Conghui He
Publications
Scientific Image Synthesis: Benchmarking, Methodologies, and Downstream Utility
While synthetic data has proven effective for improving scientific reasoning in the text domain, multimodal reasoning remains constrained by the difficulty of synthesizing scientifically rigorous images. Existing Text-to-Image (T2I) models often produce outputs that are visually plausible yet scientifically incorrect, resulting in a persistent visual-logic divergence that limits their value for downstream reasoning. Motivated by recent advances in next-generation T2I models, we conduct a systematic study of scientific image synthesis across generation paradigms, evaluation, and downstream use. We analyze both direct pixel-based generation and programmatic synthesis, and propose ImgCoder, a logic-driven framework that follows an explicit "understand - plan - code" workflow to improve structural precision. To rigorously assess scientific correctness, we introduce SciGenBench, which evaluates generated images based on information utility and logical validity. Our evaluation reveals systematic failure modes in pixel-based models and highlights a fundamental expressiveness-precision trade-off. Finally, we show that fine-tuning Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on rigorously verified synthetic scientific images yields consistent reasoning gains, with potential scaling trends analogous to the text domain, validating high-fidelity scientific synthesis as a viable path to unlocking massive multimodal reasoning capabilities.
LRAS: Advanced Legal Reasoning with Agentic Search
While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated exceptional logical capabilities in mathematical domains, their application to the legal field remains hindered by the strict requirements for procedural rigor and adherence to legal logic. Existing legal LLMs, which rely on "closed-loop reasoning" derived solely from internal parametric knowledge, frequently suffer from lack of self-awareness regarding their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect conclusions. To address this challenge, we present Legal Reasoning with Agentic Search (LRAS), the first framework designed to transition legal LLMs from static and parametric "closed-loop thinking" to dynamic and interactive "Active Inquiry". By integrating Introspective Imitation Learning and Difficulty-aware Reinforcement Learning, LRAS enables LRMs to identify knowledge boundaries and handle legal reasoning complexity. Empirical results demonstrate that LRAS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 8.2-32\%, with the most substantial gains observed in tasks requiring deep reasoning with reliable knowledge. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.