Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Unlike bitmap images, scalable vector graphics (SVG) maintain quality when scaled, frequently employed in computer vision and artistic design in the representation of SVG code. In this era of proliferating AI-powered systems, enabling AI to understand and generate SVG has become increasingly urgent. However, AI-driven SVG understanding and generation (U&G) remain significant challenges. SVG code, equivalent to a set of curves and lines controlled by floating-point parameters, demands high precision in SVG U&G. Besides, SVG generation operates under diverse conditional constraints, including textual prompts and visual references, which requires powerful multi-modal processing for condition-to-SVG transformation. Recently, the rapid growth of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated capabilities to process multi-modal inputs and generate complex vector controlling parameters, suggesting the potential to address SVG U&G tasks within a unified model. To unlock MLLM's capabilities in the SVG area, we propose an SVG-centric dataset called UniSVG, comprising 525k data items, tailored for MLLM training and evaluation. To our best knowledge, it is the first comprehensive dataset designed for unified SVG generation (from textual prompts and images) and SVG understanding (color, category, usage, etc.). As expected, learning on the proposed dataset boosts open-source MLLMs' performance on various SVG U&G tasks, surpassing SOTA close-source MLLMs like GPT-4V. We release dataset, benchmark, weights, codes and experiment details on https://ryanlijinke.github.io/.

DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often discrete. Our experimental observations suggest that discrete rewards can lead to gradient anomaly, unstable optimization, and slow convergence. To address this issue, we propose ReDit (Reward Dithering), a method that dithers the discrete reward signal by adding simple random noise. With this perturbed reward, exploratory gradients are continuously provided throughout the learning process, enabling smoother gradient updates and accelerating convergence. The injected noise also introduces stochasticity into flat reward regions, encouraging the model to explore novel policies and escape local optima. Experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ReDit. On average, ReDit achieves performance comparable to vanilla GRPO with only approximately 10% the training steps, and furthermore, still exhibits a 4% performance improvement over vanilla GRPO when trained for a similar duration. Visualizations confirm significant mitigation of gradient issues with ReDit. Moreover, theoretical analyses are provided to further validate these advantages.

Non-annotated visual description (NaVD) aims to describe generic visuals without human-annotated pairwise data. The generic visuals refer to images and videos. Existing works mainly focus on one specific visual modality, i.e., image or video. In this article, we propose a new framework for this task, which can directly be applied to both image and video with the pipeline unchanged. Essentially, it is a unified framework that flexibly adapts to images and videos. Recently, contrastive visual-language pre-training models (CVLPs) have experienced rapid development, demonstrating powerful abilities to align vision and language. To continuously leverage advanced CVLPs, our framework is designed to work well with general CVLPs. It can easily use image-language CVLPs for image input and switch to video-language CVLPs for video input. Specifically, we propose a CVLP-based framework for NaVD, named CVLP-NaVD. It follows the paradigm of adversarial learning, containing a generator and a discriminator. The generator takes an image or a video as input and produces a corresponding language description, while the discriminator evaluates the generated sentence for its naturalness in human-like language. Apart from the naturalness, CVLPs play a crucial role in enhancing the alignment between visual and language signals during generation. Particularly, we explore three rewarding strategies to compute the alignment score, including directly calculating cosine similarity (i.e., VL-cross), projecting visual embeddings into the textual domain (i.e., VL-project), and their combination (i.e., VL-mix). The three strategies are fully examined in different scenarios. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with various unpaired and unsupervised setups in both image and video captioning tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our CVLP-NaVD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.

Tanmay Parekh, Jeffrey Kwan, Jiarui Yu, Sparsh Johri, Hyosang Ahn, Sreya Muppalla, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Tanmay Parekh, Anh Mac, Jiarui Yu, Yuxuan Dong, Syed Shahriar, Bonnie Liu, Eric Yang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

The large-scale visual-language pre-trained model, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), has significantly improved image captioning for scenarios without human-annotated image-caption pairs. Recent advanced CLIP-based image captioning without human annotations follows a text-only training paradigm, i.e., reconstructing text from shared embedding space. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited by the training/inference gap or huge storage requirements for text embeddings. Given that it is trivial to obtain images in the real world, we propose CLIP-guided text GAN (CgT-GAN), which incorporates images into the training process to enable the model to "see" real visual modality. Particularly, we use adversarial training to teach CgT-GAN to mimic the phrases of an external text corpus and CLIP-based reward to provide semantic guidance. The caption generator is jointly rewarded based on the caption naturalness to human language calculated from the GAN's discriminator and the semantic guidance reward computed by the CLIP-based reward module. In addition to the cosine similarity as the semantic guidance reward (i.e., CLIP-cos), we further introduce a novel semantic guidance reward called CLIP-agg, which aligns the generated caption with a weighted text embedding by attentively aggregating the entire corpus. Experimental results on three subtasks (ZS-IC, In-UIC and Cross-UIC) show that CgT-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly across all metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/Lihr747/CgtGAN.

Understanding the long duration videos' storyline is often considered a major challenge in the field of video understanding. To promote research on understanding longer videos in the community, the deep video understanding (DVU) task is suggested for recognizing interactions at the scene level and relationships at the movie level, as well as answering questions at these two levels. In this work, we propose a unified QA-aware knowledge graph generation approach, which consists of the relation-centric graph and interaction-centric graph and demonstrates the powerful performance of multimodal pre-training models in solving such problems. Extensive validations on the HLVU dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.