arXiv subjects

Wonjune Jang

Publications and source records attributed to Wonjune Jang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BUZZY: Contrastive Scoring to Mitigate Text-Induced Bias in Multimodal Multiple-Choice QA

Multimodal multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) provides a standardized and objectively measurable setting for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs). However, because the MCQA format incorporates the candidate choices into the input context, it introduces several unintended biases. Previous work has primarily focused on structural biases, such as preferences for certain choices. Instead, we argue that the choices act as textual priors, causing models to favor linguistically plausible options regardless of the visual content. We hypothesize and empirically verify that a model genuinely relies on visual evidence only when its multimodal distribution significantly diverges from its text-only distribution. Based on this observation we propose BUZZY,a training-free decoding method that corrects multimodal predictions by subtracting the text-only distribution. Experiments with five VLMs on five multimodal MCQA benchmarks demonstrate that BUZZY achieves the highest average accuracy among state-of-the-art methods while reducing inference latency by over 28% compared to prior contrastive decoding approaches. Overall, these results suggest that amplifying the visual signal by penalizing text-only preferences is key to efficient and robust multimodal MCQA reasoning. Code and additional resources are provided https://txxnrd.github.io/buzzy/.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

From Voting to Agent Collaboration: Answer-Type-Aware LLM Pipelines for BioASQ 14b

Biomedical question answering requires not only accurate extraction of information from scientific literature but also reliable integration of evidence across multiple documents. This study presents a question-type-specific large language model (LLM) framework for BioASQ 14b Task B, designed to improve answer robustness and evidence grounding in biomedical question answering. Rather than applying a single prompting strategy to all questions, the framework selects different inference procedures for yes/no, factoid, and list questions according to their distinct reasoning and evaluation requirements. For yes/no questions, snippet shuffling and self-reflection are used to reduce sensitivity to evidence ordering and improve decision stability. For factoid questions, full-snippet input is combined with chain-of-thought-based in-context learning to support accurate biomedical entity identification. For list questions, a multi-agent architecture is employed, in which evidence extraction, candidate generation, answer verification, and final aggregation are handled collaboratively. Preliminary experiments on BioASQ 13b were used to identify effective inference strategies for each question type, and the resulting framework was subsequently evaluated in the official BioASQ 14b Task B challenge. In the official evaluation, our framework showed competitive performance across multiple batches and achieved first place in the factoid subtask of Batch 4. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining question-type-specific inference, ensemble prediction, and agent-based verification for reliable biomedical question answering.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MolDeTox: Evaluating Language Model's Stepwise Fragment Editing for Molecular Detoxification

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising capabilities in various scientific domain. In particular, these advances have opened new opportunities in drug discovery, where the ability to understand and modify molecular structures is critical for optimizing drug properties such as efficacy and toxicity. However, existing models and benchmarks often overlook toxicity-related challenges, focusing primarily on general property optimization without adequately addressing safety concerns. In addition, even existing toxicity repair benchmarks suffer from limited data diversity, low structural validity of generated molecules, and heavy reliance on proxy models for toxicity assessment. To address these limitations, we propose MolDeTox, a novel benchmark for molecular detoxification, designed to enable fine-grained and reliable evaluation of toxicity-aware molecular optimization across stepwise tasks. We evaluate a wide range of general-purpose LLMs and VLMs under diverse settings, and demonstrate that understanding and generating molecules at the fragment-level improves structural validity and enhances the quality of generated molecules. Moreover, through detailed task-level performance analysis, MolDeTox provides an interpretable benchmark that enables a deeper understanding of the detoxification process. Our dataset is available at : https://huggingface.co/datasets/MolDeTox/MolDeTox

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CLAG: Adaptive Memory Organization via Agent-Driven Clustering for Small Language Model Agents

Large language model agents heavily rely on external memory to support knowledge reuse and complex reasoning tasks. Yet most memory systems store experiences in a single global retrieval pool which can gradually dilute or corrupt stored knowledge. This problem is especially pronounced for small language models (SLMs), which are highly vulnerable to irrelevant context. We introduce CLAG, a CLustering-based AGentic memory framework where an SLM agent actively organizes memory by clustering. CLAG employs an SLM-driven router to assign incoming memories to semantically coherent clusters and autonomously generates cluster-specific profiles, including topic summaries and descriptive tags, to establish each cluster as a self-contained functional unit. By performing localized evolution within these structured neighborhoods, CLAG effectively reduces cross-topic interference and enhances internal memory density. During retrieval, the framework utilizes a two-stage process that first filters relevant clusters via their profiles, thereby excluding distractors and reducing the search space. Experiments on multiple QA datasets with three SLM backbones show that CLAG consistently improves answer quality and robustness over prior memory systems for agents, remaining lightweight and efficient.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

ToxReason: A Benchmark for Mechanistic Chemical Toxicity Reasoning via Adverse Outcome Pathway

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled molecular reasoning for property prediction. However, toxicity arises from complex biological mechanisms beyond chemical structure, necessitating mechanistic reasoning for reliable prediction. Despite its importance, current benchmarks fail to systematically evaluate this capability. LLMs can generate fluent but biologically unfaithful explanations, making it difficult to assess whether predicted toxicities are grounded invalid mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we introduce ToxReason, a benchmark grounded in the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) that evaluates organ-level toxicity reasoning across multiple organs. ToxReason integrates experimental drug-target interaction evidence with toxicity labels, requiring models to infer both toxic outcomes and their underlying mechanisms from Molecular Initiating Event (MIE) to Adverse Outcome (AO). Using ToxReason, we evaluate toxicity prediction performance and reasoning quality across diverse LLMs. We find that strong predictive performance does not necessarily imply reliable reasoning. Furthermore, we show that reasoning-aware training improves mechanistic reasoning and, consequently, toxicity prediction performance. Together, these results underscore the necessity of integrating reasoning into both evaluation and training for trustworthy toxicity modeling.

q-bio.QM↗