Does It Run and Is That Enough? Revisiting Text-to-Chart Generation with a Multi-Agent Approach

Large language models can translate natural-language chart descriptions into runnable code, yet approximately 15\% of the generated scripts still fail to execute, even after supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. We investigate whether this persistent error rate stems from model limitations or from reliance on a single-prompt design. To explore this, we propose a lightweight multi-agent pipeline that separates drafting, execution, repair, and judgment, using only an off-the-shelf GPT-4o-mini model. On the \textsc{Text2Chart31} benchmark, our system reduces execution errors to 4.5\% within three repair iterations, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned baseline by nearly 5 percentage points while requiring significantly less compute. Similar performance is observed on the \textsc{ChartX} benchmark, with an error rate of 4.6\%, demonstrating strong generalization. Under current benchmarks, execution success appears largely solved. However, manual review reveals that 6 out of 100 sampled charts contain hallucinations, and an LLM-based accessibility audit shows that only 33.3\% (\textsc{Text2Chart31}) and 7.2\% (\textsc{ChartX}) of generated charts satisfy basic colorblindness guidelines. These findings suggest that future work should shift focus from execution reliability toward improving chart aesthetics, semantic fidelity, and accessibility.

UTSA-NLP at ArchEHR-QA 2025: Improving EHR Question Answering via Self-Consistency Prompting

We describe our system for the ArchEHR-QA Shared Task on answering clinical questions using electronic health records (EHRs). Our approach uses large language models in two steps: first, to find sentences in the EHR relevant to a clinician's question, and second, to generate a short, citation-supported response based on those sentences. We use few-shot prompting, self-consistency, and thresholding to improve the sentence classification step to decide which sentences are essential. We compare several models and find that a smaller 8B model performs better than a larger 70B model for identifying relevant information. Our results show that accurate sentence selection is critical for generating high-quality responses and that self-consistency with thresholding helps make these decisions more reliable.

Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations

We propose a novel framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. Traditional evaluation methods often rely on human judgment, which is costly and unscalable, or focus solely on data accuracy, neglecting the effectiveness of visual communication. By employing VQA models, we assess data representation quality and the general communicative clarity of charts. Experiments were conducted using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta's Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. Our results indicate that LLM-generated charts do not match the accuracy of the original non-LLM-generated charts based on VQA performance measures. Moreover, while our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting significantly boosts the accuracy of chart generation, considerable progress remains to be made before LLMs can fully match the precision of human-generated graphs. This underscores the importance of our work, which expedites the research process by enabling rapid iteration without the need for human annotation, thus accelerating advancements in this field.

Improving LLM Reasoning with Multi-Agent Tree-of-Thought Validator Agent

Multi-agent strategies have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by assigning specialized roles in the problem-solving process. Concurrently, Tree of Thoughts (ToT) methods have shown potential in improving reasoning for complex question-answering tasks by exploring diverse reasoning paths. A critical limitation in multi-agent reasoning is the 'Reasoner' agent's shallow exploration of reasoning paths. While ToT strategies could help mitigate this problem, they may generate flawed reasoning branches, which could harm the trustworthiness of the final answer. To leverage the strengths of both multi-agent reasoning and ToT strategies, we introduce a novel approach combining ToT-based Reasoner agents with a Thought Validator agent. Multiple Reasoner agents operate in parallel, employing ToT to explore diverse reasoning paths. The Thought Validator then scrutinizes these paths, considering a Reasoner's conclusion only if its reasoning is valid. This method enables a more robust voting strategy by discarding faulty reasoning paths, enhancing the system's ability to tackle tasks requiring systematic and trustworthy reasoning. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing techniques when evaluated on the GSM8K dataset, outperforming the standard ToT strategy by an average 5.6\% across four LLMs.

Enhancing Event Reasoning in Large Language Models through Instruction Fine-Tuning with Semantic Causal Graphs

Event detection and text reasoning have become critical applications across various domains. While LLMs have recently demonstrated impressive progress in reasoning abilities, they often struggle with event detection, particularly due to the absence of training methods that consider causal relationships between event triggers and types. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for instruction fine-tuning LLMs for event detection. Our method introduces Semantic Causal Graphs (SCGs) to capture both causal relationships and contextual information within text. Building off of SCGs, we propose SCG Instructions for fine-tuning LLMs by focusing on event triggers and their relationships to event types, and employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to help preserve the general reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our evaluations demonstrate that training LLMs with SCG Instructions outperforms standard instruction fine-tuning by an average of 35.69\% on Event Trigger Classification. Notably, our fine-tuned Mistral 7B model also outperforms GPT-4 on key event detection metrics by an average of 31.01\% on Event Trigger Identification, 37.40\% on Event Trigger Classification, and 16.43\% on Event Classification. We analyze the retention of general capabilities, observing only a minimal average drop of 2.03 points across six benchmarks. This comprehensive study investigates multiple LLMs for the event detection task across various datasets, prompting strategies, and training approaches.

Context Matters: An Empirical Study of the Impact of Contextual Information in Temporal Question Answering Systems

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with temporal reasoning, crucial for tasks like historical event analysis and time-sensitive information retrieval. Despite advancements, state-of-the-art models falter in handling temporal information, especially when faced with irrelevant or noisy contexts. This paper addresses this gap by empirically examining the robustness of temporal question-answering (TQA) systems trained on various context types, including relevant, irrelevant, slightly altered, and no context. Our findings indicate that training with a mix of these contexts enhances model robustness and accuracy. Additionally, we show that the position of context relative to the question significantly impacts performance, with question-first positioning yielding better results. We introduce two new context-rich TQA datasets, ContextAQA and ContextTQE, and provide comprehensive evaluations and guidelines for training robust TQA models. Our work lays the foundation for developing reliable and context-aware temporal QA systems, with broader implications for enhancing LLM robustness against diverse and potentially adversarial information.

Beyond Text-to-SQL for IoT Defense: A Comprehensive Framework for Querying and Classifying IoT Threats

Recognizing the promise of natural language interfaces to databases, prior studies have emphasized the development of text-to-SQL systems. While substantial progress has been made in this field, existing research has concentrated on generating SQL statements from text queries. The broader challenge, however, lies in inferring new information about the returned data. Our research makes two major contributions to address this gap. First, we introduce a novel Internet-of-Things (IoT) text-to-SQL dataset comprising 10,985 text-SQL pairs and 239,398 rows of network traffic activity. The dataset contains additional query types limited in prior text-to-SQL datasets, notably temporal-related queries. Our dataset is sourced from a smart building's IoT ecosystem exploring sensor read and network traffic data. Second, our dataset allows two-stage processing, where the returned data (network traffic) from a generated SQL can be categorized as malicious or not. Our results show that joint training to query and infer information about the data can improve overall text-to-SQL performance, nearly matching substantially larger models. We also show that current large language models (e.g., GPT3.5) struggle to infer new information about returned data, thus our dataset provides a novel test bed for integrating complex domain-specific reasoning into LLMs.

Unmasking Database Vulnerabilities: Zero-Knowledge Schema Inference Attacks in Text-to-SQL Systems

Relational databases are integral to modern information systems, serving as the foundation for storing, querying, and managing data efficiently and effectively. Advancements in large language modeling have led to the emergence of text-to-SQL technologies, significantly enhancing the querying and extracting of information from these databases and raising concerns about privacy and security. Our research extracts the database schema elements underlying a text-to-SQL model. Knowledge of the schema can make attacks such as SQL injection easier. By asking specially crafted questions, we have developed a zero-knowledge framework designed to probe various database schema elements without knowledge of the database itself. The text-to-SQL models then process these questions to produce an output that we use to uncover the structure of the database schema. We apply it to specialized text-to-SQL models fine-tuned on text-SQL pairs and generative language models used for SQL generation. Overall, we can reconstruct the table names with an F1 of nearly .75 for fine-tuned models and .96 for generative.

Improving Expert Radiology Report Summarization by Prompting Large Language Models with a Layperson Summary

Radiology report summarization (RRS) is crucial for patient care, requiring concise "Impressions" from detailed "Findings." This paper introduces a novel prompting strategy to enhance RRS by first generating a layperson summary. This approach normalizes key observations and simplifies complex information using non-expert communication techniques inspired by doctor-patient interactions. Combined with few-shot in-context learning, this method improves the model's ability to link general terms to specific findings. We evaluate this approach on the MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert, and MIMIC-III datasets, benchmarking it against 7B/8B parameter state-of-the-art open-source large language models (LLMs) like Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct. Our results demonstrate improvements in summarization accuracy and accessibility, particularly in out-of-domain tests, with improvements as high as 5% for some metrics.

Team UTSA-NLP at SemEval 2024 Task 5: Prompt Ensembling for Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedures with GPT4

In this paper, we present our system for the SemEval Task 5, The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure Challenge. Legal argument reasoning is an essential skill that all law students must master. Moreover, it is important to develop natural language processing solutions that can reason about a question given terse domain-specific contextual information. Our system explores a prompt-based solution using GPT4 to reason over legal arguments. We also evaluate an ensemble of prompting strategies, including chain-of-thought reasoning and in-context learning. Overall, our system results in a Macro F1 of .8095 on the validation dataset and .7315 (5th out of 21 teams) on the final test set. Code for this project is available at https://github.com/danschumac1/CivilPromptReasoningGPT4.