Saayan Mitra
Author directory2026
Mitigating Forgetting Between Supervised and Reinforcement Learning Yields Stronger Reasoners
Xiangchi Yuan | Xiang Chen | Tong Yu | Dachuan Shi | Can Jin | Wenke Lee | Saayan Mitra
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiangchi Yuan | Xiang Chen | Tong Yu | Dachuan Shi | Can Jin | Wenke Lee | Saayan Mitra
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
State-of-the-art (SOTA) reasoning post-training pipelines increasingly combine supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) to balance external knowledge injection and self-exploration. In this work, we identify a critical but underexplored failure mode of these SFT+RL pipelines: catastrophic forgetting. To analyze the cause, we reveal a fundamental asymmetry between SFT and RL. SFT typically induces much larger, redundant parameter updates than RL, while RL’s updates are smaller and more parsimonious. Therefore, SFT updates can easily overwrite RL’s small non-robust updates, causing the forgetting of the knowledge learned by RL. To address this issue, we propose MIFO (MItigating FOrgetting between SFT and RL), a plug-and-play framework that integrates SFT into RL while explicitly constraining SFT-induced updates. MIFO mitigates forgetting through two complementary designs: (i) Data selection, which interleaves RL and SFT by selecting challenging samples based on rollout accuracy and optimizing only high-entropy tokens for SFT; and (ii) parameter freezing, which identifies RL-critical parameters and temporarily freezes them during SFT to prevent overwrite. Beyond stability, MIFO is data- and response-efficient and remains agnostic to the underlying SFT or RL algorithm. Empirically, MIFO achieves SOTA reasoning performance using only 1.5% of the SFT data and 20.4% of the RL data required by prior SOTA methods, while producing reasoning traces up to 10× shorter than the standard SFT→RL pipeline.
TeamFusion: Supporting Open-ended Teamwork with Multi-Agent Systems
Jiale Liu | Victor Bursztyn | Lin Ai | Haoliang Wang | Sunav Choudhary | Saayan Mitra | Qingyun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiale Liu | Victor Bursztyn | Lin Ai | Haoliang Wang | Sunav Choudhary | Saayan Mitra | Qingyun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In open-ended domains, teams must reconcile diverse viewpoints to produce strong deliverables. Answer aggregation approaches commonly used in closed domains are ill-suited to this setting, as they tend to suppress minority perspectives rather than resolve underlying disagreements. We present TeamFusion, a multi-agent system designed to support teamwork in open-ended domains by: 1. Instantiating a proxy agent for each team member conditioned on their expressed preferences; 2. Conducting a structured discussion to elicit agreements and disagreements; and 3. Synthesizing more consensus-oriented deliverables that feed into new iterations of discussion and synthesis. We evaluate TeamFusion on two teamwork tasks where team members can judge how well their individual views are represented in team decisions and how consensually good the final deliverables are, finding that it outperforms direct aggregation baselines across metrics, tasks, and team configurations.
2025
VISIAR: Empower MLLM for Visual Story Ideation
Zhaoyang Xia | Somdeb Sarkhel | Mehrab Tanjim | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yuxiao Chen | Jinxuan Xu | Di Liu | Saayan Mitra | Dimitris N. Metaxas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zhaoyang Xia | Somdeb Sarkhel | Mehrab Tanjim | Stefano Petrangeli | Ishita Dasgupta | Yuxiao Chen | Jinxuan Xu | Di Liu | Saayan Mitra | Dimitris N. Metaxas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Ideation, the process of forming ideas from concepts, is a big part of the content creation process. However, the noble goal of helping visual content creators by suggesting meaningful sequences of visual assets from a limited collection is challenging. It requires a nuanced understanding of visual assets and the integration of open-world knowledge to support creative exploration. Despite its importance, this task has yet to be explored fully in existing literature. To fill this gap, we propose Visual Story Ideation, a novel and underexplored task focused on the automated selection and arrangement of visual assets into coherent sequences that convey expressive storylines.We also present VISIAR, Visual Ideation through Sequence Integration and Asset Rearrangement, a robust framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and a novel Story Graph mechanism. Our framework operates in three key stages: visual content understanding, candidate asset selection, and asset rearrangement via MLLMs. In addition, we curated a new benchmark dataset, called VTravel, to evaluate our methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.User studies and GPT-as-the-judge evaluation show that our approach surpasses GPT-4o based baseline by an average of 33.5% and 18.5% across three different metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework for generating compelling visual stories.
2024
TAME-RD: Text Assisted Replication of Image Multi-Adjustments for Reverse Designing
Pooja Guhan | Uttaran Bhattacharya | Somdeb Sarkhel | Vahid Azizi | Xiang Chen | Saayan Mitra | Aniket Bera | Dinesh Manocha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Pooja Guhan | Uttaran Bhattacharya | Somdeb Sarkhel | Vahid Azizi | Xiang Chen | Saayan Mitra | Aniket Bera | Dinesh Manocha
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Given a source and its edited version performed based on human instructions in natural language, how do we extract the underlying edit operations, to automatically replicate similar edits on other images? This is the problem of reverse designing, and we present TAME-RD, a model to solve this problem. TAME-RD automatically learns from the complex interplay of image editing operations and the natural language instructions to learn fully specified edit operations. It predicts both the underlying image edit operations as discrete categories and their corresponding parameter values in the continuous space.We accomplish this by mapping together the contextual information from the natural language text and the structural differences between the corresponding source and edited images using the concept of pre-post effect. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through quantitative evaluations on multiple datasets. We observe improvements of 6-10% on various accuracy metrics and 1.01X-4X on the RMSE score and the concordance correlation coefficient for the corresponding parameter values on the benchmark GIER dataset. We also introduce I-MAD, a new two-part dataset: I-MAD-Dense, a collection of approximately 100K source and edited images, together with automatically generated text instructions and annotated edit operations, and I-MAD-Pro, consisting of about 1.6K source and edited images, together with text instructions and annotated edit operations provided by professional editors. On our dataset, we observe absolute improvements of 1-10% on the accuracy metrics and 1.14X–5X on the RMSE score.
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Co-authors
- Xiang Chen 2
- Somdeb Sarkhel 2
- Lin Ai 1
- Vahid Azizi 1
- Aniket Bera 1
- Uttaran Bhattacharya 1
- Victor Bursztyn 1
- Yuxiao Chen 1
- Sunav Choudhary 1
- Ishita Dasgupta 1
- Pooja Guhan 1
- Can Jin 1
- Wenke Lee 1
- Di Liu 1
- Jiale Liu 1
- Dinesh Manocha 1
- Dimitris N. Metaxas 1
- Stefano Petrangeli 1
- Dachuan Shi 1
- Mehrab Tanjim 1
- Haoliang Wang 1
- Qingyun Wu 1
- Zhaoyang Xia 1
- Jinxuan Xu 1
- Tong Yu 1
- Xiangchi Yuan 1