalization across different houses and even regions by simply adapting the injected appliance features. It also provides clear, human-readable explanations for the inferred appliance states. Our findings define the capability boundaries of using prompt-only LLMs for NILM tasks. Their strengths in generalization and explainability present a promising new direction for the field.


A Scoping Review of Natural Language Processing in Addressing Medically Inaccurate Information: Errors, Misinformation, and Hallucination

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Objective: This review aims to explore the potential and challenges of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect, correct, and mitigate medically inaccurate information, including errors, misinformation, and hallucination. By unifying these concepts, the review emphasizes their shared methodological foundations and their distinct implications for healthcare. Our goal is to advance patient safety, improve public health communication, and support the development of more reliable and transparent NLP applications in healthcare. Methods: A scoping review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines, analyzing studies from 2020 to 2024 across five databases. Studies were selected based on their use of NLP to address medically inaccurate information and were categorized by topic, tasks, document types, datasets, models, and evaluation metrics. Results: NLP has shown potential in addressing medically inaccurate information on the following tasks: (1) error detection (2) error correction (3) misinformation detection (4) misinformation correction (5) hallucination detection (6) hallucination mitigation. However, challenges remain with data privacy, context dependency, and evaluation standards. Conclusion: This review highlights the advancements in applying NLP to tackle medically inaccurate information while underscoring the need to address persistent challenges. Future efforts should focus on developing real-world datasets, refining contextual methods, and improving hallucination management to ensure reliable and transparent healthcare applications.


LZ Penalty: An information-theoretic repetition penalty for autoregressive language models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce the LZ penalty, a penalty specialized for reducing degenerate repetitions in autoregressive language models without loss of capability. The penalty is based on the codelengths in the LZ77 universal lossless compression algorithm. Through the lens of the prediction-compression duality, decoding the LZ penalty has the interpretation of sampling from the residual distribution after removing the information that is highly compressible. We demonstrate the LZ penalty enables state-of-the-art open-source reasoning models to operate with greedy (temperature zero) decoding without loss of capability and without instances of degenerate repetition. Both the industry-standard frequency penalty and repetition penalty are ineffective, incurring degenerate repetition rates of up to 4%.


Agree to Disagree? A Meta-Evaluation of LLM Misgendering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Numerous methods have been proposed to measure LLM misgendering, including probability-based evaluations (e.g., automatically with templatic sentences) and generation-based evaluations (e.g., with automatic heuristics or human validation). However, it has gone unexamined whether these evaluation methods have convergent validity, that is, whether their results align. Therefore, we conduct a systematic meta-evaluation of these methods across three existing datasets for LLM misgendering. We propose a method to transform each dataset to enable parallel probability- and generation-based evaluation. Then, by automatically evaluating a suite of 6 models from 3 families, we find that these methods can disagree with each other at the instance, dataset, and model levels, conflicting on 20.2% of evaluation instances. Finally, with a human evaluation of 2400 LLM generations, we show that misgendering behaviour is complex and goes far beyond pronouns, which automatic evaluations are not currently designed to capture, suggesting essential disagreement with human evaluations. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for future evaluations of LLM misgendering. Our results are also more widely relevant, as they call into question broader methodological conventions in LLM evaluation, which often assume that different evaluation methods agree.


LoRI: Reducing Cross-Task Interference in Multi-Task Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it still incurs notable overhead and suffers from parameter interference in multi-task scenarios. We propose LoRA with Reduced Interference (LoRI), a simple yet effective approach that freezes the projection matrices $A$ as random projections and sparsifies the matrices $B$ using task-specific masks. This design substantially reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining strong task performance. Moreover, LoRI minimizes cross-task interference in adapter merging by leveraging the orthogonality between adapter subspaces, and supports continual learning by using sparsity to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across natural language understanding, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and safety alignment tasks demonstrate that LoRI outperforms full fine-tuning and existing PEFT methods, while using up to 95% fewer trainable parameters than LoRA. In multi-task experiments, LoRI enables effective adapter merging and continual learning with reduced cross-task interference. Code is available at: https://github.com/juzhengz/LoRI


Enhancing Time Series Forecasting via Multi-Level Text Alignment with LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The adaptation of large language models (LLMs) to time series forecasting poses unique challenges, as time series data is continuous in nature, while LLMs operate on discrete tokens. Despite the success of LLMs in natural language processing (NLP) and other structured domains, aligning time series data with language-based representations while maintaining both predictive accuracy and interpretability remains a significant hurdle. Existing methods have attempted to reprogram time series data into text-based forms, but these often fall short in delivering meaningful, interpretable results. In this paper, we propose a multi-level text alignment framework for time series forecasting using LLMs that not only improves prediction accuracy but also enhances the interpretability of time series representations. Our method decomposes time series into trend, seasonal, and residual components, which are then reprogrammed into component-specific text representations. We introduce a multi-level alignment mechanism, where component-specific embeddings are aligned with pre-trained word tokens, enabling more interpretable forecasts. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models in accuracy while providing good interpretability.


GateLens: A Reasoning-Enhanced LLM Agent for Automotive Software Release Analytics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring reliable software release decisions is critical in safety-critical domains such as automotive manufacturing. Release validation relies on large tabular datasets, yet manual analysis is slow, costly, and error-prone. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising automation potential, they face challenges in analytical reasoning, structured data handling, and ambiguity resolution. This paper introduces GateLens, an LLM-based system for analyzing tabular data in the automotive domain. GateLens translates natural language queries into Relational Algebra (RA) expressions and generates optimized Python code. Unlike traditional multi-agent or planning-based systems that can be slow, opaque, and costly to maintain, GateLens emphasizes speed, transparency, and reliability. Experimental results show that GateLens outperforms the existing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) + Self-Consistency (SC) based system on real-world datasets, particularly in handling complex and ambiguous queries. Ablation studies confirm the essential role of the RA layer. Industrial deployment shows over 80% reduction in analysis time while maintaining high accuracy across test result interpretation, impact assessment, and release candidate evaluation. GateLens operates effectively in zero-shot settings without requiring few-shot examples or agent orchestration. This work advances deployable LLM system design by identifying key architectural features-intermediate formal representations, execution efficiency, and low configuration overhead-crucial for safety-critical industrial applications.


RAISE: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning in LLMs via Step-by-Step Retrieval

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Scientific reasoning requires not only long-chain reasoning processes, but also knowledge of domain-specific terminologies and adaptation to updated findings. To deal with these challenges for scientific reasoning, we introduce RAISE, a step-by-step retrieval-augmented framework which retrieves logically relevant documents from in-the-wild corpus. RAISE is divided into three steps: problem decomposition, logical query generation, and logical retrieval. We observe that RAISE consistently outperforms other baselines on scientific reasoning benchmarks. We analyze that unlike other baselines, RAISE retrieves documents that are not only similar in terms of the domain knowledge, but also documents logically more relevant.


It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Time plays a critical role in how information is generated, retrieved, and interpreted. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of Temporal Question Answering (TQA), a research area that focuses on answering questions involving temporal constraints or context. As the amount of time-stamped content from sources like news articles, web archives, and knowledge bases increases, systems must address challenges such as detecting temporal intent, normalizing time expressions, ordering events, and reasoning over evolving or ambiguous facts. We focus on recent advances in TQA enabled by neural architectures, especially transformer-based models and Large Language Models (LLMs), highlighting progress in temporal language modeling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and temporal reasoning. We also discuss benchmark datasets and evaluation strategies designed to test temporal robustness, recency awareness, and generalization.