← Search

Zhuowan Li

11 accepted papers

2025

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding

ICCV 2025poster

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challen…

2024

Causal-CoG: A Causal-Effect Look at Context Generation for Boosting Multi-modal Language Models

CVPR 2024highlight

While Multi-modal Language Models (MLMs) demon strate impressive multimodal ability they still struggle on providing factual and precise responses for tasks like vi sual question answering (VQA). In this paper we address this challenge from the perspective of contextual informa tion. We propose Caus…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach

EMNLP 2024industry

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been a powerful tool for Large Language Models (LLMs) to efficiently process overly lengthy contexts. However, recent LLMs like Gemini-1.5 and GPT-4 show exceptional capabilities to understand long contexts directly. We conduct a comprehensive comparison betw…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2024

Synthesize Step-by-Step: Tools Templates and LLMs as Data Generators for Reasoning-Based Chart VQA

CVPR 2024poster

Understanding data visualizations like charts and plots requires reasoning about both visual elements and numerics. Although strong in extractive questions current chart visual question answering (chart VQA) models suffer on complex reasoning questions. In this work we address the lack of reasoning…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

3D-Aware Visual Question Answering about Parts, Poses and Occlusions

NeurIPS 2023poster

Despite rapid progress in Visual question answering (\textit{VQA}), existing datasets and models mainly focus on testing reasoning in 2D. However, it is important that VQA models also understand the 3D structure of visual scenes, for example to support tasks like navigation or manipulation. This i…

2023

Super-CLEVR: A Virtual Benchmark To Diagnose Domain Robustness in Visual Reasoning

CVPR 2023highlight

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models often perform poorly on out-of-distribution data and struggle on domain generalization. Due to the multi-modal nature of this task, multiple factors of variation are intertwined, making generalization difficult to analyze. This motivates us to introduce a virtu…

2022

SwapMix: Diagnosing and Regularizing the Over-Reliance on Visual Context in Visual Question Answering

CVPR 2022poster

While Visual Question Answering (VQA) has progressed rapidly, previous works raise concerns about robustness of current VQA models. In this work, we study the robustness of VQA models from a novel perspective: visual context. We suggest that the models over-rely on the visual context, i.e., irreleva…

Cited by 65PDFcodeScholar
2022

Visual Commonsense in Pretrained Unimodal and Multimodal Models

NAACL 2022long

Our commonsense knowledge about objects includes their typical visual attributes; we know that bananas are typically yellow or green, and not purple. Text and image corpora, being subject to reporting bias, represent this world-knowledge to varying degrees of faithfulness. In this paper, we investig…

2021

Calibrating Concepts and Operations: Towards Symbolic Reasoning on Real Images

ICCV 2021poster

While neural symbolic methods demonstrate impressive performance in visual question answering on synthetic images, their performance suffers on real images. We identify that the long-tail distribution of visual concepts and unequal importance of reasoning steps in real data are the two key obstacles…

Cited by 18PDFcodeScholar
2020

Context-Aware Group Captioning via Self-Attention and Contrastive Features

CVPR 2020poster

While image captioning has progressed rapidly, existing works focus mainly on describing single images. In this paper, we introduce a new task, context-aware group captioning, which aims to describe a group of target images in the context of another group of related reference images. Context-aware g…

Cited by 49PDFScholar
2018

FD-GAN: Pose-guided Feature Distilling GAN for Robust Person Re-identification

NeurIPS 2018poster

Person re-identification (reID) is an important task that requires to retrieve a person's images from an image dataset, given one image of the person of interest. For learning robust person features, the pose variation of person images is one of the key challenges. Existing works targeting the probl…