@inproceedings{kang-etal-2025-retrieval,
    title = "Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning With Preference Optimization For Visual Program Generation",
    author = "Kang, Deokhyung  and
      Cho, Jeonghun  and
      Jeon, Yejin  and
      Jang, Sunbin  and
      Lee, Minsub  and
      Cho, Jawoon  and
      Lee, Gary",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.1106/",
    pages = "22667--22686",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Visual programming languages (VPLs) allow users to create programs through graphical interfaces, which results in easier accessibility and their widespread usage in various domains. To further enhance this accessibility, recent research has focused on generating VPL code from user instructions using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, by employing prompting-based methods, these studies have shown promising results. Nevertheless, such approaches can be less effective for industrial VPLs such as Ladder Diagram (LD). LD is a pivotal language used in industrial automation processes and involves extensive domain-specific configurations, which are difficult to capture in a single prompt. In this work, we demonstrate that training-based methods outperform prompting-based methods for LD generation accuracy, even with smaller backbone models. Building on these findings, we propose a two-stage training strategy to further enhance VPL generation. First, we employ retrieval-augmented fine-tuning to leverage the repetitive use of subroutines commonly seen in industrial VPLs. Second, we apply direct preference optimization (DPO) to further guide the model toward accurate outputs, using systematically generated preference pairs through graph editing operations. Extensive experiments on real-world LD data demonstrate that our approach improves program-level accuracy by over 10{\%} compared to supervised fine-tuning, which highlights its potential to advance industrial automation."
}