Daily Papers

Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down. But the judge is itself a model behind an API, and a silent version bump or scoring-prompt update changes how it scores -- so every drift alarm is ambiguous between a worse product and a changed judge. We resolve the ambiguity with a fixed, human-labeled anchor set that the current judge re-scores at a steady interleave, a second betting e-process on the judge-versus-human gap, and a guard-window rule returning a verdict in {none, system, judge}. We prove anytime-validity, one-way identification (only the judge can move the anchors), an attribution race whose design law is that the anchors must out-run the main process they guard, and process orthogonality. On two real judge changes, a silent version bump is detected as judge drift in 60/60 runs with zero judge-to-system misattribution, and a contaminating strict-prompt change is correctly attributed on 110 of 120 runs at guard width 300 -- while the industry-default rolling z-test false-alarms on 75% of drift-free streams. Every experiment replicates on a second domain (TL;DR summarization) with nothing re-tuned, and where the domains differ the differences are the ones the race predicts: the strict-prompt change shifts scores harder there, so the anchors fire faster and attribution becomes perfect (240/240). The monitor runs at approximately 0.64 of the cost of strong-judging every item, or 0.21 in a cheaper-but-deafer regime.

Generative video models are increasingly studied as implicit world models, yet evaluating whether they produce physically plausible 3D structure and motion remains challenging. Most existing video evaluation pipelines rely heavily on human judgment or learned graders, which can be subjective and weakly diagnostic for geometric failures. We introduce PDI-Bench (Perspective Distortion Index), a quantitative framework for auditing geometric coherence in generated videos. Given a generated clip, we obtain object-centric observations via segmentation and point tracking (e.g., SAM 2, MegaSaM, and CoTracker3), lift them to 3D world-space coordinates via monocular reconstruction, and compute a set of projective-geometry residuals capturing three failure dimensions: scale-depth alignment, 3D motion consistency, and 3D structural rigidity. To support systematic evaluation, we build PDI-Dataset, covering diverse scenarios designed to stress these geometric constraints. Across state-of-the-art video generators, PDI reveals consistent geometry-specific failure modes that are not captured by common perceptual metrics, and provides a diagnostic signal for progress toward physically grounded video generation and physical world model. Our code and dataset can be found at https://pdi-bench.github.io/.

Representation engineering methods have recently shown promise for enabling efficient steering of model behavior. However, evaluation pipelines for these methods have primarily relied on subjective demonstrations, instead of quantitative, objective metrics. We aim to take a step towards addressing this issue by advocating for four properties missing from current evaluations: (i) contexts sufficiently similar to downstream tasks should be used for assessing intervention quality; (ii) model likelihoods should be accounted for; (iii) evaluations should allow for standardized comparisons across different target behaviors; and (iv) baseline comparisons should be offered. We introduce an evaluation pipeline grounded in these criteria, offering both a quantitative and visual analysis of how effectively a given method works. We use this pipeline to evaluate two representation engineering methods on how effectively they can steer behaviors such as truthfulness and corrigibility, finding that some interventions are less effective than previously reported.

While Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is now widely adopted to enhance LLMs, evaluating its true performance benefits in a reproducible and interpretable way remains a major hurdle. Existing methods often fall short: they lack domain coverage, employ coarse metrics that miss sub document precision, and fail to capture computational trade offs. Most critically, they provide no standardized framework for comparing RAG effectiveness across different models and domains. We introduce OmniBench RAG, a novel automated platform for multi domain evaluation of RAG systems. The platform quantifies performance gains across accuracy and efficiency dimensions, spanning nine knowledge fields including culture, geography, and health. We introduce two standardized metrics: Improvements (accuracy gains) and Transformation (efficiency differences between pre RAG and post RAG models), enabling reproducible comparisons across models and tasks. The platform features dynamic test generation, modular evaluation pipelines, and automated knowledge base construction. Our evaluation reveals striking variability in RAG effectiveness, from significant gains in culture to declines in mathematics, highlighting the critical importance of systematic, domain aware assessment. A demonstration video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZx83QFcTCI. Code and datasets: https://github.com/Garnett-Liang/Omnibench-RAG.

Spiking Transformers have recently emerged as promising architectures for combining the efficiency of spiking neural networks with the representational power of self-attention. However, the lack of standardized implementations, evaluation pipelines, and consistent design choices has hindered fair comparison and principled analysis. In this paper, we introduce STEP, a unified benchmark framework for Spiking Transformers that supports a wide range of tasks, including classification, segmentation, and detection across static, event-based, and sequential datasets. STEP provides modular support for diverse components such as spiking neurons, input encodings, surrogate gradients, and multiple backends (e.g., SpikingJelly, BrainCog). Using STEP, we reproduce and evaluate several representative models, and conduct systematic ablation studies on attention design, neuron types, encoding schemes, and temporal modeling capabilities. We also propose a unified analytical model for energy estimation, accounting for spike sparsity, bitwidth, and memory access, and show that quantized ANNs may offer comparable or better energy efficiency. Our results suggest that current Spiking Transformers rely heavily on convolutional frontends and lack strong temporal modeling, underscoring the need for spike-native architectural innovations. The full code is available at: https://github.com/Fancyssc/STEP

Video generation is rapidly evolving from single-shot synthesis to complex multi-shot audio-video (MSAV) narratives to meet real-world demands. However, evaluating such frontier models remains a fundamental challenge. Existing benchmarks are limited in scope and data diversity, and rely on rigid evaluation pipelines, preventing systematic and reliable assessment of modern MSAV models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MSAVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark and adaptive hybrid evaluation framework for multi-shot audio-video generation. Our benchmark spans four key dimensions, video, audio, shot, and reference, covering diverse task settings, varying shot counts of up to 15, and challenging non-realistic scenarios. Our evaluation framework improves robustness through an adaptive self-correction mechanism for shot segmentation, instance-wise rubrics for subjective metrics, and tool-grounded evidence extraction for complex judgments. Furthermore, MSAVBench achieves high alignment with human judgments, reaching a Spearman rank correlation of 91.5%. Our systematic evaluation of 19 state-of-the-art closed- and open-source models shows that current systems still struggle with director-level control and fine-grained audio-visual synchronization, while modular or agentic generation pipelines offer a promising path toward narrowing the gap between open- and closed-source models. We will release the benchmark data and evaluation code to facilitate future research.

Current embodied VLM evaluation relies on static, expert-defined, manually annotated benchmarks that exhibit severe redundancy and coverage imbalance. This labor intensive paradigm drains computational and annotation resources, inflates costs, and distorts model rankings, ultimately stifling iterative development. To address this, we propose Agentic Automatic Evaluation (A2Eval), the first agentic framework that automates benchmark curation and evaluation through two collaborative agents. The Data Agent autonomously induces capability dimensions and assembles a balanced, compact evaluation suite, while the Eval Agent synthesizes and validates executable evaluation pipelines, enabling fully autonomous, high-fidelity assessment. Evaluated across 10 benchmarks and 13 models, A2Eval compresses evaluation suites by 85%, reduces overall computational costs by 77%, and delivers a 4.6x speedup while preserving evaluation quality. Crucially, A2Eval corrects systematic ranking biases, improves human alignment to Spearman's rho=0.85, and maintains high ranking fidelity (Kendall's tau=0.81), establishing a new standard for high-fidelity, low-cost embodied assessment. Our code and data will be public soon.

Recent advances in video generation have enabled high-fidelity video synthesis from user provided prompts. However, existing models and benchmarks fail to capture the complexity and requirements of professional video generation. Towards that goal, we introduce Stable Cinemetrics, a structured evaluation framework that formalizes filmmaking controls into four disentangled, hierarchical taxonomies: Setup, Event, Lighting, and Camera. Together, these taxonomies define 76 fine-grained control nodes grounded in industry practices. Using these taxonomies, we construct a benchmark of prompts aligned with professional use cases and develop an automated pipeline for prompt categorization and question generation, enabling independent evaluation of each control dimension. We conduct a large-scale human study spanning 10+ models and 20K videos, annotated by a pool of 80+ film professionals. Our analysis, both coarse and fine-grained reveal that even the strongest current models exhibit significant gaps, particularly in Events and Camera-related controls. To enable scalable evaluation, we train an automatic evaluator, a vision-language model aligned with expert annotations that outperforms existing zero-shot baselines. SCINE is the first approach to situate professional video generation within the landscape of video generative models, introducing taxonomies centered around cinematic controls and supporting them with structured evaluation pipelines and detailed analyses to guide future research.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs)-based intelligent agents underscores the need for robust, scalable evaluation frameworks. Existing methods rely on static benchmarks and labor-intensive data collection, limiting practical assessment. We introduce \oursystemname, an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based framework that automates end-to-end task generation and deep evaluation of LLM agents across diverse domains. MCPEval standardizes metrics, seamlessly integrates with native agent tools, and eliminates manual effort in building evaluation pipelines. Empirical results across five real-world domains show its effectiveness in revealing nuanced, domain-specific performance. We publicly release MCPEval https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/MCPEval to promote reproducible and standardized LLM agent evaluation.

This paper bridges internal and external analysis approaches to large language models (LLMs) by demonstrating that geometric properties of internal model representations serve as reliable proxies for evaluating generated text quality. We validate a set of metrics including Maximum Explainable Variance, Effective Rank, Intrinsic Dimensionality, MAUVE score, and Schatten Norms measured across different layers of LLMs, demonstrating that Intrinsic Dimensionality and Effective Rank can serve as universal assessments of text naturalness and quality. Our key finding reveals that different models consistently rank text from various sources in the same order based on these geometric properties, indicating that these metrics reflect inherent text characteristics rather than model-specific artifacts. This allows a reference-free text quality evaluation that does not require human-annotated datasets, offering practical advantages for automated evaluation pipelines.

Vision-language foundation models (VLMs) show promise for diverse imaging tasks but often underperform on medical benchmarks. Prior efforts to improve performance include model finetuning, which requires large domain-specific datasets and significant compute, or manual prompt engineering, which is hard to generalize and often inaccessible to medical institutions seeking to deploy these tools. These challenges motivate interest in approaches that draw on a model's embedded knowledge while abstracting away dependence on human-designed prompts to enable scalable, weight-agnostic performance improvements. To explore this, we adapt the Declarative Self-improving Python (DSPy) framework for structured automated prompt optimization in medical vision-language systems through a comprehensive, formal evaluation. We implement prompting pipelines for five medical imaging tasks across radiology, gastroenterology, and dermatology, evaluating 10 open-source VLMs with four prompt optimization techniques. Optimized pipelines achieved a median relative improvement of 53% over zero-shot prompting baselines, with the largest gains ranging from 300% to 3,400% on tasks where zero-shot performance is low. These results highlight the substantial potential of applying automated prompt optimization to medical AI systems, demonstrating significant gains for vision-based applications requiring accurate clinical image interpretation. By reducing dependence on prompt design to elicit intended outputs, these techniques allow clinicians to focus on patient care and clinical decision-making. Furthermore, our experiments offer scalability and preserve data privacy, demonstrating performance improvement on open-source VLMs. We publicly release our evaluation pipelines to support reproducible research on specialized medical tasks, available at https://github.com/DaneshjouLab/prompt-triage-lab.

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant attention because of its ability to segment a variety of objects in images given a prompt. The recently developed SAM 2 has extended this ability to video inputs. This opens an opportunity to apply SAM to 3D images, one of the fundamental tasks in the medical imaging field. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation of SAM 2's ability to segment both 2D and 3D medical images. We collect 18 medical imaging datasets, including common 3D modalities such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) as well as 2D modalities such as X-ray and ultrasound. We consider two evaluation pipelines of SAM 2: (1) multi-frame 3D segmentation, where prompts are provided to one or multiple slice(s) selected from the volume, and (2) single-frame 2D segmentation, where prompts are provided to each slice. The former is only applicable to 3D modalities, while the latter applies to both 2D and 3D modalities. We learn that SAM 2 exhibits similar performance as SAM under single-frame 2D segmentation, and has variable performance under multi-frame 3D segmentation depending on the choices of slices to annotate, the direction of the propagation, the predictions utilized during the propagation, etc.

Traditional workflow-based agents exhibit limited intelligence when addressing real-world problems requiring tool invocation. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) agents capable of autonomous reasoning and tool invocation are rapidly emerging as a powerful approach for complex decision-making tasks involving multi-step interactions with external environments. In this work, we introduce MindWatcher, a TIR agent integrating interleaved thinking and multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. MindWatcher can autonomously decide whether and how to invoke diverse tools and coordinate their use, without relying on human prompts or workflows. The interleaved thinking paradigm enables the model to switch between thinking and tool calling at any intermediate stage, while its multimodal CoT capability allows manipulation of images during reasoning to yield more precise search results. We implement automated data auditing and evaluation pipelines, complemented by manually curated high-quality datasets for training, and we construct a benchmark, called MindWatcher-Evaluate Bench (MWE-Bench), to evaluate its performance. MindWatcher is equipped with a comprehensive suite of auxiliary reasoning tools, enabling it to address broad-domain multimodal problems. A large-scale, high-quality local image retrieval database, covering eight categories including cars, animals, and plants, endows model with robust object recognition despite its small size. Finally, we design a more efficient training infrastructure for MindWatcher, enhancing training speed and hardware utilization. Experiments not only demonstrate that MindWatcher matches or exceeds the performance of larger or more recent models through superior tool invocation, but also uncover critical insights for agent training, such as the genetic inheritance phenomenon in agentic RL.

Large language model (LLM)-based evaluation pipelines have demonstrated their capability to robustly evaluate machine-generated text. Extending this methodology to assess human-written text could significantly benefit educational settings by providing direct feedback to enhance writing skills, although this application is not straightforward. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can effectively assess human-written text for educational purposes. We collected 100 texts from 32 Korean students across 15 types of writing and employed GPT-4-Turbo to evaluate them using grammaticality, fluency, coherence, consistency, and relevance as criteria. Our analyses indicate that LLM evaluators can reliably assess grammaticality and fluency, as well as more objective types of writing, though they struggle with other criteria and types of writing. We publicly release our dataset and feedback.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved near-perfect performance in solving high-school mathematics, their ability to evaluate the diverse reasoning processes of real human students remains under-examined. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealMath-Eval, a rigorously annotated benchmark of 224 real-world exam responses from high schools. Our initial evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art LLM judges struggle significantly on this task, exhibiting a high Mean Squared Error (sim2.96) against expert human grading. To probe a plausible explanation, we contrast this performance with a control setting where the same judges evaluate synthetic LLM-generated solutions. We identify a stark ``Evaluation Gap'': judges are considerably more accurate and consistent on synthetic text (MSE sim1.17) but struggle to generalize to authentic student reasoning. Through semantic embedding analysis, we find that synthetic errors suffer from a ``structural collapse'' into predictable, low-dimensional linear subspaces, whereas human errors form a more diverse error space. Furthermore, generative probability probes suggest that human reasoning involves significantly higher information-theoretic surprisal, indicating that student reasoning transitions are more out-of-distribution for current models. Finally, we find that surface-level style transfer fails to close this gap. Our findings suggest that current LLM evaluation pipelines relying heavily on synthetic data may not adequately capture the diversity of authentic student mathematical reasoning.

Developing open-source foundation models is essential for advancing research in music audio understanding and ensuring access to powerful, multipurpose representations for music information retrieval. We present OMAR-RQ, a model trained with self-supervision via masked token classification methodologies using a large-scale dataset with over 330,000 hours of music audio. We experiment with different input features and quantization options, and achieve state-of-the-art performance in music tagging, pitch estimation, chord recognition, beat tracking, segmentation, and difficulty estimation among open self-supervised models. We open-source our training and evaluation pipelines and model weights, available at https://github.com/mtg/omar-rq.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven significant progress, yet their growing parameter counts and context windows incur prohibitive compute, energy, and monetary costs. We introduce EfficientLLM, a novel benchmark and the first comprehensive empirical study evaluating efficiency techniques for LLMs at scale. Conducted on a production-class cluster (48xGH200, 8xH200 GPUs), our study systematically explores three key axes: (1) architecture pretraining (efficient attention variants: MQA, GQA, MLA, NSA; sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)), (2) fine-tuning (parameter-efficient methods: LoRA, RSLoRA, DoRA), and (3) inference (quantization methods: int4, float16). We define six fine-grained metrics (Memory Utilization, Compute Utilization, Latency, Throughput, Energy Consumption, Compression Rate) to capture hardware saturation, latency-throughput balance, and carbon cost. Evaluating over 100 model-technique pairs (0.5B-72B parameters), we derive three core insights: (i) Efficiency involves quantifiable trade-offs: no single method is universally optimal; e.g., MoE reduces FLOPs and improves accuracy but increases VRAM by 40%, while int4 quantization cuts memory/energy by up to 3.9x at a 3-5% accuracy drop. (ii) Optima are task- and scale-dependent: MQA offers optimal memory-latency trade-offs for constrained devices, MLA achieves lowest perplexity for quality-critical tasks, and RSLoRA surpasses LoRA efficiency only beyond 14B parameters. (iii) Techniques generalize across modalities: we extend evaluations to Large Vision Models (Stable Diffusion 3.5, Wan 2.1) and Vision-Language Models (Qwen2.5-VL), confirming effective transferability. By open-sourcing datasets, evaluation pipelines, and leaderboards, EfficientLLM provides essential guidance for researchers and engineers navigating the efficiency-performance landscape of next-generation foundation models.

Unified multimodal models integrate the reasoning capacity of large language models with both image understanding and generation, showing great promise for advanced multimodal intelligence. However, the community still lacks a rigorous reasoning-centric benchmark to systematically evaluate the alignment between understanding and generation, and their generalization potential in complex visual tasks. To this end, we introduce GIR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates unified models across three complementary perspectives. Firstly, we investigate understanding-generation consistency (GIR-Bench-UGC), asking whether models can consistently leverage the same knowledge in both understanding and generation tasks. Secondly, we investigate whether models can perform reasoning-centric text-to-image generation that requires applying logical constraints and implicit knowledge to generate faithful visual content (GIR-Bench-T2I). Thirdly, we evaluate whether models can handle multi-step reasoning in editing (GIR-Bench-Edit). For each subset, we carefully design different task-specific evaluation pipelines tailored for each task. This enables fine-grained and interpretable evaluation while mitigating biases from the prevalent MLLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Extensive ablations over various unified models and generation-only systems have shown that: Although unified models are more capable of reasoning-driven visual tasks, they still exhibit a persistent gap between understanding and generation. The data and code for GIR-Bench are available at https://hkust-longgroup.github.io/GIR-Bench{https://hkust-longgroup.github.io/GIR-Bench}.

Deep learning has advanced two fundamentally different paradigms for instance segmentation: specialized models optimized through task-specific fine-tuning and generalist foundation models capable of zero-shot segmentation. This work presents a comprehensive comparison between SAM3 (Segment Anything Model, also called SAMv3) operating in zero-shot mode and three variants of Ultralytics YOLO11 (nano, medium, and large) fine-tuned for instance segmentation. The evaluation is conducted on the MinneApple dataset, a dense benchmark comprising 670 orchard images with 28,179 annotated apple instances, enabling rigorous validation of model behavior under high object density and occlusion. Our analysis shows IoU choices can inflate performance gaps by up to 30%. At the appropriate IoU = 0.15 threshold, YOLO models achieve 68.9%, 72.2%, and 71.9% F1, while SAM3 reaches 59.8% in pure zero-shot mode. However, YOLO exhibits steep degradation 48-50 points across IoU ranges whereas SAM3 drops only 4 points, revealing 12 times superior boundary stability of SAM3. This highlights the strength of SAMv3 in mask precision versus specialization in detection completeness of YOLO11. We provide open-source code, evaluation pipelines, and methodological recommendations, contributing to a deeper understanding of when specialized fine-tuned models or generalist foundation models are preferable for dense instance segmentation tasks. This project repository is available on GitHub as https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Segment-Anything-Model-SAM3-Zero-Shot-Segmentation-Against-Fine-Tuned-YOLO-Detectors

Tool-calling is a central component of modern large language model (LLM) agents, equipping them with skills beyond their parametric knowledge. This paper studies tool-calling along two complementary axes: effectiveness, i.e., how this capability is measured, and efficiency, i.e., how it is learned. On effectiveness, we systematically analyze tool-calling evaluation pipelines and show that results can be highly sensitive to seemingly minor, often undocumented implementation choices including the random seed, system prompt, multi-turn template construction, and how prior interaction/reasoning history is carried forward. These choices can lead to substantial differences in reported performance, especially in multi-turn settings where without rigorous standardization, leaderboard rankings are unreliable. On efficiency, we examine standard reinforcement learning (RL) for tool-calling and identify two sources of computational waste: (i) during rollouts, many prompts produce no learning signal, and (ii) during policy updates, optimization incurs high computational cost. Guided by these findings, we introduce two techniques that accelerate RL-based tool-calling training, achieving substantial wall-clock speedup without degrading performance.

Accurate probabilistic weather forecasting demands both high accuracy and efficient uncertainty quantification, challenges that overburden both ensemble numerical weather prediction (NWP) and recent machine-learning methods. We introduce LaDCast, the first global latent-diffusion framework for medium-range ensemble forecasting, which generates hourly ensemble forecasts entirely in a learned latent space. An autoencoder compresses high-dimensional ERA5 reanalysis fields into a compact representation, and a transformer-based diffusion model produces sequential latent updates with arbitrary hour initialization. The model incorporates Geometric Rotary Position Embedding (GeoRoPE) to account for the Earth's spherical geometry, a dual-stream attention mechanism for efficient conditioning, and sinusoidal temporal embeddings to capture seasonal patterns. LaDCast achieves deterministic and probabilistic skill close to that of the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecast IFS-ENS, without any explicit perturbations. Notably, LaDCast demonstrates superior performance in tracking rare extreme events such as cyclones, capturing their trajectories more accurately than established models. By operating in latent space, LaDCast reduces storage and compute by orders of magnitude, demonstrating a practical path toward forecasting at kilometer-scale resolution in real time. We open-source our code and models and provide the training and evaluation pipelines at: https://github.com/tonyzyl/ladcast.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam, sourced from the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination. CMExam consists of 60K+ multiple-choice questions for standardized and objective evaluations, as well as solution explanations for model reasoning evaluation in an open-ended manner. For in-depth analyses of LLMs, we invited medical professionals to label five additional question-wise annotations, including disease groups, clinical departments, medical disciplines, areas of competency, and question difficulty levels. Alongside the dataset, we further conducted thorough experiments with representative LLMs and QA algorithms on CMExam. The results show that GPT-4 had the best accuracy of 61.6% and a weighted F1 score of 0.617. These results highlight a great disparity when compared to human accuracy, which stood at 71.6%. For explanation tasks, while LLMs could generate relevant reasoning and demonstrate improved performance after finetuning, they fall short of a desired standard, indicating ample room for improvement. To the best of our knowledge, CMExam is the first Chinese medical exam dataset to provide comprehensive medical annotations. The experiments and findings of LLM evaluation also provide valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions in developing Chinese medical QA systems and LLM evaluation pipelines. The dataset and relevant code are available at https://github.com/williamliujl/CMExam.

Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, while academic research remains largely non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data, hindering fair comparison and progress. To this end, we release a fully open-source system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning, including a licensed synthetic dataset, training and evaluation pipelines, and Muse, an easy-to-deploy song generation model. The dataset consists of 116k fully licensed synthetic songs with automatically generated lyrics and style descriptions paired with audio synthesized by SunoV5. We train Muse via single-stage supervised finetuning of a Qwen-based language model extended with discrete audio tokens using MuCodec, without task-specific losses, auxiliary objectives, or additional architectural components. Our evaluations find that although Muse is trained with a modest data scale and model size, it achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text--music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality, while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. All data, model weights, and training and evaluation pipelines will be publicly released, paving the way for continued progress in controllable long-form song generation research. The project repository is available at https://github.com/yuhui1038/Muse.

Large models have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks, yet they incur significant computational costs and privacy concerns during both training and inference. Distributed deployment has emerged as a potential solution, but it necessitates the exchange of intermediate information between model segments, with feature representations serving as crucial information carriers. To optimize information exchange, feature coding methods are applied to reduce transmission and storage overhead. Despite its importance, feature coding for large models remains an under-explored area. In this paper, we draw attention to large model feature coding and make three contributions to this field. First, we introduce a comprehensive dataset encompassing diverse features generated by three representative types of large models. Second, we establish unified test conditions, enabling standardized evaluation pipelines and fair comparisons across future feature coding studies. Third, we introduce two baseline methods derived from widely used image coding techniques and benchmark their performance on the proposed dataset. These contributions aim to advance the field of feature coding, facilitating more efficient large model deployment. All source code and the dataset are now available at https://github.com/chansongoal/FCM-LM/tree/master{https://github.com/chansongoal/FCM-LM/tree/master}.

As autonomous code agents move toward end-to-end software development, evaluating their practical autonomy becomes critical. Current benchmarks hide friction by testing agents in pre-configured environments, and their static evaluation pipelines frequently fail when parsing fully autonomous trajectories. We address these limitations with SWE-Cycle, a benchmark of 489 rigorously filtered instances. SWE-Cycle evaluates agents across three isolated tasks, including environment reconstruction, code implementation, and verification test generation, as well as an end-to-end FullCycle task that integrates all three. The FullCycle task requires agents to work autonomously in a bare repository without human scaffolding. To reliably assess these complex execution paths, we developed SWE-Judge. By combining static code review with dynamic testing, this execution-capable evaluation agent accurately verifies functional correctness and eliminates the systematic measurement errors of traditional static parsers. We evaluate code agents powered by six state-of-the-art LLMs across these four tasks. The results reveal a sharp drop in solve rates when transitioning from isolated tasks to FullCycle execution, exposing critical bottlenecks in handling cross-phase dependencies and maintaining code quality. Together, SWE-Cycle and SWE-Judge provide a comprehensive framework for accurately measuring the end-to-end capabilities of autonomous software agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as automated judges, where practical value depends on both accuracy and trustworthy, risk-aware judgments. Existing approaches predominantly focus on accuracy, overlooking the necessity of well-calibrated confidence, which is vital for adaptive and reliable evaluation pipelines. In this work, we advocate a shift from accuracy-centric evaluation to confidence-driven, risk-aware LLM-as-a-Judge systems, emphasizing the necessity of well-calibrated confidence for trustworthy and adaptive evaluation. We systematically identify the Overconfidence Phenomenon in current LLM-as-a-Judges, where predicted confidence significantly overstates actual correctness, undermining reliability in practical deployment. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce TH-Score, a novel metric measuring confidence-accuracy alignment. Furthermore, we propose LLM-as-a-Fuser, an ensemble framework that transforms LLMs into reliable, risk-aware evaluators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially improves calibration and enables adaptive, confidence-driven evaluation pipelines, achieving superior reliability and accuracy compared to existing baselines.

Medical image segmentation and video object segmentation are essential for diagnosing and analyzing diseases by identifying and measuring biological structures. Recent advances in natural domain have been driven by foundation models like the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2). To explore the performance of SAM 2 in biomedical applications, we designed two evaluation pipelines for single-frame image segmentation and multi-frame video segmentation with varied prompt designs, revealing SAM 2's limitations in medical contexts. Consequently, we developed BioSAM 2, an enhanced foundation model optimized for biomedical data based on SAM 2. Our experiments show that BioSAM 2 not only surpasses the performance of existing state-of-the-art foundation models but also matches or even exceeds specialist models, demonstrating its efficacy and potential in the medical domain.

Current scene graph datasets suffer from strong long-tail distributions of their predicate classes. Due to a very low number of some predicate classes in the test sets, no reliable metrics can be retrieved for the rarest classes. We construct a new panoptic scene graph dataset and a set of metrics that are designed as a benchmark for the predictive performance especially on rare predicate classes. To construct the new dataset, we propose a model-assisted annotation pipeline that efficiently finds rare predicate classes that are hidden in a large set of images like needles in a haystack. Contrary to prior scene graph datasets, Haystack contains explicit negative annotations, i.e. annotations that a given relation does not have a certain predicate class. Negative annotations are helpful especially in the field of scene graph generation and open up a whole new set of possibilities to improve current scene graph generation models. Haystack is 100% compatible with existing panoptic scene graph datasets and can easily be integrated with existing evaluation pipelines. Our dataset and code can be found here: https://lorjul.github.io/haystack/. It includes annotation files and simple to use scripts and utilities, to help with integrating our dataset in existing work.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fostered diverse paradigms for automated slide generation, ranging from code-driven layouts to image-centric synthesis. However, evaluating these heterogeneous systems remains challenging, as existing protocols often struggle to provide comparable scores across architectures or rely on uncalibrated judgments. In this paper, we introduce SlidesGen-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate slide generation through a lens of three core principles: universality, quantification, and reliability. First, to establish a unified evaluation framework, we ground our analysis in the visual domain, treating terminal outputs as renderings to remain agnostic to the underlying generation method. Second, we propose a computational approach that quantitatively assesses slides across three distinct dimensions - Content, Aesthetics, and Editability - offering reproducible metrics where prior works relied on subjective or reference-dependent proxies. Finally, to ensure high correlation with human preference, we construct the Slides-Align1.5k dataset, a human preference aligned dataset covering slides from nine mainstream generation systems across seven scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that SlidesGen-Bench achieves a higher degree of alignment with human judgment than existing evaluation pipelines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YunqiaoYang/SlidesGen-Bench.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks. (2) Scale: To our knowledge, LexEval is currently the largest Chinese legal evaluation dataset, comprising 23 tasks and 14,150 questions. (3) Data: we utilize formatted existing datasets, exam datasets and newly annotated datasets by legal experts to comprehensively evaluate the various capabilities of LLMs. LexEval not only focuses on the ability of LLMs to apply fundamental legal knowledge but also dedicates efforts to examining the ethical issues involved in their application. We evaluated 38 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtained some interesting findings. The experiments and findings offer valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions for developing Chinese legal systems and LLM evaluation pipelines. The LexEval dataset and leaderboard are publicly available at https://github.com/CSHaitao/LexEval and will be continuously updated.

Recent advances in LLM-guided evolutionary computation, particularly AlphaEvolve (Novikov et al., 2025; Georgiev et al., 2025), have demonstrated remarkable success in discovering novel mathematical constructions and solving challenging optimization problems. However, the high-level descriptions in published work leave many implementation details unspecified, hindering reproducibility and further research. In this report we present GigaEvo, an extensible open-source framework that enables researchers to study and experiment with hybrid LLM-evolution approaches inspired by AlphaEvolve. Our system provides modular implementations of key components: MAP-Elites quality-diversity algorithms, asynchronous DAG-based evaluation pipelines, LLM-driven mutation operators with insight generation and bidirectional lineage tracking, and flexible multi-island evolutionary strategies. In order to assess reproducibility and validate our implementation we evaluate GigaEvo on challenging problems from the AlphaEvolve paper: Heilbronn triangle placement, circle packing in squares, and high-dimensional kissing numbers. The framework emphasizes modularity, concurrency, and ease of experimentation, enabling rapid prototyping through declarative configuration. We provide detailed descriptions of system architecture, implementation decisions, and experimental methodology to support further research in LLM driven evolutionary methods. The GigaEvo framework and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/gigaevo-core.

Turn-level metrics are widely used to evaluate properties of multi-turn human-LLM conversations, from safety and sycophancy to dialogue quality. However, consecutive turns within a conversation are not statistically independent -- a fact that virtually all current evaluation pipelines fail to correct for in their statistical inference. We systematically characterize the autocorrelation structure of 66 turn-level metrics across 202 multi-turn conversations (11,639 turn pairs, 5 German-speaking users, 4 LLM platforms) and demonstrate that naive pooled analysis produces severely inflated significance estimates: 42% of associations that appear significant under standard pooled testing fail to survive cluster-robust correction. The inflation varies substantially across categories rather than scaling linearly with autocorrelation: three memoryless families (embedding velocity, directional, differential) aggregate to 14%, while the seven non-memoryless families (thermo-cycle, frame distance, lexical/structural, rolling windows, cumulative, interaction, timestamp) aggregate to 33%, with individual category rates ranging from 0% to 100% depending on per-family effect size. We present a two-stage correction framework combining Chelton (1983) effective degrees of freedom with conversation-level block bootstrap, and validate it on a pre-registered hold-out split where cluster-robust metrics replicate at 57% versus 30% for pooled-only metrics. We provide concrete design principles, a publication checklist, and open-source code for the correction pipeline. A survey of ~30 recent papers at major NLP and AI venues that compute turn-level statistics in LLM evaluations finds that only 4 address temporal dependence at all, and 26 do not correct for it.

IR in low-resource languages remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality, task-specific annotated datasets. Manual annotation is expensive and difficult to scale, while using large language models (LLMs) as automated annotators introduces concerns about label reliability, bias, and evaluation validity. This work presents a Bangla IR dataset constructed using a BETA-labeling framework involving multiple LLM annotators from diverse model families. The framework incorporates contextual alignment, consistency checks, and majority agreement, followed by human evaluation to verify label quality. Beyond dataset creation, we examine whether IR datasets from other low-resource languages can be effectively reused through one-hop machine translation. Using LLM-based translation across multiple language pairs, we experimented on meaning preservation and task validity between source and translated datasets. Our experiment reveal substantial variation across languages, reflecting language-dependent biases and inconsistent semantic preservation that directly affect the reliability of cross-lingual dataset reuse. Overall, this study highlights both the potential and limitations of LLM-assisted dataset creation for low-resource IR. It provides empirical evidence of the risks associated with cross-lingual dataset reuse and offers practical guidance for constructing more reliable benchmarks and evaluation pipelines in low-resource language settings.

Evaluating tabular generators remains a challenging problem, as the unique causal structural prior of heterogeneous tabular data does not lend itself to intuitive human inspection. Recent work has introduced structural fidelity as a tabular-specific evaluation dimension to assess whether synthetic data complies with the causal structures of real data. However, existing benchmarks often neglect the interplay between structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions, thus failing to provide a holistic understanding of model performance. Moreover, they are typically limited to toy datasets, as quantifying existing structural fidelity metrics requires access to ground-truth causal structures, which are rarely available for real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that jointly considers structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions. We introduce a new evaluation metric, global utility, which enables the assessment of structural fidelity even in the absence of ground-truth causal structures. In addition, we present TabStruct, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark offering large-scale quantitative analysis on 13 tabular generators from nine distinct categories, across 29 datasets. Our results demonstrate that global utility provides a task-independent, domain-agnostic lens for tabular generator performance. We release the TabStruct benchmark suite, including all datasets, evaluation pipelines, and raw results. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

Visual generation grounded in Visual Foundation Model (VFM) representations offers a highly promising unified pathway for integrating visual understanding, perception, and generation. Despite this potential, training large-scale text-to-image diffusion models entirely within the VFM representation space remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we scale the SVG (Self-supervised representations for Visual Generation) framework, proposing SVG-T2I to support high-quality text-to-image synthesis directly in the VFM feature domain. By leveraging a standard text-to-image diffusion pipeline, SVG-T2I achieves competitive performance, reaching 0.75 on GenEval and 85.78 on DPG-Bench. This performance validates the intrinsic representational power of VFMs for generative tasks. We fully open-source the project, including the autoencoder and generation model, together with their training, inference, evaluation pipelines, and pre-trained weights, to facilitate further research in representation-driven visual generation.

Medical coding is the task of assigning medical codes to clinical free-text documentation. Healthcare professionals manually assign such codes to track patient diagnoses and treatments. Automated medical coding can considerably alleviate this administrative burden. In this paper, we reproduce, compare, and analyze state-of-the-art automated medical coding machine learning models. We show that several models underperform due to weak configurations, poorly sampled train-test splits, and insufficient evaluation. In previous work, the macro F1 score has been calculated sub-optimally, and our correction doubles it. We contribute a revised model comparison using stratified sampling and identical experimental setups, including hyperparameters and decision boundary tuning. We analyze prediction errors to validate and falsify assumptions of previous works. The analysis confirms that all models struggle with rare codes, while long documents only have a negligible impact. Finally, we present the first comprehensive results on the newly released MIMIC-IV dataset using the reproduced models. We release our code, model parameters, and new MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV training and evaluation pipelines to accommodate fair future comparisons.

Deep research agents increasingly automate complex information-seeking tasks, producing evidence-grounded reports via multi-step reasoning, tool use, and synthesis. Their growing role demands scalable, reliable evaluation, positioning LLM-as-judge as a supervision paradigm for assessing factual accuracy, evidence use, and reasoning quality. Yet the reliability of these judges for deep research agents remains poorly understood, posing a critical meta-evaluation problem: before deploying LLM judges to supervise research agents, we must first evaluate the judges themselves. Existing meta-evaluations fall short in two ways: (1) reliance on coarse, subjective human-preference agreement; (2) focus on instruction-following or verifiable tasks, leaving open-ended agent executions unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce REFLECT (REliable Fine-grained LLM judge Evaluation via Controlled inTervention), a meta-evaluation benchmark targeting fine-grained failure detection in agentic environments. REFLECT defines a detailed taxonomy of process- and outcome-level failure modes, instantiated by performing controlled and localized interventions on quality-screened agent execution traces. This yields verifiable, comprehensive, and fine-grained instances for validating the judge models. Our experiments show that current LLM judges remain unreliable: even the best-performing models achieve overall accuracies below 55% across reasoning, tool-use, and report-quality failures, with especially poor performance on evidence verification. Together, our taxonomy and findings expose systematic judge limitations, reveal tradeoffs in cost and reliability, and offer actionable guidance for building more reliable evaluation pipelines for deep research agents.

Agentic AI marks an important transition from single-step generative models to systems capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and adapting over long-lasting tasks. By integrating memory, tool use, and iterative decision cycles, these systems enable continuous, autonomous workflows in real-world environments. This survey examines the implications of agentic AI for cybersecurity. On the defensive side, agentic capabilities enable continuous monitoring, autonomous incident response, adaptive threat hunting, and fraud detection at scale. Conversely, the same properties amplify adversarial power by accelerating reconnaissance, exploitation, coordination, and social-engineering attacks. These dual-use dynamics expose fundamental gaps in existing governance, assurance, and accountability mechanisms, which were largely designed for non-autonomous and short-lived AI systems. To address these challenges, we survey emerging threat models, security frameworks, and evaluation pipelines tailored to agentic systems, and analyze systemic risks including agent collusion, cascading failures, oversight evasion, and memory poisoning. Finally, we present three representative use-case implementations that illustrate how agentic AI behaves in practical cybersecurity workflows, and how design choices shape reliability, safety, and operational effectiveness.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at operating at scale by leveraging social media and various data crawled from the web. Whereas existing corpora are diverse, their frequent lack of long-term temporal structure may however limit an LLM's ability to contextualize semantic and normative evolution of language and to capture diachronic variation. To support analysis and training for the latter, we introduce CHRONOBERG, a temporally structured corpus of English book texts spanning 250 years, curated from Project Gutenberg and enriched with a variety of temporal annotations. First, the edited nature of books enables us to quantify lexical semantic change through time-sensitive Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) analysis and to construct historically calibrated affective lexicons to support temporally grounded interpretation. With the lexicons at hand, we demonstrate a need for modern LLM-based tools to better situate their detection of discriminatory language and contextualization of sentiment across various time-periods. In fact, we show how language models trained sequentially on CHRONOBERG struggle to encode diachronic shifts in meaning, emphasizing the need for temporally aware training and evaluation pipelines, and positioning CHRONOBERG as a scalable resource for the study of linguistic change and temporal generalization. Disclaimer: This paper includes language and display of samples that could be offensive to readers. Open Access: Chronoberg is available publicly on HuggingFace at ( https://huggingface.co/datasets/spaul25/Chronoberg). Code is available at (https://github.com/paulsubarna/Chronoberg).

Time series are generated in diverse domains such as economic, traffic, health, and energy, where forecasting of future values has numerous important applications. Not surprisingly, many forecasting methods are being proposed. To ensure progress, it is essential to be able to study and compare such methods empirically in a comprehensive and reliable manner. To achieve this, we propose TFB, an automated benchmark for Time Series Forecasting (TSF) methods. TFB advances the state-of-the-art by addressing shortcomings related to datasets, comparison methods, and evaluation pipelines: 1) insufficient coverage of data domains, 2) stereotype bias against traditional methods, and 3) inconsistent and inflexible pipelines. To achieve better domain coverage, we include datasets from 10 different domains: traffic, electricity, energy, the environment, nature, economic, stock markets, banking, health, and the web. We also provide a time series characterization to ensure that the selected datasets are comprehensive. To remove biases against some methods, we include a diverse range of methods, including statistical learning, machine learning, and deep learning methods, and we also support a variety of evaluation strategies and metrics to ensure a more comprehensive evaluations of different methods. To support the integration of different methods into the benchmark and enable fair comparisons, TFB features a flexible and scalable pipeline that eliminates biases. Next, we employ TFB to perform a thorough evaluation of 21 Univariate Time Series Forecasting (UTSF) methods on 8,068 univariate time series and 14 Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) methods on 25 datasets. The benchmark code and data are available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/TFB. We have also launched an online time series leaderboard: https://decisionintelligence.github.io/OpenTS/OpenTS-Bench/.

We present ESPnet-SE, which is designed for the quick development of speech enhancement and speech separation systems in a single framework, along with the optional downstream speech recognition module. ESPnet-SE is a new project which integrates rich automatic speech recognition related models, resources and systems to support and validate the proposed front-end implementation (i.e. speech enhancement and separation).It is capable of processing both single-channel and multi-channel data, with various functionalities including dereverberation, denoising and source separation. We provide all-in-one recipes including data pre-processing, feature extraction, training and evaluation pipelines for a wide range of benchmark datasets. This paper describes the design of the toolkit, several important functionalities, especially the speech recognition integration, which differentiates ESPnet-SE from other open source toolkits, and experimental results with major benchmark datasets.

Achieving human-level manipulation requires dexterous robotic hands capable of complex object interactions. Advancing such capabilities further demands standardized benchmarks for systematic evaluation. However, existing dexterous benchmarks lack tasks that reflect the unique manipulation capabilities of dexterous hands over parallel grippers, as well as comprehensive evaluation pipelines. In this paper, we present DexJoCo, a benchmark and toolkit for task-oriented dexterous manipulation, comprising 11 functionally grounded tasks that evaluate tool-use, bimanual coordination, long-horizon execution, and reasoning. We develop a low-cost data collection system and collect 1.1K trajectories across these tasks, with support for domain randomization to assess robustness. We benchmark modern models under diverse settings, including visual and dynamics randomization, multi-task training, and action-head adaptation. Through extensive empirical analysis, we identify several important insights and common limitations of current policies in dexterous manipulation, highlighting key challenges for future research in dexterous hand robot learning. Project page available at: https://dexjoco.github.io

Context-grounded hallucinations are cases where model outputs contain information not verifiable against the source text. We study the applicability of LLMs for localizing such hallucinations, as a more practical alternative to existing complex evaluation pipelines. In the absence of established benchmarks for meta-evaluation of hallucinations localization, we construct one tailored to LLMs, involving a challenging human annotation of over 1,000 examples. We complement the benchmark with an LLM-based evaluation protocol, verifying its quality in a human evaluation. Since existing representations of hallucinations limit the types of errors that can be expressed, we propose a new representation based on free-form textual descriptions, capturing the full range of possible errors. We conduct a comprehensive study, evaluating four large-scale LLMs, which highlights the benchmark's difficulty, as the best model achieves an F1 score of only 0.67. Through careful analysis, we offer insights into optimal prompting strategies for the task and identify the main factors that make it challenging for LLMs: (1) a tendency to incorrectly flag missing details as inconsistent, despite being instructed to check only facts in the output; and (2) difficulty with outputs containing factually correct information absent from the source - and thus not verifiable - due to alignment with the model's parametric knowledge.

Mixture of Experts (MoEs) plays an important role in the development of more efficient and effective large language models (LLMs). Due to the enormous resource requirements, studying large scale MoE algorithms remain in-accessible to many researchers. This work develops LibMoE, a comprehensive and modular framework to streamline the research, training, and evaluation of MoE algorithms. Built upon three core principles: (i) modular design, (ii) efficient training; (iii) comprehensive evaluation, LibMoE brings MoE in LLMs more accessible to a wide range of researchers by standardizing the training and evaluation pipelines. Using LibMoE, we extensively benchmarked five state-of-the-art MoE algorithms over three different LLMs and 11 datasets under the zero-shot setting. The results show that despite the unique characteristics, all MoE algorithms perform roughly similar when averaged across a wide range of tasks. With the modular design and extensive evaluation, we believe LibMoE will be invaluable for researchers to make meaningful progress towards the next generation of MoE and LLMs. Project page: https://fsoft-aic.github.io/fsoft-LibMoE.github.io.

Modern LLM deployments confront a widening cost-performance spectrum: premium models deliver strong reasoning but are expensive, while lightweight models are economical yet brittle on complex tasks. Static escalation rules and keyword heuristics under-utilize this spectrum and fail to adapt across task types. We present xRouter, a tool-calling-based routing system in which a learned router can either answer directly or invoke one or more external models. The router is trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning using an explicit, cost-aware reward that encodes cost-performance trade-offs, eliminating the need for hand-engineered routing rules. Our implementation encompasses the full reinforcement learning framework, including reward and cost accounting, as well as the deployment and evaluation pipelines. Across diverse benchmarks, xRouter achieves strong cost-performance trade-offs (e.g., substantial cost reductions at comparable task completion rates), and provides empirical insights into what reliably helps learned routing and what does not, ranging from model trainability to the difficulty of eliciting sophisticated orchestration behaviors in small open models. We hope these findings and our open implementation will serve as a practical substrate for advancing learned, cost-aware LLM orchestration.

Recent neural network-based language models have benefited greatly from scaling up the size of training datasets and the number of parameters in the models themselves. Scaling can be complicated due to various factors including the need to distribute computation on supercomputer clusters (e.g., TPUs), prevent bottlenecks when infeeding data, and ensure reproducible results. In this work, we present two software libraries that ease these issues: t5x simplifies the process of building and training large language models at scale while maintaining ease of use, and seqio provides a task-based API for simple creation of fast and reproducible training data and evaluation pipelines. These open-source libraries have been used to train models with hundreds of billions of parameters on datasets with multiple terabytes of training data. Along with the libraries, we release configurations and instructions for T5-like encoder-decoder models as well as GPT-like decoder-only architectures. t5x and seqio are open source and available at https://github.com/google-research/t5x and https://github.com/google/seqio, respectively.

Evaluation and alignment pipelines for large language models increasingly rely on LLM-based judges, whose behavior is guided by natural-language rubrics and validated on benchmarks. We identify a previously under-recognized vulnerability in this workflow, which we term Rubric-Induced Preference Drift (RIPD). Even when rubric edits pass benchmark validation, they can still produce systematic and directional shifts in a judge's preferences on target domains. Because rubrics serve as a high-level decision interface, such drift can emerge from seemingly natural, criterion-preserving edits and remain difficult to detect through aggregate benchmark metrics or limited spot-checking. We further show this vulnerability can be exploited through rubric-based preference attacks, in which benchmark-compliant rubric edits steer judgments away from a fixed human or trusted reference on target domains, systematically inducing RIPD and reducing target-domain accuracy up to 9.5% (helpfulness) and 27.9% (harmlessness). When these judgments are used to generate preference labels for downstream post-training, the induced bias propagates through alignment pipelines and becomes internalized in trained policies. This leads to persistent and systematic drift in model behavior. Overall, our findings highlight evaluation rubrics as a sensitive and manipulable control interface, revealing a system-level alignment risk that extends beyond evaluator reliability alone. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZDCSlab/Rubrics-as-an-Attack-Surface. Warning: Certain sections may contain potentially harmful content that may not be appropriate for all readers.

Nova Premier is Amazon's most capable multimodal foundation model and teacher for model distillation. It processes text, images, and video with a one-million-token context window, enabling analysis of large codebases, 400-page documents, and 90-minute videos in a single prompt. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of Nova Premier's critical risk profile under the Frontier Model Safety Framework. Evaluations target three high-risk domains -- Chemical, Biological, Radiological & Nuclear (CBRN), Offensive Cyber Operations, and Automated AI R&D -- and combine automated benchmarks, expert red-teaming, and uplift studies to determine whether the model exceeds release thresholds. We summarize our methodology and report core findings. Based on this evaluation, we find that Nova Premier is safe for public release as per our commitments made at the 2025 Paris AI Safety Summit. We will continue to enhance our safety evaluation and mitigation pipelines as new risks and capabilities associated with frontier models are identified.

Document summarization is a task to shorten texts into concise and informative summaries. This paper introduces a novel dataset designed for summarizing multiple scientific articles into a section of a survey. Our contributions are: (1) SurveySum, a new dataset addressing the gap in domain-specific summarization tools; (2) two specific pipelines to summarize scientific articles into a section of a survey; and (3) the evaluation of these pipelines using multiple metrics to compare their performance. Our results highlight the importance of high-quality retrieval stages and the impact of different configurations on the quality of generated summaries.

We present StyleText, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for localized scene-text inpainting with style preservation. StyleText contains 28,518 image-mask-prompt triplets grouped into 9,932 scene families, enabling controlled evaluation of text legibility and visual consistency under shared scene context. We construct the dataset with an automated pipeline that combines LLM prompt templating, Flux-based source generation with key-value (KV) cache injection, OCR-based semantic filtering, polygon mask extraction, and mask-conditioned FluxFill augmentation. We define a reproducible evaluation protocol using normalized OCR metrics (word accuracy and character error rate) and CLIP image-image similarity with explicit preprocessing. A FluxFill+LoRA baseline trained on StyleText improves OCR accuracy substantially over initialization while maintaining scene style consistency, establishing a strong reference point for future comparisons.

Experts in machine learning leverage domain knowledge to navigate decisions in model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and resource allocation. This is particularly critical for fine-tuning language models (LMs), where repeated trials incur substantial computational overhead and environmental impact. However, no existing automated framework simultaneously tackles the entire model selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) task for resource-efficient LM fine-tuning. We introduce XAutoLM, a meta-learning-augmented AutoML framework that reuses past experiences to optimize discriminative and generative LM fine-tuning pipelines efficiently. XAutoLM learns from stored successes and failures by extracting task- and system-level meta-features to bias its sampling toward valuable configurations and away from costly dead ends. On four text classification and two question-answering benchmarks, XAutoLM surpasses zero-shot optimizer's peak F1 on five of six tasks, cuts mean evaluation time of pipelines by up to 4.5x, reduces search error ratios by up to sevenfold, and uncovers up to 50% more pipelines above the zero-shot Pareto front. In contrast, simpler memory-based baselines suffer negative transfer. We release XAutoLM and our experience store to catalyze resource-efficient, Green AI fine-tuning in the NLP community.

While the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have progressed significantly, their use in high-stakes applications have been limited due to risks of hallucination. One key approach in reducing hallucination is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but even in such setups, LLMs may still hallucinate when presented with questions outside of the knowledge base. Such behavior is unacceptable in high-stake applications where LLMs are expected to abstain from answering queries it does not have sufficient context on. In this work, we present a novel methodology for systematically evaluating out-of-knowledge base (OOKB) robustness of LLMs (whether LLMs know or do not know) in the RAG setting, without the need for manual annotation of gold standard answers. We implement our methodology in knowornot, an open-source library that enables users to develop their own customized evaluation data and pipelines for OOKB robustness. knowornot comprises four main features. Firstly, it provides a unified, high-level API that streamlines the process of setting up and running robustness benchmarks. Secondly, its modular architecture emphasizes extensibility and flexibility, allowing users to easily integrate their own LLM clients and RAG settings. Thirdly, its rigorous data modeling design ensures experiment reproducibility, reliability and traceability. Lastly, it implements a comprehensive suite of tools for users to customize their pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of knowornot by developing a challenging benchmark, PolicyBench, which spans four Question-Answer (QA) chatbots on government policies, and analyze its OOKB robustness. The source code of knowornot is available https://github.com/govtech-responsibleai/KnowOrNot.

The recent surge of open-source large language models (LLMs) enables developers to create AI-based solutions while maintaining control over aspects such as privacy and compliance, thereby providing governance and ownership of the model deployment process. To utilize these LLMs, inference engines are needed. These engines load the model's weights onto available resources, such as GPUs, and process queries to generate responses. The speed of inference, or performance, of the LLM, is critical for real-time applications, as it computes millions or billions of floating point operations per inference. Recently, advanced inference engines such as vLLM have emerged, incorporating novel mechanisms such as efficient memory management to achieve state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we analyze the performance, particularly the throughput (tokens generated per unit of time), of 20 LLMs using two inference libraries: vLLM and HuggingFace's pipelines. We investigate how various hyperparameters, which developers must configure, influence inference performance. Our results reveal that throughput landscapes are irregular, with distinct peaks, highlighting the importance of hyperparameter optimization to achieve maximum performance. We also show that applying hyperparameter optimization when upgrading or downgrading the GPU model used for inference can improve throughput from HuggingFace pipelines by an average of 9.16% and 13.7%, respectively.

Document intelligence requires accurate text extraction and reliable reasoning over document content. We introduce DISCO, a Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation, that evaluates optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines and vision-language models (VLMs) separately on parsing and question answering across diverse document types, including handwritten text, multilingual scripts, medical forms, infographics, and multi-page documents. Our evaluation shows that performance varies substantially across tasks and document characteristics, underscoring the need for complexity-aware approach selection. OCR pipelines are generally more reliable for handwriting and for long or multi-page documents, where explicit text grounding supports text-heavy reasoning, while VLMs perform better on multilingual text and visually rich layouts. Task-aware prompting yields mixed effects, improving performance on some document types while degrading it on others. These findings provide empirical guidance for selecting document processing strategies based on document structure and reasoning demands.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines must address challenges beyond simple single-document retrieval, such as interpreting visual elements (tables, charts, images), synthesizing information across documents, and providing accurate source grounding. Existing benchmarks fail to capture this complexity, often focusing on textual data, single-document comprehension, or evaluating retrieval and generation in isolation. We introduce ViDoRe v3, a comprehensive multimodal RAG benchmark featuring multi-type queries over visually rich document corpora. It covers 10 datasets across diverse professional domains, comprising ~26,000 document pages paired with 3,099 human-verified queries, each available in 6 languages. Through 12,000 hours of human annotation effort, we provide high-quality annotations for retrieval relevance, bounding box localization, and verified reference answers. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art RAG pipelines reveals that visual retrievers outperform textual ones, late-interaction models and textual reranking substantially improve performance, and hybrid or purely visual contexts enhance answer generation quality. However, current models still struggle with non-textual elements, open-ended queries, and fine-grained visual grounding. To encourage progress in addressing these challenges, the benchmark is released under a commercially permissive license at https://hf.co/vidore.

Recent advancements in Korean large language models (LLMs) have spurred numerous benchmarks and evaluation methodologies, yet the lack of a standardized evaluation framework has led to inconsistent results and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce HRET Haerae Evaluation Toolkit, an open-source, self-evolving evaluation framework tailored specifically for Korean LLMs. HRET unifies diverse evaluation methods, including logit-based scoring, exact-match, language-inconsistency penalization, and LLM-as-a-Judge assessments. Its modular, registry-based architecture integrates major benchmarks (HAE-RAE Bench, KMMLU, KUDGE, HRM8K) and multiple inference backends (vLLM, HuggingFace, OpenAI-compatible endpoints). With automated pipelines for continuous evolution, HRET provides a robust foundation for reproducible, fair, and transparent Korean NLP research.

Recent advancements in visual generative models have enabled high-quality image and video generation, opening diverse applications. However, evaluating these models often demands sampling hundreds or thousands of images or videos, making the process computationally expensive, especially for diffusion-based models with inherently slow sampling. Moreover, existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook specific user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. In contrast, humans can quickly form impressions of a model's capabilities by observing only a few samples. To mimic this, we propose the Evaluation Agent framework, which employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round, while offering detailed, user-tailored analyses. It offers four key advantages: 1) efficiency, 2) promptable evaluation tailored to diverse user needs, 3) explainability beyond single numerical scores, and 4) scalability across various models and tools. Experiments show that Evaluation Agent reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. The Evaluation Agent framework is fully open-sourced to advance research in visual generative models and their efficient evaluation.

Deep learning solutions for vulnerability detection proposed in academic research are not always accessible to developers, and their applicability in industrial settings is rarely addressed. Transferring such technologies from academia to industry presents challenges related to trustworthiness, legacy systems, limited digital literacy, and the gap between academic and industrial expertise. For deep learning in particular, performance and integration into existing workflows are additional concerns. In this work, we first evaluate the performance of CodeBERT for detecting vulnerable functions in industrial and open-source software. We analyse its cross-domain generalisation when fine-tuned on open-source data and tested on industrial data, and vice versa, also exploring strategies for handling class imbalance. Based on these results, we develop AI-DO(Automating vulnerability detection Integration for Developers' Operations), a Continuous Integration-Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)-integrated recommender system that uses fine-tuned CodeBERT to detect and localise vulnerabilities during code review without disrupting workflows. Finally, we assess the tool's perceived usefulness through a survey with the company's IT professionals. Our results show that models trained on industrial data detect vulnerabilities accurately within the same domain but lose performance on open-source code, while a deep learner fine-tuned on open data, with appropriate undersampling techniques, improves the detection of vulnerabilities.

Analyzing unstructured data, such as complex documents, has been a persistent challenge in data processing. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in this regard, leading to recent proposals for declarative frameworks for LLM-powered unstructured data processing. However, these frameworks focus on reducing cost when executing user-specified operations using LLMs, rather than improving accuracy, executing most operations as-is. This is problematic for complex tasks and data, where LLM outputs for user-defined operations are often inaccurate, even with optimized prompts. We present DocETL, a system that optimizes complex document processing pipelines, while accounting for LLM shortcomings. DocETL offers a declarative interface for users to define such pipelines and uses an agent-based framework to automatically optimize them, leveraging novel agent-based rewrites (that we call {\em rewrite directives}) and an optimization and evaluation framework that we introduce. We introduce {\em (i)} logical rewriting of pipelines, tailored for LLM-based tasks, {\em (ii)} an agent-guided plan evaluation mechanism that synthesizes and orchestrates task-specific validation prompts, and {\em (iii)} an optimization algorithm that efficiently finds promising plans, considering the time constraints of LLM-based plan generation and evaluation. Our evaluation on three different unstructured document analysis tasks demonstrates that DocETL finds plans with outputs that are 1.34 to 4.6times higher quality (e.g., more accurate, comprehensive) than well-engineered baselines, addressing a critical gap in existing declarative frameworks for unstructured data analysis. DocETL is open-source at docetl.org, and as of October 2024, has amassed over 800 GitHub Stars, with users spanning a variety of domains.

Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.

We present ATANT (Automated Test for Acceptance of Narrative Truth), an open evaluation framework for measuring continuity in AI systems: the ability to persist, update, disambiguate, and reconstruct meaningful context across time. While the AI industry has produced memory components (RAG pipelines, vector databases, long context windows, profile layers), no published framework formally defines or measures whether these components produce genuine continuity. We define continuity as a system property with 7 required properties, introduce a 10-checkpoint evaluation methodology that operates without an LLM in the evaluation loop, and present a narrative test corpus of 250 stories comprising 1,835 verification questions across 6 life domains. We evaluate a reference implementation across 5 test suite iterations, progressing from 58% (legacy architecture) to 100% in isolated mode (250 stories) and 100% in 50-story cumulative mode, with 96% at 250-story cumulative scale. The cumulative result is the primary measure: when 250 distinct life narratives coexist in the same database, the system must retrieve the correct fact for the correct context without cross-contamination. ATANT is system-agnostic, model-independent, and designed as a sequenced methodology for building and validating continuity systems. The framework specification, example stories, and evaluation protocol are available at https://github.com/Kenotic-Labs/ATANT. The full 250-story corpus will be released incrementally.

Prior work evaluates code generation bias primarily through simple conditional statements, which represent only a narrow slice of real-world programming and reveal solely overt, explicitly encoded bias. We demonstrate that this approach dramatically underestimates bias in practice by examining a more realistic task: generating machine learning (ML) pipelines. Testing both code-specialized and general-instruction large language models, we find that generated pipelines exhibit significant bias during feature selection. Sensitive attributes appear in 87.7% of cases on average, despite models demonstrably excluding irrelevant features (e.g., including "race" while dropping "favorite color" for credit scoring). This bias is substantially more prevalent than that captured by conditional statements, where sensitive attributes appear in only 59.2% of cases. These findings are robust across prompt mitigation strategies, varying numbers of attributes, and different pipeline difficulty levels. Our results challenge simple conditionals as valid proxies for bias evaluation and suggest current benchmarks underestimate bias risk in practical deployments.

Automatically generating source code from natural language using large language models (LLMs) is becoming common, yet security vulnerabilities persist despite advances in fine tuning and prompting. In this work, we systematically evaluate whether multi LLM ensembles and collaborative strategies can meaningfully improve secure code generation. We present MULTI-LLMSECCODEEVAL, a framework for assessing and enhancing security across the vulnerability management lifecycle by combining multiple LLMs with static analysis and structured collaboration. Using SecLLMEval and SecLLMHolmes, we benchmark ten pipelines spanning single model, ensemble, collaborative, and hybrid designs. Our results show that ensemble pipelines augmented with static analysis improve secure code generation over single LLM baselines by up to 47.3% on SecLLMEval and 19.3% on SecLLMHolmes, while purely LLM based collaborative pipelines yield smaller gains of 8.9% to 22.3%. Hybrid pipelines that integrate ensembling, detection, and patching achieve the strongest security performance, outperforming the best ensemble baseline by 1.78% to 4.72% and collaborative baselines by 19.81% to 26.78%. Ablation studies reveal that model scale alone does not ensure security. Smaller, structured multi model ensembles consistently outperform large monolithic LLMs. Overall, our findings demonstrate that secure code does not emerge from scale, but from carefully orchestrated multi model system design.

The growing adoption of multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) pipelines for vision-centric tasks (e.g. visual QA) introduces important privacy challenges. In particular, while mRAG provides a practical capability to connect private datasets to improve model performance, it risks the leakage of private information from these datasets during inference. In this paper, we perform an empirical study to analyze the privacy risks inherent in the mRAG pipeline observed through standard model prompting. Specifically, we implement a case study that attempts to infer the inclusion of a visual asset, e.g. image, in the mRAG, and if present leak the metadata, e.g. caption, related to it. Our findings highlight the need for privacy-preserving mechanisms and motivate future research on mRAG privacy.

Tabular encoders are usually evaluated inside task-specific end-to-end pipelines, so models from different training paradigms are difficult to compare directly even when they operate on similar tabular signals. We introduce TRL-Bench, a multi-granular tabular representation learning (TRL) benchmark that standardizes cross-paradigm representation-level evaluation: each encoder exports row-, column-, or table embeddings through its supported wrapper, and shared lightweight heads probe them across three suites: TRL-CTbench (column/table), TRL-Rbench (row), and TRL-DLTE (compositional Data-Lake Table Enrichment spanning all three granularities). To support this standardized setting, we release curated benchmark assets and task reformulations, including 50 OpenML tables with 123 verified targets, 16 row-pair linkage rewrites, and a 47,772-table DLTE lake derived from 1,379 parent tables. Across 20 models and 16 tasks, TRL-Bench shows that once downstream conditions are standardized, encoder quality is capability-specific rather than captured by a single leaderboard. In TRL-CTbench, generic text encoders often lead on tasks with strong surface-text signal, while tabular specialists win where their pretraining objective aligns with the task. In TRL-Rbench, within-table prediction and cross-table linkage favor different training regimes, with atomic linkage performance correlating strongly with the row-matching stage of DLTE pipelines. In TRL-DLTE, the strongest pipelines combine capability-matched specialists rather than reuse a single encoder, and top end-to-end quality depends on non-additive compositional fit rather than per-stage marginal rank alone. TRL-Bench provides a common protocol for measuring reusable signal in exported tabular representations under shared downstream conditions. Code and data: https://github.com/LOGO-CUHKSZ/TRL-Bench

End-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems are increasingly replacing cascaded pipelines for voice-based human-AI interaction, processing raw audio directly without intermediate transcription. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate these models on synthetic speech and single-turn tasks, leaving realistic multi-turn conversational ability underexplored. We introduce Audio MultiChallenge, an open-source benchmark to evaluate E2E spoken dialogue systems under natural multi-turn interaction patterns. Building on the text-based MultiChallenge framework, which evaluates Inference Memory, Instruction Retention, and Self Coherence, we introduce a new axis Voice Editing that tests robustness to mid-utterance speech repairs and backtracking. We further augment each axis to the audio modality, such as introducing Audio-Cue challenges for Inference Memory that require recalling ambient sounds and paralinguistic signals beyond semantic content. We curate 452 conversations from 47 speakers with 1,712 instance-specific rubrics through a hybrid audio-native agentic and human-in-the-loop pipeline that exposes model failures at scale while preserving natural disfluencies found in unscripted human speech. Our evaluation of proprietary and open-source models reveals that even frontier models struggle on our benchmark, with Gemini 3 Pro Preview (Thinking), our highest-performing model achieving a 54.65% pass rate. Error analysis shows that models fail most often on our new axes and that Self Coherence degrades with longer audio context. These failures reflect difficulty of tracking edits, audio cues, and long-range context in natural spoken dialogue. Audio MultiChallenge provides a reproducible testbed to quantify them and drive improvements in audio-native multi-turn interaction capability.

PDF files are primarily intended for human reading rather than automated processing. In addition, the heterogeneous content of PDFs, such as text, tables, and images, poses significant challenges for parsing and information extraction. To address these difficulties, both practitioners and researchers are increasingly developing new methods, including the promising Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to automated PDF processing. However, there is no comprehensive study investigating how different components and design choices affect the performance of a RAG system for understanding PDFs. In this paper, we propose such a study (1) by focusing on Question Answering, a specific language understanding task, and (2) by leveraging two benchmarks from the financial domain, including TableQuest, our newly generated, publicly available benchmark. We systematically examine multiple PDF parsers and chunking strategies (with varied overlap), along with their potential synergies in preserving document structure and ensuring answer correctness. Overall, our results offer practical guidelines for building robust RAG pipelines for PDF understanding.

This paper introduces BioAgent Bench, a benchmark dataset and an evaluation suite designed for measuring the performance and robustness of AI agents in common bioinformatics tasks. The benchmark contains curated end-to-end tasks (e.g., RNA-seq, variant calling, metagenomics) with prompts that specify concrete output artifacts to support automated assessment, including stress testing under controlled perturbations. We evaluate frontier closed-source and open-weight models across multiple agent harnesses, and use an LLM-based grader to score pipeline progress and outcome validity. We find that frontier agents can complete multi-step bioinformatics pipelines without elaborate custom scaffolding, often producing the requested final artifacts reliably. However, robustness tests reveal failure modes under controlled perturbations (corrupted inputs, decoy files, and prompt bloat), indicating that correct high-level pipeline construction does not guarantee reliable step-level reasoning. Finally, because bioinformatics workflows may involve sensitive patient data, proprietary references, or unpublished IP, closed-source models can be unsuitable under strict privacy constraints; in such settings, open-weight models may be preferable despite lower completion rates. We release the dataset and evaluation suite publicly.

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains.

Long-context LLM agents must access the right evidence from large environments and use it faithfully. However, the popular Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) evaluation mostly measures benign span localization. The needle is near-unique, and the haystack is largely irrelevant. We introduce EverMemBench-S (EMB-S), an adversarial NIAH-style benchmark built on a 326M-token MemoryBank. While the full MemoryBank spans 326M tokens for retrieval-based (RAG) evaluation, we evaluate native long-context models only at scales that fit within each model's context window (up to 1M tokens in this work) to ensure a fair comparison. EMB-S pairs queries with collision-tested near-miss hard negatives and gold evidence sets spanning one or more documents, validated via human screening and LLM verification. We also propose a decoupled diagnostic protocol that reports evidence access (document-ID localization) separately from end-to-end QA quality under full-context prompting. This enables consistent diagnosis for both native long-context prompting and retrieval pipelines. Across a reference-corpus ladder from domain-isolated 64K contexts to a globally shared 326M-token environment, we observe a clear reality gap. Systems that saturate benign NIAH degrade sharply in evidence access under semantic interference. These results indicate that semantic discrimination, not context length alone, is the dominant bottleneck for long-context memory at scale.

Recent surveys on data augmentation for natural language processing have reported different techniques and advancements in the field. Several frameworks, tools, and repositories promote the implementation of text data augmentation pipelines. However, a lack of evaluation criteria and standards for method comparison due to different tasks, metrics, datasets, architectures, and experimental settings makes comparisons meaningless. Also, a lack of methods unification exists and text data augmentation research would benefit from unified metrics to compare different augmentation methods. Thus, academics and the industry endeavor relevant evaluation metrics for text data augmentation techniques. The contribution of this work is to provide a taxonomy of evaluation metrics for text augmentation methods and serve as a direction for a unified benchmark. The proposed taxonomy organizes categories that include tools for implementation and metrics calculation. Finally, with this study, we intend to present opportunities to explore the unification and standardization of text data augmentation metrics.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established standardized evaluation benchmarks as the primary instrument for model comparison. Yet, their reliability is increasingly questioned due to sensitivity to shallow variations in input prompts. This paper examines how controlled, truth-conditionally equivalent lexical and syntactic perturbations affect the absolute performance and relative ranking of 23 contemporary LLMs across three benchmarks: MMLU, SQuAD, and AMEGA. We employ two linguistically principled pipelines to generate meaning-preserving variations: one performing synonym substitution for lexical changes, and another using dependency parsing to determine applicable syntactic transformations. Results show that lexical perturbations consistently induce substantial, statistically significant performance degradation across nearly all models and tasks, while syntactic perturbations have more heterogeneous effects, occasionally improving results. Both perturbation types destabilize model leaderboards on complex tasks. Furthermore, model robustness did not consistently scale with model size, revealing strong task dependence. Overall, the findings suggest that LLMs rely more on surface-level lexical patterns than on abstract linguistic competence, underscoring the need for robustness testing as a standard component of LLM evaluation.

To generate evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled medical devices, AI models need to be evaluated on a diverse population of patient cases, some of which may not be readily available. We propose an evaluation approach for testing medical imaging AI models that relies on in silico imaging pipelines in which stochastic digital models of human anatomy (in object space) with and without pathology are imaged using a digital replica imaging acquisition system to generate realistic synthetic image datasets. Here, we release M-SYNTH, a dataset of cohorts with four breast fibroglandular density distributions imaged at different exposure levels using Monte Carlo x-ray simulations with the publicly available Virtual Imaging Clinical Trial for Regulatory Evaluation (VICTRE) toolkit. We utilize the synthetic dataset to analyze AI model performance and find that model performance decreases with increasing breast density and increases with higher mass density, as expected. As exposure levels decrease, AI model performance drops with the highest performance achieved at exposure levels lower than the nominal recommended dose for the breast type.

As LLM agents are increasingly built around reusable skills, a central challenge is no longer only whether agents can use provided skills, but whether they can generate correct, reusable, and executable skills from repositories and documents. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate the efficacy of given skills or the ability of agents to solve downstream tasks from raw context, but they do not isolate skill generation itself as the object of study. We introduce SkillGenBench, a benchmark for evaluating skill generation pipelines under a unified and controlled protocol. In SkillGenBench, a generator receives raw corpora and produces standardized skill artifacts, which are then executed under fixed harnesses and assessed with unified evaluation procedures. The benchmark covers two generation regimes: task-conditioned generation, where a task-specific skill is synthesized after the task is revealed, and task-agnostic generation, where a reusable skill library must be distilled before downstream tasks are known. It also spans two complementary procedural sources: repository-grounded instances, where procedures are distributed across code, configuration, and scripts, and document-grounded instances, where procedures and constraints must be distilled from long-form text. We provide standardized task specifications, pinned environments, and evaluation protocols centered on deterministic execution-based checks, supplemented by auxiliary signals for diagnosis. Experiments across a range of skill-generation methods and backbones show substantial performance variation, highlight the difficulty of reusable skill distillation, and reveal distinct failure modes in skill generation from software repositories versus long-form documents. SkillGenBench establishes a reproducible testbed for studying skill generation as an independent research problem in agent systems.

Large language models (LLMs) now mediate many web-based mental-health, crisis, and other emotionally sensitive services, yet their psychosocial safety in these settings remains poorly understood and weakly evaluated. We present DialogGuard, a multi-agent framework for assessing psychosocial risks in LLM-generated responses along five high-severity dimensions: privacy violations, discriminatory behaviour, mental manipulation, psychological harm, and insulting behaviour. DialogGuard can be applied to diverse generative models through four LLM-as-a-judge pipelines, including single-agent scoring, dual-agent correction, multi-agent debate, and stochastic majority voting, grounded in a shared three-level rubric usable by both human annotators and LLM judges. Using PKU-SafeRLHF with human safety annotations, we show that multi-agent mechanisms detect psychosocial risks more accurately than non-LLM baselines and single-agent judging; dual-agent correction and majority voting provide the best trade-off between accuracy, alignment with human ratings, and robustness, while debate attains higher recall but over-flags borderline cases. We release Dialog-Guard as open-source software with a web interface that provides per-dimension risk scores and explainable natural-language rationales. A formative study with 12 practitioners illustrates how it supports prompt design, auditing, and supervision of web-facing applications for vulnerable users.

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in instruction-following and context-understanding lead to the era of agents with numerous applications. Among these, task planning agents have become especially prominent in realistic scenarios involving complex internal pipelines, such as context understanding, tool management, and response generation. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate agent performance based on task completion as a proxy for overall effectiveness. We hypothesize that merely improving task completion is misaligned with maximizing user satisfaction, as users interact with the entire agentic process and not only the end result. To address this gap, we propose PIPA, a unified evaluation protocol that conceptualizes the behavioral process of interactive task planning agents within a partially observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) paradigm. The proposed protocol offers a comprehensive assessment of agent performance through a set of atomic evaluation criteria, allowing researchers and practitioners to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses within the agent's decision-making pipeline. Our analyses show that agents excel in different behavioral stages, with user satisfaction shaped by both outcomes and intermediate behaviors. We also highlight future directions, including systems that leverage multiple agents and the limitations of user simulators in task planning.

In hybrid human-machine deferral frameworks, a classifier can defer uncertain cases to human decision-makers (who are often themselves fallible). Prior work on simultaneous training of such classifier and deferral models has typically assumed access to an oracle during training to obtain true class labels for training samples, but in practice there often is no such oracle. In contrast, we consider a "closed" decision-making pipeline in which the same fallible human decision-makers used in deferral also provide training labels. How can imperfect and biased human expert labels be used to train a fair and accurate deferral framework? Our key insight is that by exploiting weak prior information, we can match experts to input examples to ensure fairness and accuracy of the resulting deferral framework, even when imperfect and biased experts are used in place of ground truth labels. The efficacy of our approach is shown both by theoretical analysis and by evaluation on two tasks.

Tiny QA Benchmark++ (TQB++) presents an ultra-lightweight, multilingual smoke-test suite designed to give large-language-model (LLM) pipelines a unit-test style safety net dataset that runs in seconds with minimal cost. Born out of the tight feedback-loop demands building the Comet Opik prompt-optimization SDK, where waiting on heavyweight benchmarks breaks developer flow. TQB++ couples a 52-item English gold set (less than 20 kB) with a tiny synthetic-data generator pypi package built on provider-agnostic LiteLLM. The generator lets practitioners mint their own tiny packs in any language, domain, or difficulty, while ten ready-made packs already cover Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Every dataset ships with Croissant metadata and plug-and-play files for OpenAI-Evals, LangChain, and standard CI tools, so teams can drop deterministic micro-benchmarks directly into pull-request gates, prompt-engineering loops, and production dashboards without touching GPU budgets. A complete TQB++ run adds only a few seconds to pipeline latency yet reliably flags prompt-template errors, tokenizer drift, and fine-tuning side-effects long before full-scale suites like MMLU or BIG-Bench would finish configuring. The entire framework is released to accelerate continuous, resource-efficient quality assurance across the generative-AI ecosystem.

Feature engineering remains a cornerstone of tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for its automation, giving rise to LLM-powered Automated Tabular Feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the field lacks standardized, cost-aware evaluation platforms, and the combinatorial explosion of design choices obscures true algorithmic progress. To bridge these gaps, we systematically deconstruct 15 representative LATTE methods into a unified 6-dimensional taxonomy. Based on this abstraction, we introduce LATTEArena, a standardized, modular, and extensible benchmarking framework that decouples monolithic pipelines into reusable execution blocks. By distilling the massive combinatorial space, we evaluate 24 core LATTE configurations across 7 research questions. Our head-to-head benchmarking goes beyond predictive accuracy to quantify token efficiency and execution robustness, yielding 17 empirical findings on cost-effectiveness trade-offs. Furthermore, we provide 3 concrete recommendations for optimal real-world deployment. By enabling controlled component-level comparisons, LATTEArena shifts the paradigm from ad-hoc prompt engineering to systematic context management. All code, datasets, and over 4,000 execution logs are publicly available to foster a dynamic, community-driven benchmark. Our framework, leaderboard, and all artifacts are hosted on the LATTEArena project website at https://goodenhak.github.io/LATTEArena.

Multi-modal generative document parsing systems challenge traditional evaluation: unlike deterministic OCR or layout models, they often produce semantically correct yet structurally divergent outputs. Conventional metrics-CER, WER, IoU, or TEDS-misclassify such diversity as error, penalizing valid interpretations and obscuring system behavior. We introduce SCORE (Structural and COntent Robust Evaluation), an interpretation-agnostic framework that integrates (i) adjusted edit distance for robust content fidelity, (ii) token-level diagnostics to distinguish hallucinations from omissions, (iii) table evaluation with spatial tolerance and semantic alignment, and (iv) hierarchy-aware consistency checks. Together, these dimensions enable evaluation that embraces representational diversity while enforcing semantic rigor. Across 1,114 pages spanning a holistic benchmark and a field dataset, SCORE consistently revealed cross-dataset performance patterns missed by standard metrics. In 2-5% of pages with ambiguous table structures, traditional metrics penalized systems by 12-25% on average, leading to distorted rankings. SCORE corrected these cases, recovering equivalence between alternative but valid interpretations. Moreover, by normalizing generative outputs into a format-agnostic representation, SCORE reproduces traditional scores (e.g., table F1 up to 0.93) without requiring object-detection pipelines, demonstrating that generative parsing alone suffices for comprehensive evaluation. By exposing how interpretive diversity impacts evaluation outcomes and providing multi-dimensional, interpretable diagnostics, SCORE establishes foundational principles for semantically grounded, fair, and practical benchmarking of modern document parsing systems.

Evaluating AI tutor responses requires more than factual correctness: tutors must identify mistakes, locate errors, provide guidance, and offer actionable next steps. We present GRADE, a systematic study of open-source models for pedagogical ability assessment in student-tutor dialogues. Building on the BEA 2025 TutorMind setting, we evaluate 120 configurations across five language models, zero-shot inference, LoRA fine-tuning, synthetic augmentation, CoT+Reasoning, and single-task versus multitask formulations. Gemma3-12B performs best for single-task evaluation, while Gemma3-27B in 8-bit precision is more reliable for multitask prediction. We find that augmentation helps models that struggle with the original data, verification adds limited gains despite higher cost, and CoT+Reasoning is more useful for synthetic data generation than direct classification. We further show that LoRA fine-tuning on structured classification objectives interferes with instruction-following behavior under thinking mode, redirecting generation away from the required evaluation format. Carbon analysis shows that model choice and reasoning mode substantially affect emissions. Overall, GRADE shows that carefully selected open-source LoRA pipelines can match or surpass proprietary and ensemble-based systems on key pedagogical dimensions, with code and data available at https://github.com/pvbgeek/GRADE.

As the smartphone market leader, Android has been a prominent target for malware attacks. The number of malicious applications (apps) identified for it has increased continually over the past decade, creating an immense challenge for all parties involved. For market holders and researchers, in particular, the large number of samples has made manual malware detection unfeasible, leading to an influx of research that investigate Machine Learning (ML) approaches to automate this process. However, while some of the proposed approaches achieve high performance, rapidly evolving Android malware has made them unable to maintain their accuracy over time. This has created a need in the community to conduct further research, and build more flexible ML pipelines. Doing so, however, is currently hindered by a lack of systematic overview of the existing literature, to learn from and improve upon the existing solutions. Existing survey papers often focus only on parts of the ML process (e.g., data collection or model deployment), while omitting other important stages, such as model evaluation and explanation. In this paper, we address this problem with a review of 42 highly-cited papers, spanning a decade of research (from 2011 to 2021). We introduce a novel procedural taxonomy of the published literature, covering how they have used ML algorithms, what features they have engineered, which dimensionality reduction techniques they have employed, what datasets they have employed for training, and what their evaluation and explanation strategies are. Drawing from this taxonomy, we also identify gaps in knowledge and provide ideas for improvement and future work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant performance improvements across various cognitive tasks. An emerging application is using LLMs to enhance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities. These systems require LLMs to understand user queries, retrieve relevant information, and synthesize coherent and accurate responses. Given the increasing real-world deployment of such systems, comprehensive evaluation becomes crucial. To this end, we propose FRAMES (Factuality, Retrieval, And reasoning MEasurement Set), a high-quality evaluation dataset designed to test LLMs' ability to provide factual responses, assess retrieval capabilities, and evaluate the reasoning required to generate final answers. While previous work has provided datasets and benchmarks to evaluate these abilities in isolation, FRAMES offers a unified framework that provides a clearer picture of LLM performance in end-to-end RAG scenarios. Our dataset comprises challenging multi-hop questions that require the integration of information from multiple sources. We present baseline results demonstrating that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with this task, achieving 0.40 accuracy with no retrieval. The accuracy is significantly improved with our proposed multi-step retrieval pipeline, achieving an accuracy of 0.66 (>50% improvement). We hope our work will help bridge evaluation gaps and assist in developing more robust and capable RAG systems.

Reward models (RMs) provide critical feedback signals for LLM post-training, notably in reinforced fine-tuning (RFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines. However, current reward evaluation relies on heterogeneous criteria such as rule-based verifiers, ground-truth references, procedural checklists, and complex rubrics, where a unified mechanism to integrate all types of evidence remains unexplored. To this end, we propose Skill Reward Model (Skill-RM), a unified framework that reformulates reward modeling as the execution of a reusable Reward-Evaluation Skill. By treating reward computation as a structured agentic task, Skill-RM provides a consistent interface to orchestrate heterogeneous resources, dynamically selecting and aggregating evidence tailored to the specific requirements of each input. This approach enables the reward model to move beyond static evaluation, ensuring consistency and transparency across diverse tasks. Extensive experiments on reward benchmarks and downstream applications, including best-of-N selection and reinforcement learning, demonstrate that Skill-RM consistently outperforms traditional judge baselines. Our findings suggest that Skill-RM not only provides a unified solution for reward modeling but also achieves superior performance through the strategic and dynamic orchestration of evidence. The code is at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/Skill-RM.

We introduce RAGAs (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a framework for reference-free evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. RAG systems are composed of a retrieval and an LLM based generation module, and provide LLMs with knowledge from a reference textual database, which enables them to act as a natural language layer between a user and textual databases, reducing the risk of hallucinations. Evaluating RAG architectures is, however, challenging because there are several dimensions to consider: the ability of the retrieval system to identify relevant and focused context passages, the ability of the LLM to exploit such passages in a faithful way, or the quality of the generation itself. With RAGAs, we put forward a suite of metrics which can be used to evaluate these different dimensions without having to rely on ground truth human annotations. We posit that such a framework can crucially contribute to faster evaluation cycles of RAG architectures, which is especially important given the fast adoption of LLMs.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio perception and language understanding within a unified framework, enabling a wide range of real-world applications. Despite recent advances, evaluation for LALMs remains heavily underspecified relative to real-world requirements: most lack true linguistic and cultural authenticity, while others fail to capture acoustic realism. To bridge this gap, we propose GlobeAudio, a multilingual and multicultural benchmark designed to evaluate naturalistic audio understanding. GlobeAudio consists of 5,637 multiple-choice questions across six typologically diverse languages, expertly crafted by native speakers grounded on naturally occurring audio. In order to do well, models must possess higher-level auditory reasoning skills and culturally grounded interpretation. We systematically evaluate representative closed-source and open-source LALMs, as well as cascaded ASR-LLM pipelines. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps under natural acoustic conditions, particularly for open-source models and low-resource languages. These findings highlight critical limitations of current LALMs and underscore the importance of naturalistic audio evaluation for future audio-language systems. GlobeAudio can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/iNLP-Lab/GlobeAudio .

Reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF) is a popular paradigm for improving the instruction-following abilities of powerful pre-trained language models. RLAIF first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using demonstrations from a teacher model and then further fine-tunes the model with reinforcement learning (RL), using feedback from a critic model. While recent popular open-source models have demonstrated substantial improvements in performance from the RL step, in this paper we question whether the complexity of this RL step is truly warranted for AI feedback. We show that the improvements of the RL step are virtually entirely due to the widespread practice of using a weaker teacher model (e.g. GPT-3.5) for SFT data collection than the critic (e.g., GPT-4) used for AI feedback generation. Specifically, we show that simple supervised fine-tuning with GPT-4 as the teacher outperforms existing RLAIF pipelines. More generally, we find that the gains from RLAIF vary substantially across base model families, test-time evaluation protocols, and critic models. Finally, we provide a mechanistic explanation for when SFT may outperform the full two-step RLAIF pipeline as well as suggestions for making RLAIF maximally useful in practice.

With the booming demand for machine learning applications, it has been recognized that the number of knowledgeable data scientists can not scale with the growing data volumes and application needs in our digital world. In response to this demand, several automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks have been developed to fill the gap of human expertise by automating the process of building machine learning pipelines. Each framework comes with different heuristics-based design decisions. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of the performance characteristics of six popular AutoML frameworks, namely, AutoWeka, AutoSKlearn, TPOT, Recipe, ATM, and SmartML, across 100 data sets from established AutoML benchmark suites. Our experimental evaluation considers different aspects for its comparison, including the performance impact of several design decisions, including time budget, size of search space, meta-learning, and ensemble construction. The results of our study reveal various interesting insights that can significantly guide and impact the design of AutoML frameworks.

Evaluating the alignment between textual prompts and generated images is critical for ensuring the reliability and usability of text-to-image (T2I) models. However, most existing evaluation methods rely on coarse-grained metrics or static QA pipelines, which lack fine-grained interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. To address this, we propose REVEALER, a unified framework for element-level alignment evaluation based on reinforcement-guided visual reasoning. Adopting a structured "grounding-reasoning-conclusion" paradigm, our method enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly localize semantic elements and derive interpretable alignment judgments. We optimize the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) using a composite reward function that incorporates structural format, grounding accuracy, and alignment fidelity. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks-EvalMuse-40K, RichHF, MHaluBench, and GenAI-Bench-demonstrate that REVEALER achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our approach consistently outperforms both strong proprietary models and supervised baselines while demonstrating superior inference efficiency compared to existing iterative visual reasoning methods.

Quantization techniques can reduce the size of Deep Neural Networks and improve inference latency and throughput by taking advantage of high throughput integer instructions. In this paper we review the mathematical aspects of quantization parameters and evaluate their choices on a wide range of neural network models for different application domains, including vision, speech, and language. We focus on quantization techniques that are amenable to acceleration by processors with high-throughput integer math pipelines. We also present a workflow for 8-bit quantization that is able to maintain accuracy within 1% of the floating-point baseline on all networks studied, including models that are more difficult to quantize, such as MobileNets and BERT-large.

In the dynamic landscape of generative NLP, traditional text processing pipelines limit research flexibility and reproducibility, as they are tailored to specific dataset, task, and model combinations. The escalating complexity, involving system prompts, model-specific formats, instructions, and more, calls for a shift to a structured, modular, and customizable solution. Addressing this need, we present Unitxt, an innovative library for customizable textual data preparation and evaluation tailored to generative language models. Unitxt natively integrates with common libraries like HuggingFace and LM-eval-harness and deconstructs processing flows into modular components, enabling easy customization and sharing between practitioners. These components encompass model-specific formats, task prompts, and many other comprehensive dataset processing definitions. The Unitxt-Catalog centralizes these components, fostering collaboration and exploration in modern textual data workflows. Beyond being a tool, Unitxt is a community-driven platform, empowering users to build, share, and advance their pipelines collaboratively. Join the Unitxt community at https://github.com/IBM/unitxt!

Industrial asset operations workflows are latency-sensitive because a single user query may require coordination over sensor data, work orders, failure modes, forecasting tools, and domain-specific agents. We evaluate this problem on AssetOpsBench (AOB), an industrial agent benchmark whose plan-execute pipeline exposes repeated overhead from tool discovery, LLM planning, MCP tool execution, and final summarization. Existing LLM caching techniques such as KV-cache reuse and embedding-based semantic caching were designed for chatbot serving and break down when output validity depends on time, asset, or sensor parameters. We propose two complementary optimization layers for AOB plan-execute pipelines: a temporal semantic cache and a set of MCP workflow optimizations combining disk-backed tool-discovery caching and dependency-aware parallel step execution. MCP workflow optimizations corresponded to a 1.67x speedup and reduced median end-to-end latency by about 40.0% while the temporal-cache benchmark achieved a median of 30.6x speedup on cache hits. Beyond the speedup, our results expose a concrete failure mode of pure semantic caching for parameter-rich industrial queries, providing a critical analysis of how caching choices interact with evaluation correctness in MCP-backed agent benchmarks.

Tokenization is a pivotal design choice for neural language modeling in morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Turkish, where productive agglutination challenges both vocabulary efficiency and morphological fidelity. Prior studies have explored tokenizer families and vocabulary sizes but typically (i) vary vocabulary without systematically controlling the tokenizer's training corpus, (ii) provide limited intrinsic diagnostics, and (iii) evaluate a narrow slice of downstream tasks. We present the first comprehensive, principled study of Turkish subword tokenization; a "subwords manifest", that jointly varies vocabulary size and tokenizer training corpus size (data and vocabulary coupling), compares multiple tokenizer families under matched parameter budgets (WordPiece, morphology level, and character baselines), and evaluates across semantic (NLI, STS, sentiment analysis, NER), syntactic (POS, dependency parsing), and morphology-sensitive probes. To explain why tokenizers succeed or fail, we introduce a morphology-aware diagnostic toolkit that goes beyond coarse aggregates to boundary-level micro/macro F1, decoupled lemma atomicity vs. surface boundary hits, over/under-segmentation indices, character/word edit distances (CER/WER), continuation rates, and affix-type coverage and token-level atomicity. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) a systematic investigation of the vocabulary-corpus-success triad; (ii) a unified, morphology-aware evaluation framework linking intrinsic diagnostics to extrinsic outcomes; (iii) controlled comparisons identifying when character-level and morphology-level tokenization pay off; and (iv) an open-source release of evaluation code, tokenizer pipelines, and models. As the first work of its kind, this "subwords manifest" delivers actionable guidance for building effective tokenizers in MRLs and establishes a reproducible foundation for future research.

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is primarily driven by Diffusion Models (DM) which rely on random Gaussian noise. Thus, like playing the slots at a casino, a DM will produce different results given the same user-defined inputs. This imposes a gambler's burden: To perform multiple generation cycles to obtain a satisfactory result. However, even though DMs use stochastic sampling to seed generation, the distribution of generated content quality highly depends on the prompt and the generative ability of a DM with respect to it. To account for this, we propose Naïve PAINE for improving the generative quality of Diffusion Models by leveraging T2I preference benchmarks. We directly predict the numerical quality of an image from the initial noise and given prompt. Naïve PAINE then selects a handful of quality noises and forwards them to the DM for generation. Further, Naïve PAINE provides feedback on the DM generative quality given the prompt and is lightweight enough to seamlessly fit into existing DM pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate that Naïve PAINE outperforms existing approaches on several prompt corpus benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to evaluate the quality of LLM generations and responses, but this leads to significant challenges: high API costs, uncertain reliability, inflexible pipelines, and inherent biases. To address these, we introduce PAJAMA (Program-As-a-Judge for Automated Model Assessment), a new alternative that uses LLMs to synthesize executable judging programs instead of directly scoring responses. These synthesized programs can be stored and run locally, costing orders of magnitude less while providing interpretable, and auditable judging logic that can be easily adapted. Program-based judges mitigate biases, improving judgment consistency by 15.83% and reducing biased responses by 23.7% on average compared to a Qwen2.5-14B-based LLM-as-a-judge. When program judgments are distilled into a model, PAJAMA outperforms LLM-as-a-judge on the challenging CHAT-HARD subset of RewardBench, outperforming metrics by 2.19% on Prometheus and 8.67% on the JudgeLM dataset, all at three orders of magnitude lower cost.

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for software maintenance tasks such as automated program repair (APR). APR agents automatically fetch GitHub issues and use backend LLMs to generate patches that fix the reported bugs. However, existing work primarily focuses on the functional correctness of APR-generated patches, whether they pass hidden or regression tests, while largely ignoring potential security risks. Given the openness of platforms like GitHub, where any user can raise issues and participate in discussions, an important question arises: Can an adversarial user submit a valid issue on GitHub that misleads an LLM-based agent into generating a functionally correct but vulnerable patch? To answer this question, we propose SWExploit, which generates adversarial issue statements designed to make APR agents produce patches that are functionally correct yet vulnerable. SWExploit operates in three main steps: (1) program analysis to identify potential injection points for vulnerable payloads; (2) adversarial issue generation to provide misleading reproduction and error information while preserving the original issue semantics; and (3) iterative refinement of the adversarial issue statements based on the outputs of the APR agents. Empirical evaluation on three agent pipelines and five backend LLMs shows that SWExploit can produce patches that are both functionally correct and vulnerable (the attack success rate on the correct patch could reach 0.91, whereas the baseline ASRs are all below 0.20). Based on our evaluation, we are the first to challenge the traditional assumption that a patch passing all tests is inherently reliable and secure, highlighting critical limitations in the current evaluation paradigm for APR agents.

Data science tasks involving tabular data present complex challenges that require sophisticated problem-solving approaches. We propose AutoKaggle, a powerful and user-centric framework that assists data scientists in completing daily data pipelines through a collaborative multi-agent system. AutoKaggle implements an iterative development process that combines code execution, debugging, and comprehensive unit testing to ensure code correctness and logic consistency. The framework offers highly customizable workflows, allowing users to intervene at each phase, thus integrating automated intelligence with human expertise. Our universal data science toolkit, comprising validated functions for data cleaning, feature engineering, and modeling, forms the foundation of this solution, enhancing productivity by streamlining common tasks. We selected 8 Kaggle competitions to simulate data processing workflows in real-world application scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that AutoKaggle achieves a validation submission rate of 0.85 and a comprehensive score of 0.82 in typical data science pipelines, fully proving its effectiveness and practicality in handling complex data science tasks.

Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose how a rubric itself fails from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode Taxonomy, a taxonomy for systematically characterizing failure modes in rubric composition and design. RIFT consists of eight failure modes organized into three high-level categories: Reliability Failures, Content Validity Failures, and Consequential Validity Failures. RIFT is developed using grounded theory by iteratively annotating rubrics drawn from five diverse data sources spanning general instruction following, code generation, creative writing, and expert-level deep research, until no new failure modes are identified. We evaluate the consistency of the taxonomy by measuring agreement among independent human annotators, observing fair agreement overall (87% pairwise agreement and 0.64 average Cohen's kappa). Finally, to support scalable diagnosis, we propose automated rubric quality metrics and show that they align with human failure-mode annotations, achieving up to 0.925 F1.

We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.

Safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) remain predominantly English-centric, creating systematic vulnerabilities in multilingual deployment. Prior work shows that translating malicious prompts into other languages can substantially increase jailbreak success rates, exposing a structural cross-lingual security gap. We investigate whether such attacks can be mitigated through language-agnostic semantic similarity without retraining or language-specific adaptation. Our approach compares multilingual query embeddings against a fixed English codebook of jailbreak prompts, operating as a training-free external guardrail for black-box LLMs. We conduct a systematic evaluation across four languages, two translation pipelines, four safety benchmarks, three embedding models, and three target LLMs (Qwen, Llama, GPT-3.5). Our results reveal two distinct regimes of cross-lingual transfer. On curated benchmarks containing canonical jailbreak templates, semantic similarity generalizes reliably across languages, achieving near-perfect separability (AUC up to 0.99) and substantial reductions in absolute attack success rates under strict low-false-positive constraints. However, under distribution shift - on behaviorally diverse and heterogeneous unsafe benchmarks - separability degrades markedly (AUC approx 0.60-0.70), and recall in the security-critical low-FPR regime drops across all embedding models.

Prompt injection remains a central obstacle to the safe deployment of large language models, particularly in multi-agent settings where intermediate outputs can propagate or amplify malicious instructions. Building on earlier work that introduced a four-metric Total Injection Vulnerability Score (TIVS), this paper extends the evaluation framework with semantic similarity-based caching and a fifth metric (Observability Score Ratio) to yield TIVS-O, investigating how defence effectiveness interacts with transparency in a HOPE-inspired Nested Learning architecture. The proposed system combines an agentic pipeline with Continuum Memory Systems that implement semantic similarity-based caching across 301 synthetically generated injection-focused prompts drawn from ten attack families, while a fourth agent performs comprehensive security analysis using five key performance indicators. In addition to traditional injection metrics, OSR quantifies the richness and clarity of security-relevant reasoning exposed by each agent, enabling an explicit analysis of trade-offs between strict mitigation and auditability. Experiments show that the system achieves secure responses with zero high-risk breaches, while semantic caching delivers substantial computational savings, achieving a 41.6% reduction in LLM calls and corresponding decreases in latency, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. Five TIVS-O configurations reveal optimal trade-offs between mitigation strictness and forensic transparency. These results indicate that observability-aware evaluation can reveal non-monotonic effects within multi-agent pipelines and that memory-augmented agents can jointly maximize security robustness, real-time performance, operational cost savings, and environmental sustainability without modifying underlying model weights, providing a production-ready pathway for secure and green LLM deployments.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in generating machine learning (ML) code, enabling end-to-end pipeline construction from natural language instructions. However, existing benchmarks for ML code generation are mainly restricted to English, overlooking the global and multilingual nature of ML research and practice. To address this gap, we present ML2B, the first benchmark for evaluating multilingual ML code generation. ML2B consists of 30 Kaggle competitions translated into 13 natural languages, covering tabular, text, and image data types, with structured metadata and validated human-reviewed translations. For evaluation, we employ AIDE, an automated framework for end-to-end assessment of data science pipelines, and provide insights into cross-lingual model performance. Our results reveal substantial 15-45% performance degradation on non-English tasks, highlighting critical challenges in multilingual representation learning for code generation. The benchmark, evaluation framework, and comprehensive results are made available through our GitHub repository to facilitate future research in multilingual ML code generation: https://github.com/enaix/ml2b.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into applications ranging from interactive chatbots to multi-agent systems has introduced a wide spectrum of service-level objectives (SLOs) for responsiveness. These include latency-sensitive requests emphasizing per-token latency in streaming chat, deadline-sensitive requests requiring rapid full responses to trigger external tools, and compound requests with evolving dependencies across multiple LLM calls. Despite-or perhaps, because of-this workload diversity and unpredictable request information (e.g., response lengths and dependencies), existing request schedulers have focused on aggregate performance, unable to ensure application-level SLO needs. This paper presents JITServe, the first SLO-aware LLM serving system designed to maximize service goodput (e.g., the number of tokens meeting request SLOs) across diverse workloads. JITServe novelly schedules requests using imprecise request information and gradually relaxes this conservatism by refining request information estimates as generation progresses. It applies a grouped margin goodput maximization algorithm to allocate just enough serving bandwidth to satisfy each request's SLO just-in-time (JIT), maximizing residual capacity for others, while deciding the composition of requests in a batch to maximize efficiency and goodput with provable guarantees. Our evaluation across diverse realistic workloads, including chat, deep research, and agentic pipelines, shows that JITServe improves service goodput by 1.4x-6.3x, alternatively achieving 28.5%-83.2% resource savings, compared to state-of-the-art designs.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key paradigm for training software engineering (SWE) agents, but existing pipelines typically rely on per-task containers for isolation. At scale, pre-built container images incur substantial storage overhead, slow environment setup, and require container-management privileges. We propose SWE-MiniSandbox, a lightweight, container-free method that enables scalable RL training of SWE agents without sacrificing isolation. Instead of relying on per-instance containers, SWE-MiniSandbox executes each task in an isolated workspace backed by kernel-level mechanisms, substantially reducing system overhead. It leverages lightweight environment pre-caching techniques to eliminate the need for bulky container images. As a result, our approach lowers disk usage to approximately 5\% of that required by container-based pipelines and reduces environment preparation time to about 25\% of the container baseline. Empirical results demonstrate that SWE-MiniSandbox achieves evaluation performance comparable to standard container-based pipelines. By removing the dependency on heavy container infrastructure, SWE-MiniSandbox offers a practical and accessible foundation for scaling RL-based SWE agents, particularly in resource-constrained research environments.

Diffusion language models promise bidirectional context and infilling capabilities that autoregressive coders lack, yet practical systems remain heavyweight. We introduce CoDA, a 1.7B-parameter diffusion coder trained on TPU with a fully open-source training pipeline. CoDA pairs large-scale diffusion pre-training with code-centric mid-training and instruction tuning, enabling confidence-guided sampling that keeps inference latency competitive. On Humaneval, MBPP, and EvalPlus, CoDA-1.7B-Instruct matches or surpasses diffusion models up to 7B parameters. Our release includes model checkpoints, evaluation harnesses, and TPU training pipelines to accelerate research on lightweight diffusion-based coding assistants.

Large language models have made significant progress in complex but easy-to-verify problems, yet they still struggle with discovering the unknown. In this paper, we present AlphaResearch, an autonomous research agent designed to discover new algorithms on open-ended problems. To synergize the feasibility and innovation of the discovery process, we construct a novel dual research environment by combining the execution-based verify and simulated real-world peer review environment. AlphaResearch discovers new algorithm by iteratively running the following steps: (1) propose new ideas (2) verify the ideas in the dual research environment (3) optimize the research proposals for better performance. To promote a transparent evaluation process, we construct AlphaResearchComp, a new evaluation benchmark that includes an eight open-ended algorithmic problems competition, with each problem carefully curated and verified through executable pipelines, objective metrics, and reproducibility checks. AlphaResearch gets a 2/8 win rate in head-to-head comparison with human researchers, demonstrate the possibility of accelerating algorithm discovery with LLMs. Notably, the algorithm discovered by AlphaResearch on the ``packing circles'' problem achieves the best-of-known performance, surpassing the results of human researchers and strong baselines from recent work (e.g., AlphaEvolve). Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the remaining challenges of the 6/8 failure cases, providing valuable insights for future research.

Punctuation restoration is essential for improving the readability and downstream utility of automatic speech recognition (ASR) outputs, yet remains underexplored for Persian despite its importance. We introduce PersianPunc, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of 17 million samples for Persian punctuation restoration, constructed through systematic aggregation and filtering of existing textual resources. We formulate punctuation restoration as a token-level sequence labeling task and fine-tune ParsBERT to achieve strong performance. Through comparative evaluation, we demonstrate that while large language models can perform punctuation restoration, they suffer from critical limitations: over-correction tendencies that introduce undesired edits beyond punctuation insertion (particularly problematic for speech-to-text pipelines) and substantially higher computational requirements. Our lightweight BERT-based approach achieves a macro-averaged F1 score of 91.33% on our test set while maintaining efficiency suitable for real-time applications. We make our dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/persian-punctuation-restoration) and model (https://huggingface.co/MohammadJRanjbar/parsbert-persian-punctuation) publicly available to facilitate future research in Persian NLP and provide a scalable framework applicable to other morphologically rich, low-resource languages.

CCTV safety monitoring demands anomaly detectors combine reliable clip-level accuracy with predictable per-clip latency despite weak supervision. This work investigates compact vision-language models (VLMs) as practical detectors for this regime. A unified evaluation protocol standardizes preprocessing, prompting, dataset splits, metrics, and runtime settings to compare parameter-efficiently adapted compact VLMs against training-free VLM pipelines and weakly supervised baselines. Evaluation spans accuracy, precision, recall, F1, ROC-AUC, and average per-clip latency to jointly quantify detection quality and efficiency. With parameter-efficient adaptation, compact VLMs achieve performance on par with, and in several cases exceeding, established approaches while retaining competitive per-clip latency. Adaptation further reduces prompt sensitivity, producing more consistent behavior across prompt regimes under the shared protocol. These results show that parameter-efficient fine-tuning enables compact VLMs to serve as dependable clip-level anomaly detectors, yielding a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off within a transparent and consistent experimental setup.

Existing visual reasoning benchmarks predominantly rely on natural language prompts, evaluate narrow reasoning modalities, or depend on subjective scoring procedures such as LLM-as-judge. We introduce the TACIT Benchmark, a programmatic visual reasoning benchmark comprising 10 tasks across 6 reasoning domains: spatial navigation, abstract pattern completion, causal simulation, logical constraint satisfaction, graph theory, and topology. The benchmark provides dual-track evaluation: a generative track in which models must produce solution images verified through deterministic computer-vision pipelines, and a discriminative track offering five-way multiple choice with structurally plausible near-miss distractors. Each distractor violates exactly one structural constraint, requiring models to reason about fine-grained visual differences rather than exploit superficial cues. Version 0.1.0 distributes 6,000 puzzles (108,000 PNG images across three resolutions) with fully deterministic seeded generation and reproducible verification. The dataset, generation code, and evaluation harness are released under the Apache 2.0 license on HuggingFace (DOI: 10.57967/hf/7904).

Large-scale video generative models can synthesize diverse and realistic visual content for dynamic world creation, but they often lack element-wise controllability, hindering their use in editing scenes and training embodied AI agents. We propose Dreamland, a hybrid world generation framework combining the granular control of a physics-based simulator and the photorealistic content output of large-scale pretrained generative models. In particular, we design a layered world abstraction that encodes both pixel-level and object-level semantics and geometry as an intermediate representation to bridge the simulator and the generative model. This approach enhances controllability, minimizes adaptation cost through early alignment with real-world distributions, and supports off-the-shelf use of existing and future pretrained generative models. We further construct a D3Sim dataset to facilitate the training and evaluation of hybrid generation pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that Dreamland outperforms existing baselines with 50.8% improved image quality, 17.9% stronger controllability, and has great potential to enhance embodied agent training. Code and data will be made available.

While Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) show potential for complex clinical decision support, the field remains hindered by architectural fragmentation and the lack of standardized multimodal integration. Current medical MAS research suffers from non-uniform data ingestion pipelines, inconsistent visual-reasoning evaluation, and a lack of cross-specialty benchmarking. To address these challenges, we present MedMASLab, a unified framework and benchmarking platform for multimodal medical multi-agent systems. MedMASLab introduces: (1) A standardized multimodal agent communication protocol that enables seamless integration of 11 heterogeneous MAS architectures across 24 medical modalities. (2) An automated clinical reasoning evaluator, a zero-shot semantic evaluation paradigm that overcomes the limitations of lexical string-matching by leveraging large vision-language models to verify diagnostic logic and visual grounding. (3) The most extensive benchmark to date, spanning 11 organ systems and 473 diseases, standardizing data from 11 clinical benchmarks. Our systematic evaluation reveals a critical domain-specific performance gap: while MAS improves reasoning depth, current architectures exhibit significant fragility when transitioning between specialized medical sub-domains. We provide a rigorous ablation of interaction mechanisms and cost-performance trade-offs, establishing a new technical baseline for future autonomous clinical systems. The source code and data is publicly available at: https://github.com/NUS-Project/MedMASLab/

Advancements in deep neural networks have allowed automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to attain human parity on several publicly available clean speech datasets. However, even state-of-the-art ASR systems experience performance degradation when confronted with adverse conditions, as a well-trained acoustic model is sensitive to variations in the speech domain, e.g., background noise. Intuitively, humans address this issue by relying on their linguistic knowledge: the meaning of ambiguous spoken terms is usually inferred from contextual cues thereby reducing the dependency on the auditory system. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the first open-source benchmark to utilize external large language models (LLMs) for ASR error correction, where N-best decoding hypotheses provide informative elements for true transcription prediction. This approach is a paradigm shift from the traditional language model rescoring strategy that can only select one candidate hypothesis as the output transcription. The proposed benchmark contains a novel dataset, HyPoradise (HP), encompassing more than 334,000 pairs of N-best hypotheses and corresponding accurate transcriptions across prevalent speech domains. Given this dataset, we examine three types of error correction techniques based on LLMs with varying amounts of labeled hypotheses-transcription pairs, which gains a significant word error rate (WER) reduction. Experimental evidence demonstrates the proposed technique achieves a breakthrough by surpassing the upper bound of traditional re-ranking based methods. More surprisingly, LLM with reasonable prompt and its generative capability can even correct those tokens that are missing in N-best list. We make our results publicly accessible for reproducible pipelines with released pre-trained models, thus providing a new evaluation paradigm for ASR error correction with LLMs.

Pairwise human preference prediction is central to evaluating code-generation systems, where quality often depends on task-specific trade-offs beyond functional correctness. While rubric-based LLM judges improve interpretability by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, most existing pipelines remain pointwise: they score each response independently and derive preferences by comparing aggregated scores. We show that this design is poorly matched to pairwise code preference prediction and can underperform a strong monolithic judge. We propose CriterAlign, a criterion-centric framework that adapts rubric-based judging to pairwise preference evaluation through direct criterion-level pairwise judgments, tie-driven criterion refinement, swap-consistency filtering, and final pairwise synthesis. We further introduce Human-Preference-Aligned Guidance (HPAG), synthesized offline from training examples by extracting recurring rationale gaps between human preferences and monolithic judge predictions, and injected into the criterion generator, criterion judge, and final judge. On BigCodeReward, CriterAlign improves a Qwen2.5-VL-32B monolithic judge from 60.4% to 66.3% accuracy, with ablations confirming the contributions of pairwise criterion design and HPAG.

Weight pruning is widely advocated for deploying Large Language Models on resource-constrained IoT and edge devices, yet its impact on model fairness remains poorly understood. We conduct a controlled empirical study of three instruction-tuned models (Gemma-2-9b-it, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Phi-3.5-mini-instruct) across three pruning methods (Random, Magnitude, Wanda) at four sparsity levels (10-70%) on 12,148 BBQ bias benchmark items with 5 random seeds, totaling 2,368,860 inference records. Our results reveal a Smart Pruning Paradox: activation-aware pruning (Wanda) preserves perplexity nearly perfectly (just 3.5% increase at 50% sparsity for Mistral-7B), yet produces the highest bias amplification, with Stereotype Reliance Score increasing 83.7% and 47-59% of previously unbiased items developing new stereotypical behaviors at 70% sparsity. Random pruning destroys language capability entirely (perplexity exceeding 10^4 and reaching 10^8) but produces only random-chance bias. We further show that unstructured pruning provides zero storage savings and zero inference latency reduction on real edge hardware, undermining the primary motivation for its use in IoT deployment. Of 180 dense-vs-pruned comparisons, 141 (78.3%) are significant (p < 0.05) with mean |h| = 0.305. Published quantization studies report up to 21% of responses flipping between biased and unbiased states; our pruning results show transition rates nearly three times higher (47-59%), suggesting pruning poses a categorically greater risk to alignment than quantization. These findings demonstrate that perplexity-based evaluation provides false assurance of behavioral equivalence, and that IoT deployment pipelines require bias-aware validation before deploying pruned models at the edge.

We introduce a novel Longitudinal Focused Attention Meditation Electroencephalography (L-FAME) dataset and an accompanying benchmark, designed to foster research into the neural effects of various meditation practices and the evolution of these effects over a six-week training period. The dataset contains EEG recordings and psychological assessments from 74 healthy college participants, collected at two distinct time points: pre-intervention and post-intervention. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three distinct meditation groups: two mantra-based techniques (SA-TA-NA-MA and Hare Krishna) and one Breath Focus practice. Leveraging this unique longitudinal and comparative dataset, we propose a benchmark suite comprising three distinct classification tasks: (1) cognitive state decoding to distinguish between resting and meditation states, (2) fine-grained classification of the specific meditation techniques, and (3) cross-session adaptation to evaluate model generalization across the longitudinal time gap. We provide comprehensive baseline results for these tasks utilizing a range of classical machine learning algorithms and deep learning architectures. The complete dataset, preprocessing pipelines, and benchmark evaluation code will be publicly released, offering a valuable resource and a standardized framework for the development and comparison of new analytical methods in computational meditation research and EEG-based machine learning. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/L-FAME-Dataset-Benchmark/L-FAME

Age estimation systems are increasingly deployed as gatekeepers for age-restricted online content, yet their robustness to cosmetic modifications has not been systematically evaluated. We investigate whether simple, household-accessible cosmetic changes, including beards, grey hair, makeup, and simulated wrinkles, can cause AI age estimators to classify minors as adults. To study this threat at scale without ethical concerns, we simulate these physical attacks on 329 facial images of individuals aged 10 to 21 using a VLM image editor (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image). We then evaluate eight models from our prior benchmark: five specialized architectures (MiVOLO, Custom-Best, Herosan, MiViaLab, DEX) and three vision-language models (Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5-Nano). We introduce the Attack Conversion Rate (ACR), defined as the fraction of images predicted as minor at baseline that flip to adult after attack, a population-agnostic metric that does not depend on the ratio of minors to adults in the test set. Our results reveal that a synthetic beard alone achieves 28 to 69 percent ACR across all eight models; combining all four attacks shifts predicted age by +7.7 years on average across all 329 subjects and reaches up to 83 percent ACR; and vision-language models exhibit lower ACR (59 to 71 percent) than specialized models (63 to 83 percent) under the full attack, although the ACR ranges overlap and the difference is not statistically tested. These findings highlight a critical vulnerability in deployed age-verification pipelines and call for adversarial robustness evaluation as a mandatory criterion for model selection.

Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic dialects such as Sudanese. This paper presents a comprehensive study of data augmentation techniques for fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper models and establishes the first benchmark for the Sudanese dialect. Two augmentation strategies are investigated: (1) self-training with pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled speech, and (2) TTS-based augmentation using synthetic speech from the Klaam TTS system. The best-performing model, Whisper-Medium fine-tuned with combined self-training and TTS augmentation (28.4 hours), achieves a Word Error Rate (WER) of 57.1% on the evaluation set and 51.6% on an out-of-domain holdout set substantially outperforming zero-shot multilingual Whisper (78.8% WER) and MSA-specialized Arabic models (73.8-123% WER). All experiments used low-cost resources (Kaggle free tier and Lightning.ai trial), demonstrating that strategic data augmentation can overcome resource limitations for low-resource dialects and provide a practical roadmap for developing ASR systems for low-resource Arabic dialects and other marginalized language varieties. The models, evaluation benchmarks, and reproducible training pipelines are publicly released to facilitate future research on low-resource Arabic ASR.

Answer verification methods are widely employed in language model training pipelines spanning data curation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While prior work focus on developing unified verifiers applicable across multiple reasoning scenarios, significant challenges remain in computation-oriented scientific domains, such as algebraic equivalence checking and physical constant substitution. In this paper, we introduce \model, a tool-augmented verifier that leverages external executors to perform precise computations and symbolic simplifications. \model enables robust verification that goes beyond simple semantic matching. We propose a novel two-stage pipeline, which begin with cold-start fine-tuning and followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning with tool integration. Extensive experiments conducted on STEM subjects, general QA, and long-form reasoning tasks demonstrates strong generalization of \model. The results shows that the \model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerifyBench-Hard and SCI-Bench. And we also employ our \model in RLVR as a reward model, the results show that it consistently outperforms both rubric-based and model-based verifiers on AIME'24 and AIME'25, demonstrating strong potential to enhance reasoning capabilities of LLM. Our model is released at https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}.

Modeling weather and climate is an essential endeavor to understand the near- and long-term impacts of climate change, as well as inform technology and policymaking for adaptation and mitigation efforts. In recent years, there has been a surging interest in applying data-driven methods based on machine learning for solving core problems such as weather forecasting and climate downscaling. Despite promising results, much of this progress has been impaired due to the lack of large-scale, open-source efforts for reproducibility, resulting in the use of inconsistent or underspecified datasets, training setups, and evaluations by both domain scientists and artificial intelligence researchers. We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science. ClimateLearn consists of holistic pipelines for dataset processing (e.g., ERA5, CMIP6, PRISM), implementation of state-of-the-art deep learning models (e.g., Transformers, ResNets), and quantitative and qualitative evaluation for standard weather and climate modeling tasks. We supplement these functionalities with extensive documentation, contribution guides, and quickstart tutorials to expand access and promote community growth. We have also performed comprehensive forecasting and downscaling experiments to showcase the capabilities and key features of our library. To our knowledge, ClimateLearn is the first large-scale, open-source effort for bridging research in weather and climate modeling with modern machine learning systems. Our library is available publicly at https://github.com/aditya-grover/climate-learn.