Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated impressive capabilities in handling complex tasks. However, the complexity of agentic behaviors makes these systems difficult to understand. When failures occur, developers often struggle to identify root causes and to determine actionable paths for improvement. Traditional methods that rely on inspecting raw log records are inefficient, given both the large volume and complexity of data. To address this challenge, we propose a framework and an interactive system, DiLLS, designed to reveal and structure the behaviors of multi-agent systems. The key idea is to organize information across three levels of query completion: activities, actions, and operations. By probing the multi-agent system through natural language, DiLLS derives and organizes information about planning and execution into a structured, multi-layered summary. Through a user study, we show that DiLLS significantly improves developers’ effectiveness and efficiency in identifying, diagnosing, and understanding failures in LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Design studies aim to develop visualization solutions for real-world problems across various application domains. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities to enhance the design study process, providing capabilities such as creative problem-solving, data handling, and insightful analysis. However, despite their growing popularity, there remains a lack of systematic understanding of how LLMs can effectively assist researchers in visualization-specific design studies. In this paper, we conducted a rnulti-stage qualitative study to fill this gap, which involved 30 design study researchers from diverse backgrounds and expertise levels. Through in-depth interviews and carefully-designed questionnaires, we investigated strategies for utilizing LLMs, the challenges encountered, and the practices used to overcome them. We further compiled the roles that LLMs can play across different stages of the design study process. Our findings highlight practical implications to inform visualization practitioners, and also provide a framework for leveraging LLMs to facilitate the design study process in visualization research.

Mental health is an urgent societal issue, and social scientists are increasingly turning to online mental health communities (OMHCs) to analyze user behavior data for early intervention. However, existing sequence mining techniques fall short of the urgent need to explore the behavior progression of different groups (e.g., recovery or deterioration groups) and track the potential long-term impact of behaviors on mental health status. To address this issue, we introduce EMINDS, a visual analytics system built on a novel automatic mining pipeline that extracts distinct behavior stages and assesses the potential impact of frequent stage patterns on mental health status over time. The system includes a set of interactive visualizations that summarize the meaning of each behavior stage and the evolution of different stage patterns. We feature a pattern-centric Sankey diagram to reveal contextual information about the impact of stage patterns on mental health, helping experts understand the specific changes in sequences before and after a stage pattern. We evaluated the effectiveness and usability of EMINDS through two case studies and expert interviews, which examined the potential stage patterns impacting long-term mental health by analyzing user behaviors on Reddit.

Eligibility criteria play a critical role in clinical trials by determining the target patient population, which significantly influences the outcomes of medical interventions. However, current approaches for designing eligibility criteria have limitations to support interactive exploration of the large space of eligibility criteria. They also ignore incorporating detailed characteristics from the original electronic health record (EHR) data for criteria refinement. To address these limitations, we proposed TrialCompass, a visual analytics system integrating a novel workflow, which can empower clinicians to iteratively explore the vast space of eligibility criteria through knowledge-driven and outcome-driven approaches. TrialCompass supports history-tracking to help clinicians trace the evolution of their adjustments and decisions when exploring various forms of data (i.e., eligibility criteria, outcome metrics, and detailed characteristics of original EHR data) through these two approaches. This feature can help clinicians comprehend the impact of eligibility criteria on outcome metrics and patient characteristics, which facilitates systematic refinement of eligibility criteria. Using a real-world dataset, we demonstrated the effectiveness of TrialCompass in providing insights into designing eligibility criteria for septic shock and sepsis-associated acute kidney injury. We also discussed the research prospects of applying visual analytics to clinical trials.

Cell state discovery is crucial for understanding biological systems and enhancing medical outcomes. A key aspect of this process is identifying distinct biomarkers that define specific cell states. However, difficulties arise from the co-discovery process of cell states and biomarkers: biologists often use dimensionality reduction to visualize cells in a two-dimensional space. Then they usually interpret visually clustered cells as distinct states, from which they seek to identify unique biomarkers. However, this assumption is often this assumption often fails to hold due to internal inconsistencies in a cluster, making the process trial-and-error and highly uncertain. Therefore, biologists urgently need effective tools to help uncover the hidden association relationships between different cell populations and their potential biomarkers. To address this problem, we first designed a machine-learning algorithm based on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique to identify meaningful associations between cell populations and biomarkers. We further developed a visual analytics system-CellScout-in collaboration with biologists, to help them explore and refine these association relationships to advance cell state discovery. We validated our system through expert interviews, from which we further selected a representative case to demonstrate its effectiveness in discovering new cell states.

Constructing cell developmental trajectories is a critical task in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analysis, enabling the inference of potential cellular progression paths. However, current automated methods are limited to establishing cell developmental trajectories within individual samples, necessitating biologists to manually link cells across samples to construct complete cross-sample evolutionary trajectories that consider cellular spatial dynamics. This process demands substantial human effort due to the complex spatial correspondence between each pair of samples. To address this challenge, we first proposed a GNN-based model to predict cross-sample cell developmental trajectories. We then developed TrajLens, a visual analytics system that supports biologists in exploring and refining the cell developmental trajectories based on predicted links. Specifically, we designed the visualization that integrates features on cell distribution and developmental direction across multiple samples, providing an overview of the spatial evolutionary patterns of cell populations along trajectories. Additionally, we included contour maps superimposed on the original cell distribution data, enabling biologists to explore them intuitively. To demonstrate our system's performance, we conducted quantitative evaluations of our model with two case studies and expert interviews to validate its usefulness and effectiveness.

Misleading visualizations, which manipulate chart representations to support specific claims, can distort perception and lead to incorrect conclusions.Despite decades of research, they remain a widespread issue, posing risks to public understanding and raising safety concerns for AI systems involved in data-driven communication.While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong chart comprehension abilities, their capacity to detect and interpret misleading charts remains unexplored.We introduce Misleading ChartQA benchmark, a large-scale multimodal dataset designed to evaluate MLLMs on misleading chart reasoning.It contains 3,026 curated examples spanning 21 misleader types and 10 chart types, each with standardized chart code, CSV data, multiple-choice questions, and labeled explanations, validated through iterative MLLM checks and expert human review.We benchmark 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs, analyze their performance across misleader types and chart formats, and propose a novel regionaware reasoning pipeline that enhances model accuracy.Our work lays the foundation for developing MLLMs that are robust, trustworthy, and aligned with the demands of responsible visual communication.

Designing synthetic routes for novel molecules is pivotal in various fields like medicine and chemistry. In this process, researchers need to explore a set of synthetic reactions to transform starting molecules into intermediates step by step until the target novel molecule is obtained. However, designing synthetic routes presents challenges for researchers. First, researchers need to make decisions among numerous possible synthetic reactions at each step, considering various criteria (e.g., yield, experimental duration, and the count of experimental steps) to construct the synthetic route. Second, they must consider the potential impact of one choice at each step on the overall synthetic route. To address these challenges, we proposed SynthLens, a visual analytics system to facilitate the iterative construction of synthetic routes by exploring multiple possibilities for synthetic reactions at each step of construction. Specifically, we have introduced a tree-form visualization in SynthLensto compare and evaluate all the explored routes at various exploration steps, considering both the exploration step and multiple criteria. Our system empowers researchers to consider their construction process comprehensively, guiding them toward promising exploration directions to complete the synthetic route. We validated the usability and effectiveness of SynthLensthrough a quantitative evaluation and expert interviews, highlighting its role in facilitating the design process of synthetic routes. Finally, we discussed the insights of SynthLensto inspire other multi-criteria decision-making scenarios with visual analytics.

Target detection based on outdoor and remote sensing (RS) images are used in many fields [1] , such as civil and military [2] , traffic surveillance [3] and disaster forecast [4] . However, in harsh environmental conditions, as air contaminants increase, light is scattered in the air and the image becomes hazy [5] . Therefore, image dehazing is an important issue in target detection for outdoor images and RS images. Therefore, image dehazing is an important issue in target detection for outdoor images and RS images. It has recently been proposed a variety of methods to dehaze images, which can be broadly categorized into three types: image enhancement-based, image restoration-based, and deep learning-based methods, respectively. Image enhancement-based dehazing methods highlight useful information without considering the cause of haze. Image restoration-based dehazing methods analyze the effect of atmospheric scattering model (ASM) on the image. Deep learning-based dehazing methods learn the intrinsic relationships between images and obtain clear images by training.