Lucy Lu Wang

Real-world visual question answering (VQA) may be context-dependent: an image-question pair could be under-specified, such that the correct answer depends on external information that is not observable in the image. In such cases, directly answering can lead to confident but incorrect predictions. We propose CoA (Clarify-or-Answer), an ask-or-answer agent that separately models the decision to ask or answer, and what to ask if needed. CoA first determines whether clarification is necessary; if so, it generates one or more clarification questions to iteratively enrich the context until ambiguity is resolved. To validate this framework, we introduce ContextClarify, a dataset of ambiguous VQA questions along with a contrast set of non-ambiguous questions. We further introduce GRPO-CR (Clarification Reasoning), a reinforcement learning approach that optimizes clarification question generation with multiple reward signals encouraging well-formed, focused, non-trivial questions that resolve ambiguity. Across three VLMs and three datasets, CoA achieves consistent improvements at both the module and system levels, with a single clarification turn providing significant gains and recursive multi-turn execution further boosting accuracy in some settings beyond baselines.

Plain Language Summaries (PLS) aim to make research accessible to lay readers, but they are typically written in a one-size-fits-all style that ignores differences in readers' information needs and comprehension. In health contexts, this limitation is particularly important because misunderstanding scientific information can affect real-world decisions. Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for personalizing PLS, but it remains unclear whether personalization helps, which strategies are most effective, and how to balance personalization with safety. We introduce **ReLay**, a dataset of 300 participant–PLS pairs from 50 lay participants in both **static** (expert-written) and **interactive** (LLM-personalized) settings. ReLay includes user characteristics, health information needs, information-seeking behavior, comprehension outcomes, interaction logs, and quality ratings. We use ReLay to evaluate five LLMs across two personalization methods: **profile-based prompting**, which conditions generation on participant survey profiles, and **retrieval-based prompting**, which incorporates prior interactions from the same or similar users. The interactive personalized setting yields higher comprehension and perceived quality than the static expert-written setting, while personalization methods can also increase the risk of reinforcing user biases and introducing hallucinations, revealing a trade-off between effectiveness and safety. These findings highlight the need for personalization methods that are both effective and trustworthy for diverse lay audiences.

Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. To address this, we present MMMG, a comprehensive and human-aligned benchmark for multimodal generation across 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio), with a focus on tasks that present significant challenges for generation models, while still enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 55 tasks (including 31 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 1288 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human judgment, achieving an average agreement of 94.4%. Benchmarking results on 29 models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 70.7% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable improvement space in audio generation, highlighting an important future direction.