With recent advances in multi-modal foundation models, the previously text-only large language models (LLM) have evolved to incorporate visual input, opening up unprecedented opportunities for various applications in visualization. Our work explores the utilization of the visual perception ability of multi-modal LLMs to develop Autonomous Visualization Agents (AVAs) that can interpret and accomplish user-defined visualization objectives through natural language. We propose the first framework for the design of AVAs and present several usage scenarios intended to demonstrate the general applicability of the proposed paradigm. The addition of visual perception allows AVAs to act as the virtual visualization assistant for domain experts who may lack the knowledge or expertise in fine-tuning visualization outputs. Our preliminary exploration and proof-of-concept agents suggest that this approach can be widely applicable whenever the choices of appropriate visualization parameters require the interpretation of previous visual output. Feedback from unstructured interviews with experts in AI research, medical visualization, and radiology has been incorporated, highlighting the practicality and potential of AVAs. Our study indicates that AVAs represent a general paradigm for designing intelligent visualization systems that can achieve high-level visualization goals, which pave the way for developing expert-level visualization agents in the future.

In this paper, we use a linear program to empirically decompose fitted neural networks into ensembles of low-bias sub-networks. We show that these sub-networks are relatively uncorrelated which leads to an internal regularization process, very much like a random forest, which can explain why a neural network is surprisingly resistant to overfitting. We then demonstrate this in practice by applying large neural networks, with hundreds of parameters per training observation, to a collection of 116 real-world data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. This collection of data sets contains a much smaller number of training examples than the types of image classification tasks generally studied in the deep learning literature, as well as non-trivial label noise. We show that even in this setting deep neural nets are capable of achieving superior classification accuracy without overfitting.

In this paper, we use a linear program to empirically decompose fitted neural networks into ensembles of low-bias sub-networks. We show that these sub-networks are relatively uncorrelated which leads to an internal regularization process, very much like a random forest, which can explain why a neural network is surprisingly resistant to overfitting. We then demonstrate this in practice by applying large neural networks, with hundreds of parameters per training observation, to a collection of 116 real-world data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. This collection of data sets contains a much smaller number of training examples than the types of image classification tasks generally studied in the deep learning literature, as well as non-trivial label noise. We show that even in this setting deep neural nets are capable of achieving superior classification accuracy without overfitting.

There is a large literature explaining why AdaBoost is a successful classifier. The literature on AdaBoost focuses on classifier margins and boosting's interpretation as the optimization of an exponential likelihood function. These existing explanations, however, have been pointed out to be incomplete. A random forest is another popular ensemble method for which there is substantially less explanation in the literature. We introduce a novel perspective on AdaBoost and random forests that proposes that the two algorithms work for similar reasons. While both classifiers achieve similar predictive accuracy, random forests cannot be conceived as a direct optimization procedure. Rather, random forests is a self-averaging, interpolating algorithm which creates what we denote as a "spikey-smooth" classifier, and we view AdaBoost in the same light. We conjecture that both AdaBoost and random forests succeed because of this mechanism. We provide a number of examples and some theoretical justification to support this explanation. In the process, we question the conventional wisdom that suggests that boosting algorithms for classification require regularization or early stopping and should be limited to low complexity classes of learners, such as decision stumps. We conclude that boosting should be used like random forests: with large decision trees and without direct regularization or early stopping.