Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer chart questions accurately, but output accuracy alone provides limited insight into the internal representations supporting exact value reading. We study value reading from vertical bar charts through controlled counterfactual activation patching in Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL3.5-8B. Our study connects three analyses. First, under one-tick bar-height counterfactuals, patching states selected by the changed-height region produces greater restoration of the original answer preference than patching states selected by the invariant bar body. Across language-model depth, restoration from legend- and series-related positions declines earlier than restoration from bar-geometry and axis-scale positions. Second, we identify middle-layer states at series-related prompt positions that can restore answer preference under legend swaps. Resetting these states selectively weakens restoration from an earlier visual-legend patch, demonstrating their causal role in the downstream effects of that intervention. Third, a factorial analysis shows that both models can combine geometry and scale states from separate donors to favor the combined target answer. Together, these results provide causal evidence about the internal states supporting exact bar-value reading.
Chart-to-code generation is commonly trained through supervised fine-tuning on reference plotting scripts, implicitly treating the gold code as a fully observable target. However, many chart programs contain latent variables that cannot be uniquely recovered from the rendered image. We identify this latent-observation mismatch in four forms across five chart types: aggregation-induced mismatch, where raw samples are reduced to box statistics or histogram bin masses; normalization-induced mismatch, where absolute scale is removed in pie charts; projection-induced mismatch, where 3D information is lost through 2D rendering; and level-set-induced mismatch, where a scalar field is observable only through selected contour lines. These mismatches introduce target ambiguity and require models to generate information unsupported by the image. We propose Observation-Aligned Supervision, which replaces latent variables with visually constrained quantities. And we study fixed-view 3D scatter and contour charts through controlled experiments. Across VLMs, observation-aligned supervision generally improves observable recovery end-to-end and under both-executable evaluation. Against compact analytic contour formulas, end-to-end performance declines despite better conditional boundary recovery in both-exec setting, suggesting a trade-off with representational compactness.
Autonomous agents increasingly depend on harnesses that govern interaction, memory, tools, and execution around large language models (LLMs). While recent work has begun to evolve these harnesses from execution experience, the supervision used to guide evolution often remains relatively static, making it difficult to track changing behavioral weaknesses across rounds and potentially limiting generalization to unseen tasks. To address this issue, we propose RuHarness, a rubric--harness co-evolution framework for continual agent self-improvement. RuHarness continually discovers and reassesses behavioral criteria from execution trajectories, prioritizes the most relevant unresolved weaknesses, and uses them to guide targeted harness updates while keeping the task objective fixed. Extensive experiments across diverse agent tasks and backbone models show that RuHarness outperforms strong harness-evolution baselines, particularly on unseen held-out tasks. Further analyses show that adaptive rubric prioritization tracks shifting weaknesses and supports more sustained improvement and stable generalization across evolution rounds.
Xianzhen Luo Harbin Institute of Techology, Wenzhen Zheng, Qingfu Zhu Harbin Institute of Technology, Rongyi Zhang, Houyi Li Fudan University, Siming Huang, YuanTao Fan, Wanxiang Che Harbin Institute of Technology
Code Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing software engineering. However, scaling laws that guide the efficient training are predominantly analyzed on Natural Language (NL). Given the fundamental differences like strict syntax between code and NL, it is unclear whether these laws are directly applicable to code. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of scaling laws for code, comprising 117 experimental runs with model sizes from 0.2B to 3.8B and training tokens from 2B to 128B. We fit the Chinchilla law and the Farsser law. First, the results show that the more expressive Farseer law offers greater accuracy. Second, the analysis reveals that Code LLMs scale effectively with model size. Crucially, code represents a more data-hungry regime, requiring a substantially higher data-to-parameter ratio than NL. Finally, two additional sets of experiments on code-NL mixtures show that NL benefits resource-constrained scenarios, but becomes a detriment at higher compute budgets.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Qiguang Chen, Shiqi Zhou, Baocai Shan Harbin Institute of Technology, Hengjie Fang, Qingfu Zhu Harbin Institute of Technology, Wanxiang Che Harbin Institute of Technology
Automatic data visualization generation have advanced rapidly with multi-modal large language models, yet existing efforts largely focus on static charts and overlook the interactive dashboards commonly used for real-world data exploration. We introduce Dashboard2Code, a novel task that requires a model to proactively explore an interactive dashboard, acquire and integrate feedback from its own interactions (e.g., clicking and filtering), and generate code that reproduces the target dashboard. To support comprehensive evaluation, we present DashboardMimic, the first Plotly+Dash benchmark for Dashboard2Code, comprising 180 carefully designed and manually verified dashboard–code pairs spanning three difficulty levels and covering eight common real-world interaction patterns. We further propose an automated evaluation framework tailored to dashboards that combines code semantic analysis with dynamic interaction-based testing to assess visual and interaction consistency, showing strong agreement with human judgments. Experiments across a range of open- and closed-source multi-modal models reveal that even the strongest systems struggle on high-complexity dashboards and that a substantial performance gap remains between open-source and closed-source models on the Dashboard2Code task.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xuan Dong, Zhe Han, Tianhao Niu, Qingfu Zhu Harbin Institute of Technology, Wanxiang Che Harbin Institute of Technology
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, We present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30–50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表