Beyond Pixels: Introspective and Interactive Grounding for Visualization Agents

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently misread values, hallucinate details, and confuse overlapping elements in charts. Current approaches rely solely on pixel interpretation, creating a Pixel-Only Bottleneck: agents treat interactive charts as static images, losing access to the structured specification that encodes exact values. We introduce Introspective and Interactive Visual Grounding (IVG), a framework that combines (1) spec-grounded introspection, which queries the underlying specification for deterministic evidence, with (2) view-grounded interaction, which manipulates the view to resolve visual ambiguity. To enable evaluation without VLM bias, we present iPlotBench, a benchmark of 500 interactive Plotly figures with 6,706 binary questions and ground-truth specifications. Experiments show that introspection improves data reconstruction fidelity, while the combination with interaction achieves the highest QA accuracy (0.81), with +6.7 % gains on overlapping geometries. We further demonstrate IVG in deployed agents that explore data autonomously and collaborate with human users in real time.

Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Parsing and Mining Unstructured Logs on Leadership HPC Systems

Leadership-class HPC systems generate massive volumes of heterogeneous, largely unstructured system logs. Because these logs originate from diverse software, hardware, and runtime layers, they exhibit inconsistent formats, making structure extraction and pattern discovery extremely challenging. Therefore, robust log parsing and mining is critical to transform this raw telemetry into actionable insights that reveal operational patterns, diagnose anomalies, and enable reliable, efficient, and scalable system analysis. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising new direction for automated log understanding in leadership-class HPC environments. To capitalize on this opportunity, we present a domain-adapted, instruction-following, LLM-driven framework that leverages chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to parse and structure HPC logs with high fidelity. Our approach combines domain-specific log-template data with instruction-tuned examples to fine-tune an 8B-parameter LLaMA model tailored for HPC log analysis. We develop a hybrid fine-tuning methodology that adapts a general-purpose LLM to domain-specific log data, enabling privacy-preserving, locally deployable, fast, and energy-efficient log-mining approach. We conduct experiments on a diverse set of log datasets from the LogHub repository. The evaluation confirms that our approach achieves parsing accuracy on par with significantly larger models, such as LLaMA 70B and Anthropic's Claude. We further validate the practical utility of our fine-tuned LLM model by parsing over 600 million production logs from the Frontier supercomputer over a four-week window, uncovering critical patterns in temporal dynamics, node-level anomalies, and workload-error log correlations.