With the rapid advancement of natural language processing (NLP) technologies, the demand for high-quality Chinese document question-answering datasets is steadily growing. To address this issue, we present the Chinese Multi-Document Question Answering Dataset(ChiMDQA), specifically designed for downstream business scenarios across prevalent domains including academic, education, finance, law, medical treatment, and news. ChiMDQA encompasses long-form documents from six distinct fields, consisting of 6,068 rigorously curated, high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs further classified into ten fine-grained categories. Through meticulous document screening and a systematic question-design methodology, the dataset guarantees both diversity and high quality, rendering it applicable to various NLP tasks such as document comprehension, knowledge extraction, and intelligent QA systems. Additionally, this paper offers a comprehensive overview of the dataset's design objectives, construction methodologies, and fine-grained evaluation system, supplying a substantial foundation for future research and practical applications in Chinese QA. The code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Foxit-CHiMDQA/.

Creation of large-scale databases for Visual Question Answering tasks pertaining to the text data in a scene (text-VQA) involves skilful human annotation, which is tedious and challenging. With the advent of foundation models that handle vision and language modalities, and with the maturity of OCR systems, it is the need of the hour to establish an end-to-end pipeline that can synthesize Question-Answer (QA) pairs based on scene-text from a given image. We propose a pipeline for automated synthesis for text-VQA dataset that can produce faithful QA pairs, and which scales up with the availability of scene text data. Our proposed method harnesses the capabilities of multiple models and algorithms involving OCR detection and recognition (text spotting), region of interest (ROI) detection, caption generation, and question generation. These components are streamlined into a cohesive pipeline to automate the synthesis and validation of QA pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first pipeline proposed to automatically synthesize and validate a large-scale text-VQA dataset comprising around 72K QA pairs based on around 44K images.

Tabular data embedded within PDF files, web pages, and other document formats are prevalent across numerous sectors such as government, engineering, science, and business. These human-centric tables (HCTs) possess a unique combination of high business value, intricate layouts, limited operational power at scale, and sometimes serve as the only data source for critical insights. However, their complexity poses significant challenges to traditional data extraction, processing, and querying methods. While current solutions focus on transforming these tables into relational formats for SQL queries, they fall short in handling the diverse and complex layouts of HCTs and hence being amenable to querying. This paper describes HCT-QA, an extensive benchmark of HCTs, natural language queries, and related answers on thousands of tables. Our dataset includes 2,188 real-world HCTs with 9,835 QA pairs and 4,679 synthetic tables with 67.5K QA pairs. While HCTs can be potentially processed by different type of query engines, in this paper, we focus on Large Language Models as potential engines and assess their ability in processing and querying such tables.

GraphRAG enhances large language models (LLMs) to generate quality answers for user questions by retrieving related facts from external knowledge graphs. However, current GraphRAG methods are primarily evaluated on and overly tailored for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) benchmarks, which are biased towards a few specific question patterns and do not reflect the diversity of real-world questions. To better evaluate GraphRAG methods, we propose a complete four-class taxonomy to categorize the basic patterns of knowledge graph questions and use it to create PolyBench, a new GraphRAG benchmark encompassing a comprehensive set of graph questions. With the new benchmark, we find that existing GraphRAG methods fall short in effectiveness (i.e., quality of the generated answers) and/or efficiency (i.e., response time or token usage) because they adopt either a fixed graph traversal strategy or free-form exploration by LLMs for fact retrieval. However, different question patterns require distinct graph traversal strategies and context formation. To facilitate better retrieval, we propose PolyG, an adaptive GraphRAG approach by decomposing and categorizing the questions according to our proposed question taxonomy. Built on top of a unified interface and execution engine, PolyG dynamically prompts an LLM to generate a graph database query to retrieve the context for each decomposed basic question. Compared with SOTA GraphRAG methods, PolyG achieves a higher win rate in generation quality and has a low response latency and token cost. Our code and benchmark are open-source at https://github.com/Liu-rj/PolyG.

Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is a crucial multimodal task in clinical decision support and telemedicine. Recent self-attention based methods struggle to effectively handle cross-modal semantic alignments between vision and language. Moreover, classification-based methods rely on predefined answer sets. Treating this task as a simple classification problem may make it unable to adapt to the diversity of free-form answers and overlook the detailed semantic information of free-form answers. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce a Cross-Mamba Interaction based Multi-Task Learning (CMI-MTL) framework that learns cross-modal feature representations from images and texts. CMI-MTL comprises three key modules: fine-grained visual-text feature alignment (FVTA), cross-modal interleaved feature representation (CIFR), and free-form answer-enhanced multi-task learning (FFAE). FVTA extracts the most relevant regions in image-text pairs through fine-grained visual-text feature alignment. CIFR captures cross-modal sequential interactions via cross-modal interleaved feature representation. FFAE leverages auxiliary knowledge from open-ended questions through free-form answer-enhanced multi-task learning, improving the model's capability for open-ended Med-VQA. Experimental results show that CMI-MTL outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on three Med-VQA datasets: VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and OVQA. Furthermore, we conduct more interpretability experiments to prove the effectiveness. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-repo/CMI-MTL.

Abstract--The immense diversity in the culture and culinary of Indian cuisines calls attention to the major shortcoming of the existing Visual Question Answering(VQA) systems which are inclined towards the foods from western regionRecent attempt towards building a VQA dataset for Indian food is a step towards addressing this challenge. However, their approach towards VQA follows a two-step process in which the answer is generated first, followed by the explanation of the expected answer . In this work, we claim that food VQA requires to follow a multi-step reasoning process to arrive at an accurate answer, especially in the context of India food, which involves understanding complex culinary context and identifying relationships between various food items. With this hypothesis we create reasoning chains upon the QA with minimal human intervention. With augmentation of reasoning chains, we observed accuracy improvement of an average 10 percentage points on the baseline. We provide detailed analysis in terms the effect of addition of reasoning chains for the Indian Food VQA task. One of the most important part of culture and social aspects in everyday life is food. In a country like India, food highlights immense diversity based on geography, religion, and traditions of different regions. A single mealcontain items which differ in preparation, presentation and flavor. This richness in the culinary and the culture, poses unique set of challenges for AI systems that target the understanding of content related to Indian food. A powerful framework that has emerged to connect visual and language reasoning is Visual Question Answering(VQA) [6].

Coral reefs are vital yet vulnerable ecosystems that require continuous monitoring to support conservation. While coral reef images provide essential information in coral monitoring, interpreting such images remains challenging due to the need for domain expertise. Visual Question Answering (VQA), powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), has great potential in user-friendly interaction with coral reef images. However, applying VQA to coral imagery demands a dedicated dataset that addresses two key challenges: domain-specific annotations and multidimensional questions. In this work, we introduce CoralVQA, the first large-scale VQA dataset for coral reef analysis. It contains 12,805 real-world coral images from 67 coral genera collected from 3 oceans, along with 277,653 question-answer pairs that comprehensively assess ecological and health-related conditions. To construct this dataset, we develop a semi-automatic data construction pipeline in collaboration with marine biologists to ensure both scalability and professional-grade data quality. CoralVQA presents novel challenges and provides a comprehensive benchmark for studying vision-language reasoning in the context of coral reef images. By evaluating several state-of-the-art LVLMs, we reveal key limitations and opportunities. These insights form a foundation for future LVLM development, with a particular emphasis on supporting coral conservation efforts.

We characterize how memorization is represented in transformer models and show that it can be disentangled in the weights of both language models (LMs) and vision transformers (ViTs) using a decomposition based on the loss landscape curvature. This insight is based on prior theoretical and empirical work showing that the curvature for memorized training points is much sharper than non memorized, meaning ordering weight components from high to low curvature can reveal a distinction without explicit labels. This motivates a weight editing procedure that suppresses far more recitation of untargeted memorized data more effectively than a recent unlearning method (BalancedSubnet), while maintaining lower perplexity. Since the basis of curvature has a natural interpretation for shared structure in model weights, we analyze the editing procedure extensively on its effect on downstream tasks in LMs, and find that fact retrieval and arithmetic are specifically and consistently negatively affected, even though open book fact retrieval and general logical reasoning is conserved. We posit these tasks rely heavily on specialized directions in weight space rather than general purpose mechanisms, regardless of whether those individual datapoints are memorized. We support this by showing a correspondence between task data's activation strength with low curvature components that we edit out, and the drop in task performance after the edit. Our work enhances the understanding of memorization in neural networks with practical applications towards removing it, and provides evidence for idiosyncratic, narrowly-used structures involved in solving tasks like math and fact retrieval.

Understanding infographic charts with design-driven visual elements (e.g., pictograms, icons) requires both visual recognition and reasoning, posing challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing visual-question answering benchmarks fall short in evaluating these capabilities of MLLMs due to the lack of paired plain charts and visual-element-based questions. To bridge this gap, we introduce InfoChartQA, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on infographic chart understanding. It includes 5,642 pairs of infographic and plain charts, each sharing the same underlying data but differing in visual presentations. We further design visual-element-based questions to capture their unique visual designs and communicative intent. Evaluation of 20 MLLMs reveals a substantial performance decline on infographic charts, particularly for visual-element-based questions related to metaphors. The paired infographic and plain charts enable fine-grained error analysis and ablation studies, which highlight new opportunities for advancing MLLMs in infographic chart understanding. We release InfoChartQA at https://github.com/CoolDawnAnt/InfoChartQA.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized Natural Language Processing, yet their application in high-stakes, specialized domains like religious question answering is hindered by challenges like hallucination and unfaithfulness to authoritative sources. This issue is particularly critical for the Persian-speaking Muslim community, where accuracy and trustworthiness are paramount. Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, relying on simplistic single-pass pipelines, fall short on complex, multi-hop queries requiring multi-step reasoning and evidence aggregation. To address this gap, we introduce FARSIQA, a novel, end-to-end system for Faithful Advanced Question Answering in the Persian Islamic domain. FARSIQA is built upon our innovative FAIR-RAG architecture: a Faithful, Adaptive, Iterative Refinement framework for RAG. FAIR-RAG employs a dynamic, self-correcting process: it adaptively decomposes complex queries, assesses evidence sufficiency, and enters an iterative loop to generate sub-queries, progressively filling information gaps. Operating on a curated knowledge base of over one million authoritative Islamic documents, FARSIQA demonstrates superior performance. Rigorous evaluation on the challenging IslamicPCQA benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance: the system achieves a remarkable 97.0% in Negative Rejection - a 40-point improvement over baselines - and a high Answer Correctness score of 74.3%. Our work establishes a new standard for Persian Islamic QA and validates that our iterative, adaptive architecture is crucial for building faithful, reliable AI systems in sensitive domains.