Zhen Yang
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2026
AWM: Answerable Working Memory for Long-Document VQA Agents
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yule Liu | Zhen Yang | Rui Lu | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yule Liu | Zhen Yang | Rui Lu | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers. Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access. This creates a memory-quality blind spot: an agent may reach the right page and answer correctly while leaving behind memory too generic or incomplete to support answering once page context is removed. We introduce memory-only answerability, a diagnostic that asks whether a reader can answer from the question and terminal working memory alone. Building on this diagnostic, Answerable Working Memory (AWM) treats terminal working memory as an answerable evidence artifact, and AWM-GRPO incorporates this signal into the GRPO reward while preserving final-answer priority. Under GRPO, this reward assigns higher advantages to answer-correct trajectories whose terminal working memory remains answerable. On MMLongBench-Doc, even when gold evidence pages are provided, 42.5% of correct answers still cannot be answered from terminal working memory alone. AWM-GRPO improves final-answer accuracy over the RAG baseline by 8.1 and 11.9 points on MMLongBench-Doc and LongDocURL and reduces the memory-missing-correct rate by 2.7 points over answer-only GRPO.
PlotGen-Bench: Evaluating VLMs on Generating Visualization Code from Diverse Plots across Multiple Libraries
Yi Zhao | Zhen Yang | Shuaiqi Duan | Wenmeng Yu | Zhe Su | Jibing Gong | Jie Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yi Zhao | Zhen Yang | Shuaiqi Duan | Wenmeng Yu | Zhe Su | Jibing Gong | Jie Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) have expanded their multimodal code generation capabilities, yet their ability to generate executable visualization code from plots, especially for complex 3D, animated, plot-to-plot transformations, or multi-library scenarios, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce PlotGen-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating plot-to-code generation under realistic and complex visualization scenarios. The benchmark spans 9 major categories, 30 subcategories, and 3 core tasks—plot replication, plot transformation, and multi-library generation, covering both 2D, 3D and animated plots across 5 widely used visualization libraries. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs, we find that open-source models still lag considerably behind in visual fidelity and semantic consistency, despite achieving comparable code executability. Moreover, all models exhibit substantial degradation on reasoning-intensive tasks such as chart type conversion and animation generation. PlotGen-Bench establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing research toward more capable and reliable VLMs for visualization authoring and code synthesis, with all data and code available at https://plotgen.github.io.
Conformalized Large Language Models under Configuration Shift
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jialin Yu | Lin Li | Gengyuan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Steffen Staab | Puneet K. Dokania | Philip Torr | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jialin Yu | Lin Li | Gengyuan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Steffen Staab | Puneet K. Dokania | Philip Torr | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Conformal prediction (CP) is a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification that has recently been adapted to large language models (LLMs), providing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees under exchangeability. Yet for LLMs, nonconformity scores are often induced by an inference pipeline, not just a fixed model, making them depend not only on the data distribution but also on configurable factors such as the prompt template, decoding parameters, and deployment setting. Since such configurations are routinely modified in practice but rarely treated as a source of shift, their impact on CP validity remains poorly understood. We call this configuration shift and study it systematically along three axes: prompt template, decoding temperature, and weight quantization. In a broad empirical study spanning 9 LLMs, 4 datasets, and 4 nonconformity scores, we find that configuration shift consistently erodes CP validity, often driving empirical coverage below the target. By contrast, efficiency is largely preserved: valid prediction sets remain close in size to the i.i.d. baseline. We derive coverage lower bounds that attribute this loss to a discrepancy between calibration and test score distributions, and use their finite-sample plug-in versions as empirical diagnostics of shift severity. We further show that these findings lead to practical mitigations: bound-inspired recalibration is effective with limited test examples, while fragility-aware calibration ensembling recovers much of the lost coverage without test data.
Video2Code: Generating Interactive Webpages from UI Videos via Action-Aware Revisit
Mingde Xu | Zhen Yang | Yan Wang | Yu Wang | Xijun Liu | Zijun Dou | Wenyi Hong | Xiaotao Gu | Bin Xu | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mingde Xu | Zhen Yang | Yan Wang | Yu Wang | Xijun Liu | Zijun Dou | Wenyi Hong | Xiaotao Gu | Bin Xu | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
UI videos provide a natural input for generating interactive webpages, as they capture both webpage appearance and action-triggered state transitions. However, directly applying video-capable vision-language models to this task remains insufficient. Existing models typically rely on sparse sampling or compressed temporal representations, which may miss short action boundaries and break the state-action-state transitions needed to implement webpage behavior. We formulate UI video-to-code generation as executable state-transition recovery from interaction videos, and identify this failure mode as state-transition misalignment. We introduce Video2Code, an action-aware video-to-code approach for recovering executable UI state transitions. Rather than allocating the visual budget uniformly across the video, Video2Code first performs coarse video understanding to locate action-critical regions, then invokes a temporal clipping tool to revisit these regions at higher temporal resolution before generating HTML/CSS/JavaScript code. We instantiate Video2Code with action-aligned video-code supervision and evaluate it under both visual and functional criteria. Experiments show that Video2Code substantially strengthens the underlying open-source model for UI video-to-code generation, improving functional correctness over direct video observation, especially on dense multi-step interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/kiwixu1024/Video2code.
LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings
Yi Zhao | Zhen Yang | Mengpan Chen | Mingde Xu | ShangHui Gong | Xijun Liu | Jibing Gong | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yi Zhao | Zhen Yang | Mengpan Chen | Mingde Xu | ShangHui Gong | Xijun Liu | Jibing Gong | Jie Tang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhaoyi-hb/LongWebBench.
MathSight: A Benchmark Exploring Have Vision-Language Models Really Seen in University-Level Mathematical Reasoning?
Yuandong Wang | Yao Cui | Yuxin Zhao | Zhen Yang | Yangfu Zhu | Zhenzhou Shao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuandong Wang | Yao Cui | Yuxin Zhao | Zhen Yang | Yangfu Zhu | Zhenzhou Shao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal mathematical reasoning. Yet, howmuch visual information truly contributes to reasoning remains unclear. Existing benchmarks report strong overall performance but seldom isolate the role of the image modality, leaving open whether VLMs genuinely leverage visual understanding or merely depend on linguistic priors. To address this, we present MathSight, a university-level multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmark designed to disentangle and quantify the effect of visual input. Each problem includes multiple visual variants—original, hand-drawn, photocaptured—and a text-only condition for controlled comparison. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a consistent trend: the contribution of visual information diminishes with increasing problem difficulty. Remarkably, Qwen3-VL without any image input surpasses both its multimodal variants and GPT-5, underscoring the need for benchmarks like MathSight to advance genuine vision-grounded reasoning in future models. The project page is available at https://cnu-bot-group.github.io/MathSight/.
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Co-authors
- Jie Tang 5
- Jibing Gong 2
- Evgeny Kharlamov 2
- Xijun Liu 2
- Mingde Xu 2
- Yi Zhao 2
- Yuqicheng Zhu 2
- Mengpan Chen 1
- Yao Cui 1
- Puneet K. Dokania 1
- Yuxiao Dong 1
- Zijun Dou 1
- Shuaiqi Duan 1
- ShangHui Gong 1
- Xiaotao Gu 1
- Wenyi Hong 1
- Lin Li 1
- Yule Liu 1
- Rui Lu 1
- Zhenzhou Shao 1
- Steffen Staab 1
- Zhe Su 1
- Philip Torr 1
- Yan Wang 1
- Yu Wang 1
- Yuandong Wang 1
- Bin Xu 1
- Jialin Yu 1
- Wenmeng Yu 1
- Gengyuan Zhang 1
- Yuxin Zhao 1
- Dongzhuoran Zhou 1
- Yangfu Zhu 1