Automated chart summarization is crucial for enhancing data accessibility and enabling efficient information extraction from visual data. While recent advances in visual-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promise, existing methods often suffer from limitations in matching the generated summary to the chart data and in reasoning about complex chart patterns. This paper introduces End-to-End Visual Chain-of-Thought (V-CoT) for chart summarization, a novel approach optimized for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Our method directly trains an LVLM to process chart images and generate textual summaries in an end-to-end fashion, eliminating the need for explicit chart parsing modules. We incorporate a visual Chain-of-Thought mechanism through instruction fine-tuning, implicitly guiding the LVLM to perform visual reasoning steps during summary generation. Evaluated on the large-scale Chart-Sum-QA dataset, our V-CoT method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a range of automatic metrics, including BLEU, BLEURT, CIDEr, and CS, and demonstrates superior matching degree and reasoning correctness in human evaluations. Ablation studies and detailed analyses further validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach, establishing a new benchmark for end-to-end chart summarization.

In this demonstration, we develop IntentRec4Maps, a system to recognise users' intentions in interactive maps for real-world navigation. IntentRec4Maps uses the Google Maps Platform as the real-world interactive map, and a very effective approach for recognising users' intentions in real-time. We showcase the recognition process of IntentRec4Maps using two different Path-Planners and a Large Language Model (LLM). GitHub: https://github.com/PeijieZ/IntentRec4Maps

Recent research across mathematical problem solving, proof assistant programming and multimodal jailbreaking documents a striking finding: when (multimodal) language model tackle a suite of tasks with multiple attempts per task -- succeeding if any attempt is correct -- then the negative log of the average success rate scales a power law in the number of attempts. In this work, we identify an apparent puzzle: a simple mathematical calculation predicts that on each problem, the failure rate should fall exponentially with the number of attempts. We confirm this prediction empirically, raising a question: from where does aggregate polynomial scaling emerge? We then answer this question by demonstrating per-problem exponential scaling can be made consistent with aggregate polynomial scaling if the distribution of single-attempt success probabilities is heavy tailed such that a small fraction of tasks with extremely low success probabilities collectively warp the aggregate success trend into a power law - even as each problem scales exponentially on its own. We further demonstrate that this distributional perspective explains previously observed deviations from power law scaling, and provides a simple method for forecasting the power law exponent with an order of magnitude lower relative error, or equivalently, ${\sim}2-4$ orders of magnitude less inference compute. Overall, our work contributes to a better understanding of how neural language model performance improves with scaling inference compute and the development of scaling-predictable evaluations of (multimodal) language models.

Deploying natural language generation systems in clinical settings remains challenging despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), which continue to exhibit hallucinations and factual inconsistencies, necessitating human oversight. This paper explores automated dataset augmentation using LLMs as human proxies to condition LLMs for clinician control without increasing cognitive workload. On the BioNLP ACL'24 Discharge Me! Shared Task, we achieve new state-of-the-art results with simpler methods than prior submissions through more efficient training, yielding a 9\% relative improvement without augmented training and up to 34\% with dataset augmentation. Preliminary human evaluation further supports the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the potential of augmenting clinical text generation for control to enhance relevance, accuracy, and factual consistency.

Interpreting data is central to modern research. Large language models (LLMs) show promise in providing such natural language interpretations of data, yet simple feature extraction methods such as prompting often fail to produce accurate and versatile descriptions for diverse datasets and lack control over granularity and scale. To address these limitations, we propose a domain-agnostic method for dataset featurization that provides precise control over the number of features extracted while maintaining compact and descriptive representations comparable to human expert labeling. Our method optimizes the selection of informative binary features by evaluating the ability of an LLM to reconstruct the original data using those features. We demonstrate its effectiveness in dataset modeling tasks and through two case studies: (1) Constructing a feature representation of jailbreak tactics that compactly captures both the effectiveness and diversity of a larger set of human-crafted attacks; and (2) automating the discovery of features that align with human preferences, achieving accuracy and robustness comparable to expert-crafted features. Moreover, we show that the pipeline scales effectively, improving as additional features are sampled, making it suitable for large and diverse datasets.

Generating accurate and concise textual summaries from multimodal documents is challenging, especially when dealing with visually complex content like scientific posters. We introduce PosterSum, a novel benchmark to advance the development of vision-language models that can understand and summarize scientific posters into research paper abstracts. Our dataset contains 16,305 conference posters paired with their corresponding abstracts as summaries. Each poster is provided in image format and presents diverse visual understanding challenges, such as complex layouts, dense text regions, tables, and figures. We benchmark state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on PosterSum and demonstrate that they struggle to accurately interpret and summarize scientific posters. We propose Segment & Summarize, a hierarchical method that outperforms current MLLMs on automated metrics, achieving a 3.14% gain in ROUGE-L. This will serve as a starting point for future research on poster summarization.

This paper introduces a novel causal framework for multi-stage decision-making in natural language action spaces where outcomes are only observed after a sequence of actions. While recent approaches like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) can handle such delayed-reward settings in high-dimensional action spaces, they typically require multiple models (policy, value, and reward) and substantial training data. Our approach employs Q-learning to estimate Dynamic Treatment Regimes (DTR) through a single model, enabling data-efficient policy learning via gradient ascent on language embeddings. A key technical contribution of our approach is a decoding strategy that translates optimized embeddings back into coherent natural language. We evaluate our approach on mental health intervention, hate speech countering, and sentiment transfer tasks, demonstrating significant improvements over competitive baselines across multiple metrics. Notably, our method achieves superior transfer strength while maintaining content preservation and fluency, as validated through human evaluation. Our work provides a practical foundation for learning optimal policies in complex language tasks where training data is limited.

Motivated by reducing the computational and storage costs of LLMs, model compression and KV cache compression have attracted much attention from researchers. However, current methods predominantly emphasize maintaining the performance of compressed LLMs, as measured by perplexity or simple accuracy on tasks of common sense knowledge QA and basic arithmetic reasoning. In this blog, we present a brief review of recent advancements in LLMs related to retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step reasoning, external tools, and computational expressivity, all of which substantially enhance LLM performance. Then, we propose a lottery LLM hypothesis suggesting that for a given LLM and task, there exists a smaller lottery LLM capable of producing the same performance as the original LLM with the assistance of multi-step reasoning and external tools. Based on the review of current progress in LLMs, we discuss and summarize the essential capabilities that the lottery LLM and KV cache compression must possess, which are currently overlooked in existing methods.

The constant $\pi$ has fascinated scholars for centuries, inspiring the derivation of countless formulas rooted in profound mathematical insight. This abundance of formulas raises a question: Are they interconnected, and can a unifying structure explain their relationships? We propose a systematic methodology for discovering and proving formula equivalences, leveraging modern large language models, large-scale data processing, and novel mathematical algorithms. Analyzing 457,145 arXiv papers, over a third of the validated formulas for $\pi$ were proven to be derivable from a single mathematical object - including formulas by Euler, Gauss, Lord Brouncker, and newer ones from algorithmic discoveries by the Ramanujan Machine. Our approach extends to other constants, such as $e$, $\zeta(3)$, and Catalan's constant, proving its broad applicability. This work represents a step toward the automatic unification of mathematical knowledge, laying a foundation for AI-driven discoveries of connections across scientific domains.

Humans naturally integrate vision and haptics for robust object perception during manipulation. The loss of either modality significantly degrades performance. Inspired by this multisensory integration, prior object pose estimation research has attempted to combine visual and haptic/tactile feedback. Although these works demonstrate improvements in controlled environments or synthetic datasets, they often underperform vision-only approaches in real-world settings due to poor generalization across diverse grippers, sensor layouts, or sim-to-real environments. Furthermore, they typically estimate the object pose for each frame independently, resulting in less coherent tracking over sequences in real-world deployments. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel unified haptic representation that effectively handles multiple gripper embodiments. Building on this representation, we introduce a new visuo-haptic transformer-based object pose tracker that seamlessly integrates visual and haptic input. We validate our framework in our dataset and the Feelsight dataset, demonstrating significant performance improvement on challenging sequences. Notably, our method achieves superior generalization and robustness across novel embodiments, objects, and sensor types (both taxel-based and vision-based tactile sensors). In real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art visual trackers by a large margin. We further show that we can achieve precise manipulation tasks by incorporating our real-time object tracking result into motion plans, underscoring the advantages of visuo-haptic perception. Our model and dataset will be made open source upon acceptance of the paper. Project website: https://lhy.xyz/projects/v-hop/