Jiahao Huo


2025

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MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection
Yibo Yan | Shen Wang | Jiahao Huo | Philip S. Yu | Xuming Hu | Qingsong Wen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)

Mathematical error detection in educational settings presents a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring a sophisticated understanding of both visual and textual mathematical content along with complex reasoning capabilities. Though effective in mathematical problem-solving, MLLMs often struggle with the nuanced task of **identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts**. Therefore, we introduce **MathAgent, a novel Mixture-of-Math-Agent framework** specifically designed to address these challenges. Our approach decomposes error detection into three phases with specialized agents: an image-text consistency validator, a visual semantic interpreter, and an integrative error analyzer. This architecture enables more accurate processing of multimodal mathematical content by explicitly modeling the relationships between multimodal problems and student solution steps. We evaluate MathAgent on real-world educational data, demonstrating approximately 5% higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization compared to baseline models. Furthermore, MathAgent has been successfully deployed in an educational platform serving over one million K-12 students, achieving nearly 90% student satisfaction while generating significant cost savings by reducing manual error detection.

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EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models
Jiamin Su | Yibo Yan | Fangteng Fu | Zhang Han | Jingheng Ye | Xiang Liu | Jiahao Huo | Huiyu Zhou | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in educational assessment by providing scalable and consistent evaluations of writing tasks. However, traditional AES systems face three major challenges: (i) reliance on handcrafted features that limit generalizability, (ii) difficulty in capturing fine-grained traits like coherence and argumentation, and (iii) inability to handle multimodal contexts. In the era of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose **EssayJudge**, the **first multimodal benchmark to evaluate AES capabilities across lexical-, sentence-, and discourse-level traits**. By leveraging MLLMs’ strengths in trait-specific scoring and multimodal context understanding, EssayJudge aims to offer precise, context-rich evaluations without manual feature engineering, addressing longstanding AES limitations. Our experiments with 18 representative MLLMs reveal gaps in AES performance compared to human evaluation, particularly in discourse-level traits, highlighting the need for further advancements in MLLM-based AES research. Our dataset and code will be available upon acceptance.

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MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models
Jiahao Huo | Yibo Yan | Xu Zheng | Yuanhuiyi Lyu | Xin Zou | Zhihua Wei | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Recent progress in Machine Unlearning (MU) has introduced solutions for the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. Nonetheless, MU for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains in its nascent phase. Therefore, we propose to **reformulate the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs**, which aims to erase only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge encoded within the original parameters of the language model backbone. Furthermore, we **develop a novel geometry-constrained gradient ascent method MMUnlearner**. It updates the weights of MLLMs with a weight saliency map jointly restricted by the remaining concepts and textual knowledge during unlearning, thereby preserving parameters essential for non-target knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMUnlearner surpasses baselines that finetuning MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

2024

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MMNeuron: Discovering Neuron-Level Domain-Specific Interpretation in Multimodal Large Language Model
Jiahao Huo | Yibo Yan | Boren Hu | Yutao Yue | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Projecting visual features into word embedding space has become a significant fusion strategy adopted by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, its internal mechanisms have yet to be explored. Inspired by multilingual research, we identify domain-specific neurons in multimodal large language models. Specifically, we investigate the distribution of domain-specific neurons and the mechanism of how MLLMs process features from diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage framework for language model modules in MLLMs when handling projected image features, and verify this hypothesis using logit lens. Extensive experiments indicate that while current MLLMs exhibit Visual Question Answering (VQA) capability, they may not fully utilize domain-specific information. Manipulating domain-specific neurons properly will result in a 10% change of accuracy at most, shedding light on the development of cross-domain, all-encompassing MLLMs in the future. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MMNeuron.