Tao Bai
Author directory2026
Visual Attention Faithfulness in Vision-Language Models is Heterogeneous
Xurui Song | Weishi Wang | Zhongqi Yue | Kuluhan Binici | Tao Bai | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier | Jun Luo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xurui Song | Weishi Wang | Zhongqi Yue | Kuluhan Binici | Tao Bai | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier | Jun Luo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Whether attention weights faithfully reflect model reasoning has been actively debated in NLP, yet this question remains largely unexplored for the visual modality in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We address this gap through causal perturbation analysis on current VLMs, evaluating both the comprehensiveness and sufficiency gap of attention-ranked visual tokens. Our analysis reveals that visual attention faithfulness is heterogeneous, manifesting in three distinct processing modes: *Faithful-Sufficient*, where top-k attention tokens are both necessary and sufficient for prediction; *Faithful-Distributed*, where they are necessary but broader visual context remains required; and *Non-Focal*, where no localized attention region is individually necessary while visual information remains an essential trigger for prediction. Furthermore, human-annotated ground-truth regions satisfy comprehensiveness in only ∼60% of cases compared with model attention rankings, revealing systematic divergence between model visual reliance and human intuition. We demonstrate these patterns across both general VQA on VQAv2 and document tasks on VRDU and ChartQA, showing that visual attention faithfulness varies systematically with processing demands and model architectures rather than being uniformly faithful or unfaithful.
Do Agents Help? Agentic Document Information Extraction with Enterprise Database Grounding
Zhijie Zhang | Hongxin Shao | Mattis Lennart Geiger | Tao Bai | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Zhijie Zhang | Hongxin Shao | Mattis Lennart Geiger | Tao Bai | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
In enterprise applications, document information extraction (IE) does not operate in isolation: extracted information must match the systems of record (SoR) for the process to work. While reliable IE demands entity extraction, SoR grounding, and iterative refinement, existing methods rely on single-pass inference. To address this gap, we propose a SoR-grounded agentic pipeline and evaluate four agentic paradigms (Agentic Workflow, ReAct, Plan-Execute-Critic, and Dynamic Agent Collaboration) on real-world enterprise data. We focus on the goods receipt and invoice settlement processes as representative use cases, where delivery notes and invoices must be matched and verified against purchase order SoR. Our results show that agentic approaches generally match or exceed non-agentic baselines, with simpler paradigms matching or outperforming complex alternatives. Paired with systematic error analysis, this work provides actionable guidance for deploying agentic document AI at enterprise scale.
Vision is Not Enough: Enhancing Bounding Box Grounding for Document Key Information Extraction with OCR Anchors
Zhaochen Li | Rathika Suresh Kumar | Tao Bai | Zhijie Zhang | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Zhaochen Li | Rathika Suresh Kumar | Tao Bai | Zhijie Zhang | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Vision Language Model (VLM)-based OCR-free pipelines are increasingly adopted for industrial Key Information Extraction (KIE) systems due to their simpler end-to-end architecture and reduced dependence on potentially noisy OCR outputs. However, their reliability in grounding extracted values to precise bounding boxes remains unclear, raising questions about their suitability for grounding-critical use cases. In this paper, we present a systematic study of bounding box grounding capability in both general and document-specific VLMs. Our findings reveal a consistent extraction-grounding gap across model families. We revisit the OCR system as a grounding primitive and find that delegating the grounding step to Large Language Models (LLMs), rather than VLMs, in a zero-shot manner substantially improves region-level grounding accuracy. We introduce a fine-tuned 0.6B LLM that further improves the predicted box alignment, achieving high overlap with the target field for in-domain data while maintaining low serving latency. These results position OCR-anchored grounding as a practical deployment choice for industrial KIE systems that require both extraction and precise localization.
OmniOData: Unleashing Small Language Models for OData Query Generation with Synthetic Data and Reinforcement Learning
Tao Bai | Zhaochen Li | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Tao Bai | Zhaochen Li | Hongxin Shao | Daniel Dahlmeier
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in structured query generation, OData—a critical RESTful protocol for enterprise APIs—remains under-researched due to a lack of high-fidelity, execution-validated datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniOData, a framework that generates SynOData, the first large-scale OData corpus featuring execution-grounded queries and reasoning traces. Using this corpus, we develop OmniOData-R1 (1.5B–3B parameters), a family of models that match or surpass frontier proprietary systems, such as GPT-4o and Gemini 3, on realistic industrial benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that the synergy of execution-verified synthetic data and Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively unlocks the latent reasoning of Small Language Models (SLMs), providing a high-performance, low-latency solution for specialized enterprise query generation.The code and data will be released under an open-source license.
2015
A Graph-based Readability Assessment Method using Word Coupling
Zhiwei Jiang | Gang Sun | Qing Gu | Tao Bai | Daoxu Chen
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhiwei Jiang | Gang Sun | Qing Gu | Tao Bai | Daoxu Chen
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing