OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Probing the Visualization Literacy of Vision Language Models: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate promising chart comprehension capabilities. Yet, prior explorations of their visualization literacy have been limited to assessing their response correctness and fail to explore their internal reasoning. To address this gap, we adapted attention-guided class activation maps (AG-CAM) for VLMs, to visualize the influence and importance of input features (image and text) on model responses. Using this approach, we conducted an examination of four open-source (ChartGemma, Janus 1B and 7B, and LLaVA) and two closed-source (GPT-4o, Gemini) models comparing their performance and, for the open-source models, their AG-CAM results. Overall, we found that ChartGemma, a 3B parameter VLM fine-tuned for chart question-answering (QA), outperformed other open-source models and exhibited performance on par with significantly larger closed-source VLMs. We also found that VLMs exhibit spatial reasoning by accurately localizing key chart features, and semantic reasoning by associating visual elements with corresponding data values and query tokens. Our approach is the first to demonstrate the use of AG-CAM on early fusion VLM architectures, which are widely used, and for chart QA. We also show preliminary evidence that these results can align with human reasoning. Our promising open-source VLMs results pave the way for transparent and reproducible research in AI visualization literacy.
Connecting Feedback to Choice: Understanding Educator Preferences in GenAI vs. Human-Created Lesson Plans in K-12 Education -- A Comparative Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

As generative AI (GenAI) models are increasingly explored for educational applications, understanding educator preferences for AI-generated lesson plans is critical for their effective integration into K-12 instruction. This exploratory study compares lesson plans authored by human curriculum designers, a fine-tuned LLaMA-2-13b model trained on K-12 content, and a customized GPT-4 model to evaluate their pedagogical quality across multiple instructional measures: warm-up activities, main tasks, cool-down activities, and overall quality. Using a large-scale preference study with K-12 math educators, we examine how preferences vary across grade levels and instructional components. We employ both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The raw preference results indicate that human-authored lesson plans are generally favored, particularly for elementary education, where educators emphasize student engagement, scaffolding, and collaborative learning. However, AI-generated models demonstrate increasing competitiveness in cool-down tasks and structured learning activities, particularly in high school settings. Beyond quantitative results, we conduct thematic analysis using LDA and manual coding to identify key factors influencing educator preferences. Educators value human-authored plans for their nuanced differentiation, real-world contextualization, and student discourse facilitation. Meanwhile, AI-generated lesson plans are often praised for their structure and adaptability for specific instructional tasks. Findings suggest a human-AI collaborative approach to lesson planning, where GenAI can serve as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for educator expertise in lesson planning. This study contributes to the growing discourse on responsible AI integration in education, highlighting both opportunities and challenges in leveraging GenAI for curriculum development.
Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data: A Survey and Benchmarking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results in various image synthesis tasks. Vast studies have demonstrated that GANs are more powerful in feature and expression learning compared to other generative models and their latent space encodes rich semantic information. However, the tremendous performance of GANs heavily relies on the access to large-scale training data and deteriorates rapidly when the amount of data is limited. This paper aims to provide an overview of GANs, its variants and applications in various vision tasks, focusing on addressing the limited data issue. We analyze state-of-the-art GANs in limited data regime with designed experiments, along with presenting various methods attempt to tackle this problem from different perspectives. Finally, we further elaborate on remaining challenges and trends for future research.
Studying Image Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates the use of large-scale diffusion models for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation (ZS-VOS) without fine-tuning on video data or training on any image segmentation data. While diffusion models have demonstrated strong visual representations across various tasks, their direct application to ZS-VOS remains underexplored. Our goal is to find the optimal feature extraction process for ZS-VOS by identifying the most suitable time step and layer from which to extract features. We further analyze the affinity of these features and observe a strong correlation with point correspondences. Through extensive experiments on DAVIS-17 and MOSE, we find that diffusion models trained on ImageNet outperform those trained on larger, more diverse datasets for ZS-VOS. Additionally, we highlight the importance of point correspondences in achieving high segmentation accuracy, and we yield state-of-the-art results in ZS-VOS. Finally, our approach performs on par with models trained on expensive image segmentation datasets.
REEF: Relevance-Aware and Efficient LLM Adapter for Video Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Integrating vision models into large language models (LLMs) has sparked significant interest in creating vision-language foundation models, especially for video understanding. Recent methods often utilize memory banks to handle untrimmed videos for video-level understanding. However, they typically compress visual memory using similarity-based greedy approaches, which can overlook the contextual importance of individual tokens. To address this, we introduce an efficient LLM adapter designed for video-level understanding of untrimmed videos that prioritizes the contextual relevance of spatio-temporal tokens. Our framework leverages scorer networks to selectively compress the visual memory bank and filter spatial tokens based on relevance, using a differentiable Top-K operator for end-to-end training. Across three key video-level understanding tasks$\unicode{x2013}$ untrimmed video classification, video question answering, and video captioning$\unicode{x2013}$our method achieves competitive or superior results on four large-scale datasets while reducing computational overhead by up to 34%. The code will be available soon on GitHub.
dpBento: Benchmarking DPUs for Data Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Data processing units (DPUs, SoC-based SmartNICs) are emerging data center hardware that provide opportunities to address cloud data processing challenges. Their onboard compute, memory, network, and auxiliary storage can be leveraged to offload a variety of data processing tasks. Although recent work shows promising benefits of DPU offloading for specific operations, a comprehensive view of the implications of DPUs for data processing is missing. Benchmarking can help, but existing benchmark tools lack the focus on data processing and are limited to specific DPUs. In this paper, we present dpBento, a benchmark suite that aims to uncover the performance characteristics of different DPU resources and different DPUs, and the performance implications of offloading a wide range of data processing operations and systems to DPUs. It provides an abstraction for automated performance testing and reporting and is easily extensible. We use dpBento to measure recent DPUs, present our benchmarking results, and highlight insights into the potential benefits of DPU offloading for data processing.
Caption Anything in Video: Fine-grained Object-centric Captioning via Spatiotemporal Multimodal Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

We present CAT-V (Caption AnyThing in Video), a training-free framework for fine-grained object-centric video captioning that enables detailed descriptions of user-selected objects through time. CAT-V integrates three key components: a Segmenter based on SAMURAI for precise object segmentation across frames, a Temporal Analyzer powered by TRACE-Uni for accurate event boundary detection and temporal analysis, and a Captioner using InternVL-2.5 for generating detailed object-centric descriptions. Through spatiotemporal visual prompts and chain-of-thought reasoning, our framework generates detailed, temporally-aware descriptions of objects' attributes, actions, statuses, interactions, and environmental contexts without requiring additional training data. CAT-V supports flexible user interactions through various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and irregular regions) and maintains temporal sensitivity by tracking object states and interactions across different time segments. Our approach addresses limitations of existing video captioning methods, which either produce overly abstract descriptions or lack object-level precision, enabling fine-grained, object-specific descriptions while maintaining temporal coherence and spatial accuracy. The GitHub repository for this project is available at https://github.com/yunlong10/CAT-V
Can Large Language Models Match Tutoring System Adaptivity? A Benchmarking Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise as dynamic instructional aids. Yet, it remains unclear whether LLMs can replicate the adaptivity of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS)--where student knowledge and pedagogical strategies are explicitly modeled. We propose a prompt variation framework to assess LLM-generated instructional moves' adaptivity and pedagogical soundness across 75 real-world tutoring scenarios from an ITS. We systematically remove key context components (e.g., student errors and knowledge components) from prompts to create variations of each scenario. Three representative LLMs (Llama3-8B, Llama3-70B, and GPT-4o) generate 1,350 instructional moves. We use text embeddings and randomization tests to measure how the omission of each context feature impacts the LLMs' outputs (adaptivity) and a validated tutor-training classifier to evaluate response quality (pedagogical soundness). Surprisingly, even the best-performing model only marginally mimics the adaptivity of ITS. Specifically, Llama3-70B demonstrates statistically significant adaptivity to student errors. Although Llama3-8B's recommendations receive higher pedagogical soundness scores than the other models, it struggles with instruction-following behaviors, including output formatting. By contrast, GPT-4o reliably adheres to instructions but tends to provide overly direct feedback that diverges from effective tutoring, prompting learners with open-ended questions to gauge knowledge. Given these results, we discuss how current LLM-based tutoring is unlikely to produce learning benefits rivaling known-to-be-effective ITS tutoring. Through our open-source benchmarking code, we contribute a reproducible method for evaluating LLMs' instructional adaptivity and fidelity.
MicroNN: An On-device Disk-resident Updatable Vector Database
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2025
Year: 2025

Nearest neighbour search over dense vector collections has important applications in information retrieval, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and content ranking. Performing efficient search over large vector collections is a well studied problem with many existing approaches and open source implementations. However, most state-of-the-art systems are generally targeted towards scenarios using large servers with an abundance of memory, static vector collections that are not updatable, and nearest neighbour search in isolation of other search criteria. We present Micro Nearest Neighbour (MicroNN), an embedded nearest-neighbour vector search engine designed for scalable similarity search in low-resource environments. MicroNN addresses the problem of on-device vector search for real-world workloads containing updates and hybrid search queries that combine nearest neighbour search with structured attribute filters. In this scenario, memory is highly constrained and disk-efficient index structures and algorithms are required, as well as support for continuous inserts and deletes. MicroNN is an embeddable library that can scale to large vector collections with minimal resources. MicroNN is used in production and powers a wide range of vector search use-cases on-device. MicroNN takes less than 7 ms to retrieve the top-100 nearest neighbours with 90% recall on publicly available million-scale vector benchmark while using ~10 MB of memory.
A Lightweight Large Vision-language Model for Multimodal Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) enhances clinical decision-making by enabling systems to interpret medical images and answer clinical queries. However, developing efficient, high-performance VQA models is challenging due to the complexity of medical imagery and diverse modalities. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight, multimodal VQA model integrating BiomedCLIP for image feature extraction and LLaMA-3 for text processing. Designed for medical VQA tasks, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OmniMedVQA dataset. With approximately 8 billion parameters, it requires only two NVIDIA 40 GB A100 GPUs, demonstrating superior efficiency over larger models. Our results show 73.4% accuracy for open-end questions, surpassing existing models and validating its potential for real-world medical applications. Key contributions include a specialized multimodal VQA model, a resource-efficient architecture, and strong performance in answering open-ended clinical questions.
BoolE: Exact Symbolic Reasoning via Boolean Equality Saturation
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2025
Year: 2025

Boolean symbolic reasoning for gate-level netlists is a critical step in verification, logic and datapath synthesis, and hardware security. Specifically, reasoning datapath and adder tree in bit-blasted Boolean networks is particularly crucial for verification and synthesis, and challenging. Conventional approaches either fail to accurately (exactly) identify the function blocks of the designs in gate-level netlist with structural hashing and symbolic propagation, or their reasoning performance is highly sensitive to structure modifications caused by technology mapping or logic optimization. This paper introduces BoolE, an exact symbolic reasoning framework for Boolean netlists using equality saturation. BoolE optimizes scalability and performance by integrating domain-specific Boolean ruleset for term rewriting. We incorporate a novel extraction algorithm into BoolE to enhance its structural insight and computational efficiency, which adeptly identifies and captures multi-input, multi-output high-level structures (e.g., full adder) in the reconstructed e-graph. Our experiments show that BoolE surpasses state-of-the-art symbolic reasoning baselines, including the conventional functional approach (ABC) and machine learning-based method (Gamora). Specifically, we evaluated its performance on various multiplier architecture with different configurations. Our results show that BoolE identifies $3.53\times$ and $3.01\times$ more exact full adders than ABC in carry-save array and Booth-encoded multipliers, respectively. Additionally, we integrated BoolE into multiplier formal verification tasks, where it significantly accelerates the performance of traditional formal verification tools using computer algebra, demonstrated over four orders of magnitude runtime improvements.
Gaze-Guided Learning: Avoiding Shortcut Bias in Visual Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Inspired by human visual attention, deep neural networks have widely adopted attention mechanisms to learn locally discriminative attributes for challenging visual classification tasks. However, existing approaches primarily emphasize the representation of such features while neglecting their precise localization, which often leads to misclassification caused by shortcut biases. This limitation becomes even more pronounced when models are evaluated on transfer or out-of-distribution datasets. In contrast, humans are capable of leveraging prior object knowledge to quickly localize and compare fine-grained attributes, a capability that is especially crucial in complex and high-variance classification scenarios. Motivated by this, we introduce Gaze-CIFAR-10, a human gaze time-series dataset, along with a dual-sequence gaze encoder that models the precise sequential localization of human attention on distinct local attributes. In parallel, a Vision Transformer (ViT) is employed to learn the sequential representation of image content. Through cross-modal fusion, our framework integrates human gaze priors with machine-derived visual sequences, effectively correcting inaccurate localization in image feature representations. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that gaze-guided cognitive cues significantly enhance classification accuracy.
Model-Agnostic Policy Explanations with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Intelligent agents, such as robots, are increasingly deployed in real-world, human-centric environments. To foster appropriate human trust and meet legal and ethical standards, these agents must be able to explain their behavior. However, state-of-the-art agents are typically driven by black-box models like deep neural networks, limiting their interpretability. We propose a method for generating natural language explanations of agent behavior based only on observed states and actions -- without access to the agent's underlying model. Our approach learns a locally interpretable surrogate model of the agent's behavior from observations, which then guides a large language model to generate plausible explanations with minimal hallucination. Empirical results show that our method produces explanations that are more comprehensible and correct than those from baselines, as judged by both language models and human evaluators. Furthermore, we find that participants in a user study more accurately predicted the agent's future actions when given our explanations, suggesting improved understanding of agent behavior.
Leveraging Prompt-Tuning for Bengali Grammatical Error Explanation Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We propose a novel three-step prompt-tuning method for Bengali Grammatical Error Explanation (BGEE) using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and Llama-2-70b. Our approach involves identifying and categorizing grammatical errors in Bengali sentences, generating corrected versions of the sentences, and providing natural language explanations for each identified error. We evaluate the performance of our BGEE system using both automated evaluation metrics and human evaluation conducted by experienced Bengali language experts. Our proposed prompt-tuning approach shows that GPT-4, the best performing LLM, surpasses the baseline model in automated evaluation metrics, with a 5.26% improvement in F1 score and a 6.95% improvement in exact match. Furthermore, compared to the previous baseline, GPT-4 demonstrates a decrease of 25.51% in wrong error type and a decrease of 26.27% in wrong error explanation. However, the results still lag behind the human baseline.
iEBAKER: Improved Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval Framework via Eliminate Before Align and Keyword Explicit Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent studies focus on the Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval (RSITR), which aims at searching for the corresponding targets based on the given query. Among these efforts, the application of Foundation Models (FMs), such as CLIP, to the domain of remote sensing has yielded encouraging outcomes. However, existing FM based methodologies neglect the negative impact of weakly correlated sample pairs and fail to account for the key distinctions among remote sensing texts, leading to biased and superficial exploration of sample pairs. To address these challenges, we propose an approach named iEBAKER (an Improved Eliminate Before Align strategy with Keyword Explicit Reasoning framework) for RSITR. Specifically, we propose an innovative Eliminate Before Align (EBA) strategy to filter out the weakly correlated sample pairs, thereby mitigating their deviations from optimal embedding space during alignment.Further, two specific schemes are introduced from the perspective of whether local similarity and global similarity affect each other. On this basis, we introduce an alternative Sort After Reversed Retrieval (SAR) strategy, aims at optimizing the similarity matrix via reverse retrieval. Additionally, we incorporate a Keyword Explicit Reasoning (KER) module to facilitate the beneficial impact of subtle key concept distinctions. Without bells and whistles, our approach enables a direct transition from FM to RSITR task, eliminating the need for additional pretraining on remote sensing data. Extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed iEBAKER method surpasses the state-of-the-art models while requiring less training data. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/zhangy0822/iEBAKER.
Pose-Aware Weakly-Supervised Action Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding human behavior is an important problem in the pursuit of visual intelligence. A challenge in this endeavor is the extensive and costly effort required to accurately label action segments. To address this issue, we consider learning methods that demand minimal supervision for segmentation of human actions in long instructional videos. Specifically, we introduce a weakly-supervised framework that uniquely incorporates pose knowledge during training while omitting its use during inference, thereby distilling pose knowledge pertinent to each action component. We propose a pose-inspired contrastive loss as a part of the whole weakly-supervised framework which is trained to distinguish action boundaries more effectively. Our approach, validated through extensive experiments on representative datasets, outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) in segmenting long instructional videos under both online and offline settings. Additionally, we demonstrate the framework's adaptability to various segmentation backbones and pose extractors across different datasets.