MagiC: Evaluating Multimodal Cognition Toward Grounded Visual Reasoning

Recent advances in large vision-language models have led to impressive performance in visual question answering and multimodal reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely perform grounded visual reasoning or rely on superficial patterns and dataset biases. In this work, we introduce MagiC, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate grounded multimodal cognition, assessing not only answer accuracy but also the quality of step-by-step reasoning and its alignment with relevant visual evidence. Our benchmark includes approximately 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human-curated examples with fine-grained annotations, including answers, rationales, and bounding box groundings. We evaluate 15 vision-language models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters across four dimensions: final answer correctness, reasoning validity, grounding fidelity, and self-correction ability. MagiC further includes diagnostic settings to probe model robustness under adversarial visual cues and assess their capacity for introspective error correction. We introduce new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and provide comprehensive analyses that reveal key limitations and opportunities in current approaches to grounded visual reasoning.

Embodied Web Agents: Bridging Physical-Digital Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce Embodied Web Agents, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning. To operationalize this concept, we first develop the Embodied Web Agents task environments, a unified simulation platform that tightly integrates realistic 3D indoor and outdoor environments with functional web interfaces. Building upon this platform, we construct and release the Embodied Web Agents Benchmark, which encompasses a diverse suite of tasks including cooking, navigation, shopping, tourism, and geolocation - all requiring coordinated reasoning across physical and digital realms for systematic assessment of cross-domain intelligence. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps between state-of-the-art AI systems and human capabilities, establishing both challenges and opportunities at the intersection of embodied cognition and web-scale knowledge access. All datasets, codes and websites are publicly available at our project page https://embodied-web-agent.github.io/.

Nano-3D: Metasurface-Based Neural Depth Imaging

Depth imaging is a foundational building block for broad applications, such as autonomous driving and virtual/augmented reality. Traditionally, depth cameras have relied on time-of-flight sensors or multi-lens systems to achieve physical depth measurements. However, these systems often face a trade-off between a bulky form factor and imprecise approximations, limiting their suitability for spatially constrained scenarios. Inspired by the emerging advancements of nano-optics, we present Nano-3D, a metasurface-based neural depth imaging solution with an ultra-compact footprint. Nano-3D integrates our custom-fabricated 700 nm thick TiO2 metasurface with a multi-module deep neural network to extract precise metric depth information from monocular metasurface-polarized imagery. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Nano-3D with both simulated and physical experiments. We hope the exhibited success paves the way for the community to bridge future graphics systems with emerging nanomaterial technologies through novel computational approaches.

Contrastive Visual Data Augmentation

Large multimodal models (LMMs) often struggle to recognize novel concepts, as they rely on pre-trained knowledge and have limited ability to capture subtle visual details. Domain-specific knowledge gaps in training also make them prone to confusing visually similar, commonly misrepresented, or low-resource concepts. To help LMMs better align nuanced visual features with language, improving their ability to recognize and reason about novel or rare concepts, we propose a Contrastive visual Data Augmentation (CoDA) strategy. CoDA extracts key contrastive textual and visual features of target concepts against the known concepts they are misrecognized as, and then uses multimodal generative models to produce targeted synthetic data. Automatic filtering of extracted features and augmented images is implemented to guarantee their quality, as verified by human annotators. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of CoDA on low-resource concept and diverse scene recognition datasets including INaturalist and SUN. We additionally collect NovelSpecies, a benchmark dataset consisting of newly discovered animal species that are guaranteed to be unseen by LMMs. LLaVA-1.6 1-shot updating results on these three datasets show CoDA significantly improves SOTA visual data augmentation strategies by 12.3% (NovelSpecies), 5.1% (SUN), and 6.0% (iNat) absolute gains in accuracy.

METAL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Chart Generation with Test-Time Scaling

Chart generation aims to generate code to produce charts satisfying the desired visual properties, e.g., texts, layout, color, and type. It has great potential to empower the automatic professional report generation in financial analysis, research presentation, education, and healthcare. In this work, we build a vision-language model (VLM) based multi-agent framework for effective automatic chart generation. Generating high-quality charts requires both strong visual design skills and precise coding capabilities that embed the desired visual properties into code. Such a complex multi-modal reasoning process is difficult for direct prompting of VLMs. To resolve these challenges, we propose METAL, a multi-agent framework that decomposes the task of chart generation into the iterative collaboration among specialized agents. METAL achieves 5.2% improvement in accuracy over the current best result in the chart generation task. The METAL framework exhibits the phenomenon of test-time scaling: its performance increases monotonically as the logarithmic computational budget grows from 512 to 8192 tokens. In addition, we find that separating different modalities during the critique process of METAL boosts the self-correction capability of VLMs in the multimodal context.

VISCO: Benchmarking Fine-Grained Critique and Correction Towards Self-Improvement in Visual Reasoning

The ability of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to critique and correct their reasoning is an essential building block towards their self-improvement. However, a systematic analysis of such capabilities in LVLMs is still lacking. We propose VISCO, the first benchmark to extensively analyze the fine-grained critique and correction capabilities of LVLMs. Compared to existing work that uses a single scalar value to critique the entire reasoning [4], VISCO features dense and fine-grained critique, requiring LVLMs to evaluate the correctness of each step in the chain-of-thought and provide natural language explanations to support their judgments. Extensive evaluation of 24 LVLMs demonstrates that human-written critiques significantly enhance the performance after correction, showcasing the potential of the self-improvement strategy. However, the model-generated critiques are less helpful and sometimes detrimental to the performance, suggesting that critique is the crucial bottleneck. We identified three common patterns in critique failures: failure to critique visual perception, reluctance to "say no", and exaggerated assumption of error propagation. To address these issues, we propose an effective LookBack strategy that revisits the image to verify each piece of information in the initial reasoning. LookBack significantly improves critique and correction performance by up to 13.5%.

st-DTPM: Spatial-Temporal Guided Diffusion Transformer Probabilistic Model for Delayed Scan PET Image Prediction

PET imaging is widely employed for observing biological metabolic activities within the human body. However, numerous benign conditions can cause increased uptake of radiopharmaceuticals, confounding differentiation from malignant tumors. Several studies have indicated that dual-time PET imaging holds promise in distinguishing between malignant and benign tumor processes. Nevertheless, the hour-long distribution period of radiopharmaceuticals post-injection complicates the determination of optimal timing for the second scan, presenting challenges in both practical applications and research. Notably, we have identified that delay time PET imaging can be framed as an image-to-image conversion problem. Motivated by this insight, we propose a novel spatial-temporal guided diffusion transformer probabilistic model (st-DTPM) to solve dual-time PET imaging prediction problem. Specifically, this architecture leverages the U-net framework that integrates patch-wise features of CNN and pixel-wise relevance of Transformer to obtain local and global information. And then employs a conditional DDPM model for image synthesis. Furthermore, on spatial condition, we concatenate early scan PET images and noisy PET images on every denoising step to guide the spatial distribution of denoising sampling. On temporal condition, we convert diffusion time steps and delay time to a universal time vector, then embed it to each layer of model architecture to further improve the accuracy of predictions. Experimental results demonstrated the superiority of our method over alternative approaches in preserving image quality and structural information, thereby affirming its efficacy in predictive task.

Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement with Large Language Models

Predictive modeling often faces challenges due to limited data availability and quality, especially in domains where collected features are weakly correlated with outcomes and where additional feature collection is constrained by ethical or practical difficulties. Traditional machine learning (ML) models struggle to incorporate unobserved yet critical factors. In this work, we introduce an effective approach to formulate latent feature mining as text-to-text propositional logical reasoning. We propose FLAME (Faithful Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement), a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to augment observed features with latent features and enhance the predictive power of ML models in downstream tasks. Our framework is generalizable across various domains with necessary domain-specific adaptation, as it is designed to incorporate contextual information unique to each area, ensuring effective transfer to different areas facing similar data availability challenges. We validate our framework with two case studies: (1) the criminal justice system, a domain characterized by limited and ethically challenging data collection; (2) the healthcare domain, where patient privacy concerns and the complexity of medical data limit comprehensive feature collection. Our results show that inferred latent features align well with ground truth labels and significantly enhance the downstream classifier.

Control Large Language Models via Divide and Conquer

This paper investigates controllable generation for large language models (LLMs) with prompt-based control, focusing on Lexically Constrained Generation (LCG). We systematically evaluate the performance of LLMs on satisfying lexical constraints with prompt-based control, as well as their efficacy in downstream applications. We conclude that LLMs face significant challenges in consistently satisfying lexical constraints with prompt-based control. We identified three key limitations of LLMs for LCG, including (1) position bias, where LLMs tend to satisfy constraints that appear in specific positions within the input; (2) low responsiveness to decoding parameters, which render minimal impact on control of LLMs; and (3) struggle with handling the inherent complexity of certain constraints (e.g., compound words). To address these issues, we introduce a Divide and Conquer Generation strategy, effective for both white-box and black-box LLMs, to enhance LLMs performance in LCG tasks, which demonstrates over 90% improvement on success rate in the most challenging LCG task. Our analysis provides valuable insights into the performance of LLMs in LCG with prompt-based control, and our proposed strategy offers a pathway to more sophisticated and customized text generation applications.

REFFLY: Melody-Constrained Lyrics Editing Model

Automatic melody-to-lyric generation aims to produce lyrics that align with a given melody. Although previous work can generate lyrics based on high-level control signals, such as keywords or genre, they often struggle with three challenges: (1) lack of controllability, as prior works are only able to produce lyrics from scratch, with little or no control over the content; (2) inability to generate fully structured songs with the desired format; and (3) failure to align prominent words in the lyrics with prominent notes in the melody, resulting in poor lyrics-melody alignment. In this work, we introduce REFFLY (REvision Framework For Lyrics), the first revision framework designed to edit arbitrary forms of plain text draft into high-quality, full-fledged song lyrics. Our approach ensures that the generated lyrics retain the original meaning of the draft, align with the melody, and adhere to the desired song structures. We demonstrate that REFFLY performs well in diverse task settings, such as lyrics revision and song translation. Experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines, such as Lyra (Tian et al. 2023) and GPT-4, by 25% in both musicality and text quality.