Author name cluster

Aishwarya Agrawal

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6 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing

Saba Ahmadi
Rabiul Awal
Ankur Sikarwar
Amirhossein Kazemnejad
Ge Ya Luo
Juan Rodriguez
Sai Rajeswar Mudumba
Siva Reddy

While image generation techniques are now capable of producing high-quality images that respect prompts which span multiple sentences, the task of text-guided image editing remains a challenge. Even edit requests that consist of only a few words often fail to be executed correctly. We explore three strategies to enhance performance on a wide range of image editing tasks: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In order to study all these components in one consistent framework, we adopt an autoregressive multimodal model that processes textual and visual tokens in a unified manner. We find RL combined with a large multi-modal LLM verifier to be the most effective of these strategies. As a result, we release EARL: E diting with A utoregression and RL, a strong RL-based image editing model that performs competitively on a diverse range of edits compared to strong baselines, despite using much less training data. Thus, EARL pushes the frontier of autoregressive multimodal models on image editing. We release our code, training data, and trained models at https: //github. com/mair-lab/EARL.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction

Shravan Nayak
Xiangru Jian
Kevin Qinghong Lin
Juan A. Rodríguez
Montek Kalsi
Nicolas Chapados
M. Tamer Özsu
Aishwarya Agrawal

Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks—Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction—with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents’ performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer-use agents. With UI-Vision, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models

Oscar Mañas
Benno Krojer
Aishwarya Agrawal

8 years after the visual question answering (VQA) task was proposed, accuracy remains the primary metric for automatic evaluation. VQA Accuracy has been effective so far in the IID evaluation setting. However, our community is undergoing a shift towards open-ended generative models and OOD evaluation. In this new paradigm, the existing VQA Accuracy metric is overly stringent and underestimates the performance of VQA systems. Thus, there is a need to develop more robust automatic VQA metrics that serve as a proxy for human judgment. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to build a better VQA metric. We formulate VQA evaluation as an answer-rating task where the LLM is instructed to score the accuracy of a candidate answer given a set of reference answers. We demonstrate the proposed metric better correlates with human judgment compared to existing metrics across several VQA models and benchmarks. We hope wide adoption of our metric will contribute to better estimating the research progress on the VQA task. We plan to release the evaluation code and collected human judgments.

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TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimization

Oscar Mañas
Pietro Astolfi
Melissa Hall
Candace Ross
Jack Urbanek
Adina Williams
Aishwarya Agrawal
Adriana Romero-Soriano

Impressive advances in text-to-image (T2I) generative models have yielded a plethora of high performing models which are able to generate aesthetically appealing, photorealistic images. Despite the progress, these models still struggle to produce images that are consistent with the input prompt, oftentimes failing to capture object quantities, relations and attributes properly. Existing solutions to improve prompt-image consistency suffer from the following challenges: (1) they oftentimes require model fine-tuning, (2) they only focus on nearby prompt samples, and (3) they are affected by unfavorable trade-offs among image quality, representation diversity, and prompt-image consistency. In this paper, we address these challenges and introduce a T2I optimization-by-prompting framework, OPT2I, which leverages a large language model (LLM) to improve prompt-image consistency in T2I models. Our framework starts from a user prompt and iteratively generates revised prompts with the goal of maximizing a consistency score. Our extensive validation on two datasets, MSCOCO and PartiPrompts, shows that OPT2I can boost the initial consistency score by up to 24.9% in terms of DSG score while preserving the FID and increasing the recall between generated and real data. Our work paves the way toward building more reliable and robust T2I systems by harnessing the power of LLMs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding

Rabiul Awal
Saba Ahmadi
Le Zhang
Aishwarya Agrawal

Fine-grained understanding of objects, attributes, and relationships between objects is crucial for visual-language models (VLMs). To evaluate VLMs' fine-grained understanding, existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar captions given an image. In this paper, our focus is on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar images given a caption. To this end, we introduce a new, challenging benchmark termed Visual Minimal-Change Understanding (VisMin), which requires models to predict the correct image-caption match given two images and two captions. Importantly, the image pair (as well as the caption pair) contains minimal changes, i. e. , between the two images (as well as between the two captions), only one aspect changes at a time from among the following possible types of changes: object, attribute, count, and spatial relation. These four types of minimal changes are specifically designed to test the models' understanding of objects, attributes of objects (such as color, material, shape), counts of objects, and spatial relationships between objects. To curate our benchmark, we built an automatic pipeline using large language models and diffusion models, followed by a rigorous 4-step verification process by human annotators. Empirical experiments reveal that current VLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in understanding spatial relationships and counting abilities. Furthermore, leveraging the automated nature of our data creation process, we generate a large-scale training dataset, which we use to finetune CLIP (a foundational VLM) and Idefics2 (a multimodal large language model). Our findings show that both these models benefit significantly from fine-tuning on this data, as evident by marked improvements in fine-grained understanding across a wide range of benchmarks. Additionally, such fine-tuning improves CLIP's general image-text alignment capabilities too. All resources including the benchmark, the training data, and the finetuned model checkpoints will be released.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering with Adversarial Regularization

Sainandan Ramakrishnan
Aishwarya Agrawal
Stefan Lee

Modern Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have been shown to rely heavily on superficial correlations between question and answer words learned during training -- \eg overwhelmingly reporting the type of room as kitchen or the sport being played as tennis, irrespective of the image. Most alarmingly, this shortcoming is often not well reflected during evaluation because the same strong priors exist in test distributions; however, a VQA system that fails to ground questions in image content would likely perform poorly in real-world settings. In this work, we present a novel regularization scheme for VQA that reduces this effect. We introduce a question-only model that takes as input the question encoding from the VQA model and must leverage language biases in order to succeed. We then pose training as an adversarial game between the VQA model and this question-only adversary -- discouraging the VQA model from capturing language biases in its question encoding. Further, we leverage this question-only model to estimate the mutual information between the image and answer given the question, which we maximize explicitly to encourage visual grounding. Our approach is a model agnostic training procedure and simple to implement. We show empirically that it can improve performance significantly on a bias-sensitive split of the VQA dataset for multiple base models -- achieving state-of-the-art on this task. Further, on standard VQA tasks, our approach shows significantly less drop in accuracy compared to existing bias-reducing VQA models.

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