Jaewoo Lee, Archiki Prasad, Justin Chen, Zaid Khan, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The process of creating training data to teach models is currently driven by humans, who manually analyze model weaknesses and plan how to create data that improves a student model. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) as annotators reduce human annotation effort, but still require humans to interpret feedback from evaluations and control the LLM to produce data the student needs. Automating this labor-intensive process by creating autonomous data generation agents – or teachers – is desirable, but requires environments that can simulate the feedback-driven, iterative, closed loop of data creation. To enable rapid and scalable testing for such agents and their modules, we introduce DataEnvGym, a testbed of teacher environments for data generation agents. DataEnvGym frames data generation as a sequential decision-making task, involving an agent consisting of a data generation policy (which generates a plan for creating training data) and a data generation engine (which transforms the plan into data), inside an environment that provides feedback from a student. The agent’s end goal is to improve student model performance. Students are iteratively trained and evaluated on generated data, with their feedback (in the form of errors or weak skills) being reported to the agent after each iteration. As a general-purpose testbed, DataEnvGym includes multiple instantiations of teacher environments across three levels of structure in the state representation and action space, with varying levels of scaffolding support. More structured environments are based on automatically-inferred skills and offer a higher degree of interpretability and control over the curriculum. We support developing and testing data generation agents in four diverse tasks covering text, images, and actions (mathematics, programming, visual question answering, and tool-use) and test multiple student and teacher models. We find that example agents in our teaching environments can iteratively improve students across diverse tasks and settings. Moreover, we show that environments can teach different skill levels and can be used to test variants of key modules, pointing to directions of future work in improving data generation agents, engines, and feedback mechanisms. Project page: https://DataEnvGym.github.io.

The goal of selective prediction is to allow an a model to abstain when it may not be able to deliver a reliable prediction, which is important in safety-critical contexts. Existing approaches to selective prediction typically require access to the internals of a model, require retraining a model or study only unimodal models. However, the most powerful models (e.g. GPT-4) are typically only available as black boxes with inaccessible internals, are not retrainable by end-users, and are frequently used for multimodal tasks. We study the possi-bility of selective prediction for vision-language models in a realistic, black-box setting. We propose using the principle of neighborhood consistency to identify unreliable responses from a black-box vision-language model in question answering tasks. We hypothesize that given only a visual question and model response, the consistency of the model's responses over the neighborhood of a visual question will indicate re-liability. It is impossible to directly sample neighbors in feature space in a black-box setting. Instead, we show that it is possible to use a smaller proxy model to approximately sample from the neighborhood. We find that neighborhood consistency can be used to identify model responses to vi-sual questions that are likely unreliable, even in adversarial settings or settings that are out-of-distribution to the proxy model.

Visual program synthesis is a promising approach to ex-ploit the reasoning abilities of large language models for compositional computer vision tasks. Previous work has used few-shot prompting with frozen LLMs to synthesize visual programs. Training an LLM to write better visual programs is an attractive prospect, but it is unclear how to accomplish this. No dataset of visual programs for training exists, and acquisition of a visual program dataset cannot be easily crowdsourced due to the need for expert annotators. To get around the lack of direct supervision, we explore improving the program synthesis abilities of an LLM using feedback from interactive experience. We propose a method where we exploit existing annotations for a vision-language task to improvise a coarse reward signal for that task, treat the LLM as a policy, and apply reinforced self-training to improve the visual program synthesis ability of the LLM for that task. We describe a series of experiments on object detection, compositional visual question answering, and image-text retrieval, and show that in each case, the self-trained LLM outperforms or performs on par with few-shot frozen LLMs that are an order of magnitude larger. Website: https://zaidkhan.me/ViReP

Finetuning a large vision language model (VLM) on a target dataset after large scale pretraining is a dominant paradigm in visual question answering (VQA). Datasets for specialized tasks such as knowledge-based VQA or VQA in non natural-image domains are orders of magnitude smaller than those for general-purpose VQA. While collecting additional labels for specialized tasks or domains can be challenging, unlabeled images are often available. We introduce SelTDA (Self-Taught Data Augmentation), a strategy for finetuning large VLMs on small-scale VQA datasets. SelTDA uses the VLM and target dataset to build a teacher model that can generate question-answer pseudolabels directly conditioned on an image alone, allowing us to pseudolabel unlabeled images. SelTDA then finetunes the initial VLM on the original dataset augmented with freshly pseudolabeled images. We describe a series of experiments showing that our self-taught data augmentation increases robustness to adversarially searched questions, counterfactual examples and rephrasings, improves domain generalization, and results in greater retention of numerical reasoning skills. The proposed strategy requires no additional annotations or architectural modifications, and is compatible with any modern encoder-decoder multimodal transformer. Code available at https://github.com/codezakh/SelTDA.

Visual question answering (VQA) has traditionally been treated as a single-step task where each question receives the same amount of effort, unlike natural human question-answering strategies. We explore a question decomposition strategy for VQA to overcome this limitation. We probe the ability of recently developed large vision-language models to use human-written decompositions and produce their own decompositions of visual questions, finding they are capable of learning both tasks from demonstrations alone. However, we show that naive application of model-written decompositions can hurt performance. We introduce a model-driven selective decomposition approach for second-guessing predictions and correcting errors, and validate its effectiveness on eight VQA tasks across three domains, showing consistent improvements in accuracy, including improvements of >20% on medical VQA datasets and boosting the zero-shot performance of BLIP-2 above chance on a VQA reformulation of the challenging Winoground task. Project Site: https://zaidkhan.me/decomposition-0shot-vqa/

Kinship, a soft biometric detectable in media, is fundamental for a myriad of use-cases. Despite the difficulty of detecting kinship, annual data challenges using still-images have consistently improved performances and attracted new researchers. Now, systems reach performance levels unforeseeable a decade ago, closing in on performances acceptable to deploy in practice. Like other biometric tasks, we expect systems can receive help from other modalities. We hypothesize that adding modalities toFamilies In the Wild(FIW), which has only still-images, will improve performance. Thus, to narrow the gap between research and reality and enhance the power of kinship recognition systems, we extend FIW with multimedia (MM) data (i.e., video, audio, and text captions). Specifically, we introduce the first publicly available multi-task MM kinship dataset. To buildFIW in Multimedia(FIW MM), we developed machinery to automatically collect, annotate, and prepare the data, requiring minimal human input and no financial cost. The proposed MM corpus allows the problem statements to be more realistic template-based protocols. We show significant improvements in all benchmarks with the added modalities. The results highlight edge cases to inspire future research with different areas of improvement. FIW MM supplies the data needed to increase the potential of automated systems to detect kinship in MM. It also allows experts from diverse fields to collaborate in novel ways.

Multimodal target/aspect sentiment classification combines multimodal sentiment analysis and aspect/target sentiment classification. The goal of the task is to combine vision and language to understand the sentiment towards a target entity in a sentence. Twitter is an ideal setting for the task because it is inherently multimodal, highly emotional, and affects real world events. However, multimodal tweets are short and accompanied by complex, possibly irrelevant images. We introduce a two-stream model that translates images in input space using an object-aware transformer followed by a single-pass non-autoregressive text generation approach. We then leverage the translation to construct an auxiliary sentence that provides multimodal information to a language model. Our approach increases the amount of text available to the language model and distills the object-level information in complex images. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on two multimodal Twitter datasets without modifying the internals of the language model to accept multimodal data, demonstrating the effectiveness of our translation. In addition, we explain a failure mode of a popular approach for aspect sentiment analysis when applied to tweets. Our code is available at https://github.com/codezakh/exploiting-BERT-thru-translation.

Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW)- an annual large-scale, multi-track automatic kinship recognition evaluation- supports various visual kin-based problems on scales much higher than ever before. Organized in conjunction with the as a Challenge, RFIW provides a platform for publishing original work and the gathering of experts for a discussion of the next steps. This paper summarizes the supported tasks (i.e., kinship verification, tri-subject verification, and search & retrieval of missing children) in the evaluation protocols, which include the practical motivation, technical background, data splits, metrics, and benchmark results. Furthermore, top submissions (i.e., leader-board stats) are listed and reviewed as a high-level analysis on the state of the problem. In the end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the 2020 RFIW challenge, end-to-end, along with forecasts in promising future directions.