VDebugger: Harnessing Execution Feedback for Debugging Visual Programs

Xueqing Wu, Zongyu Lin, Songyan Zhao, Te-Lin Wu, Pan Lu, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang


Abstract
Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems. However, these programs are prone to logic errors, with our preliminary evaluation showing that 58% of the total errors are caused by program logic errors. Debugging complex visual programs remains a major bottleneck for visual reasoning. To address this, we introduce **VDebugger**, a novel critic-refiner framework trained to localize and debug visual programs by tracking execution step by step. VDebugger identifies and corrects program errors leveraging detailed execution feedback, improving interpretability and accuracy. The training data is generated through an automated pipeline that injects errors into correct visual programs using a novel mask-best decoding technique. Evaluations on six datasets demonstrate VDebugger’s effectiveness, showing performance improvements of up to 3.2% in downstream task accuracy. Further studies show VDebugger’s ability to generalize to unseen tasks, bringing a notable improvement of 2.3% on the unseen COVR task.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.575
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9845–9860
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.575
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xueqing Wu, Zongyu Lin, Songyan Zhao, Te-Lin Wu, Pan Lu, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2024. VDebugger: Harnessing Execution Feedback for Debugging Visual Programs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9845–9860, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VDebugger: Harnessing Execution Feedback for Debugging Visual Programs (Wu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.575.pdf