Get trending papers in your email inbox once a day!
Get trending papers in your email inbox!
SubscribeCloudFormer: An Attention-based Performance Prediction for Public Clouds with Unknown Workload
Cloud platforms are increasingly relied upon to host diverse, resource-intensive workloads due to their scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. In multi-tenant cloud environments, virtual machines are consolidated on shared physical servers to improve resource utilization. While virtualization guarantees resource partitioning for CPU, memory, and storage, it cannot ensure performance isolation. Competition for shared resources such as last-level cache, memory bandwidth, and network interfaces often leads to severe performance degradation. Existing management techniques, including VM scheduling and resource provisioning, require accurate performance prediction to mitigate interference. However, this remains challenging in public clouds due to the black-box nature of VMs and the highly dynamic nature of workloads. To address these limitations, we propose CloudFormer, a dual-branch Transformer-based model designed to predict VM performance degradation in black-box environments. CloudFormer jointly models temporal dynamics and system-level interactions, leveraging 206 system metrics at one-second resolution across both static and dynamic scenarios. This design enables the model to capture transient interference effects and adapt to varying workload conditions without scenario-specific tuning. Complementing the methodology, we provide a fine-grained dataset that significantly expands the temporal resolution and metric diversity compared to existing benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that CloudFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, achieving robust generalization across diverse and previously unseen workloads. Notably, CloudFormer attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of just 7.8%, representing a substantial improvement in predictive accuracy and outperforming existing methods at least by 28%.
APEX: An Extensible and Dynamism-Aware Simulator for Automated Parallel Execution in LLM Serving
Efficiently serving Large Language Models (LLMs) requires selecting an optimal parallel execution plan, balancing computation, memory, and communication overhead. However, determining the best strategy is challenging due to varying parallelism techniques (data, pipeline, tensor) and workload characteristics (e.g., compute-intensive tasks with long prompts vs. memory-intensive tasks with long generation). We propose APEX, an LLM serving system simulator that efficiently identifies optimal parallel execution plans by considering key factors of LLM serving systems, such as memory usage, batching behavior, etc. APEX performs dynamism-aware simulation to model iteration-level batching, and leverages LLMs' repetitive structure to reduce design space, scaling efficiently to trillion-scale models. APEX abstracts the key components of LLM serving systems, including the model, batching module, quantization formats, and device clusters, enabling the simulator to be general and extensible. Simulating on a CPU, APEX evaluates execution plans for various device clusters, covering diverse LLMs and workloads. APEX finds plans up to 3.37x faster than heuristics, and also plans that reduce energy consumption by up to 45% compared to latency-optimal plans. APEX performs comprehensive evaluations, reporting key system metrics like time per output token and time to first token, which can help service providers meet SLOs. APEX identifies an optimal plan within 15 minutes on a CPU, making it 71x faster and 1234x more cost-effective than cloud-based GPU deployment. APEX can be accessed at https://github.com/microsoft/apex_plus
Global Message Ordering using Distributed Kafka Clusters
In contemporary distributed systems, logs are produced at an astounding rate, generating terabytes of data within mere seconds. These logs, containing pivotal details like system metrics, user actions, and diverse events, are foundational to the system's consistent and accurate operations. Precise log ordering becomes indispensable to avert potential ambiguities and discordances in system functionalities. Apache Kafka, a prevalent distributed message queue, offers significant solutions to various distributed log processing challenges. However, it presents an inherent limitation while Kafka ensures the in-order delivery of messages within a single partition to the consumer, it falls short in guaranteeing a global order for messages spanning multiple partitions. This research delves into innovative methodologies to achieve global ordering of messages within a Kafka topic, aiming to bolster the integrity and consistency of log processing in distributed systems. Our code is available on GitHub.
METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring
We pretrain METAGENE-1, a 7-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer model, which we refer to as a metagenomic foundation model, on a novel corpus of diverse metagenomic DNA and RNA sequences comprising over 1.5 trillion base pairs. This dataset is sourced from a large collection of human wastewater samples, processed and sequenced using deep metagenomic (next-generation) sequencing methods. Unlike genomic models that focus on individual genomes or curated sets of specific species, the aim of METAGENE-1 is to capture the full distribution of genomic information present within this wastewater, to aid in tasks relevant to pandemic monitoring and pathogen detection. We carry out byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization on our dataset, tailored for metagenomic sequences, and then pretrain our model. In this paper, we first detail the pretraining dataset, tokenization strategy, and model architecture, highlighting the considerations and design choices that enable the effective modeling of metagenomic data. We then show results of pretraining this model on our metagenomic dataset, providing details about our losses, system metrics, and training stability over the course of pretraining. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of METAGENE-1, which achieves state-of-the-art results on a set of genomic benchmarks and new evaluations focused on human-pathogen detection and genomic sequence embedding, showcasing its potential for public health applications in pandemic monitoring, biosurveillance, and early detection of emerging health threats.
Open RL Benchmark: Comprehensive Tracked Experiments for Reinforcement Learning
In many Reinforcement Learning (RL) papers, learning curves are useful indicators to measure the effectiveness of RL algorithms. However, the complete raw data of the learning curves are rarely available. As a result, it is usually necessary to reproduce the experiments from scratch, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. We present Open RL Benchmark, a set of fully tracked RL experiments, including not only the usual data such as episodic return, but also all algorithm-specific and system metrics. Open RL Benchmark is community-driven: anyone can download, use, and contribute to the data. At the time of writing, more than 25,000 runs have been tracked, for a cumulative duration of more than 8 years. Open RL Benchmark covers a wide range of RL libraries and reference implementations. Special care is taken to ensure that each experiment is precisely reproducible by providing not only the full parameters, but also the versions of the dependencies used to generate it. In addition, Open RL Benchmark comes with a command-line interface (CLI) for easy fetching and generating figures to present the results. In this document, we include two case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of Open RL Benchmark in practice. To the best of our knowledge, Open RL Benchmark is the first RL benchmark of its kind, and the authors hope that it will improve and facilitate the work of researchers in the field.
FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations
Full-duplex voice interaction allows users and agents to speak simultaneously with controllable barge-in, enabling lifelike assistants and customer service. Existing solutions are either end-to-end, difficult to design and hard to control, or modular pipelines governed by turn-taking controllers that ease upgrades and per-module optimization; however, prior modular frameworks depend on non-open components and external providers, limiting holistic optimization. In this work, we present a complete, practical full-duplex voice interaction system comprising a turn-taking controller, an interaction module, and a dialogue manager. The controller integrates streaming personalized VAD (pVAD) to suppress false barge-ins from noise and non-primary speakers, precisely timestamp primary-speaker segments, and explicitly enable primary-speaker barge-ins; a semantic end-of-turn detector improves stop decisions. It upgrades heterogeneous half-duplex pipelines, cascaded, semi-cascaded, and speech-to-speech, to full duplex. Using internal models, we implement cascaded and semi-cascaded variants; the semi-cascaded one captures emotional and paralinguistic cues, yields more coherent responses, lowers latency and error propagation, and improves robustness. A dialogue manager extends capabilities via tool invocation and context management. We also propose three system-level metrics, barge-in, end-of-turn detection accuracy, and end-to-end latency, to assess naturalness, control accuracy, and efficiency. Experiments show fewer false interruptions, more accurate semantic ends, and lower latency approaching industrial systems, enabling robust, natural, real-time full-duplex interaction. Demos: https://fireredteam.github.io/demos/firered_chat.
ConsumerBench: Benchmarking Generative AI Applications on End-User Devices
The recent shift in Generative AI (GenAI) applications from cloud-only environments to end-user devices introduces new challenges in resource management, system efficiency, and user experience. This paper presents ConsumerBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework designed to evaluate the system efficiency and response time of GenAI models running on end-user devices. Unlike existing benchmarks that assume exclusive model access on dedicated GPUs, ConsumerBench simulates realistic multi-application scenarios executing concurrently on constrained hardware. Furthermore, ConsumerBench supports customizable workflows that simulate complex tasks requiring coordination among multiple applications. ConsumerBench captures both application-level metrics, including latency and Service Level Objective (SLO) attainment, and system-level metrics like CPU/GPU utilization and memory bandwidth. Through extensive experiments, ConsumerBench reveals inefficiencies in resource sharing, unfair scheduling under greedy allocation, and performance pitfalls of static model server configurations. The paper also provides practical insights for model developers and system designers, highlighting the benefits of custom kernels tailored to consumer-grade GPU architectures and the value of implementing SLO-aware scheduling strategies.
RefactorCoderQA: Benchmarking LLMs for Multi-Domain Coding Question Solutions in Cloud and Edge Deployment
To optimize the reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel cloud-edge collaborative architecture that enables a structured, multi-agent prompting framework. This framework comprises three specialized components: GuideLLM, a lightweight model deployed at the edge to provide methodological guidance; SolverLLM, a more powerful model hosted in the cloud responsible for generating code solutions; and JudgeLLM, an automated evaluator for assessing solution correctness and quality. To evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture in realistic settings, we introduce RefactorCoderQA, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multi-domain coding tasks. Motivated by the limitations of existing benchmarks, RefactorCoderQA systematically covers various technical domains, including Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, using authentic coding challenges from Stack Overflow. Extensive experiments reveal that our fine-tuned model, RefactorCoder-MoE, achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming leading open-source and commercial baselines with an overall accuracy of 76.84%. Human evaluations further validate the interpretability, accuracy, and practical relevance of the generated solutions. In addition, we evaluate system-level metrics, such as throughput and latency, to gain deeper insights into the performance characteristics and trade-offs of the proposed architecture.
Can Visual Input Be Compressed? A Visual Token Compression Benchmark for Large Multimodal Models
Large multimodal models (LMMs) often suffer from severe inference inefficiency due to the large number of visual tokens introduced by image encoders. While recent token compression methods, such as pruning and merging, have shown promise in reducing redundancy, their evaluation remains fragmented and inconsistent. In this work, we present UniPruneBench, a unified and extensible benchmark for visual token pruning in multimodal LLMs. UniPruneBench provides standardized protocols across six ability dimensions and ten datasets, covering ten representative compression algorithms and three families of LMMs (LLaVA-v1.5, Intern-VL3, and Qwen2.5-VL). Beyond task accuracy, it incorporates system-level metrics such as runtime and prefilling latency to provide a holistic view. Our experiments uncover several key findings: (1) random pruning is a surprisingly strong baseline, (2) no single method consistently outperforms others across scenarios, (3) pruning sensitivity varies significantly across tasks, with OCR being most vulnerable, and (4) pruning ratio is the dominant factor governing performance degradation. We believe UniPruneBench will serve as a reliable foundation for future research on efficient multimodal modeling.
Navigating the Synchrony-Stability Frontier in Adaptive Chatbots
Adaptive chatbots that mimic a user's linguistic style can build rapport and engagement, yet unconstrained mimicry risks an agent that feels unstable or sycophantic. We present a computational evaluation framework that makes the core design tension explicit: balancing moment-to-moment linguistic synchrony against long-term persona stability. Using an 8-dimensional style vector and a closed-loop "base+delta" prompting architecture, we simulate and compare explicit adaptation policies - Uncapped, Cap, Exponential Moving Average (EMA), Dead-Band, and Hybrids - on a human-log dataset. Our analysis maps a clear Pareto frontier: bounded policies achieve substantial gains in stability at a modest cost to synchrony. For example, a Hybrid (EMA+Cap) raises stability from 0.542 to 0.878 (+62%) while reducing synchrony by only 17%. We confirm this trade-off through large-scale replications on three public corpora (DailyDialog, Persona-Chat, EmpatheticDialogues) and LLM-in-the-loop validation across two model families. Furthermore, we quantify "prompt legibility," showing that frontier policies reduce instruction churn and cut jarring register flips (major tone changes) from 0.254 to 0.092, yielding systems that are easier to reason about and maintain. Taken together, our framework provides a general evaluation harness for style adaptation; a systematic ablation that identifies Pareto-efficient policies; robust validation across diverse datasets and models; and novel legibility metrics linking policy choices to system maintainability.
PublicHearingBR: A Brazilian Portuguese Dataset of Public Hearing Transcripts for Summarization of Long Documents
This paper introduces PublicHearingBR, a Brazilian Portuguese dataset designed for summarizing long documents. The dataset consists of transcripts of public hearings held by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, paired with news articles and structured summaries containing the individuals participating in the hearing and their statements or opinions. The dataset supports the development and evaluation of long document summarization systems in Portuguese. Our contributions include the dataset, a hybrid summarization system to establish a baseline for future studies, and a discussion on evaluation metrics for summarization involving large language models, addressing the challenge of hallucination in the generated summaries. As a result of this discussion, the dataset also provides annotated data that can be used in Natural Language Inference tasks in Portuguese.
A Comprehensive Survey of Evaluation Techniques for Recommendation Systems
The effectiveness of recommendation systems is pivotal to user engagement and satisfaction in online platforms. As these recommendation systems increasingly influence user choices, their evaluation transcends mere technical performance and becomes central to business success. This paper addresses the multifaceted nature of recommendations system evaluation by introducing a comprehensive suite of metrics, each tailored to capture a distinct aspect of system performance. We discuss * Similarity Metrics: to quantify the precision of content-based filtering mechanisms and assess the accuracy of collaborative filtering techniques. * Candidate Generation Metrics: to evaluate how effectively the system identifies a broad yet relevant range of items. * Predictive Metrics: to assess the accuracy of forecasted user preferences. * Ranking Metrics: to evaluate the effectiveness of the order in which recommendations are presented. * Business Metrics: to align the performance of the recommendation system with economic objectives. Our approach emphasizes the contextual application of these metrics and their interdependencies. In this paper, we identify the strengths and limitations of current evaluation practices and highlight the nuanced trade-offs that emerge when optimizing recommendation systems across different metrics. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for selecting and interpreting these metrics to not only improve system performance but also to advance business goals. This work is to aid researchers and practitioners in critically assessing recommendation systems and fosters the development of more nuanced, effective, and economically viable personalization strategies. Our code is available at GitHub - https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Evaluation-Metrics-for-Recommendation-Systems.
MapQaTor: A System for Efficient Annotation of Map Query Datasets
Mapping and navigation services like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Openstreet Maps, are essential for accessing various location-based data, yet they often struggle to handle natural language geospatial queries. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in question answering (QA), but creating reliable geospatial QA datasets from map services remains challenging. We introduce MapQaTor, a web application that streamlines the creation of reproducible, traceable map-based QA datasets. With its plug-and-play architecture, MapQaTor enables seamless integration with any maps API, allowing users to gather and visualize data from diverse sources with minimal setup. By caching API responses, the platform ensures consistent ground truth, enhancing the reliability of the data even as real-world information evolves. MapQaTor centralizes data retrieval, annotation, and visualization within a single platform, offering a unique opportunity to evaluate the current state of LLM-based geospatial reasoning while advancing their capabilities for improved geospatial understanding. Evaluation metrics show that, MapQaTor speeds up the annotation process by at least 30 times compared to manual methods, underscoring its potential for developing geospatial resources, such as complex map reasoning datasets. The website is live at: https://mapqator.github.io/ and a demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/7_aV9Wmhs6Q.
gec-metrics: A Unified Library for Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation
We introduce gec-metrics, a library for using and developing grammatical error correction (GEC) evaluation metrics through a unified interface. Our library enables fair system comparisons by ensuring that everyone conducts evaluations using a consistent implementation. Moreover, it is designed with a strong focus on API usage, making it highly extensible. It also includes meta-evaluation functionalities and provides analysis and visualization scripts, contributing to developing GEC evaluation metrics. Our code is released under the MIT license and is also distributed as an installable package. The video is available on YouTube.
DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System for Multi-turn Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have significantly advanced in recent years. However, effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation, hindering a dynamic and iterative creation process. Recent attempts have tried to equip Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with T2I models to bring the user's natural language instructions into reality. Hence, the output modality of MLLMs is extended, and the multi-turn generation quality of T2I models is enhanced thanks to the strong multi-modal comprehension ability of MLLMs. However, many of these works face challenges in identifying correct output modalities and generating coherent images accordingly as the number of output modalities increases and the conversations go deeper. Therefore, we propose DialogGen, an effective pipeline to align off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System (MIDS) for multi-turn Text-to-Image generation. It is composed of drawing prompt alignment, careful training data curation, and error correction. Moreover, as the field of MIDS flourishes, comprehensive benchmarks are urgently needed to evaluate MIDS fairly in terms of output modality correctness and multi-modal output coherence. To address this issue, we introduce the Multi-modal Dialogue Benchmark (DialogBen), a comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate accurate and coherent multi-modal content that supports image editing. It contains two evaluation metrics to measure the model's ability to switch modalities and the coherence of the output images. Our extensive experiments on DialogBen and user study demonstrate the effectiveness of DialogGen compared with other State-of-the-Art models.
Mind the Metrics: Patterns for Telemetry-Aware In-IDE AI Application Development using the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
AI development environments are evolving into observability first platforms that integrate real time telemetry, prompt traces, and evaluation feedback into the developer workflow. This paper introduces telemetry aware integrated development environments (IDEs) enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a system that connects IDEs with prompt metrics, trace logs, and versioned control for real time refinement. We present design patterns for local prompt iteration, CI based optimization, and autonomous agents that adapt behavior using telemetry. Rather than focusing on a single algorithm, we describe an architecture that supports integration with frameworks like DSPy, PromptWizard, and Prompts as Programs. We demonstrate this through Opik, an open source MCP server for LLM telemetry, and position our approach within the emerging LLMOps ecosystem. This work lays a foundation for future research on prompt optimization, IDE agent tooling, and empirical benchmarking in telemetry rich AI development workflows.
A Deep Learning Earth System Model for Efficient Simulation of the Observed Climate
A key challenge for computationally intensive state-of-the-art Earth System models is to distinguish global warming signals from interannual variability. Here we introduce DLESyM, a parsimonious deep learning model that accurately simulates the Earth's current climate over 1000-year periods with no smoothing or drift. DLESyM simulations equal or exceed key metrics of seasonal and interannual variability--such as tropical cyclogenesis over the range of observed intensities, the cycle of the Indian Summer monsoon, and the climatology of mid-latitude blocking events--when compared to historical simulations from four leading models from the 6th Climate Model Intercomparison Project. DLESyM, trained on both historical reanalysis data and satellite observations, is an accurate, highly efficient model of the coupled Earth system, empowering long-range sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts while using a fraction of the energy and computational time required by traditional models.
Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations
Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.
Orchestrator-Agent Trust: A Modular Agentic AI Visual Classification System with Trust-Aware Orchestration and RAG-Based Reasoning
Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components including the complete software source code are openly released to support reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust
Robust Recommender System: A Survey and Future Directions
With the rapid growth of information, recommender systems have become integral for providing personalized suggestions and overcoming information overload. However, their practical deployment often encounters "dirty" data, where noise or malicious information can lead to abnormal recommendations. Research on improving recommender systems' robustness against such dirty data has thus gained significant attention. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent work on recommender systems' robustness. We first present a taxonomy to organize current techniques for withstanding malicious attacks and natural noise. We then explore state-of-the-art methods in each category, including fraudster detection, adversarial training, certifiable robust training against malicious attacks, and regularization, purification, self-supervised learning against natural noise. Additionally, we summarize evaluation metrics and common datasets used to assess robustness. We discuss robustness across varying recommendation scenarios and its interplay with other properties like accuracy, interpretability, privacy, and fairness. Finally, we delve into open issues and future research directions in this emerging field. Our goal is to equip readers with a holistic understanding of robust recommender systems and spotlight pathways for future research and development.
End-to-end Music Remastering System Using Self-supervised and Adversarial Training
Mastering is an essential step in music production, but it is also a challenging task that has to go through the hands of experienced audio engineers, where they adjust tone, space, and volume of a song. Remastering follows the same technical process, in which the context lies in mastering a song for the times. As these tasks have high entry barriers, we aim to lower the barriers by proposing an end-to-end music remastering system that transforms the mastering style of input audio to that of the target. The system is trained in a self-supervised manner, in which released pop songs were used for training. We also anticipated the model to generate realistic audio reflecting the reference's mastering style by applying a pre-trained encoder and a projection discriminator. We validate our results with quantitative metrics and a subjective listening test and show that the model generated samples of mastering style similar to the target.
Toward Human Centered Interactive Clinical Question Answering System
Unstructured clinical notes contain essential patient information but are challenging for physicians to search and interpret efficiently. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in question answering (QA), most existing systems lack transparency, usability, and alignment with clinical workflows. This work introduces an interactive QA system that enables physicians to query clinical notes via text or voice and receive extractive answers highlighted directly in the note for traceability. The system was built using OpenAI models with zero-shot prompting and evaluated across multiple metrics, including exact string match, word overlap, SentenceTransformer similarity, and BERTScore. Results show that while exact match scores ranged from 47 to 62 percent, semantic similarity scores exceeded 87 percent, indicating strong contextual alignment even when wording varied. To assess usability, the system was also evaluated using simulated clinical personas. Seven diverse physician and nurse personas interacted with the system across scenario-based tasks and provided structured feedback. The evaluations highlighted strengths in intuitive design and answer accessibility, alongside opportunities for enhancing explanation clarity.
TRUST: An LLM-Based Dialogue System for Trauma Understanding and Structured Assessments
Objectives: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to assist clinicians and support patients, no existing work has explored dialogue systems for standard diagnostic interviews and assessments. This study aims to bridge the gap in mental healthcare accessibility by developing an LLM-powered dialogue system that replicates clinician behavior. Materials and Methods: We introduce TRUST, a framework of cooperative LLM modules capable of conducting formal diagnostic interviews and assessments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). To guide the generation of appropriate clinical responses, we propose a Dialogue Acts schema specifically designed for clinical interviews. Additionally, we develop a patient simulation approach based on real-life interview transcripts to replace time-consuming and costly manual testing by clinicians. Results: A comprehensive set of evaluation metrics is designed to assess the dialogue system from both the agent and patient simulation perspectives. Expert evaluations by conversation and clinical specialists show that TRUST performs comparably to real-life clinical interviews. Discussion: Our system performs at the level of average clinicians, with room for future enhancements in communication styles and response appropriateness. Conclusions: Our TRUST framework shows its potential to facilitate mental healthcare availability.
ComfyGPT: A Self-Optimizing Multi-Agent System for Comprehensive ComfyUI Workflow Generation
ComfyUI provides a widely-adopted, workflow-based interface that enables users to customize various image generation tasks through an intuitive node-based architecture. However, the intricate connections between nodes and diverse modules often present a steep learning curve for users. In this paper, we introduce ComfyGPT, the first self-optimizing multi-agent system designed to generate ComfyUI workflows based on task descriptions automatically. ComfyGPT comprises four specialized agents: ReformatAgent, FlowAgent, RefineAgent, and ExecuteAgent. The core innovation of ComfyGPT lies in two key aspects. First, it focuses on generating individual node links rather than entire workflows, significantly improving generation precision. Second, we proposed FlowAgent, a LLM-based workflow generation agent that uses both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to improve workflow generation accuracy. Moreover, we introduce FlowDataset, a large-scale dataset containing 13,571 workflow-description pairs, and FlowBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating workflow generation systems. We also propose four novel evaluation metrics: Format Validation (FV), Pass Accuracy (PA), Pass Instruct Alignment (PIA), and Pass Node Diversity (PND). Experimental results demonstrate that ComfyGPT significantly outperforms existing LLM-based methods in workflow generation.
MRScore: Evaluating Radiology Report Generation with LLM-based Reward System
In recent years, automated radiology report generation has experienced significant growth. This paper introduces MRScore, an automatic evaluation metric tailored for radiology report generation by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). Conventional NLG (natural language generation) metrics like BLEU are inadequate for accurately assessing the generated radiology reports, as systematically demonstrated by our observations within this paper. To address this challenge, we collaborated with radiologists to develop a framework that guides LLMs for radiology report evaluation, ensuring alignment with human analysis. Our framework includes two key components: i) utilizing GPT to generate large amounts of training data, i.e., reports with different qualities, and ii) pairing GPT-generated reports as accepted and rejected samples and training LLMs to produce MRScore as the model reward. Our experiments demonstrate MRScore's higher correlation with human judgments and superior performance in model selection compared to traditional metrics. Our code and datasets will be available on GitHub.
MoC: Mixtures of Text Chunking Learners for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), while serving as a viable complement to large language models (LLMs), often overlooks the crucial aspect of text chunking within its pipeline. This paper initially introduces a dual-metric evaluation method, comprising Boundary Clarity and Chunk Stickiness, to enable the direct quantification of chunking quality. Leveraging this assessment method, we highlight the inherent limitations of traditional and semantic chunking in handling complex contextual nuances, thereby substantiating the necessity of integrating LLMs into chunking process. To address the inherent trade-off between computational efficiency and chunking precision in LLM-based approaches, we devise the granularity-aware Mixture-of-Chunkers (MoC) framework, which consists of a three-stage processing mechanism. Notably, our objective is to guide the chunker towards generating a structured list of chunking regular expressions, which are subsequently employed to extract chunks from the original text. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both our proposed metrics and the MoC framework effectively settle challenges of the chunking task, revealing the chunking kernel while enhancing the performance of the RAG system.
Quality and Quantity of Machine Translation References for Automated Metrics
Automatic machine translation metrics often use human translations to determine the quality of system translations. Common wisdom in the field dictates that the human references should be of very high quality. However, there are no cost-benefit analyses that could be used to guide practitioners who plan to collect references for machine translation evaluation. We find that higher-quality references lead to better metric correlations with humans at the segment-level. Having up to 7 references per segment and taking their average helps all metrics. Interestingly, the references from vendors of different qualities can be mixed together and improve metric success. Higher quality references, however, cost more to create and we frame this as an optimization problem: given a specific budget, what references should be collected to maximize metric success. These findings can be used by evaluators of shared tasks when references need to be created under a certain budget.
Is my automatic audio captioning system so bad? spider-max: a metric to consider several caption candidates
Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) is the task that aims to describe an audio signal using natural language. AAC systems take as input an audio signal and output a free-form text sentence, called a caption. Evaluating such systems is not trivial, since there are many ways to express the same idea. For this reason, several complementary metrics, such as BLEU, CIDEr, SPICE and SPIDEr, are used to compare a single automatic caption to one or several captions of reference, produced by a human annotator. Nevertheless, an automatic system can produce several caption candidates, either using some randomness in the sentence generation process, or by considering the various competing hypothesized captions during decoding with beam-search, for instance. If we consider an end-user of an AAC system, presenting several captions instead of a single one seems relevant to provide some diversity, similarly to information retrieval systems. In this work, we explore the possibility to consider several predicted captions in the evaluation process instead of one. For this purpose, we propose SPIDEr-max, a metric that takes the maximum SPIDEr value among the scores of several caption candidates. To advocate for our metric, we report experiments on Clotho v2.1 and AudioCaps, with a transformed-based system. On AudioCaps for example, this system reached a SPIDEr-max value (with 5 candidates) close to the SPIDEr human score of reference.
Unlearning Comparator: A Visual Analytics System for Comparative Evaluation of Machine Unlearning Methods
Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove target training data from a trained model so that the removed data no longer influences the model's behavior, fulfilling "right to be forgotten" obligations under data privacy laws. Yet, we observe that researchers in this rapidly emerging field face challenges in analyzing and understanding the behavior of different MU methods, especially in terms of three fundamental principles in MU: accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. Consequently, they often rely on aggregate metrics and ad-hoc evaluations, making it difficult to accurately assess the trade-offs between methods. To fill this gap, we introduce a visual analytics system, Unlearning Comparator, designed to facilitate the systematic evaluation of MU methods. Our system supports two important tasks in the evaluation process: model comparison and attack simulation. First, it allows the user to compare the behaviors of two models, such as a model generated by a certain method and a retrained baseline, at class-, instance-, and layer-levels to better understand the changes made after unlearning. Second, our system simulates membership inference attacks (MIAs) to evaluate the privacy of a method, where an attacker attempts to determine whether specific data samples were part of the original training set. We evaluate our system through a case study visually analyzing prominent MU methods and demonstrate that it helps the user not only understand model behaviors but also gain insights that can inform the improvement of MU methods.
QuantV2X: A Fully Quantized Multi-Agent System for Cooperative Perception
Cooperative perception through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication offers significant potential for enhancing vehicle perception by mitigating occlusions and expanding the field of view. However, past research has predominantly focused on improving accuracy metrics without addressing the crucial system-level considerations of efficiency, latency, and real-world deployability. Noticeably, most existing systems rely on full-precision models, which incur high computational and transmission costs, making them impractical for real-time operation in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we introduce QuantV2X, the first fully quantized multi-agent system designed specifically for efficient and scalable deployment of multi-modal, multi-agent V2X cooperative perception. QuantV2X introduces a unified end-to-end quantization strategy across both neural network models and transmitted message representations that simultaneously reduces computational load and transmission bandwidth. Remarkably, despite operating under low-bit constraints, QuantV2X achieves accuracy comparable to full-precision systems. More importantly, when evaluated under deployment-oriented metrics, QuantV2X reduces system-level latency by 3.2times and achieves a +9.5 improvement in mAP30 over full-precision baselines. Furthermore, QuantV2X scales more effectively, enabling larger and more capable models to fit within strict memory budgets. These results highlight the viability of a fully quantized multi-agent intermediate fusion system for real-world deployment. The system will be publicly released to promote research in this field: https://github.com/ucla-mobility/QuantV2X.
Bayesian Hierarchical Models for Quantitative Estimates for Performance metrics applied to Saddle Search Algorithms
Rigorous performance evaluation is essential for developing robust algorithms for high-throughput computational chemistry. Traditional benchmarking, however, often struggles to account for system-specific variability, making it difficult to form actionable conclusions. We present a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework that rigorously quantifies performance metrics and their uncertainty, enabling a nuanced comparison of algorithmic strategies. We apply this framework to analyze the Dimer method, comparing Conjugate Gradient (CG) and L-BFGS rotation optimizers, with and without the removal of external rotations, across a benchmark of 500 molecular systems. Our analysis confirms that CG offers higher overall robustness than L-BFGS in this context. While the theoretically-motivated removal of external rotations led to higher computational cost (>40% more energy and force calls) for most systems in this set, our models also reveal a subtle interplay, hinting that this feature may improve the reliability of the L-BFGS optimizer. Rather than identifying a single superior method, our findings support the design of adaptive "chain of methods" workflows. This work showcases how a robust statistical paradigm can move beyond simple performance rankings to inform the intelligent, context-dependent application of computational chemistry methods.
Efficient Multi-Agent System Training with Data Influence-Oriented Tree Search
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based methods provide promising approaches for generating synthetic data to enhance the self-training of Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS). These methods leverage Q-values to estimate individual agent contributions. However, relying solely on Q-values to identify informative data may misalign with the data synthesis objective, as the focus should be on selecting data that best enhances model training. To address this discrepancy, we propose Data Influence-oriented Tree Search (DITS), a novel framework that incorporates influence scores to guide both tree search and data selection. By leveraging influence scores, we effectively identify the most impactful data for system improvement, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we derive influence score estimation methods tailored for non-differentiable metrics, significantly reducing computational overhead by utilizing inference computations. Extensive experiments on eight multi-agent datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed methods. Notably, our findings reveal that allocating more inference resources to estimate influence scores, rather than Q-values, during data synthesis can more effectively and efficiently enhance model training.
The T05 System for The VoiceMOS Challenge 2024: Transfer Learning from Deep Image Classifier to Naturalness MOS Prediction of High-Quality Synthetic Speech
We present our system (denoted as T05) for the VoiceMOS Challenge (VMC) 2024. Our system was designed for the VMC 2024 Track 1, which focused on the accurate prediction of naturalness mean opinion score (MOS) for high-quality synthetic speech. In addition to a pretrained self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech feature extractor, our system incorporates a pretrained image feature extractor to capture the difference of synthetic speech observed in speech spectrograms. We first separately train two MOS predictors that use either of an SSL-based or spectrogram-based feature. Then, we fine-tune the two predictors for better MOS prediction using the fusion of two extracted features. In the VMC 2024 Track 1, our T05 system achieved first place in 7 out of 16 evaluation metrics and second place in the remaining 9 metrics, with a significant difference compared to those ranked third and below. We also report the results of our ablation study to investigate essential factors of our system.
Multi-Scenario Combination Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Advertising Recommendation System
This paper explores multi-scenario optimization on large platforms using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We address this by treating scenarios like search, recommendation, and advertising as a cooperative, partially observable multi-agent decision problem. We introduce the Multi-Agent Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient (MARDPG) algorithm, which aligns different scenarios under a shared objective and allows for strategy communication to boost overall performance. Our results show marked improvements in metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and total sales, confirming our method's efficacy in practical settings.
Enhancing Text-to-SQL Translation for Financial System Design
Text-to-SQL, the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries, is part of various business processes. Its automation, which is an emerging challenge, will empower software practitioners to seamlessly interact with relational databases using natural language, thereby bridging the gap between business needs and software capabilities. In this paper, we consider Large Language Models (LLMs), which have achieved state of the art for various NLP tasks. Specifically, we benchmark Text-to-SQL performance, the evaluation methodologies, as well as input optimization (e.g., prompting). In light of the empirical observations that we have made, we propose two novel metrics that were designed to adequately measure the similarity between SQL queries. Overall, we share with the community various findings, notably on how to select the right LLM on Text-to-SQL tasks. We further demonstrate that a tree-based edit distance constitutes a reliable metric for assessing the similarity between generated SQL queries and the oracle for benchmarking Text2SQL approaches. This metric is important as it relieves researchers from the need to perform computationally expensive experiments such as executing generated queries as done in prior works. Our work implements financial domain use cases and, therefore contributes to the advancement of Text2SQL systems and their practical adoption in this domain.
UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022
We present the UTokyo-SaruLab mean opinion score (MOS) prediction system submitted to VoiceMOS Challenge 2022. The challenge is to predict the MOS values of speech samples collected from previous Blizzard Challenges and Voice Conversion Challenges for two tracks: a main track for in-domain prediction and an out-of-domain (OOD) track for which there is less labeled data from different listening tests. Our system is based on ensemble learning of strong and weak learners. Strong learners incorporate several improvements to the previous fine-tuning models of self-supervised learning (SSL) models, while weak learners use basic machine-learning methods to predict scores from SSL features. In the Challenge, our system had the highest score on several metrics for both the main and OOD tracks. In addition, we conducted ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Guardians of the Agentic System: Preventing Many Shots Jailbreak with Agentic System
The autonomous AI agents using large language models can create undeniable values in all span of the society but they face security threats from adversaries that warrants immediate protective solutions because trust and safety issues arise. Considering the many-shot jailbreaking and deceptive alignment as some of the main advanced attacks, that cannot be mitigated by the static guardrails used during the supervised training, points out a crucial research priority for real world robustness. The combination of static guardrails in dynamic multi-agent system fails to defend against those attacks. We intend to enhance security for LLM-based agents through the development of new evaluation frameworks which identify and counter threats for safe operational deployment. Our work uses three examination methods to detect rogue agents through a Reverse Turing Test and analyze deceptive alignment through multi-agent simulations and develops an anti-jailbreaking system by testing it with GEMINI 1.5 pro and llama-3.3-70B, deepseek r1 models using tool-mediated adversarial scenarios. The detection capabilities are strong such as 94\% accuracy for GEMINI 1.5 pro yet the system suffers persistent vulnerabilities when under long attacks as prompt length increases attack success rates (ASR) and diversity metrics become ineffective in prediction while revealing multiple complex system faults. The findings demonstrate the necessity of adopting flexible security systems based on active monitoring that can be performed by the agents themselves together with adaptable interventions by system admin as the current models can create vulnerabilities that can lead to the unreliable and vulnerable system. So, in our work, we try to address such situations and propose a comprehensive framework to counteract the security issues.
BRAINS: A Retrieval-Augmented System for Alzheimer's Detection and Monitoring
As the global burden of Alzheimer's disease (AD) continues to grow, early and accurate detection has become increasingly critical, especially in regions with limited access to advanced diagnostic tools. We propose BRAINS (Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Intelligence for Neurodegeneration Screening) to address this challenge. This novel system harnesses the powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Alzheimer's detection and monitoring. BRAINS features a dual-module architecture: a cognitive diagnostic module and a case-retrieval module. The Diagnostic Module utilizes LLMs fine-tuned on cognitive and neuroimaging datasets -- including MMSE, CDR scores, and brain volume metrics -- to perform structured assessments of Alzheimer's risk. Meanwhile, the Case Retrieval Module encodes patient profiles into latent representations and retrieves similar cases from a curated knowledge base. These auxiliary cases are fused with the input profile via a Case Fusion Layer to enhance contextual understanding. The combined representation is then processed with clinical prompts for inference. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate BRAINS effectiveness in classifying disease severity and identifying early signs of cognitive decline. This system not only shows strong potential as an assistive tool for scalable, explainable, and early-stage Alzheimer's disease detection, but also offers hope for future applications in the field.
Understanding Self-attention Mechanism via Dynamical System Perspective
The self-attention mechanism (SAM) is widely used in various fields of artificial intelligence and has successfully boosted the performance of different models. However, current explanations of this mechanism are mainly based on intuitions and experiences, while there still lacks direct modeling for how the SAM helps performance. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, based on the dynamical system perspective of the residual neural network, we first show that the intrinsic stiffness phenomenon (SP) in the high-precision solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) also widely exists in high-performance neural networks (NN). Thus the ability of NN to measure SP at the feature level is necessary to obtain high performance and is an important factor in the difficulty of training NN. Similar to the adaptive step-size method which is effective in solving stiff ODEs, we show that the SAM is also a stiffness-aware step size adaptor that can enhance the model's representational ability to measure intrinsic SP by refining the estimation of stiffness information and generating adaptive attention values, which provides a new understanding about why and how the SAM can benefit the model performance. This novel perspective can also explain the lottery ticket hypothesis in SAM, design new quantitative metrics of representational ability, and inspire a new theoretic-inspired approach, StepNet. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks demonstrate that StepNet can extract fine-grained stiffness information and measure SP accurately, leading to significant improvements in various visual tasks.
Unbabel's Participation in the WMT20 Metrics Shared Task
We present the contribution of the Unbabel team to the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Metrics. We intend to participate on the segment-level, document-level and system-level tracks on all language pairs, as well as the 'QE as a Metric' track. Accordingly, we illustrate results of our models in these tracks with reference to test sets from the previous year. Our submissions build upon the recently proposed COMET framework: We train several estimator models to regress on different human-generated quality scores and a novel ranking model trained on relative ranks obtained from Direct Assessments. We also propose a simple technique for converting segment-level predictions into a document-level score. Overall, our systems achieve strong results for all language pairs on previous test sets and in many cases set a new state-of-the-art.
LibVulnWatch: A Deep Assessment Agent System and Leaderboard for Uncovering Hidden Vulnerabilities in Open-Source AI Libraries
Open-source AI libraries are foundational to modern AI systems but pose significant, underexamined risks across security, licensing, maintenance, supply chain integrity, and regulatory compliance. We present LibVulnWatch, a graph-based agentic assessment framework that performs deep, source-grounded evaluations of these libraries. Built on LangGraph, the system coordinates a directed acyclic graph of specialized agents to extract, verify, and quantify risk using evidence from trusted sources such as repositories, documentation, and vulnerability databases. LibVulnWatch generates reproducible, governance-aligned scores across five critical domains, publishing them to a public leaderboard for longitudinal ecosystem monitoring. Applied to 20 widely used libraries, including ML frameworks, LLM inference engines, and agent orchestration tools, our system covers up to 88% of OpenSSF Scorecard checks while uncovering up to 19 additional risks per library. These include critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, absent Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), licensing constraints, undocumented telemetry, and widespread gaps in regulatory documentation and auditability. By translating high-level governance principles into practical, verifiable metrics, LibVulnWatch advances technical AI governance with a scalable, transparent mechanism for continuous supply chain risk assessment and informed library selection.
DeepPsy-Agent: A Stage-Aware and Deep-Thinking Emotional Support Agent System
This paper introduces DeepPsy-Agent, an innovative psychological support system that combines the three-stage helping theory in psychology with deep learning techniques. The system consists of two core components: (1) a multi-stage response-capable dialogue model (deeppsy-chat), which enhances reasoning capabilities through stage-awareness and deep-thinking analysis to generate high-quality responses; and (2) a real-time stage transition detection model that identifies contextual shifts to guide the dialogue towards more effective intervention stages. Based on 30,000 real psychological hotline conversations, we employ AI-simulated dialogues and expert re-annotation strategies to construct a high-quality multi-turn dialogue dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepPsy-Agent outperforms general-purpose large language models (LLMs) in key metrics such as problem exposure completeness, cognitive restructuring success rate, and action adoption rate. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of stage-awareness and deep-thinking modules, showing that stage information contributes 42.3\% to performance, while the deep-thinking module increases root-cause identification by 58.3\% and reduces ineffective suggestions by 72.1\%. This system addresses critical challenges in AI-based psychological support through dynamic dialogue management and deep reasoning, advancing intelligent mental health services.
InCA: Rethinking In-Car Conversational System Assessment Leveraging Large Language Models
The assessment of advanced generative large language models (LLMs) poses a significant challenge, given their heightened complexity in recent developments. Furthermore, evaluating the performance of LLM-based applications in various industries, as indicated by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), is a complex undertaking. This task necessitates a profound understanding of industry use cases and the anticipated system behavior. Within the context of the automotive industry, existing evaluation metrics prove inadequate for assessing in-car conversational question answering (ConvQA) systems. The unique demands of these systems, where answers may relate to driver or car safety and are confined within the car domain, highlight the limitations of current metrics. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a set of KPIs tailored for evaluating the performance of in-car ConvQA systems, along with datasets specifically designed for these KPIs. A preliminary and comprehensive empirical evaluation substantiates the efficacy of our proposed approach. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of employing varied personas in prompts and found that it enhances the model's capacity to simulate diverse viewpoints in assessments, mirroring how individuals with different backgrounds perceive a topic.
Evaluating ChatGPT as a Recommender System: A Rigorous Approach
Recent popularity surrounds large AI language models due to their impressive natural language capabilities. They contribute significantly to language-related tasks, including prompt-based learning, making them valuable for various specific tasks. This approach unlocks their full potential, enhancing precision and generalization. Research communities are actively exploring their applications, with ChatGPT receiving recognition. Despite extensive research on large language models, their potential in recommendation scenarios still needs to be explored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating ChatGPT's capabilities as a zero-shot recommender system. Our goals include evaluating its ability to use user preferences for recommendations, reordering existing recommendation lists, leveraging information from similar users, and handling cold-start situations. We assess ChatGPT's performance through comprehensive experiments using three datasets (MovieLens Small, Last.FM, and Facebook Book). We compare ChatGPT's performance against standard recommendation algorithms and other large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and PaLM-2. To measure recommendation effectiveness, we employ widely-used evaluation metrics like Mean Average Precision (MAP), Recall, Precision, F1, normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG), Item Coverage, Expected Popularity Complement (EPC), Average Coverage of Long Tail (ACLT), Average Recommendation Popularity (ARP), and Popularity-based Ranking-based Equal Opportunity (PopREO). Through thoroughly exploring ChatGPT's abilities in recommender systems, our study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the versatility and potential applications of large language models. Our experiment code is available on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/sisinflab/Recommender-ChatGPT
A Hardware-Aware System for Accelerating Deep Neural Network Optimization
Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) which extract specialized hardware-aware configurations (a.k.a. "sub-networks") from a hardware-agnostic "super-network" have become increasingly popular. While considerable effort has been employed towards improving the first stage, namely, the training of the super-network, the search for derivative high-performing sub-networks is still largely under-explored. For example, some recent network morphism techniques allow a super-network to be trained once and then have hardware-specific networks extracted from it as needed. These methods decouple the super-network training from the sub-network search and thus decrease the computational burden of specializing to different hardware platforms. We propose a comprehensive system that automatically and efficiently finds sub-networks from a pre-trained super-network that are optimized to different performance metrics and hardware configurations. By combining novel search tactics and algorithms with intelligent use of predictors, we significantly decrease the time needed to find optimal sub-networks from a given super-network. Further, our approach does not require the super-network to be refined for the target task a priori, thus allowing it to interface with any super-network. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our system works seamlessly with existing state-of-the-art super-network training methods in multiple domains. Moreover, we show how novel search tactics paired with evolutionary algorithms can accelerate the search process for ResNet50, MobileNetV3 and Transformer while maintaining objective space Pareto front diversity and demonstrate an 8x faster search result than the state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization WeakNAS approach.
Learning to Generate Images with Perceptual Similarity Metrics
Deep networks are increasingly being applied to problems involving image synthesis, e.g., generating images from textual descriptions and reconstructing an input image from a compact representation. Supervised training of image-synthesis networks typically uses a pixel-wise loss (PL) to indicate the mismatch between a generated image and its corresponding target image. We propose instead to use a loss function that is better calibrated to human perceptual judgments of image quality: the multiscale structural-similarity score (MS-SSIM). Because MS-SSIM is differentiable, it is easily incorporated into gradient-descent learning. We compare the consequences of using MS-SSIM versus PL loss on training deterministic and stochastic autoencoders. For three different architectures, we collected human judgments of the quality of image reconstructions. Observers reliably prefer images synthesized by MS-SSIM-optimized models over those synthesized by PL-optimized models, for two distinct PL measures (ell_1 and ell_2 distances). We also explore the effect of training objective on image encoding and analyze conditions under which perceptually-optimized representations yield better performance on image classification. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of perceptually-optimized networks for super-resolution imaging. Just as computer vision has advanced through the use of convolutional architectures that mimic the structure of the mammalian visual system, we argue that significant additional advances can be made in modeling images through the use of training objectives that are well aligned to characteristics of human perception.
AutoRev: Automatic Peer Review System for Academic Research Papers
Generating a review for an academic research paper is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of the document's content and the interdependencies between its sections. It demands not only insight into technical details but also an appreciation of the paper's overall coherence and structure. Recent methods have predominantly focused on fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. However, they often overlook the computational and performance limitations imposed by long input token lengths. To address this, we introduce AutoRev, an Automatic Peer Review System for Academic Research Papers. Our novel framework represents an academic document as a graph, enabling the extraction of the most critical passages that contribute significantly to the review. This graph-based approach demonstrates effectiveness for review generation and is potentially adaptable to various downstream tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and document representation. When applied to review generation, our method outperforms SOTA baselines by an average of 58.72% across all evaluation metrics. We hope that our work will stimulate further research in applying graph-based extraction techniques to other downstream tasks in NLP. We plan to make our code public upon acceptance.
ContestTrade: A Multi-Agent Trading System Based on Internal Contest Mechanism
In financial trading, large language model (LLM)-based agents demonstrate significant potential. However, the high sensitivity to market noise undermines the performance of LLM-based trading systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel multi-agent system featuring an internal competitive mechanism inspired by modern corporate management structures. The system consists of two specialized teams: (1) Data Team - responsible for processing and condensing massive market data into diversified text factors, ensuring they fit the model's constrained context. (2) Research Team - tasked with making parallelized multipath trading decisions based on deep research methods. The core innovation lies in implementing a real-time evaluation and ranking mechanism within each team, driven by authentic market feedback. Each agent's performance undergoes continuous scoring and ranking, with only outputs from top-performing agents being adopted. The design enables the system to adaptively adjust to dynamic environment, enhances robustness against market noise and ultimately delivers superior trading performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system significantly outperforms prevailing multi-agent systems and traditional quantitative investment methods across diverse evaluation metrics. ContestTrade is open-sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/FinStep-AI/ContestTrade.
LegalRAG: A Hybrid RAG System for Multilingual Legal Information Retrieval
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational linguistic techniques are increasingly being applied across various domains, yet their use in legal and regulatory tasks remains limited. To address this gap, we develop an efficient bilingual question-answering framework for regulatory documents, specifically the Bangladesh Police Gazettes, which contain both English and Bangla text. Our approach employs modern Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines to enhance information retrieval and response generation. In addition to conventional RAG pipelines, we propose an advanced RAG-based approach that improves retrieval performance, leading to more precise answers. This system enables efficient searching for specific government legal notices, making legal information more accessible. We evaluate both our proposed and conventional RAG systems on a diverse test set on Bangladesh Police Gazettes, demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods across all evaluation metrics.
Many Hands Make Light Work: Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Module-Based Mixture-of-Experts
Task-oriented dialogue systems are broadly used in virtual assistants and other automated services, providing interfaces between users and machines to facilitate specific tasks. Nowadays, task-oriented dialogue systems have greatly benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their task-solving performance is constrained by the inherent capacities of PLMs, and scaling these models is expensive and complex as the model size becomes larger. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Mixture-of-Expert Task-Oriented Dialogue system (SMETOD) which leverages an ensemble of Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) to excel at subproblems and generate specialized outputs for task-oriented dialogues. SMETOD also scales up a task-oriented dialogue system with simplicity and flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency. We extensively evaluate our model on three benchmark functionalities: intent prediction, dialogue state tracking, and dialogue response generation. Experimental results demonstrate that SMETOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on most evaluated metrics. Moreover, comparisons against existing strong baselines show that SMETOD has a great advantage in the cost of inference and correctness in problem-solving.
OnePiece: Bringing Context Engineering and Reasoning to Industrial Cascade Ranking System
Despite the growing interest in replicating the scaled success of large language models (LLMs) in industrial search and recommender systems, most existing industrial efforts remain limited to transplanting Transformer architectures, which bring only incremental improvements over strong Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs). From a first principle perspective, the breakthroughs of LLMs stem not only from their architectures but also from two complementary mechanisms: context engineering, which enriches raw input queries with contextual cues to better elicit model capabilities, and multi-step reasoning, which iteratively refines model outputs through intermediate reasoning paths. However, these two mechanisms and their potential to unlock substantial improvements remain largely underexplored in industrial ranking systems. In this paper, we propose OnePiece, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-style context engineering and reasoning into both retrieval and ranking models of industrial cascaded pipelines. OnePiece is built on a pure Transformer backbone and further introduces three key innovations: (1) structured context engineering, which augments interaction history with preference and scenario signals and unifies them into a structured tokenized input sequence for both retrieval and ranking; (2) block-wise latent reasoning, which equips the model with multi-step refinement of representations and scales reasoning bandwidth via block size; (3) progressive multi-task training, which leverages user feedback chains to effectively supervise reasoning steps during training. OnePiece has been deployed in the main personalized search scenario of Shopee and achieves consistent online gains across different key business metrics, including over +2% GMV/UU and a +2.90% increase in advertising revenue.
CRASH: Crash Recognition and Anticipation System Harnessing with Context-Aware and Temporal Focus Attentions
Accurately and promptly predicting accidents among surrounding traffic agents from camera footage is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This task presents substantial challenges stemming from the unpredictable nature of traffic accidents, their long-tail distribution, the intricacies of traffic scene dynamics, and the inherently constrained field of vision of onboard cameras. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel accident anticipation framework for AVs, termed CRASH. It seamlessly integrates five components: object detector, feature extractor, object-aware module, context-aware module, and multi-layer fusion. Specifically, we develop the object-aware module to prioritize high-risk objects in complex and ambiguous environments by calculating the spatial-temporal relationships between traffic agents. In parallel, the context-aware is also devised to extend global visual information from the temporal to the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and capture fine-grained visual features of potential objects and broader context cues within traffic scenes. To capture a wider range of visual cues, we further propose a multi-layer fusion that dynamically computes the temporal dependencies between different scenes and iteratively updates the correlations between different visual features for accurate and timely accident prediction. Evaluated on real-world datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D) datasets--our model surpasses existing top baselines in critical evaluation metrics like Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA). Importantly, its robustness and adaptability are particularly evident in challenging driving scenarios with missing or limited training data, demonstrating significant potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.
Team Xiaomi EV-AD VLA: Caption-Guided Retrieval System for Cross-Modal Drone Navigation -- Technical Report for IROS 2025 RoboSense Challenge Track 4
Cross-modal drone navigation remains a challenging task in robotics, requiring efficient retrieval of relevant images from large-scale databases based on natural language descriptions. The RoboSense 2025 Track 4 challenge addresses this challenge, focusing on robust, natural language-guided cross-view image retrieval across multiple platforms (drones, satellites, and ground cameras). Current baseline methods, while effective for initial retrieval, often struggle to achieve fine-grained semantic matching between text queries and visual content, especially in complex aerial scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage retrieval refinement method: Caption-Guided Retrieval System (CGRS) that enhances the baseline coarse ranking through intelligent reranking. Our method first leverages a baseline model to obtain an initial coarse ranking of the top 20 most relevant images for each query. We then use Vision-Language-Model (VLM) to generate detailed captions for these candidate images, capturing rich semantic descriptions of their visual content. These generated captions are then used in a multimodal similarity computation framework to perform fine-grained reranking of the original text query, effectively building a semantic bridge between the visual content and natural language descriptions. Our approach significantly improves upon the baseline, achieving a consistent 5\% improvement across all key metrics (Recall@1, Recall@5, and Recall@10). Our approach win TOP-2 in the challenge, demonstrating the practical value of our semantic refinement strategy in real-world robotic navigation scenarios.
Oasis: Data Curation and Assessment System for Pretraining of Large Language Models
Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.
SysLLMatic: Large Language Models are Software System Optimizers
Automatic software system optimization can improve software speed, reduce operating costs, and save energy. Traditional approaches to optimization rely on manual tuning and compiler heuristics, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse codebases and system contexts. Recent methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation to address these limitations, but often fail to scale to the complexity of real-world software systems and applications. We present SysLLMatic, a system that integrates LLMs with profiling-guided feedback and system performance insights to automatically optimize software code. We evaluate it on three benchmark suites: HumanEval_CPP (competitive programming in C++), SciMark2 (scientific kernels in Java), and DaCapoBench (large-scale software systems in Java). Results show that SysLLMatic can improve system performance, including latency, throughput, energy efficiency, memory usage, and CPU utilization. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM baselines on microbenchmarks. On large-scale application codes, it surpasses traditional compiler optimizations, achieving average relative improvements of 1.85x in latency and 2.24x in throughput. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs, guided by principled systems thinking and appropriate performance diagnostics, can serve as viable software system optimizers. We further identify limitations of our approach and the challenges involved in handling complex applications. This work provides a foundation for generating optimized code across various languages, benchmarks, and program sizes in a principled manner.
Building a Role Specified Open-Domain Dialogue System Leveraging Large-Scale Language Models
Recent open-domain dialogue models have brought numerous breakthroughs. However, building a chat system is not scalable since it often requires a considerable volume of human-human dialogue data, especially when enforcing features such as persona, style, or safety. In this work, we study the challenge of imposing roles on open-domain dialogue systems, with the goal of making the systems maintain consistent roles while conversing naturally with humans. To accomplish this, the system must satisfy a role specification that includes certain conditions on the stated features as well as a system policy on whether or not certain types of utterances are allowed. For this, we propose an efficient data collection framework leveraging in-context few-shot learning of large-scale language models for building role-satisfying dialogue dataset from scratch. We then compare various architectures for open-domain dialogue systems in terms of meeting role specifications while maintaining conversational abilities. Automatic and human evaluations show that our models return few out-of-bounds utterances, keeping competitive performance on general metrics. We release a Korean dialogue dataset we built for further research.
SimUSER: Simulating User Behavior with Large Language Models for Recommender System Evaluation
Recommender systems play a central role in numerous real-life applications, yet evaluating their performance remains a significant challenge due to the gap between offline metrics and online behaviors. Given the scarcity and limits (e.g., privacy issues) of real user data, we introduce SimUSER, an agent framework that serves as believable and cost-effective human proxies. SimUSER first identifies self-consistent personas from historical data, enriching user profiles with unique backgrounds and personalities. Then, central to this evaluation are users equipped with persona, memory, perception, and brain modules, engaging in interactions with the recommender system. SimUSER exhibits closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments to explore the effects of thumbnails on click rates, the exposure effect, and the impact of reviews on user engagement. Finally, we refine recommender system parameters based on offline A/B test results, resulting in improved user engagement in the real world.
Visualizing Uncertainty in Translation Tasks: An Evaluation of LLM Performance and Confidence Metrics
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized for machine translation, yet their predictions often exhibit uncertainties that hinder interpretability and user trust. Effectively visualizing these uncertainties can enhance the usability of LLM outputs, particularly in contexts where translation accuracy is critical. This paper addresses two primary objectives: (1) providing users with token-level insights into model confidence and (2) developing a web-based visualization tool to quantify and represent translation uncertainties. To achieve these goals, we utilized the T5 model with the WMT19 dataset for translation tasks and evaluated translation quality using established metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE. We introduced three novel uncertainty quantification (UQ) metrics: (1) the geometric mean of token probabilities, (2) the arithmetic mean of token probabilities, and (3) the arithmetic mean of the kurtosis of token distributions. These metrics provide a simple yet effective framework for evaluating translation performance. Our analysis revealed a linear relationship between the traditional evaluation metrics and our UQ metrics, demonstrating the validity of our approach. Additionally, we developed an interactive web-based visualization that uses a color gradient to represent token confidence. This tool offers users a clear and intuitive understanding of translation quality while providing valuable insights into model performance. Overall, we show that our UQ metrics and visualization are both robust and interpretable, offering practical tools for evaluating and accessing machine translation systems.
ConCerNet: A Contrastive Learning Based Framework for Automated Conservation Law Discovery and Trustworthy Dynamical System Prediction
Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown great capacity of modeling a dynamical system; nevertheless, they usually do not obey physics constraints such as conservation laws. This paper proposes a new learning framework named ConCerNet to improve the trustworthiness of the DNN based dynamics modeling to endow the invariant properties. ConCerNet consists of two steps: (i) a contrastive learning method to automatically capture the system invariants (i.e. conservation properties) along the trajectory observations; (ii) a neural projection layer to guarantee that the learned dynamics models preserve the learned invariants. We theoretically prove the functional relationship between the learned latent representation and the unknown system invariant function. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms the baseline neural networks in both coordinate error and conservation metrics by a large margin. With neural network based parameterization and no dependence on prior knowledge, our method can be extended to complex and large-scale dynamics by leveraging an autoencoder.
DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-Based Summary Quality Metrics Reference-Freely
Automated summary quality assessment falls into two categories: reference-based and reference-free. Reference-based metrics, historically deemed more accurate due to the additional information provided by human-written references, are limited by their reliance on human input. In this paper, we hypothesize that the comparison methodologies used by some reference-based metrics to evaluate a system summary against its corresponding reference can be effectively adapted to assess it against its source document, thereby transforming these metrics into reference-free ones. Experimental results support this hypothesis. After being repurposed reference-freely, the zero-shot BERTScore using the pretrained DeBERTa-large-MNLI model of <0.5B parameters consistently outperforms its original reference-based version across various aspects on the SummEval and Newsroom datasets. It also excels in comparison to most existing reference-free metrics and closely competes with zero-shot summary evaluators based on GPT-3.5.
Baichuan-M2: Scaling Medical Capability with Large Verifier System
As large language models (LLMs) advance in conversational and reasoning capabilities, their practical application in healthcare has become a critical research focus. However, there is a notable gap between the performance of medical LLMs on static benchmarks such as USMLE and their utility in real-world clinical decision-making. This discrepancy arises because traditional exams fail to capture the dynamic, interactive nature of medical consultations. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel dynamic verification framework that moves beyond static answer verifier, establishing a large-scale, high-fidelity interactive reinforcement learning system. Our framework comprises two key components: a Patient Simulator that creates realistic clinical environments using de-identified medical records, and a Clinical Rubrics Generator that dynamically produces multi-dimensional evaluation metrics. Building on this foundation, we develop Baichuan-M2, a 32B-parameter medical augmented reasoning model trained through a multi-stage reinforcement learning strategy with an improved Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. Evaluated on HealthBench, Baichuan-M2 outperforms all other open-source models and most advanced closed-source counterparts, achieving a score above 32 on the challenging HealthBench Hard benchmark-previously exceeded only by GPT-5. Our work demonstrates that robust dynamic verifier system is essential for aligning LLM capabilities with practical clinical applications, establishing a new Pareto front in the performance-parameter trade-off for medical AI deployment.
HyPA-RAG: A Hybrid Parameter Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for AI Legal and Policy Applications
Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations in AI legal and policy applications due to outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and poor reasoning in complex contexts. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems address these issues by incorporating external knowledge, but suffer from retrieval errors, ineffective context integration, and high operational costs. This paper presents the Hybrid Parameter-Adaptive RAG (HyPA-RAG) system, designed for the AI legal domain, with NYC Local Law 144 (LL144) as the test case. HyPA-RAG integrates a query complexity classifier for adaptive parameter tuning, a hybrid retrieval approach combining dense, sparse, and knowledge graph methods, and a comprehensive evaluation framework with tailored question types and metrics. Testing on LL144 demonstrates that HyPA-RAG enhances retrieval accuracy, response fidelity, and contextual precision, offering a robust and adaptable solution for high-stakes legal and policy applications.
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Exemplar Selection in Task-oriented Dialogue System
Intelligent task-oriented dialogue systems (ToDs) are expected to continuously acquire new knowledge, also known as Continual Learning (CL), which is crucial to fit ever-changing user needs. However, catastrophic forgetting dramatically degrades the model performance in face of a long streamed curriculum. In this paper, we aim to overcome the forgetting problem in ToDs and propose a method (HESIT) with hyper-gradient-based exemplar strategy, which samples influential exemplars for periodic retraining. Instead of unilaterally observing data or models, HESIT adopts a profound exemplar selection strategy that considers the general performance of the trained model when selecting exemplars for each task domain. Specifically, HESIT analyzes the training data influence by tracing their hyper-gradient in the optimization process. Furthermore, HESIT avoids estimating Hessian to make it compatible for ToDs with a large pre-trained model. Experimental results show that HESIT effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting by exemplar selection, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest CL benchmark of ToDs in terms of all metrics.
OmniForce: On Human-Centered, Large Model Empowered and Cloud-Edge Collaborative AutoML System
Automated machine learning (AutoML) seeks to build ML models with minimal human effort. While considerable research has been conducted in the area of AutoML in general, aiming to take humans out of the loop when building artificial intelligence (AI) applications, scant literature has focused on how AutoML works well in open-environment scenarios such as the process of training and updating large models, industrial supply chains or the industrial metaverse, where people often face open-loop problems during the search process: they must continuously collect data, update data and models, satisfy the requirements of the development and deployment environment, support massive devices, modify evaluation metrics, etc. Addressing the open-environment issue with pure data-driven approaches requires considerable data, computing resources, and effort from dedicated data engineers, making current AutoML systems and platforms inefficient and computationally intractable. Human-computer interaction is a practical and feasible way to tackle the problem of open-environment AI. In this paper, we introduce OmniForce, a human-centered AutoML (HAML) system that yields both human-assisted ML and ML-assisted human techniques, to put an AutoML system into practice and build adaptive AI in open-environment scenarios. Specifically, we present OmniForce in terms of ML version management; pipeline-driven development and deployment collaborations; a flexible search strategy framework; and widely provisioned and crowdsourced application algorithms, including large models. Furthermore, the (large) models constructed by OmniForce can be automatically turned into remote services in a few minutes; this process is dubbed model as a service (MaaS). Experimental results obtained in multiple search spaces and real-world use cases demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of OmniForce.
Yseop at FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Specializing Financial Domain Learning with Phrase Representations
In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of this shared task is to correctly classify a list of given terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. For our system submission, we evaluate two methods: a Sentence-RoBERTa (SRoBERTa) embeddings model pre-trained on a custom corpus, and a dual word-sentence embeddings model that builds on the first method by improving the proposed baseline word embeddings construction using the FastText model to boost the classification performance. Our system ranks 2nd overall on both metrics, scoring 0.917 on Average Accuracy and 1.141 on Mean Rank.
Neural Network-Based Algorithmic Trading Systems: Multi-Timeframe Analysis and High-Frequency Execution in Cryptocurrency Markets
This paper explores neural network-based approaches for algorithmic trading in cryptocurrency markets. Our approach combines multi-timeframe trend analysis with high-frequency direction prediction networks, achieving positive risk-adjusted returns through statistical modeling and systematic market exploitation. The system integrates diverse data sources including market data, on-chain metrics, and orderbook dynamics, translating these into unified buy/sell pressure signals. We demonstrate how machine learning models can effectively capture cross-timeframe relationships, enabling sub-second trading decisions with statistical confidence.
DeepRetrieval: Hacking Real Search Engines and Retrievers with Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
Information retrieval systems are crucial for enabling effective access to large document collections. Recent approaches have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance retrieval performance through query augmentation, but often rely on expensive supervised learning or distillation techniques that require significant computational resources and hand-labeled data. We introduce DeepRetrieval, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains LLMs for query generation through trial and error without supervised data (reference query). Using retrieval metrics as rewards, our system generates queries that maximize retrieval performance. DeepRetrieval outperforms leading methods on literature search with 65.07% (vs. previous SOTA 24.68%) recall for publication search and 63.18% (vs. previous SOTA 32.11%) recall for trial search using real-world search engines. DeepRetrieval also dominates in evidence-seeking retrieval, classic information retrieval and SQL database search. With only 3B parameters, it outperforms industry-leading models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet on 11/13 datasets. These results demonstrate that our RL approach offers a more efficient and effective paradigm for information retrieval. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/pat-jj/DeepRetrieval.
ExposureEngine: Oriented Logo Detection and Sponsor Visibility Analytics in Sports Broadcasts
Quantifying sponsor visibility in sports broadcasts is a critical marketing task traditionally hindered by manual, subjective, and unscalable analysis methods. While automated systems offer an alternative, their reliance on axis-aligned Horizontal Bounding Box (HBB) leads to inaccurate exposuremetrics when logos appear rotated or skewed due to dynamic camera angles and perspective distortions. This paper introduces ExposureEngine, an end-to-end system designed for accurate, rotation-aware sponsor visibility analytics in sports broadcasts, demonstrated in a soccer case study. Our approach predicts Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) to provide a geometrically precise fit to each logo regardless of the orientation on-screen. To train and evaluate our detector, we developed a new dataset comprising 1,103 frames from Swedish elite soccer, featuring 670 unique sponsor logos annotated with OBBs. Our model achieves a mean Average Precision ([email protected]) of 0.859, with a precision of 0.96 and recall of 0.87, demonstrating robust performance in localizing logos under diverse broadcast conditions. The system integrates these detections into an analytical pipeline that calculates precise visibility metrics, such as exposure duration and on-screen coverage. Furthermore, we incorporate a language-driven agentic layer, enabling users to generate reports, summaries, and media content through natural language queries. The complete system, including the dataset and the analytics dashboard, provides a comprehensive solution for auditable and interpretable sponsor measurement in sports media. An overview of the ExposureEngine is available online: https://youtu.be/tRw6OBISuW4 .
6G-Enabled Digital Twin Framework for Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems: An Experimental Validation with Industrial Bearing Fault Detection
Current Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrated with Digital Twin (DT) technology face critical limitations in achieving real-time performance for mission-critical industrial applications. Existing 5G-enabled systems suffer from latencies exceeding 10ms, which are inadequate for applications requiring sub-millisecond response times, such as autonomous industrial control and predictive maintenance. This research aims to develop and validate a 6G-enabled Digital Twin framework that achieves ultra-low latency communication and real-time synchronization between physical industrial assets and their digital counterparts, specifically targeting bearing fault detection as a critical industrial use case. The proposed framework integrates terahertz communications (0.1-1 THz), intelligent reflecting surfaces, and edge artificial intelligence within a five-layer architecture. Experimental validation was conducted using the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing dataset, implementing comprehensive feature extraction (15 time and frequency domain features) and Random Forest classification algorithms. The system performance was evaluated against traditional WiFi-6 and 5G networks across multiple metrics, including classification accuracy, end-to-end latency, and scalability. It achieved 97.7% fault classification accuracy with 0.8ms end-to-end latency, representing a 15.6x improvement over WiFi-6 (12.5ms) and 5.25x improvement over 5G (4.2ms) networks. The system demonstrated superior scalability with sub-linear processing time growth and maintained consistent performance across four bearing fault categories (normal, inner race, outer race, and ball faults) with macro-averaged F1-scores exceeding 97%.
TransEvalnia: Reasoning-based Evaluation and Ranking of Translations
We present TransEvalnia, a prompting-based translation evaluation and ranking system that uses reasoning in performing its evaluations and ranking. This system presents fine-grained evaluations based on a subset of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (https://themqm.org/), returns an assessment of which translation it deems the best, and provides numerical scores for the various dimensions and for the overall translation. We show that TransEvalnia performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art MT-Ranker (Moosa et al. 2024) on our own English-Japanese data as well as several language pairs from various WMT shared tasks. Using Anthropic's Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct as the evaluation LLMs, we show that the evaluations returned are deemed highly acceptable to human raters, and that the scores assigned to the translations by Sonnet, as well as other LLMs, correlate well with scores assigned by the human raters. We also note the sensitivity of our system -- as well as MT-Ranker -- to the order in which the translations are presented, and we propose methods to address this position bias. All data, including the system's evaluation and reasoning, human assessments, as well as code is released.
Refine Medical Diagnosis Using Generation Augmented Retrieval and Clinical Practice Guidelines
Current medical language models, adapted from large language models (LLMs), typically predict ICD code-based diagnosis from electronic health records (EHRs) because these labels are readily available. However, ICD codes do not capture the nuanced, context-rich reasoning clinicians use for diagnosis. Clinicians synthesize diverse patient data and reference clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to make evidence-based decisions. This misalignment limits the clinical utility of existing models. We introduce GARMLE-G, a Generation-Augmented Retrieval framework that grounds medical language model outputs in authoritative CPGs. Unlike conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation based approaches, GARMLE-G enables hallucination-free outputs by directly retrieving authoritative guideline content without relying on model-generated text. It (1) integrates LLM predictions with EHR data to create semantically rich queries, (2) retrieves relevant CPG knowledge snippets via embedding similarity, and (3) fuses guideline content with model output to generate clinically aligned recommendations. A prototype system for hypertension diagnosis was developed and evaluated on multiple metrics, demonstrating superior retrieval precision, semantic relevance, and clinical guideline adherence compared to RAG-based baselines, while maintaining a lightweight architecture suitable for localized healthcare deployment. This work provides a scalable, low-cost, and hallucination-free method for grounding medical language models in evidence-based clinical practice, with strong potential for broader clinical deployment.
Deep Learning-Based Breast Cancer Detection in Mammography: A Multi-Center Validation Study in Thai Population
This study presents a deep learning system for breast cancer detection in mammography, developed using a modified EfficientNetV2 architecture with enhanced attention mechanisms. The model was trained on mammograms from a major Thai medical center and validated on three distinct datasets: an in-domain test set (9,421 cases), a biopsy-confirmed set (883 cases), and an out-of-domain generalizability set (761 cases) collected from two different hospitals. For cancer detection, the model achieved AUROCs of 0.89, 0.96, and 0.94 on the respective datasets. The system's lesion localization capability, evaluated using metrics including Lesion Localization Fraction (LLF) and Non-Lesion Localization Fraction (NLF), demonstrated robust performance in identifying suspicious regions. Clinical validation through concordance tests showed strong agreement with radiologists: 83.5% classification and 84.0% localization concordance for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 78.1% classification and 79.6% localization concordance for out-of-domain cases. Expert radiologists' acceptance rate also averaged 96.7% for biopsy-confirmed cases, and 89.3% for out-of-domain cases. The system achieved a System Usability Scale score of 74.17 for source hospital, and 69.20 for validation hospitals, indicating good clinical acceptance. These results demonstrate the model's effectiveness in assisting mammogram interpretation, with the potential to enhance breast cancer screening workflows in clinical practice.
Code-Craft: Hierarchical Graph-Based Code Summarization for Enhanced Context Retrieval
Understanding and navigating large-scale codebases remains a significant challenge in software engineering. Existing methods often treat code as flat text or focus primarily on local structural relationships, limiting their ability to provide holistic, context-aware information retrieval. We present Hierarchical Code Graph Summarization (HCGS), a novel approach that constructs a multi-layered representation of a codebase by generating structured summaries in a bottom-up fashion from a code graph. HCGS leverages the Language Server Protocol for language-agnostic code analysis and employs a parallel level-based algorithm for efficient summary generation. Through extensive evaluation on five diverse codebases totaling 7,531 functions, HCGS demonstrates significant improvements in code retrieval accuracy, achieving up to 82 percentage relative improvement in top-1 retrieval precision for large codebases like libsignal (27.15 percentage points), and perfect Pass@3 scores for smaller repositories. The system's hierarchical approach consistently outperforms traditional code-only retrieval across all metrics, with particularly substantial gains in larger, more complex codebases where understanding function relationships is crucial.
A-Scan2BIM: Assistive Scan to Building Information Modeling
This paper proposes an assistive system for architects that converts a large-scale point cloud into a standardized digital representation of a building for Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications. The process is known as Scan-to-BIM, which requires many hours of manual work even for a single building floor by a professional architect. Given its challenging nature, the paper focuses on helping architects on the Scan-to-BIM process, instead of replacing them. Concretely, we propose an assistive Scan-to-BIM system that takes the raw sensor data and edit history (including the current BIM model), then auto-regressively predicts a sequence of model editing operations as APIs of a professional BIM software (i.e., Autodesk Revit). The paper also presents the first building-scale Scan2BIM dataset that contains a sequence of model editing operations as the APIs of Autodesk Revit. The dataset contains 89 hours of Scan2BIM modeling processes by professional architects over 16 scenes, spanning over 35,000 m^2. We report our system's reconstruction quality with standard metrics, and we introduce a novel metric that measures how natural the order of reconstructed operations is. A simple modification to the reconstruction module helps improve performance, and our method is far superior to two other baselines in the order metric. We will release data, code, and models at a-scan2bim.github.io.
Beyond Correlation: Interpretable Evaluation of Machine Translation Metrics
Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics assess translation quality automatically. Recently, researchers have employed MT metrics for various new use cases, such as data filtering and translation re-ranking. However, most MT metrics return assessments as scalar scores that are difficult to interpret, posing a challenge to making informed design choices. Moreover, MT metrics' capabilities have historically been evaluated using correlation with human judgment, which, despite its efficacy, falls short of providing intuitive insights into metric performance, especially in terms of new metric use cases. To address these issues, we introduce an interpretable evaluation framework for MT metrics. Within this framework, we evaluate metrics in two scenarios that serve as proxies for the data filtering and translation re-ranking use cases. Furthermore, by measuring the performance of MT metrics using Precision, Recall, and F-score, we offer clearer insights into their capabilities than correlation with human judgments. Finally, we raise concerns regarding the reliability of manually curated data following the Direct Assessments+Scalar Quality Metrics (DA+SQM) guidelines, reporting a notably low agreement with Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) annotations.
Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality
We describe GEMBA, a GPT-based metric for assessment of translation quality, which works both with a reference translation and without. In our evaluation, we focus on zero-shot prompting, comparing four prompt variants in two modes, based on the availability of the reference. We investigate nine versions of GPT models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4. We show that our method for translation quality assessment only works with GPT~3.5 and larger models. Comparing to results from WMT22's Metrics shared task, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in both modes when compared to MQM-based human labels. Our results are valid on the system level for all three WMT22 Metrics shared task language pairs, namely English into German, English into Russian, and Chinese into English. This provides a first glimpse into the usefulness of pre-trained, generative large language models for quality assessment of translations. We publicly release all our code and prompt templates used for the experiments described in this work, as well as all corresponding scoring results, to allow for external validation and reproducibility.
LiteraryQA: Towards Effective Evaluation of Long-document Narrative QA
Question Answering (QA) on narrative text poses a unique challenge to current systems, requiring a deep understanding of long, complex documents. However, the reliability of NarrativeQA, the most widely used benchmark in this domain, is hindered by noisy documents and flawed QA pairs. In this work, we introduce LiteraryQA, a high-quality subset of NarrativeQA focused on literary works. Using a human- and LLM-validated pipeline, we identify and correct low-quality QA samples while removing extraneous text from source documents. We then carry out a meta-evaluation of automatic metrics to clarify how systems should be evaluated on LiteraryQA. This analysis reveals that all n-gram-based metrics have a low system-level correlation to human judgment, while LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations, even with small open-weight models, can strongly agree with the ranking identified by humans. Finally, we benchmark a set of long-context LLMs on LiteraryQA. We release our code and data at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/LiteraryQA.
MultiAgent Collaboration Attack: Investigating Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Model Collaborations via Debate
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results on current benchmarks when working individually. The advancement in their capabilities, along with a reduction in parameter size and inference times, has facilitated the use of these models as agents, enabling interactions among multiple models to execute complex tasks. Such collaborations offer several advantages, including the use of specialized models (e.g. coding), improved confidence through multiple computations, and enhanced divergent thinking, leading to more diverse outputs. Thus, the collaborative use of language models is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary. We introduce pertinent metrics to assess the adversary's effectiveness, focusing on system accuracy and model agreement. Our findings highlight the importance of a model's persuasive ability in influencing others. Additionally, we explore inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments and evaluate the potential of prompt-based mitigation as a defensive strategy.
KubeIntellect: A Modular LLM-Orchestrated Agent Framework for End-to-End Kubernetes Management
Kubernetes has become the foundation of modern cloud-native infrastructure, yet its management remains complex and fragmented. Administrators must navigate a vast API surface, manage heterogeneous workloads, and coordinate tasks across disconnected tools - often requiring precise commands, YAML configuration, and contextual expertise. This paper presents KubeIntellect, a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered system for intelligent, end-to-end Kubernetes control. Unlike existing tools that focus on observability or static automation, KubeIntellect supports natural language interaction across the full spectrum of Kubernetes API operations, including read, write, delete, exec, access control, lifecycle, and advanced verbs. The system uses modular agents aligned with functional domains (e.g., logs, metrics, RBAC), orchestrated by a supervisor that interprets user queries, maintains workflow memory, invokes reusable tools, or synthesizes new ones via a secure Code Generator Agent. KubeIntellect integrates memory checkpoints, human-in-the-loop clarification, and dynamic task sequencing into a structured orchestration framework. Evaluation results show a 93% tool synthesis success rate and 100% reliability across 200 natural language queries, demonstrating the system's ability to operate efficiently under diverse workloads. An automated demo environment is provided on Azure, with additional support for local testing via kind. This work introduces a new class of interpretable, extensible, and LLM-driven systems for managing complex infrastructure.
The Pursuit of Empathy: Evaluating Small Language Models for PTSD Dialogue Support
Can small language models with 0.5B to 5B parameters meaningfully engage in trauma-informed, empathetic dialogue for individuals with PTSD? We address this question by introducing TIDE, a dataset of 10,000 two-turn dialogues spanning 500 diverse PTSD client personas and grounded in a three-factor empathy model: emotion recognition, distress normalization, and supportive reflection. All scenarios and reference responses were reviewed for realism and trauma sensitivity by a clinical psychologist specializing in PTSD. We evaluate eight small language models before and after fine-tuning, comparing their outputs to a frontier model (Claude Sonnet 3.5). Our IRB-approved human evaluation and automatic metrics show that fine-tuning generally improves perceived empathy, but gains are highly scenario- and user-dependent, with smaller models facing an empathy ceiling. Demographic analysis shows older adults value distress validation and graduate-educated users prefer nuanced replies, while gender effects are minimal. We highlight the limitations of automatic metrics and the need for context- and user-aware system design. Our findings, along with the planned release of TIDE, provide a foundation for building safe, resource-efficient, and ethically sound empathetic AI to supplement, not replace, clinical mental health care.
Remedy: Learning Machine Translation Evaluation from Human Preferences with Reward Modeling
A key challenge in MT evaluation is the inherent noise and inconsistency of human ratings. Regression-based neural metrics struggle with this noise, while prompting LLMs shows promise at system-level evaluation but performs poorly at segment level. In this work, we propose ReMedy, a novel MT metric framework that reformulates translation evaluation as a reward modeling task. Instead of regressing on imperfect human ratings directly, ReMedy learns relative translation quality using pairwise preference data, resulting in a more reliable evaluation. In extensive experiments across WMT22-24 shared tasks (39 language pairs, 111 MT systems), ReMedy achieves state-of-the-art performance at both segment- and system-level evaluation. Specifically, ReMedy-9B surpasses larger WMT winners and massive closed LLMs such as MetricX-13B, XCOMET-Ensemble, GEMBA-GPT-4, PaLM-540B, and finetuned PaLM2. Further analyses demonstrate that ReMedy delivers superior capability in detecting translation errors and evaluating low-quality translations.
Jewelry Shop Conversational Chatbot
Since the advent of chatbots in the commercial sector, they have been widely employed in the customer service department. Typically, these commercial chatbots are retrieval-based, so they are unable to respond to queries absent in the provided dataset. On the contrary, generative chatbots try to create the most appropriate response, but are mostly unable to create a smooth flow in the customer-bot dialog. Since the client has few options left for continuing after receiving a response, the dialog becomes short. Through our work, we try to maximize the intelligence of a simple conversational agent so it can answer unseen queries, and generate follow-up questions or remarks. We have built a chatbot for a jewelry shop that finds the underlying objective of the customer's query by finding similarity of the input to patterns in the corpus. Our system features an audio input interface for clients, so they may speak to it in natural language. After converting the audio to text, we trained the model to extract the intent of the query, to find an appropriate response and to speak to the client in a natural human voice. To gauge the system's performance, we used performance metrics such as Recall, Precision and F1 score.
Language Model Guided Reinforcement Learning in Quantitative Trading
Algorithmic trading requires short-term decisions aligned with long-term financial goals. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored for such tactical decisions, its adoption remains limited by myopic behavior and opaque policy rationale. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strategic reasoning and multi-modal financial signal interpretation when guided by well-designed prompts. We propose a hybrid system where LLMs generate high-level trading strategies to guide RL agents in their actions. We evaluate (i) the rationale of LLM-generated strategies via expert review, and (ii) the Sharpe Ratio (SR) and Maximum Drawdown (MDD) of LLM-guided agents versus unguided baselines. Results show improved return and risk metrics over standard RL.
Automated Benchmark Generation for Repository-Level Coding Tasks
Code Agent development is an extremely active research area, where a reliable performance metric is critical for tracking progress and guiding new developments. This demand is underscored by the meteoric rise in popularity of SWE-Bench. This benchmark challenges code agents to generate patches addressing GitHub issues given the full repository as context. The correctness of generated patches is then evaluated by executing a human-written test suite extracted from the repository after the issue's resolution. However, constructing benchmarks like SWE-Bench requires substantial manual effort to set up historically accurate execution environments for testing. Crucially, this severely limits the number of considered repositories, e.g., just 12 for SWE-Bench. Considering so few repositories, selected for their popularity runs the risk of leading to a distributional mismatch, i.e., the measured performance may not be representative of real-world scenarios potentially misguiding development efforts. In this work, we address this challenge and introduce SetUpAgent, a fully automated system capable of historically accurate dependency setup, test execution, and result parsing. Using SetUpAgent, we generate two new datasets: (i) SWEE-Bench an extended version of SWE-Bench encompassing hundreds of repositories, and (ii) SWA-Bench a benchmark focusing on applications rather than libraries. Comparing these datasets to SWE-Bench with respect to their characteristics and code agent performance, we find significant distributional differences, including lower issue description quality and detail level, higher fix complexity, and most importantly up to 40% lower agent success rates.
Proofread: Fixes All Errors with One Tap
The impressive capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a powerful approach to reimagine users' typing experience. This paper demonstrates Proofread, a novel Gboard feature powered by a server-side LLM in Gboard, enabling seamless sentence-level and paragraph-level corrections with a single tap. We describe the complete system in this paper, from data generation, metrics design to model tuning and deployment. To obtain models with sufficient quality, we implement a careful data synthetic pipeline tailored to online use cases, design multifaceted metrics, employ a two-stage tuning approach to acquire the dedicated LLM for the feature: the Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) for foundational quality, followed by the Reinforcement Learning (RL) tuning approach for targeted refinement. Specifically, we find sequential tuning on Rewrite and proofread tasks yields the best quality in SFT stage, and propose global and direct rewards in the RL tuning stage to seek further improvement. Extensive experiments on a human-labeled golden set showed our tuned PaLM2-XS model achieved 85.56\% good ratio. We launched the feature to Pixel 8 devices by serving the model on TPU v5 in Google Cloud, with thousands of daily active users. Serving latency was significantly reduced by quantization, bucket inference, text segmentation, and speculative decoding. Our demo could be seen in https://youtu.be/4ZdcuiwFU7I{Youtube}.
Aladdin: Zero-Shot Hallucination of Stylized 3D Assets from Abstract Scene Descriptions
What constitutes the "vibe" of a particular scene? What should one find in "a busy, dirty city street", "an idyllic countryside", or "a crime scene in an abandoned living room"? The translation from abstract scene descriptions to stylized scene elements cannot be done with any generality by extant systems trained on rigid and limited indoor datasets. In this paper, we propose to leverage the knowledge captured by foundation models to accomplish this translation. We present a system that can serve as a tool to generate stylized assets for 3D scenes described by a short phrase, without the need to enumerate the objects to be found within the scene or give instructions on their appearance. Additionally, it is robust to open-world concepts in a way that traditional methods trained on limited data are not, affording more creative freedom to the 3D artist. Our system demonstrates this using a foundation model "team" composed of a large language model, a vision-language model and several image diffusion models, which communicate using an interpretable and user-editable intermediate representation, thus allowing for more versatile and controllable stylized asset generation for 3D artists. We introduce novel metrics for this task, and show through human evaluations that in 91% of the cases, our system outputs are judged more faithful to the semantics of the input scene description than the baseline, thus highlighting the potential of this approach to radically accelerate the 3D content creation process for 3D artists.
Research without Re-search: Maximal Update Parametrization Yields Accurate Loss Prediction across Scales
As language models scale up, it becomes increasingly expensive to verify research ideas because conclusions on small models do not trivially transfer to large ones. A possible solution is to establish a generic system that directly predicts some metrics for large models solely based on the results and hyperparameters from small models. Existing methods based on scaling laws require hyperparameter search on the largest models, which is impractical with limited resources. We address this issue by presenting our discoveries indicating that Maximal Update parametrization (Mup) enables accurate fitting of scaling laws for hyperparameters close to common loss basins, without any search. Thus, different models can be directly compared on large scales with loss prediction even before the training starts. We propose a new paradigm as a first step towards reliable academic research for any model scale without heavy computation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cofe-ai/Mu-scaling.
Simulating Fluids in Real-World Still Images
In this work, we tackle the problem of real-world fluid animation from a still image. The key of our system is a surface-based layered representation deriving from video decomposition, where the scene is decoupled into a surface fluid layer and an impervious background layer with corresponding transparencies to characterize the composition of the two layers. The animated video can be produced by warping only the surface fluid layer according to the estimation of fluid motions and recombining it with the background. In addition, we introduce surface-only fluid simulation, a 2.5D fluid calculation version, as a replacement for motion estimation. Specifically, we leverage the triangular mesh based on a monocular depth estimator to represent the fluid surface layer and simulate the motion in the physics-based framework with the inspiration of the classic theory of the hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian method, along with a learnable network so as to adapt to complex real-world image textures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system through comparison with existing methods in both standard objective metrics and subjective ranking scores. Extensive experiments not only indicate our method's competitive performance for common fluid scenes but also better robustness and reasonability under complex transparent fluid scenarios. Moreover, as the proposed surface-based layer representation and surface-only fluid simulation naturally disentangle the scene, interactive editing such as adding objects to the river and texture replacing could be easily achieved with realistic results.
Image Quality Assessment for Machines: Paradigm, Large-scale Database, and Models
Machine vision systems (MVS) are intrinsically vulnerable to performance degradation under adverse visual conditions. To address this, we propose a machine-centric image quality assessment (MIQA) framework that quantifies the impact of image degradations on MVS performance. We establish an MIQA paradigm encompassing the end-to-end assessment workflow. To support this, we construct a machine-centric image quality database (MIQD-2.5M), comprising 2.5 million samples that capture distinctive degradation responses in both consistency and accuracy metrics, spanning 75 vision models, 250 degradation types, and three representative vision tasks. We further propose a region-aware MIQA (RA-MIQA) model to evaluate MVS visual quality through fine-grained spatial degradation analysis. Extensive experiments benchmark the proposed RA-MIQA against seven human visual system (HVS)-based IQA metrics and five retrained classical backbones. Results demonstrate RA-MIQA's superior performance in multiple dimensions, e.g., achieving SRCC gains of 13.56% on consistency and 13.37% on accuracy for image classification, while also revealing task-specific degradation sensitivities. Critically, HVS-based metrics prove inadequate for MVS quality prediction, while even specialized MIQA models struggle with background degradations, accuracy-oriented estimation, and subtle distortions. This study can advance MVS reliability and establish foundations for machine-centric image processing and optimization. The model and code are available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiWang/MIQA.
A Domain-Agnostic Approach for Characterization of Lifelong Learning Systems
Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.
Large Scale Generative AI Text Applied to Sports and Music
We address the problem of scaling up the production of media content, including commentary and personalized news stories, for large-scale sports and music events worldwide. Our approach relies on generative AI models to transform a large volume of multimodal data (e.g., videos, articles, real-time scoring feeds, statistics, and fact sheets) into coherent and fluent text. Based on this approach, we introduce, for the first time, an AI commentary system, which was deployed to produce automated narrations for highlight packages at the 2023 US Open, Wimbledon, and Masters tournaments. In the same vein, our solution was extended to create personalized content for ESPN Fantasy Football and stories about music artists for the Grammy awards. These applications were built using a common software architecture achieved a 15x speed improvement with an average Rouge-L of 82.00 and perplexity of 6.6. Our work was successfully deployed at the aforementioned events, supporting 90 million fans around the world with 8 billion page views, continuously pushing the bounds on what is possible at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and AI.
bbOCR: An Open-source Multi-domain OCR Pipeline for Bengali Documents
Despite the existence of numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, the lack of comprehensive open-source systems hampers the progress of document digitization in various low-resource languages, including Bengali. Low-resource languages, especially those with an alphasyllabary writing system, suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets for various document OCR components such as word-level OCR, document layout extraction, and distortion correction; which are available as individual modules in high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce Bengali.AI-BRACU-OCR (bbOCR): an open-source scalable document OCR system that can reconstruct Bengali documents into a structured searchable digitized format that leverages a novel Bengali text recognition model and two novel synthetic datasets. We present extensive component-level and system-level evaluation: both use a novel diversified evaluation dataset and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation suggests that our proposed solution is preferable over the current state-of-the-art Bengali OCR systems. The source codes and datasets are available here: https://bengaliai.github.io/bbocr.
ChipSeek-R1: Generating Human-Surpassing RTL with LLM via Hierarchical Reward-Driven Reinforcement Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential for automating Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code generation. However, current approaches face a critical challenge: they can not simultaneously optimize for functional correctness and hardware quality (Power, Performance, Area - PPA). Methods based on supervised fine-tuning often generate functionally correct but PPA-suboptimal code, lacking mechanisms to learn optimization principles. In contrast, post-processing techniques that attempt to improve PPA metrics after generation are often inefficient because they operate externally without updating the LLM's parameters, thus failing to enhance the model's intrinsic design capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChipSeek-R1, a hierarchical reward-driven reinforcement learning framework to train LLMs to generate RTL code that achieves both functional correctness and optimized PPA metrics. ChipSeek-R1 employs a hierarchical reward system, which incorporates direct feedback on syntax, functional correctness (from simulators) and PPA metrics (from synthesis tools) during reinforcement learning. This enables the model to learn complex hardware design trade-offs via trial-and-error, generating RTL code that is both functionally correct and PPA-optimized. Evaluating ChipSeek-R1 on standard benchmarks (VerilogEval, RTLLM), we achieve state-of-the-art results in functional correctness. Notably, on the RTLLM benchmark, ChipSeek-R1 generated 27 RTL designs surpassing the PPA metrics of the original human-written code. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating toolchain feedback into LLM training and highlight the potential for reinforcement learning to enable automated generation of human-surpassing RTL code. We open-source our code in anonymous github.
Towards Realistic Evaluation of Commit Message Generation by Matching Online and Offline Settings
Commit message generation (CMG) is a crucial task in software engineering that is challenging to evaluate correctly. When a CMG system is integrated into the IDEs and other products at JetBrains, we perform online evaluation based on user acceptance of the generated messages. However, performing online experiments with every change to a CMG system is troublesome, as each iteration affects users and requires time to collect enough statistics. On the other hand, offline evaluation, a prevalent approach in the research literature, facilitates fast experiments but employs automatic metrics that are not guaranteed to represent the preferences of real users. In this work, we describe a novel way we employed to deal with this problem at JetBrains, by leveraging an online metric - the number of edits users introduce before committing the generated messages to the VCS - to select metrics for offline experiments. To support this new type of evaluation, we develop a novel markup collection tool mimicking the real workflow with a CMG system, collect a dataset with 57 pairs consisting of commit messages generated by GPT-4 and their counterparts edited by human experts, and design and verify a way to synthetically extend such a dataset. Then, we use the final dataset of 656 pairs to study how the widely used similarity metrics correlate with the online metric reflecting the real users' experience. Our results indicate that edit distance exhibits the highest correlation, whereas commonly used similarity metrics such as BLEU and METEOR demonstrate low correlation. This contradicts the previous studies on similarity metrics for CMG, suggesting that user interactions with a CMG system in real-world settings differ significantly from the responses by human labelers operating within controlled research environments. We release all the code and the dataset for researchers: https://jb.gg/cmg-evaluation.
How Are LLMs Mitigating Stereotyping Harms? Learning from Search Engine Studies
With the widespread availability of LLMs since the release of ChatGPT and increased public scrutiny, commercial model development appears to have focused their efforts on 'safety' training concerning legal liabilities at the expense of social impact evaluation. This mimics a similar trend which we could observe for search engine autocompletion some years prior. We draw on scholarship from NLP and search engine auditing and present a novel evaluation task in the style of autocompletion prompts to assess stereotyping in LLMs. We assess LLMs by using four metrics, namely refusal rates, toxicity, sentiment and regard, with and without safety system prompts. Our findings indicate an improvement to stereotyping outputs with the system prompt, but overall a lack of attention by LLMs under study to certain harms classified as toxic, particularly for prompts about peoples/ethnicities and sexual orientation. Mentions of intersectional identities trigger a disproportionate amount of stereotyping. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings about stereotyping harms in light of the coming intermingling of LLMs and search and the choice of stereotyping mitigation policy to adopt. We address model builders, academics, NLP practitioners and policy makers, calling for accountability and awareness concerning stereotyping harms, be it for training data curation, leader board design and usage, or social impact measurement.
Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision for Opinion Summarization
Current opinion summarization systems simply generate summaries reflecting important opinions from customer reviews, but the generated summaries may not attract the reader's attention. Although it is helpful to automatically generate professional reviewer-like summaries from customer reviews, collecting many training pairs of customer and professional reviews is generally tricky. We propose a weakly supervised opinion summarization framework, Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision (NAPA) that can build a stylized opinion summarization system with no customer-professional review pairs. Experimental results show consistent improvements in automatic evaluation metrics, and qualitative analysis shows that our weakly supervised opinion summarization system can generate summaries that look more like those written by professional reviewers.
How to Evaluate Your Dialogue Models: A Review of Approaches
Evaluating the quality of a dialogue system is an understudied problem. The recent evolution of evaluation method motivated this survey, in which an explicit and comprehensive analysis of the existing methods is sought. We are first to divide the evaluation methods into three classes, i.e., automatic evaluation, human-involved evaluation and user simulator based evaluation. Then, each class is covered with main features and the related evaluation metrics. The existence of benchmarks, suitable for the evaluation of dialogue techniques are also discussed in detail. Finally, some open issues are pointed out to bring the evaluation method into a new frontier.
Marco-Voice Technical Report
This paper presents a multifunctional speech synthesis system that integrates voice cloning and emotion control speech synthesis within a unified framework. The goal of this work is to address longstanding challenges in achieving highly expressive, controllable, and natural speech generation that faithfully preserves speaker identity across diverse linguistic and emotional contexts. Our approach introduces an effective speaker-emotion disentanglement mechanism with in-batch contrastive learning, enabling independent manipulation of speaker identity and eemotional style, as well as rotational emotional embedding integration method for smooth emotion control. To support comprehensive training and evaluation, we construct CSEMOTIONS, a high-quality emotional speech dataset containing 10 hours of Mandarin speech from six professional speakers across seven emotional categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system, Marco-Voice, achieves substantial improvements in both objective and subjective metrics. Comprehensive evaluations and analysis were conducted, results show that MarcoVoice delivers competitive performance in terms of speech clarity and emotional richness, representing a substantial advance in the field of expressive neural speech synthesis.
Goal2Story: A Multi-Agent Fleet based on Privately Enabled sLLMs for Impacting Mapping on Requirements Elicitation
As requirements drift with rapid iterations, agile development becomes the dominant paradigm. Goal-driven Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a pivotal yet challenging task in agile project development due to its heavy tangling with adaptive planning and efficient collaboration. Recently, AI agents have shown promising ability in supporting requirements analysis by saving significant time and effort for stakeholders. However, current research mainly focuses on functional RE, and research works have not been reported bridging the long journey from goal to user stories. Moreover, considering the cost of LLM facilities and the need for data and idea protection, privately hosted small-sized LLM should be further utilized in RE. To address these challenges, we propose Goal2Story, a multi-agent fleet that adopts the Impact Mapping (IM) framework while merely using cost-effective sLLMs for goal-driven RE. Moreover, we introduce a StorySeek dataset that contains over 1,000 user stories (USs) with corresponding goals and project context information, as well as the semi-automatic dataset construction method. For evaluation, we proposed two metrics: Factuality Hit Rate (FHR) to measure consistency between the generated USs with the dataset and Quality And Consistency Evaluation (QuACE) to evaluate the quality of the generated USs. Experimental results demonstrate that Goal2Story outperforms the baseline performance of the Super-Agent adopting powerful LLMs, while also showcasing the performance improvements in key metrics brought by CoT and Agent Profile to Goal2Story, as well as its exploration in identifying latent needs.
MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a) the generalization abilities of MLLMs across distinct scenarios, and (b) their reasoning capabilities to identify the triggering factors behind emotional states. To bridge these gaps, we present MME-Emotion, a systematic benchmark that assesses both emotional understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, enjoying scalable capacity, diverse settings, and unified protocols. As the largest emotional intelligence benchmark for MLLMs, MME-Emotion contains over 6,000 curated video clips with task-specific questioning-answering (QA) pairs, spanning broad scenarios to formulate eight emotional tasks. It further incorporates a holistic evaluation suite with hybrid metrics for emotion recognition and reasoning, analyzed through a multi-agent system framework. Through a rigorous evaluation of 20 advanced MLLMs, we uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights: 182 Current MLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory emotional intelligence, with the best-performing model achieving only 39.3% recognition score and 56.0% Chain-of-Thought (CoT) score on our benchmark. 183 Generalist models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro) derive emotional intelligence from generalized multimodal understanding capabilities, while specialist models (e.g., R1-Omni) can achieve comparable performance through domain-specific post-training adaptation. By introducing MME-Emotion, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for advancing MLLMs' emotional intelligence in the future.
Mosaic: Composite Projection Pruning for Resource-efficient LLMs
Extensive compute and memory requirements limit the deployment of large language models (LLMs) on any hardware. Compression methods, such as pruning, can reduce model size, which in turn reduces resource requirements. State-of-the-art pruning is based on coarse-grained methods. They are time-consuming and inherently remove critical model parameters, adversely impacting the quality of the pruned model. This paper introduces projection pruning, a novel fine-grained method for pruning LLMs. In addition, LLM projection pruning is enhanced by a new approach we refer to as composite projection pruning - the synergistic combination of unstructured pruning that retains accuracy and structured pruning that reduces model size. We develop Mosaic, a novel system to create and deploy pruned LLMs using composite projection pruning. Mosaic is evaluated using a range of performance and quality metrics on multiple hardware platforms, LLMs, and datasets. Mosaic is 7.19x faster in producing models than existing approaches. Mosaic models achieve up to 84.2% lower perplexity and 31.4% higher accuracy than models obtained from coarse-grained pruning. Up to 67% faster inference and 68% lower GPU memory use is noted for Mosaic models.
DiscoScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT and Discourse Coherence
Recently, there has been a growing interest in designing text generation systems from a discourse coherence perspective, e.g., modeling the interdependence between sentences. Still, recent BERT-based evaluation metrics are weak in recognizing coherence, and thus are not reliable in a way to spot the discourse-level improvements of those text generation systems. In this work, we introduce DiscoScore, a parametrized discourse metric, which uses BERT to model discourse coherence from different perspectives, driven by Centering theory. Our experiments encompass 16 non-discourse and discourse metrics, including DiscoScore and popular coherence models, evaluated on summarization and document-level machine translation (MT). We find that (i) the majority of BERT-based metrics correlate much worse with human rated coherence than early discourse metrics, invented a decade ago; (ii) the recent state-of-the-art BARTScore is weak when operated at system level -- which is particularly problematic as systems are typically compared in this manner. DiscoScore, in contrast, achieves strong system-level correlation with human ratings, not only in coherence but also in factual consistency and other aspects, and surpasses BARTScore by over 10 correlation points on average. Further, aiming to understand DiscoScore, we provide justifications to the importance of discourse coherence for evaluation metrics, and explain the superiority of one variant over another. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIPHES/DiscoScore.
VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models
Video generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet evaluating these models remains a challenge. A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for video generation is indispensable for two reasons: 1) Existing metrics do not fully align with human perceptions; 2) An ideal evaluation system should provide insights to inform future developments of video generation. To this end, we present VBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite that dissects "video generation quality" into specific, hierarchical, and disentangled dimensions, each with tailored prompts and evaluation methods. VBench has several appealing properties: 1) Comprehensive Dimensions: VBench comprises 16 dimensions in video generation (e.g., subject identity inconsistency, motion smoothness, temporal flickering, and spatial relationship, etc). The evaluation metrics with fine-grained levels reveal individual models' strengths and weaknesses. 2) Human Alignment: We also provide a dataset of human preference annotations to validate our benchmarks' alignment with human perception, for each evaluation dimension respectively. 3) Valuable Insights: We look into current models' ability across various evaluation dimensions, and various content types. We also investigate the gaps between video and image generation models. 4) Versatile Benchmarking: VBench++ supports evaluating text-to-video and image-to-video. We introduce a high-quality Image Suite with an adaptive aspect ratio to enable fair evaluations across different image-to-video generation settings. Beyond assessing technical quality, VBench++ evaluates the trustworthiness of video generative models, providing a more holistic view of model performance. 5) Full Open-Sourcing: We fully open-source VBench++ and continually add new video generation models to our leaderboard to drive forward the field of video generation.
VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models
Video generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet evaluating these models remains a challenge. A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for video generation is indispensable for two reasons: 1) Existing metrics do not fully align with human perceptions; 2) An ideal evaluation system should provide insights to inform future developments of video generation. To this end, we present VBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite that dissects "video generation quality" into specific, hierarchical, and disentangled dimensions, each with tailored prompts and evaluation methods. VBench has three appealing properties: 1) Comprehensive Dimensions: VBench comprises 16 dimensions in video generation (e.g., subject identity inconsistency, motion smoothness, temporal flickering, and spatial relationship, etc). The evaluation metrics with fine-grained levels reveal individual models' strengths and weaknesses. 2) Human Alignment: We also provide a dataset of human preference annotations to validate our benchmarks' alignment with human perception, for each evaluation dimension respectively. 3) Valuable Insights: We look into current models' ability across various evaluation dimensions, and various content types. We also investigate the gaps between video and image generation models. We will open-source VBench, including all prompts, evaluation methods, generated videos, and human preference annotations, and also include more video generation models in VBench to drive forward the field of video generation.
TRUE: Re-evaluating Factual Consistency Evaluation
Grounded text generation systems often generate text that contains factual inconsistencies, hindering their real-world applicability. Automatic factual consistency evaluation may help alleviate this limitation by accelerating evaluation cycles, filtering inconsistent outputs and augmenting training data. While attracting increasing attention, such evaluation metrics are usually developed and evaluated in silo for a single task or dataset, slowing their adoption. Moreover, previous meta-evaluation protocols focused on system-level correlations with human annotations, which leave the example-level accuracy of such metrics unclear. In this work, we introduce TRUE: a comprehensive survey and assessment of factual consistency metrics on a standardized collection of existing texts from diverse tasks, manually annotated for factual consistency. Our standardization enables an example-level meta-evaluation protocol that is more actionable and interpretable than previously reported correlations, yielding clearer quality measures. Across diverse state-of-the-art metrics and 11 datasets we find that large-scale NLI and question generation-and-answering-based approaches achieve strong and complementary results. We recommend those methods as a starting point for model and metric developers, and hope TRUE will foster progress towards even better evaluation methods.
RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation
Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a challenging task. Firstly, the metric should ensure that the generated hypothesis reflects the reference's semantics. Secondly, it should consider the grammatical quality of the generated sentence. Thirdly, it should be robust enough to handle various surface forms of the generated sentence. Thus, an effective evaluation metric has to be multifaceted. In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation metric incorporating several core aspects of natural language understanding (language competence, syntactic and semantic variation). Our proposed metric, RoMe, is trained on language features such as semantic similarity combined with tree edit distance and grammatical acceptability, using a self-supervised neural network to assess the overall quality of the generated sentence. Moreover, we perform an extensive robustness analysis of the state-of-the-art methods and RoMe. Empirical results suggest that RoMe has a stronger correlation to human judgment over state-of-the-art metrics in evaluating system-generated sentences across several NLG tasks.
Grounded Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Large Language Models
Despite great progress, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are prone to visual hallucination, greatly impeding their trustworthy applications. In this paper, we study this problem from the perspective of visual-spatial reasoning, and propose a new learning task for MLLMs, termed Grounded Chain-of-Thought (GCoT). Different from recent visual CoT studies, which focus more on visual knowledge reasoning, GCoT is keen to helping MLLMs to recognize and ground the relevant visual cues step by step, thereby predicting the correct answer with grounding coordinates as the intuitive basis. To facilitate this task, we also carefully design and construct a dataset called multimodal grounded chain-of-thought (MM-GCoT) consisting of 24,022 GCoT examples for 5,033 images. Besides, a comprehensive consistency evaluation system is also introduced, including the metrics of answer accuracy, grounding accuracy and answer-grounding consistency. We further design and conduct a bunch of experiments on 12 advanced MLLMs, and reveal some notable findings: i. most MLLMs performs poorly on the consistency evaluation, indicating obvious visual hallucination; ii. visual hallucination is not directly related to the parameter size and general multimodal performance, i.e., a larger and stronger MLLM is not less affected by this issue. Lastly, we also demonstrate that the proposed dataset can help existing MLLMs to well cultivate their GCoT capability and reduce the inconsistent answering significantly. Moreover, their GCoT can be also generalized to exiting multimodal tasks, such as open-world QA and REC.
The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled Systems
Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in behavior. However, how an environment configuration impacts the behavior of such systems has yet to be explored. Understanding and quantifying the degree of instability caused by different environment settings can help practitioners decide the best environment configuration for the most stable AI systems. To achieve this goal, we performed experiments with eight different combinations of three key environment variables (operating system, Python version, and CPU architecture) on 30 open-source AI-enabled systems using the Travis CI platform. We determine the existence and the degree of instability introduced by each configuration using three metrics: the output of an AI component of the system (model performance), the time required to build and run the system (processing time), and the cost associated with building and running the system (expense). Our results indicate that changes in environment configurations lead to instability across all three metrics; however, it is observed more frequently with respect to processing time and expense rather than model performance. For example, between Linux and MacOS, instability is observed in 23\%, 96.67\%, and 100\% of the studied projects in model performance, processing time, and expense, respectively. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying the optimal combination of configuration settings to mitigate drops in model performance and reduce the processing time and expense before deploying an AI-enabled system.
Dynamic Planning in Open-Ended Dialogue using Reinforcement Learning
Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild" remains a formidable challenge. In this work we develop a real-time, open-ended dialogue system that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to power a bot's conversational skill at scale. Our work pairs the succinct embedding of the conversation state generated using SOTA (supervised) language models with RL techniques that are particularly suited to a dynamic action space that changes as the conversation progresses. Trained using crowd-sourced data, our novel system is able to substantially exceeds the (strong) baseline supervised model with respect to several metrics of interest in a live experiment with real users of the Google Assistant.
The Architectural Implications of Facebook's DNN-based Personalized Recommendation
The widespread application of deep learning has changed the landscape of computation in the data center. In particular, personalized recommendation for content ranking is now largely accomplished leveraging deep neural networks. However, despite the importance of these models and the amount of compute cycles they consume, relatively little research attention has been devoted to systems for recommendation. To facilitate research and to advance the understanding of these workloads, this paper presents a set of real-world, production-scale DNNs for personalized recommendation coupled with relevant performance metrics for evaluation. In addition to releasing a set of open-source workloads, we conduct in-depth analysis that underpins future system design and optimization for at-scale recommendation: Inference latency varies by 60% across three Intel server generations, batching and co-location of inferences can drastically improve latency-bounded throughput, and the diverse composition of recommendation models leads to different optimization strategies.
MegaScience: Pushing the Frontiers of Post-Training Datasets for Science Reasoning
Scientific reasoning is critical for developing AI scientists and supporting human researchers in advancing the frontiers of natural science discovery. However, the open-source community has primarily focused on mathematics and coding while neglecting the scientific domain, largely due to the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality, verifiable scientific reasoning datasets. To bridge this gap, we first present TextbookReasoning, an open dataset featuring truthful reference answers extracted from 12k university-level scientific textbooks, comprising 650k reasoning questions spanning 7 scientific disciplines. We further introduce MegaScience, a large-scale mixture of high-quality open-source datasets totaling 1.25 million instances, developed through systematic ablation studies that evaluate various data selection methodologies to identify the optimal subset for each publicly available scientific dataset. Meanwhile, we build a comprehensive evaluation system covering diverse subjects and question types across 15 benchmarks, incorporating comprehensive answer extraction strategies to ensure accurate evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that our datasets achieve superior performance and training efficiency with more concise response lengths compared to existing open-source scientific datasets. Furthermore, we train Llama3.1, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3 series base models on MegaScience, which significantly outperform the corresponding official instruct models in average performance. In addition, MegaScience exhibits greater effectiveness for larger and stronger models, suggesting a scaling benefit for scientific tuning. We release our data curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and seven trained models to the community to advance scientific reasoning research.
LARGE: Legal Retrieval Augmented Generation Evaluation Tool
Recently, building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to enhance the capability of large language models (LLMs) has become a common practice. Especially in the legal domain, previous judicial decisions play a significant role under the doctrine of stare decisis which emphasizes the importance of making decisions based on (retrieved) prior documents. However, the overall performance of RAG system depends on many components: (1) retrieval corpora, (2) retrieval algorithms, (3) rerankers, (4) LLM backbones, and (5) evaluation metrics. Here we propose LRAGE, an open-source tool for holistic evaluation of RAG systems focusing on the legal domain. LRAGE provides GUI and CLI interfaces to facilitate seamless experiments and investigate how changes in the aforementioned five components affect the overall accuracy. We validated LRAGE using multilingual legal benches including Korean (KBL), English (LegalBench), and Chinese (LawBench) by demonstrating how the overall accuracy changes when varying the five components mentioned above. The source code is available at https://github.com/hoorangyee/LRAGE.
MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance
A robust evaluation metric has a profound impact on the development of text generation systems. A desirable metric compares system output against references based on their semantics rather than surface forms. In this paper we investigate strategies to encode system and reference texts to devise a metric that shows a high correlation with human judgment of text quality. We validate our new metric, namely MoverScore, on a number of text generation tasks including summarization, machine translation, image captioning, and data-to-text generation, where the outputs are produced by a variety of neural and non-neural systems. Our findings suggest that metrics combining contextualized representations with a distance measure perform the best. Such metrics also demonstrate strong generalization capability across tasks. For ease-of-use we make our metrics available as web service.
Panza: A Personalized Text Writing Assistant via Data Playback and Local Fine-Tuning
The availability of powerful open-source large language models (LLMs) opens exciting use-cases, such as automated personal assistants that adapt to the user's unique data and demands. Two key desiderata for such assistants are personalization-in the sense that the assistant should reflect the user's own style-and privacy-in the sense that users may prefer to always store their personal data locally, on their own computing device. We present a new design for such an automated assistant, for the specific use case of personal assistant for email generation, which we call Panza. Specifically, Panza can be both trained and inferenced locally on commodity hardware, and is personalized to the user's writing style. Panza's personalization features are based on a new technique called data playback, which allows us to fine-tune an LLM to better reflect a user's writing style using limited data. We show that, by combining efficient fine-tuning and inference methods, Panza can be executed entirely locally using limited resources-specifically, it can be executed within the same resources as a free Google Colab instance. Finally, our key methodological contribution is a careful study of evaluation metrics, and of how different choices of system components (e.g. the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation or different fine-tuning approaches) impact the system's performance.
MOHAF: A Multi-Objective Hierarchical Auction Framework for Scalable and Fair Resource Allocation in IoT Ecosystems
The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has intensified the challenge of efficiently allocating heterogeneous resources in highly dynamic, distributed environments. Conventional centralized mechanisms and single-objective auction models, focusing solely on metrics such as cost minimization or revenue maximization, struggle to deliver balanced system performance. This paper proposes the Multi-Objective Hierarchical Auction Framework (MOHAF), a distributed resource allocation mechanism that jointly optimizes cost, Quality of Service (QoS), energy efficiency, and fairness. MOHAF integrates hierarchical clustering to reduce computational complexity with a greedy, submodular optimization strategy that guarantees a (1-1/e) approximation ratio. A dynamic pricing mechanism adapts in real time to resource utilization, enhancing market stability and allocation quality. Extensive experiments on the Google Cluster Data trace, comprising 3,553 requests and 888 resources, demonstrate MOHAF's superior allocation efficiency (0.263) compared to Greedy (0.185), First-Price (0.138), and Random (0.101) auctions, while achieving perfect fairness (Jain's index = 1.000). Ablation studies reveal the critical influence of cost and QoS components in sustaining balanced multi-objective outcomes. With near-linear scalability, theoretical guarantees, and robust empirical performance, MOHAF offers a practical and adaptable solution for large-scale IoT deployments, effectively reconciling efficiency, equity, and sustainability in distributed resource coordination.
RAGChecker: A Fine-grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems.
LLMs vs. Chinese Anime Enthusiasts: A Comparative Study on Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing conversations and providing emotional support as separate research directions. However, there remains a significant research gap in combining these capabilities to enable emotionally supportive interactions with virtual characters. To address this research gap, we focus on anime characters as a case study because of their well-defined personalities and large fan bases. This choice enables us to effectively evaluate how well LLMs can provide emotional support while maintaining specific character traits. We introduce ChatAnime, the first Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing (ESRP) dataset. We first thoughtfully select 20 top-tier characters from popular anime communities and design 60 emotion-centric real-world scenario questions. Then, we execute a nationwide selection process to identify 40 Chinese anime enthusiasts with profound knowledge of specific characters and extensive experience in role-playing. Next, we systematically collect two rounds of dialogue data from 10 LLMs and these 40 Chinese anime enthusiasts. To evaluate the ESRP performance of LLMs, we design a user experience-oriented evaluation system featuring 9 fine-grained metrics across three dimensions: basic dialogue, role-playing and emotional support, along with an overall metric for response diversity. In total, the dataset comprises 2,400 human-written and 24,000 LLM-generated answers, supported by over 132,000 human annotations. Experimental results show that top-performing LLMs surpass human fans in role-playing and emotional support, while humans still lead in response diversity. We hope this work can provide valuable resources and insights for future research on optimizing LLMs in ESRP. Our datasets are available at https://github.com/LanlanQiu/ChatAnime.
FUSE : A Ridge and Random Forest-Based Metric for Evaluating MT in Indigenous Languages
This paper presents the winning submission of the RaaVa team to the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task 3 on Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation (MT) into Indigenous Languages of America, where our system ranked first overall based on average Pearson correlation with the human annotations. We introduce Feature-Union Scorer (FUSE) for Evaluation, FUSE integrates Ridge regression and Gradient Boosting to model translation quality. In addition to FUSE, we explore five alternative approaches leveraging different combinations of linguistic similarity features and learning paradigms. FUSE Score highlights the effectiveness of combining lexical, phonetic, semantic, and fuzzy token similarity with learning-based modeling to improve MT evaluation for morphologically rich and low-resource languages. MT into Indigenous languages poses unique challenges due to polysynthesis, complex morphology, and non-standardized orthography. Conventional automatic metrics such as BLEU, TER, and ChrF often fail to capture deeper aspects like semantic adequacy and fluency. Our proposed framework, formerly referred to as FUSE, incorporates multilingual sentence embeddings and phonological encodings to better align with human evaluation. We train supervised models on human-annotated development sets and evaluate held-out test data. Results show that FUSE consistently achieves higher Pearson and Spearman correlations with human judgments, offering a robust and linguistically informed solution for MT evaluation in low-resource settings.
Named entity recognition for Serbian legal documents: Design, methodology and dataset development
Recent advancements in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and especially large language models (LLMs) and their numerous applications have brought research attention to design of different document processing tools and enhancements in the process of document archiving, search and retrieval. Domain of official, legal documents is especially interesting due to vast amount of data generated on the daily basis, as well as the significant community of interested practitioners (lawyers, law offices, administrative workers, state institutions and citizens). Providing efficient ways for automation of everyday work involving legal documents is therefore expected to have significant impact in different fields. In this work we present one LLM based solution for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the case of legal documents written in Serbian language. It leverages on the pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), which had been carefully adapted to the specific task of identifying and classifying specific data points from textual content. Besides novel dataset development for Serbian language (involving public court rulings), presented system design and applied methodology, the paper also discusses achieved performance metrics and their implications for objective assessment of the proposed solution. Performed cross-validation tests on the created manually labeled dataset with mean F_1 score of 0.96 and additional results on the examples of intentionally modified text inputs confirm applicability of the proposed system design and robustness of the developed NER solution.
Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT)
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) for numerical weather prediction (NWP) have significantly transformed atmospheric modeling. AI NWP models outperform traditional physics-based systems, such as the Integrated Forecast System (IFS), across several global metrics while requiring fewer computational resources. However, existing AI NWP models face limitations related to training datasets and timestep choices, often resulting in artifacts that reduce model performance. To address these challenges, we introduce the Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT) framework, developed at NSF NCAR. CREDIT provides a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly platform for training and deploying AI-based atmospheric models on high-performance computing systems. It offers an end-to-end pipeline for data preprocessing, model training, and evaluation, democratizing access to advanced AI NWP capabilities. We demonstrate CREDIT's potential through WXFormer, a novel deterministic vision transformer designed to predict atmospheric states autoregressively, addressing common AI NWP issues like compounding error growth with techniques such as spectral normalization, padding, and multi-step training. Additionally, to illustrate CREDIT's flexibility and state-of-the-art model comparisons, we train the FUXI architecture within this framework. Our findings show that both FUXI and WXFormer, trained on six-hourly ERA5 hybrid sigma-pressure levels, generally outperform IFS HRES in 10-day forecasts, offering potential improvements in efficiency and forecast accuracy. CREDIT's modular design enables researchers to explore various models, datasets, and training configurations, fostering innovation within the scientific community.
SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation
Smartphone agents are increasingly important for helping users control devices efficiently, with (Multimodal) Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches emerging as key contenders. Fairly comparing these agents is essential but challenging, requiring a varied task scope, the integration of agents with different implementations, and a generalisable evaluation pipeline to assess their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we present SPA-Bench, a comprehensive SmartPhone Agent Benchmark designed to evaluate (M)LLM-based agents in an interactive environment that simulates real-world conditions. SPA-Bench offers three key contributions: (1) A diverse set of tasks covering system and third-party apps in both English and Chinese, focusing on features commonly used in daily routines; (2) A plug-and-play framework enabling real-time agent interaction with Android devices, integrating over ten agents with the flexibility to add more; (3) A novel evaluation pipeline that automatically assesses agent performance across multiple dimensions, encompassing seven metrics related to task completion and resource consumption. Our extensive experiments across tasks and agents reveal challenges like interpreting mobile user interfaces, action grounding, memory retention, and execution costs. We propose future research directions to ease these difficulties, moving closer to real-world smartphone agent applications. SPA-Bench is available at https://ai-agents-2030.github.io/SPA-Bench/.
KInIT at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Fine-tuned LLMs for Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection
SemEval-2024 Task 8 is focused on multigenerator, multidomain, and multilingual black-box machine-generated text detection. Such a detection is important for preventing a potential misuse of large language models (LLMs), the newest of which are very capable in generating multilingual human-like texts. We have coped with this task in multiple ways, utilizing language identification and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of smaller LLMs for text classification. We have further used the per-language classification-threshold calibration to uniquely combine fine-tuned models predictions with statistical detection metrics to improve generalization of the system detection performance. Our submitted method achieved competitive results, ranking at the fourth place, just under 1 percentage point behind the winner.
Self-supervised Learning for Large-scale Item Recommendations
Large scale recommender models find most relevant items from huge catalogs, and they play a critical role in modern search and recommendation systems. To model the input space with large-vocab categorical features, a typical recommender model learns a joint embedding space through neural networks for both queries and items from user feedback data. However, with millions to billions of items in the corpus, users tend to provide feedback for a very small set of them, causing a power-law distribution. This makes the feedback data for long-tail items extremely sparse. Inspired by the recent success in self-supervised representation learning research in both computer vision and natural language understanding, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for large-scale item recommendations. The framework is designed to tackle the label sparsity problem by learning better latent relationship of item features. Specifically, SSL improves item representation learning as well as serving as additional regularization to improve generalization. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation method that utilizes feature correlations within the proposed framework. We evaluate our framework using two real-world datasets with 500M and 1B training examples respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SSL regularization and show its superior performance over the state-of-the-art regularization techniques. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a web-scale commercial app-to-app recommendation system, with significant improvements top-tier business metrics demonstrated in A/B experiments on live traffic. Our online results also verify our hypothesis that our framework indeed improves model performance even more on slices that lack supervision.
DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis
The ability to research and synthesize knowledge is central to human expertise and progress. An emerging class of systems promises these exciting capabilities through generative research synthesis, performing retrieval over the live web and synthesizing discovered sources into long-form, cited summaries. However, evaluating such systems remains an open challenge: existing question-answering benchmarks focus on short-form factual responses, while expert-curated datasets risk staleness and data contamination. Both fail to capture the complexity and evolving nature of real research synthesis tasks. In this work, we introduce DeepScholar-bench, a live benchmark and holistic, automated evaluation framework designed to evaluate generative research synthesis. DeepScholar-bench draws queries from recent, high-quality ArXiv papers and focuses on a real research synthesis task: generating the related work sections of a paper by retrieving, synthesizing, and citing prior research. Our evaluation framework holistically assesses performance across three key dimensions, knowledge synthesis, retrieval quality, and verifiability. We also develop DeepScholar-base, a reference pipeline implemented efficiently using the LOTUS API. Using the DeepScholar-bench framework, we perform a systematic evaluation of prior open-source systems, search AI's, OpenAI's DeepResearch, and DeepScholar-base. We find that DeepScholar-base establishes a strong baseline, attaining competitive or higher performance than each other method. We also find that DeepScholar-bench remains far from saturated, with no system exceeding a score of 19% across all metrics. These results underscore the difficulty of DeepScholar-bench, as well as its importance for progress towards AI systems capable of generative research synthesis. We make our code available at https://github.com/guestrin-lab/deepscholar-bench.
Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Neural task-oriented dialogue systems often struggle to smoothly interface with a knowledge base. In this work, we seek to address this problem by proposing a new neural dialogue agent that is able to effectively sustain grounded, multi-domain discourse through a novel key-value retrieval mechanism. The model is end-to-end differentiable and does not need to explicitly model dialogue state or belief trackers. We also release a new dataset of 3,031 dialogues that are grounded through underlying knowledge bases and span three distinct tasks in the in-car personal assistant space: calendar scheduling, weather information retrieval, and point-of-interest navigation. Our architecture is simultaneously trained on data from all domains and significantly outperforms a competitive rule-based system and other existing neural dialogue architectures on the provided domains according to both automatic and human evaluation metrics.
OmniPred: Language Models as Universal Regressors
Over the broad landscape of experimental design, regression has been a powerful tool to accurately predict the outcome metrics of a system or model given a set of parameters, but has been traditionally restricted to methods which are only applicable to a specific task. In this paper, we propose OmniPred, a framework for training language models as universal end-to-end regressors over (x,y) evaluation data from diverse real world experiments. Using data sourced from Google Vizier, one of the largest blackbox optimization databases in the world, our extensive experiments demonstrate that through only textual representations of mathematical parameters and values, language models are capable of very precise numerical regression, and if given the opportunity to train over multiple tasks, can significantly outperform traditional regression models.
Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey
Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Over the past two decades, we have seen a rapid technological evolution of object detection and its profound impact on the entire computer vision field. If we consider today's object detection technique as a revolution driven by deep learning, then back in the 1990s, we would see the ingenious thinking and long-term perspective design of early computer vision. This paper extensively reviews this fast-moving research field in the light of technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2022). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed-up techniques, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods.
Talking Head Generation with Probabilistic Audio-to-Visual Diffusion Priors
In this paper, we introduce a simple and novel framework for one-shot audio-driven talking head generation. Unlike prior works that require additional driving sources for controlled synthesis in a deterministic manner, we instead probabilistically sample all the holistic lip-irrelevant facial motions (i.e. pose, expression, blink, gaze, etc.) to semantically match the input audio while still maintaining both the photo-realism of audio-lip synchronization and the overall naturalness. This is achieved by our newly proposed audio-to-visual diffusion prior trained on top of the mapping between audio and disentangled non-lip facial representations. Thanks to the probabilistic nature of the diffusion prior, one big advantage of our framework is it can synthesize diverse facial motion sequences given the same audio clip, which is quite user-friendly for many real applications. Through comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, we conclude that (1) our diffusion prior outperforms auto-regressive prior significantly on almost all the concerned metrics; (2) our overall system is competitive with prior works in terms of audio-lip synchronization but can effectively sample rich and natural-looking lip-irrelevant facial motions while still semantically harmonized with the audio input.
SwitchLingua: The First Large-Scale Multilingual and Multi-Ethnic Code-Switching Dataset
Code-switching (CS) is the alternating use of two or more languages within a conversation or utterance, often influenced by social context and speaker identity. This linguistic phenomenon poses challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, which are typically designed for a single language and struggle to handle multilingual inputs. The growing global demand for multilingual applications, including Code-Switching ASR (CSASR), Text-to-Speech (CSTTS), and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR), highlights the inadequacy of existing monolingual datasets. Although some code-switching datasets exist, most are limited to bilingual mixing within homogeneous ethnic groups, leaving a critical need for a large-scale, diverse benchmark akin to ImageNet in computer vision. To bridge this gap, we introduce LinguaMaster, a multi-agent collaboration framework specifically designed for efficient and scalable multilingual data synthesis. Leveraging this framework, we curate SwitchLingua, the first large-scale multilingual and multi-ethnic code-switching dataset, including: (1) 420K CS textual samples across 12 languages, and (2) over 80 hours of audio recordings from 174 speakers representing 18 countries/regions and 63 racial/ethnic backgrounds, based on the textual data. This dataset captures rich linguistic and cultural diversity, offering a foundational resource for advancing multilingual and multicultural research. Furthermore, to address the issue that existing ASR evaluation metrics lack sensitivity to code-switching scenarios, we propose the Semantic-Aware Error Rate (SAER), a novel evaluation metric that incorporates semantic information, providing a more accurate and context-aware assessment of system performance.
Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation for University Knowledge Retrieval
This paper introduces an innovative approach using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance information retrieval and query response systems for university-related question answering. By systematically extracting data from the university official webpage and employing advanced prompt engineering techniques, we generate accurate, contextually relevant responses to user queries. We developed a comprehensive university benchmark, UniversityQuestionBench (UQB), to rigorously evaluate our system performance, based on common key metrics in the filed of RAG pipelines, assessing accuracy and reliability through various metrics and real-world scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the precision and relevance of generated responses, enhancing user experience and reducing the time required to obtain relevant answers. In summary, this paper presents a novel application of RAG pipelines and LLMs, supported by a meticulously prepared university benchmark, offering valuable insights into advanced AI techniques for academic data retrieval and setting the stage for future research in this domain.
DINO-VITS: Data-Efficient Noise-Robust Zero-Shot Voice Cloning via Multi-Tasking with Self-Supervised Speaker Verification Loss
Recent progress in self-supervised representation learning has opened up new opportunities for training from unlabeled data and has been a growing trend in voice conversion. However, unsupervised training of voice cloning seems to remain a challenging task. In this paper we propose a semi-supervised zero-shot voice cloning approach that works by adapting a HuBERT-based voice conversion system to the voice cloning task and shows the robustness of such a system to noises both in training data (we add noises resulting in up to 0db signal-to-noise-ratio to 35% of training data with no significant degradation of evaluation metrics) and in the target speaker reference audio at inference. Moreover, such a method does not require any type of denoising or noise-labeling of training data. Finally, we introduce a novel multi-tasking approach by incorporating self-supervised DINO loss into joint training of a CAM++ based speaker verification system and a unit-based VITS cloning system. We show that it significantly improves the quality of generated audio over baselines, especially for noisy target speaker references.
CoMoSVC: Consistency Model-based Singing Voice Conversion
The diffusion-based Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) methods have achieved remarkable performances, producing natural audios with high similarity to the target timbre. However, the iterative sampling process results in slow inference speed, and acceleration thus becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose CoMoSVC, a consistency model-based SVC method, which aims to achieve both high-quality generation and high-speed sampling. A diffusion-based teacher model is first specially designed for SVC, and a student model is further distilled under self-consistency properties to achieve one-step sampling. Experiments on a single NVIDIA GTX4090 GPU reveal that although CoMoSVC has a significantly faster inference speed than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) diffusion-based SVC system, it still achieves comparable or superior conversion performance based on both subjective and objective metrics. Audio samples and codes are available at https://comosvc.github.io/.
Neural Lithography: Close the Design-to-Manufacturing Gap in Computational Optics with a 'Real2Sim' Learned Photolithography Simulator
We introduce neural lithography to address the 'design-to-manufacturing' gap in computational optics. Computational optics with large design degrees of freedom enable advanced functionalities and performance beyond traditional optics. However, the existing design approaches often overlook the numerical modeling of the manufacturing process, which can result in significant performance deviation between the design and the fabricated optics. To bridge this gap, we, for the first time, propose a fully differentiable design framework that integrates a pre-trained photolithography simulator into the model-based optical design loop. Leveraging a blend of physics-informed modeling and data-driven training using experimentally collected datasets, our photolithography simulator serves as a regularizer on fabrication feasibility during design, compensating for structure discrepancies introduced in the lithography process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two typical tasks in computational optics, where we design and fabricate a holographic optical element (HOE) and a multi-level diffractive lens (MDL) using a two-photon lithography system, showcasing improved optical performance on the task-specific metrics.
TrueGL: A Truthful, Reliable, and Unified Engine for Grounded Learning in Full-Stack Search
In the age of open and free information, a concerning trend of reliance on AI is emerging. However, existing AI tools struggle to evaluate the credibility of information and to justify their assessments. Hence, there is a growing need for systems that can help users evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. Although major search engines incorporate AI features, they often lack clear reliability indicators. We present TrueGL, a model that makes trustworthy search results more accessible. The model is a fine-tuned version of IBM's Granite-1B, trained on the custom dataset and integrated into a search engine with a reliability scoring system. We evaluate the system using prompt engineering and assigning each statement a continuous reliability score from 0.1 to 1, then instructing the model to return a textual explanation alongside the score. Each model's predicted scores are measured against real scores using standard evaluation metrics. TrueGL consistently outperforms other small-scale LLMs and rule-based approaches across all experiments on key evaluation metrics, including MAE, RMSE, and R2. The model's high accuracy, broad content coverage, and ease of use make trustworthy information more accessible and help reduce the spread of false or misleading content online. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AlgazinovAleksandr/TrueGL, and our model is publicly released at https://huggingface.co/JoydeepC/trueGL.
Lessons Learned from the URGENT 2024 Speech Enhancement Challenge
The URGENT 2024 Challenge aims to foster speech enhancement (SE) techniques with great universality, robustness, and generalizability, featuring a broader task definition, large-scale multi-domain data, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Nourished by the challenge outcomes, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of two key, yet understudied, issues in SE system development: data cleaning and evaluation metrics. We highlight several overlooked problems in traditional SE pipelines: (1) mismatches between declared and effective audio bandwidths, along with label noise even in various "high-quality" speech corpora; (2) lack of both effective SE systems to conquer the hardest conditions (e.g., speech overlap, strong noise / reverberation) and reliable measure of speech sample difficulty; (3) importance of combining multifaceted metrics for a comprehensive evaluation correlating well with human judgment. We hope that this endeavor can inspire improved SE pipeline designs in the future.
Session-level Normalization and Click-through Data Enhancement for Session-based Evaluation
Since a user usually has to issue a sequence of queries and examine multiple documents to resolve a complex information need in a search session, researchers have paid much attention to evaluating search systems at the session level rather than the single-query level. Most existing session-level metrics evaluate each query separately and then aggregate the query-level scores using a session-level weighting function. The assumptions behind these metrics are that all queries in the session should be involved, and their orders are fixed. However, if a search system could make the user satisfied with her first few queries, she may not need any subsequent queries. Besides, in most real-world search scenarios, due to a lack of explicit feedback from real users, we can only leverage some implicit feedback, such as users' clicks, as relevance labels for offline evaluation. Such implicit feedback might be different from the real relevance in a search session as some documents may be omitted in the previous query but identified in the later reformulations. To address the above issues, we make two assumptions about session-based evaluation, which explicitly describe an ideal session-search system and how to enhance click-through data in computing session-level evaluation metrics. Based on our assumptions, we design a session-level metric called Normalized U-Measure (NUM). NUM evaluates a session as a whole and utilizes an ideal session to normalize the result of the actual session. Besides, it infers session-level relevance labels based on implicit feedback. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of NUM by comparing it with existing session-based metrics in terms of correlation with user satisfaction and intuitiveness. We also conduct ablation studies to explore whether these assumptions hold.
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again: Faithful Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation by Selection
Despite their impressive capabilities, diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models can lack faithfulness to the text prompt, where generated images may not contain all the mentioned objects, attributes or relations. To alleviate these issues, recent works proposed post-hoc methods to improve model faithfulness without costly retraining, by modifying how the model utilizes the input prompt. In this work, we take a step back and show that large T2I diffusion models are more faithful than usually assumed, and can generate images faithful to even complex prompts without the need to manipulate the generative process. Based on that, we show how faithfulness can be simply treated as a candidate selection problem instead, and introduce a straightforward pipeline that generates candidate images for a text prompt and picks the best one according to an automatic scoring system that can leverage already existing T2I evaluation metrics. Quantitative comparisons alongside user studies on diverse benchmarks show consistently improved faithfulness over post-hoc enhancement methods, with comparable or lower computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ImageSelect.
OmniEval: An Omnidirectional and Automatic RAG Evaluation Benchmark in Financial Domain
As a typical and practical application of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have gained extensive attention, particularly in vertical domains where LLMs may lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an omnidirectional and automatic RAG benchmark, OmniEval, in the financial domain. Our benchmark is characterized by its multi-dimensional evaluation framework, including (1) a matrix-based RAG scenario evaluation system that categorizes queries into five task classes and 16 financial topics, leading to a structured assessment of diverse query scenarios; (2) a multi-dimensional evaluation data generation approach, which combines GPT-4-based automatic generation and human annotation, achieving an 87.47\% acceptance ratio in human evaluations on generated instances; (3) a multi-stage evaluation system that evaluates both retrieval and generation performance, result in a comprehensive evaluation on the RAG pipeline; and (4) robust evaluation metrics derived from rule-based and LLM-based ones, enhancing the reliability of assessments through manual annotations and supervised fine-tuning of an LLM evaluator. Our experiments demonstrate the comprehensiveness of OmniEval, which includes extensive test datasets and highlights the performance variations of RAG systems across diverse topics and tasks, revealing significant opportunities for RAG models to improve their capabilities in vertical domains. We open source the code of our benchmark in https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval}.
DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection
A critical yet frequently overlooked challenge in the field of deepfake detection is the lack of a standardized, unified, comprehensive benchmark. This issue leads to unfair performance comparisons and potentially misleading results. Specifically, there is a lack of uniformity in data processing pipelines, resulting in inconsistent data inputs for detection models. Additionally, there are noticeable differences in experimental settings, and evaluation strategies and metrics lack standardization. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for deepfake detection, called DeepfakeBench, which offers three key contributions: 1) a unified data management system to ensure consistent input across all detectors, 2) an integrated framework for state-of-the-art methods implementation, and 3) standardized evaluation metrics and protocols to promote transparency and reproducibility. Featuring an extensible, modular-based codebase, DeepfakeBench contains 15 state-of-the-art detection methods, 9 deepfake datasets, a series of deepfake detection evaluation protocols and analysis tools, as well as comprehensive evaluations. Moreover, we provide new insights based on extensive analysis of these evaluations from various perspectives (e.g., data augmentations, backbones). We hope that our efforts could facilitate future research and foster innovation in this increasingly critical domain. All codes, evaluations, and analyses of our benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/SCLBD/DeepfakeBench.
Revisiting Metric Reliability for Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine Translation and Summarization in Indian Languages
While automatic metrics drive progress in Machine Translation (MT) and Text Summarization (TS), existing metrics have been developed and validated almost exclusively for English and other high-resource languages. This narrow focus leaves Indian languages, spoken by over 1.5 billion people, largely overlooked, casting doubt on the universality of current evaluation practices. To address this gap, we introduce ITEM, a large-scale benchmark that systematically evaluates the alignment of 26 automatic metrics with human judgments across six major Indian languages, enriched with fine-grained annotations. Our extensive evaluation, covering agreement with human judgments, sensitivity to outliers, language-specific reliability, inter-metric correlations, and resilience to controlled perturbations, reveals four central findings: (1) LLM-based evaluators show the strongest alignment with human judgments at both segment and system levels; (2) outliers exert a significant impact on metric-human agreement; (3) in TS, metrics are more effective at capturing content fidelity, whereas in MT, they better reflect fluency; and (4) metrics differ in their robustness and sensitivity when subjected to diverse perturbations. Collectively, these findings offer critical guidance for advancing metric design and evaluation in Indian languages.
Analyzing the Evolution and Maintenance of ML Models on Hugging Face
Hugging Face (HF) has established itself as a crucial platform for the development and sharing of machine learning (ML) models. This repository mining study, which delves into more than 380,000 models using data gathered via the HF Hub API, aims to explore the community engagement, evolution, and maintenance around models hosted on HF, aspects that have yet to be comprehensively explored in the literature. We first examine the overall growth and popularity of HF, uncovering trends in ML domains, framework usage, authors grouping and the evolution of tags and datasets used. Through text analysis of model card descriptions, we also seek to identify prevalent themes and insights within the developer community. Our investigation further extends to the maintenance aspects of models, where we evaluate the maintenance status of ML models, classify commit messages into various categories (corrective, perfective, and adaptive), analyze the evolution across development stages of commits metrics and introduce a new classification system that estimates the maintenance status of models based on multiple attributes. This study aims to provide valuable insights about ML model maintenance and evolution that could inform future model development strategies on platforms like HF.
MetaMetrics: Calibrating Metrics For Generation Tasks Using Human Preferences
Understanding the quality of a performance evaluation metric is crucial for ensuring that model outputs align with human preferences. However, it remains unclear how well each metric captures the diverse aspects of these preferences, as metrics often excel in one particular area but not across all dimensions. To address this, it is essential to systematically calibrate metrics to specific aspects of human preference, catering to the unique characteristics of each aspect. We introduce MetaMetrics, a calibrated meta-metric designed to evaluate generation tasks across different modalities in a supervised manner. MetaMetrics optimizes the combination of existing metrics to enhance their alignment with human preferences. Our metric demonstrates flexibility and effectiveness in both language and vision downstream tasks, showing significant benefits across various multilingual and multi-domain scenarios. MetaMetrics aligns closely with human preferences and is highly extendable and easily integrable into any application. This makes MetaMetrics a powerful tool for improving the evaluation of generation tasks, ensuring that metrics are more representative of human judgment across diverse contexts.
Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A Survey of Current Evaluation Practices
Automatic metrics are extensively used to evaluate natural language processing systems. However, there has been increasing focus on how they are used and reported by practitioners within the field. In this paper, we have conducted a survey on the use of automatic metrics, focusing particularly on natural language generation (NLG) tasks. We inspect which metrics are used as well as why they are chosen and how their use is reported. Our findings from this survey reveal significant shortcomings, including inappropriate metric usage, lack of implementation details and missing correlations with human judgements. We conclude with recommendations that we believe authors should follow to enable more rigour within the field.
Leveraging LLMs for Legacy Code Modernization: Challenges and Opportunities for LLM-Generated Documentation
Legacy software systems, written in outdated languages like MUMPS and mainframe assembly, pose challenges in efficiency, maintenance, staffing, and security. While LLMs offer promise for modernizing these systems, their ability to understand legacy languages is largely unknown. This paper investigates the utilization of LLMs to generate documentation for legacy code using two datasets: an electronic health records (EHR) system in MUMPS and open-source applications in IBM mainframe Assembly Language Code (ALC). We propose a prompting strategy for generating line-wise code comments and a rubric to evaluate their completeness, readability, usefulness, and hallucination. Our study assesses the correlation between human evaluations and automated metrics, such as code complexity and reference-based metrics. We find that LLM-generated comments for MUMPS and ALC are generally hallucination-free, complete, readable, and useful compared to ground-truth comments, though ALC poses challenges. However, no automated metrics strongly correlate with comment quality to predict or measure LLM performance. Our findings highlight the limitations of current automated measures and the need for better evaluation metrics for LLM-generated documentation in legacy systems.
Guardians of the Machine Translation Meta-Evaluation: Sentinel Metrics Fall In!
Annually, at the Conference of Machine Translation (WMT), the Metrics Shared Task organizers conduct the meta-evaluation of Machine Translation (MT) metrics, ranking them according to their correlation with human judgments. Their results guide researchers toward enhancing the next generation of metrics and MT systems. With the recent introduction of neural metrics, the field has witnessed notable advancements. Nevertheless, the inherent opacity of these metrics has posed substantial challenges to the meta-evaluation process. This work highlights two issues with the meta-evaluation framework currently employed in WMT, and assesses their impact on the metrics rankings. To do this, we introduce the concept of sentinel metrics, which are designed explicitly to scrutinize the meta-evaluation process's accuracy, robustness, and fairness. By employing sentinel metrics, we aim to validate our findings, and shed light on and monitor the potential biases or inconsistencies in the rankings. We discover that the present meta-evaluation framework favors two categories of metrics: i) those explicitly trained to mimic human quality assessments, and ii) continuous metrics. Finally, we raise concerns regarding the evaluation capabilities of state-of-the-art metrics, emphasizing that they might be basing their assessments on spurious correlations found in their training data.
A quantitative framework for evaluating architectural patterns in ML systems
Contemporary intelligent systems incorporate software components, including machine learning components. As they grow in complexity and data volume such machine learning systems face unique quality challenges like scalability and performance. To overcome them, engineers may often use specific architectural patterns, however their impact on ML systems is difficult to quantify. The effect of software architecture on traditional systems is well studied, however more work is needed in the area of machine learning systems. This study proposes a framework for quantitative assessment of architectural patterns in ML systems, focusing on scalability and performance metrics for cost-effective CPU-based inference. We integrate these metrics into a systematic evaluation process for selection of architectural patterns and demonstrate its application through a case study. The approach shown in the paper should enable software architects to objectively analyze and select optimal patterns, addressing key challenges in ML system design.
What Did I Do Wrong? Quantifying LLMs' Sensitivity and Consistency to Prompt Engineering
Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want to include these models in their software stack, however, face a dreadful challenge: debugging LLMs' inconsistent behavior across minor variations of the prompt. We therefore introduce two metrics for classification tasks, namely sensitivity and consistency, which are complementary to task performance. First, sensitivity measures changes of predictions across rephrasings of the prompt, and does not require access to ground truth labels. Instead, consistency measures how predictions vary across rephrasings for elements of the same class. We perform an empirical comparison of these metrics on text classification tasks, using them as guideline for understanding failure modes of the LLM. Our hope is that sensitivity and consistency will be helpful to guide prompt engineering and obtain LLMs that balance robustness with performance.
The CAP Principle for LLM Serving: A Survey of Long-Context Large Language Model Serving
We survey the large language model (LLM) serving area to understand the intricate dynamics between cost-efficiency and accuracy, which is magnified by the growing need for longer contextual understanding when deploying models at a massive scale. Our findings reveal that works in this space optimize along three distinct but conflicting goals: improving serving context length (C), improving serving accuracy (A), and improving serving performance (P). Drawing inspiration from the CAP theorem in databases, we propose a CAP principle for LLM serving, which suggests that any optimization can improve at most two of these three goals simultaneously. Our survey categorizes existing works within this framework. We find the definition and continuity of user-perceived measurement metrics are crucial in determining whether a goal has been met, akin to prior CAP databases in the wild. We recognize the CAP principle for LLM serving as a guiding principle, rather than a formal theorem, to inform designers of the inherent and dynamic trade-offs in serving models. As serving accuracy and performance have been extensively studied, this survey focuses on works that extend serving context length and address the resulting challenges.
A Review and Efficient Implementation of Scene Graph Generation Metrics
Scene graph generation has emerged as a prominent research field in computer vision, witnessing significant advancements in the recent years. However, despite these strides, precise and thorough definitions for the metrics used to evaluate scene graph generation models are lacking. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature by providing a review and precise definition of commonly used metrics in scene graph generation. Our comprehensive examination clarifies the underlying principles of these metrics and can serve as a reference or introduction to scene graph metrics. Furthermore, to facilitate the usage of these metrics, we introduce a standalone Python package called SGBench that efficiently implements all defined metrics, ensuring their accessibility to the research community. Additionally, we present a scene graph benchmarking web service, that enables researchers to compare scene graph generation methods and increase visibility of new methods in a central place. All of our code can be found at https://lorjul.github.io/sgbench/.
LUNA: A Framework for Language Understanding and Naturalness Assessment
The evaluation of Natural Language Generation (NLG) models has gained increased attention, urging the development of metrics that evaluate various aspects of generated text. LUNA addresses this challenge by introducing a unified interface for 20 NLG evaluation metrics. These metrics are categorized based on their reference-dependence and the type of text representation they employ, from string-based n-gram overlap to the utilization of static embeddings and pre-trained language models. The straightforward design of LUNA allows for easy extension with novel metrics, requiring just a few lines of code. LUNA offers a user-friendly tool for evaluating generated texts.
Performance Prediction for Large Systems via Text-to-Text Regression
In many industries, predicting metric outcomes of large systems is a fundamental problem, driven largely by traditional tabular regression. However, such methods struggle on complex systems data in the wild such as configuration files or system logs, where feature engineering is often infeasible. We propose text-to-text regression as a general, scalable alternative. For predicting resource efficiency on Borg, Google's massive compute cluster scheduling system, a 60M parameter encoder-decoder, trained from random initialization, achieves up to a near perfect 0.99 (0.9 average) rank correlation across the entire fleet, and 100x lower MSE than tabular approaches. The model also easily adapts to new tasks in only 500 few-shot examples and captures the densities of complex outcome distributions. Ablation studies highlight the importance of using encoders, increasing sequence length, and the model's inherent uncertainty quantification. These findings pave the way for universal simulators of real-world outcomes.
VERSA: A Versatile Evaluation Toolkit for Speech, Audio, and Music
In this work, we introduce VERSA, a unified and standardized evaluation toolkit designed for various speech, audio, and music signals. The toolkit features a Pythonic interface with flexible configuration and dependency control, making it user-friendly and efficient. With full installation, VERSA offers 63 metrics with 711 metric variations based on different configurations. These metrics encompass evaluations utilizing diverse external resources, including matching and non-matching reference audio, text transcriptions, and text captions. As a lightweight yet comprehensive toolkit, VERSA is versatile to support the evaluation of a wide range of downstream scenarios. To demonstrate its capabilities, this work highlights example use cases for VERSA, including audio coding, speech synthesis, speech enhancement, singing synthesis, and music generation. The toolkit is available at https://github.com/shinjiwlab/versa.
RuMedBench: A Russian Medical Language Understanding Benchmark
The paper describes the open Russian medical language understanding benchmark covering several task types (classification, question answering, natural language inference, named entity recognition) on a number of novel text sets. Given the sensitive nature of the data in healthcare, such a benchmark partially closes the problem of Russian medical dataset absence. We prepare the unified format labeling, data split, and evaluation metrics for new tasks. The remaining tasks are from existing datasets with a few modifications. A single-number metric expresses a model's ability to cope with the benchmark. Moreover, we implement several baseline models, from simple ones to neural networks with transformer architecture, and release the code. Expectedly, the more advanced models yield better performance, but even a simple model is enough for a decent result in some tasks. Furthermore, for all tasks, we provide a human evaluation. Interestingly the models outperform humans in the large-scale classification tasks. However, the advantage of natural intelligence remains in the tasks requiring more knowledge and reasoning.
Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets
Recent machine translation (MT) metrics calibrate their effectiveness by correlating with human judgement but without any insights about their behaviour across different error types. Challenge sets are used to probe specific dimensions of metric behaviour but there are very few such datasets and they either focus on a limited number of phenomena or a limited number of language pairs. We introduce ACES, a contrastive challenge set spanning 146 language pairs, aimed at discovering whether metrics can identify 68 translation accuracy errors. These phenomena range from simple alterations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We conduct a large-scale study by benchmarking ACES on 50 metrics submitted to the WMT 2022 and 2023 metrics shared tasks. We benchmark metric performance, assess their incremental performance over successive campaigns, and measure their sensitivity to a range of linguistic phenomena. We also investigate claims that Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective as MT evaluators by evaluating on ACES. Our results demonstrate that different metric families struggle with different phenomena and that LLM-based methods fail to demonstrate reliable performance. Our analyses indicate that most metrics ignore the source sentence, tend to prefer surface-level overlap and end up incorporating properties of base models which are not always beneficial. We expand ACES to include error span annotations, denoted as SPAN-ACES and we use this dataset to evaluate span-based error metrics showing these metrics also need considerable improvement. Finally, we provide a set of recommendations for building better MT metrics, including focusing on error labels instead of scores, ensembling, designing strategies to explicitly focus on the source sentence, focusing on semantic content and choosing the right base model for representations.
SysBench: Can Large Language Models Follow System Messages?
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become instrumental across various applications, with the customization of these models to specific scenarios becoming increasingly critical. System message, a fundamental component of LLMs, is consist of carefully crafted instructions that guide the behavior of model to meet intended goals. Despite the recognized potential of system messages to optimize AI-driven solutions, there is a notable absence of a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how well different LLMs follow these system messages. To fill this gap, we introduce SysBench, a benchmark that systematically analyzes system message following ability in terms of three challenging aspects: constraint complexity, instruction misalignment and multi-turn stability. In order to enable effective evaluation, SysBench constructs multi-turn user conversations covering various interaction relationships, based on six common types of constraints from system messages in real-world scenarios. Our dataset contains 500 system messages from various domains, each paired with 5 turns of user conversations, which have been manually formulated and checked to guarantee high quality. SysBench provides extensive evaluation across various LLMs, measuring their ability to follow specified constraints given in system messages. The results highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of existing models, offering key insights and directions for future research. The open source library SysBench is available at https://github.com/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/SysBench.
Predicting User Experience on Laptops from Hardware Specifications
Estimating the overall user experience (UX) on a device is a common challenge faced by manufacturers. Today, device makers primarily rely on microbenchmark scores, such as Geekbench, that stress test specific hardware components, such as CPU or RAM, but do not satisfactorily capture consumer workloads. System designers often rely on domain-specific heuristics and extensive testing of prototypes to reach a desired UX goal, and yet there is often a mismatch between the manufacturers' performance claims and the consumers' experience. We present our initial results on predicting real-life experience on laptops from their hardware specifications. We target web applications that run on Chromebooks (ChromeOS laptops) for a simple and fair aggregation of experience across applications and workloads. On 54 laptops, we track 9 UX metrics on common end-user workloads: web browsing, video playback and audio/video calls. We focus on a subset of high-level metrics exposed by the Chrome browser, that are part of the Web Vitals initiative for judging the UX on web applications. With a dataset of 100K UX data points, we train gradient boosted regression trees that predict the metric values from device specifications. Across our 9 metrics, we note a mean R^2 score (goodness-of-fit on our dataset) of 97.8% and a mean MAAPE (percentage error in prediction on unseen data) of 10.1%.
The Inside Story: Towards Better Understanding of Machine Translation Neural Evaluation Metrics
Neural metrics for machine translation evaluation, such as COMET, exhibit significant improvements in their correlation with human judgments, as compared to traditional metrics based on lexical overlap, such as BLEU. Yet, neural metrics are, to a great extent, "black boxes" returning a single sentence-level score without transparency about the decision-making process. In this work, we develop and compare several neural explainability methods and demonstrate their effectiveness for interpreting state-of-the-art fine-tuned neural metrics. Our study reveals that these metrics leverage token-level information that can be directly attributed to translation errors, as assessed through comparison of token-level neural saliency maps with Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) annotations and with synthetically-generated critical translation errors. To ease future research, we release our code at: https://github.com/Unbabel/COMET/tree/explainable-metrics.
On the Evaluation of Commit Message Generation Models: An Experimental Study
Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for program understanding and maintenance. However, writing commit messages manually is time-consuming and laborious, especially when the code is updated frequently. Various approaches utilizing generation or retrieval techniques have been proposed to automatically generate commit messages. To achieve a better understanding of how the existing approaches perform in solving this problem, this paper conducts a systematic and in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art models and datasets. We find that: (1) Different variants of the BLEU metric are used in previous works, which affects the evaluation and understanding of existing methods. (2) Most existing datasets are crawled only from Java repositories while repositories in other programming languages are not sufficiently explored. (3) Dataset splitting strategies can influence the performance of existing models by a large margin. Some models show better performance when the datasets are split by commit, while other models perform better when the datasets are split by timestamp or by project. Based on our findings, we conduct a human evaluation and find the BLEU metric that best correlates with the human scores for the task. We also collect a large-scale, information-rich, and multi-language commit message dataset MCMD and evaluate existing models on this dataset. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments under different dataset splitting strategies and suggest the suitable models under different scenarios. Based on the experimental results and findings, we provide feasible suggestions for comprehensively evaluating commit message generation models and discuss possible future research directions. We believe this work can help practitioners and researchers better evaluate and select models for automatic commit message generation.
TIGERScore: Towards Building Explainable Metric for All Text Generation Tasks
We present TIGERScore, a Trained metric that follows Instruction Guidance to perform Explainable, and Reference-free evaluation over a wide spectrum of text generation tasks. Different from other automatic evaluation methods that only provide arcane scores, TIGERScore is guided by the natural language instruction to provide error analysis to pinpoint the mistakes in the generated text. Our metric is based on LLaMA, trained on our meticulously curated instruction-tuning dataset MetricInstruct which covers 6 text generation tasks and 23 text generation datasets. The dataset consists of 48K quadruple in the form of (instruction, input, system output rightarrow error analysis). We collected the `system outputs' through diverse channels to cover different types of errors. To quantitatively assess our metric, we evaluate its correlation with human ratings on 5 held-in datasets, 2 held-out datasets and show that TIGERScore can achieve the highest overall Spearman's correlation with human ratings across these datasets and outperforms other metrics significantly. As a reference-free metric, its correlation can even surpass the best existing reference-based metrics. To further qualitatively assess the rationale generated by our metric, we conduct human evaluation on the generated explanations and found that the explanations are 70.8\% accurate. Through these experimental results, we believe TIGERScore demonstrates the possibility of building universal explainable metrics to evaluate any text generation task.
Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery
This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.
Generate and Pray: Using SALLMS to Evaluate the Security of LLM Generated Code
With the growing popularity of Large Language Models (e.g. GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.) in software engineers' daily practices, it is important to ensure that the code generated by these tools is not only functionally correct but also free of vulnerabilities. Although LLMs can help developers to be more productive, prior empirical studies have shown that LLMs can generate insecure code. There are two contributing factors to the insecure code generation. First, existing datasets used to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) do not adequately represent genuine software engineering tasks sensitive to security. Instead, they are often based on competitive programming challenges or classroom-type coding tasks. In real-world applications, the code produced is integrated into larger codebases, introducing potential security risks. There's a clear absence of benchmarks that focus on evaluating the security of the generated code. Second, existing evaluation metrics primarily focus on the functional correctness of the generated code while ignoring security considerations. Metrics such as pass@k gauge the probability of obtaining the correct code in the top k suggestions. Other popular metrics like BLEU, CodeBLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR similarly emphasize functional accuracy, neglecting security implications. In light of these research gaps, in this paper, we described SALLM, a framework to benchmark LLMs' abilities to generate secure code systematically. This framework has three major components: a novel dataset of security-centric Python prompts, an evaluation environment to test the generated code, and novel metrics to evaluate the models' performance from the perspective of secure code generation.
The Multi-Range Theory of Translation Quality Measurement: MQM scoring models and Statistical Quality Control
The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework for analytic translation quality evaluation. The MQM error typology has been widely used by practitioners in the translation and localization industry and has served as the basis for many derivative projects. The annual Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) shared tasks on both human and automatic translation quality evaluations used the MQM error typology. The metric stands on two pillars: error typology and the scoring model. The scoring model calculates the quality score from annotation data, detailing how to convert error type and severity counts into numeric scores to determine if the content meets specifications. Previously, only the raw scoring model had been published. This April, the MQM Council published the Linear Calibrated Scoring Model, officially presented herein, along with the Non-Linear Scoring Model, which had not been published before. This paper details the latest MQM developments and presents a universal approach to translation quality measurement across three sample size ranges. It also explains why Statistical Quality Control should be used for very small sample sizes, starting from a single sentence.
System Message Generation for User Preferences using Open-Source Models
System messages play a crucial role in interactions with large language models (LLMs), often serving as prompts to initiate conversations. Through system messages, users can assign specific roles, perform intended tasks, incorporate background information, specify various output formats and communication styles. Despite such versatility, publicly available data are often lack system messages and subject to strict license constraints in the industry field. Manual labeling of publicly available data with system messages that align with user instructions demands significant resources. In view of such challenges, our work introduces SysGen, a pipeline for generating system messages with better aligned assistant responses from the supervised fine-tuning dataset without system messages. Training on SysGen data has demonstrated substantial improvements in the alignment of model responses with system messages and user instructions, as demonstrated across various open-source models on the Multifacet benchmark, while maintaining minimal impact on other unseen benchmarks such as Open LLM Leaderboard 2. Our qualitative analysis highlights the importance of diverse system messages to ensure better adaptability across different contexts.
Critical Appraisal of Fairness Metrics in Clinical Predictive AI
Predictive artificial intelligence (AI) offers an opportunity to improve clinical practice and patient outcomes, but risks perpetuating biases if fairness is inadequately addressed. However, the definition of "fairness" remains unclear. We conducted a scoping review to identify and critically appraise fairness metrics for clinical predictive AI. We defined a "fairness metric" as a measure quantifying whether a model discriminates (societally) against individuals or groups defined by sensitive attributes. We searched five databases (2014-2024), screening 820 records, to include 41 studies, and extracted 62 fairness metrics. Metrics were classified by performance-dependency, model output level, and base performance metric, revealing a fragmented landscape with limited clinical validation and overreliance on threshold-dependent measures. Eighteen metrics were explicitly developed for healthcare, including only one clinical utility metric. Our findings highlight conceptual challenges in defining and quantifying fairness and identify gaps in uncertainty quantification, intersectionality, and real-world applicability. Future work should prioritise clinically meaningful metrics.
COMET-poly: Machine Translation Metric Grounded in Other Candidates
Automated metrics for machine translation attempt to replicate human judgment. Unlike humans, who often assess a translation in the context of multiple alternatives, these metrics typically consider only the source sentence and a single translation. This discrepancy in the evaluation setup may negatively impact the performance of automated metrics. We propose two automated metrics that incorporate additional information beyond the single translation. COMET-polycand uses alternative translations of the same source sentence to compare and contrast with the translation at hand, thereby providing a more informed assessment of its quality. COMET-polyic, inspired by retrieval-based in-context learning, takes in translations of similar source texts along with their human-labeled quality scores to guide the evaluation. We find that including a single additional translation in COMET-polycand improves the segment-level metric performance (0.079 to 0.118 Kendall's tau-b correlation), with further gains when more translations are added. Incorporating retrieved examples in COMET-polyic yields similar improvements (0.079 to 0.116 Kendall's tau-b correlation). We release our models publicly.
What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking
In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.
What do we know about Hugging Face? A systematic literature review and quantitative validation of qualitative claims
Background: Collaborative Software Package Registries (SPRs) are an integral part of the software supply chain. Much engineering work synthesizes SPR package into applications. Prior research has examined SPRs for traditional software, such as NPM (JavaScript) and PyPI (Python). Pre-Trained Model (PTM) Registries are an emerging class of SPR of increasing importance, because they support the deep learning supply chain. Aims: Recent empirical research has examined PTM registries in ways such as vulnerabilities, reuse processes, and evolution. However, no existing research synthesizes them to provide a systematic understanding of the current knowledge. Some of the existing research includes qualitative claims lacking quantitative analysis. Our research fills these gaps by providing a knowledge synthesis and quantitative analyses. Methods: We first conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). We then observe that some of the claims are qualitative. We identify quantifiable metrics associated with those claims, and measure in order to substantiate these claims. Results: From our SLR, we identify 12 claims about PTM reuse on the HuggingFace platform, 4 of which lack quantitative validation. We successfully test 3 of these claims through a quantitative analysis, and directly compare one with traditional software. Our findings corroborate qualitative claims with quantitative measurements. Our findings are: (1) PTMs have a much higher turnover rate than traditional software, indicating a dynamic and rapidly evolving reuse environment within the PTM ecosystem; and (2) There is a strong correlation between documentation quality and PTM popularity. Conclusions: We confirm qualitative research claims with concrete metrics, supporting prior qualitative and case study research. Our measures show further dynamics of PTM reuse, inspiring research infrastructure and new measures.
The illusion of a perfect metric: Why evaluating AI's words is harder than it looks
Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) is crucial for the practical adoption of AI, but has been a longstanding research challenge. While human evaluation is considered the de-facto standard, it is expensive and lacks scalability. Practical applications have driven the development of various automatic evaluation metrics (AEM), designed to compare the model output with human-written references, generating a score which approximates human judgment. Over time, AEMs have evolved from simple lexical comparisons, to semantic similarity models and, more recently, to LLM-based evaluators. However, it seems that no single metric has emerged as a definitive solution, resulting in studies using different ones without fully considering the implications. This paper aims to show this by conducting a thorough examination of the methodologies of existing metrics, their documented strengths and limitations, validation methods, and correlations with human judgment. We identify several key challenges: metrics often capture only specific aspects of text quality, their effectiveness varies by task and dataset, validation practices remain unstructured, and correlations with human judgment are inconsistent. Importantly, we find that these challenges persist in the most recent type of metric, LLM-as-a-Judge, as well as in the evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), an increasingly relevant task in academia and industry. Our findings challenge the quest for the 'perfect metric'. We propose selecting metrics based on task-specific needs and leveraging complementary evaluations and advocate that new metrics should focus on enhanced validation methodologies.
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models
Language models (LMs) are becoming the foundation for almost all major language technologies, but their capabilities, limitations, and risks are not well understood. We present Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) to improve the transparency of language models. First, we taxonomize the vast space of potential scenarios (i.e. use cases) and metrics (i.e. desiderata) that are of interest for LMs. Then we select a broad subset based on coverage and feasibility, noting what's missing or underrepresented (e.g. question answering for neglected English dialects, metrics for trustworthiness). Second, we adopt a multi-metric approach: We measure 7 metrics (accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency) for each of 16 core scenarios when possible (87.5% of the time). This ensures metrics beyond accuracy don't fall to the wayside, and that trade-offs are clearly exposed. We also perform 7 targeted evaluations, based on 26 targeted scenarios, to analyze specific aspects (e.g. reasoning, disinformation). Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 30 prominent language models (spanning open, limited-access, and closed models) on all 42 scenarios, 21 of which were not previously used in mainstream LM evaluation. Prior to HELM, models on average were evaluated on just 17.9% of the core HELM scenarios, with some prominent models not sharing a single scenario in common. We improve this to 96.0%: now all 30 models have been densely benchmarked on the same core scenarios and metrics under standardized conditions. Our evaluation surfaces 25 top-level findings. For full transparency, we release all raw model prompts and completions publicly for further analysis, as well as a general modular toolkit. We intend for HELM to be a living benchmark for the community, continuously updated with new scenarios, metrics, and models.
Reranking-based Generation for Unbiased Perspective Summarization
Generating unbiased summaries in real-world settings such as political perspective summarization remains a crucial application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing evaluation frameworks rely on traditional metrics for measuring key attributes such as coverage and faithfulness without verifying their applicability, and efforts to develop improved summarizers are still nascent. We address these gaps by (1) identifying reliable metrics for measuring perspective summary quality, and (2) investigating the efficacy of LLM-based methods beyond zero-shot inference. Namely, we build a test set for benchmarking metric reliability using human annotations and show that traditional metrics underperform compared to language model-based metrics, which prove to be strong evaluators. Using these metrics, we show that reranking-based methods yield strong results, and preference tuning with synthetically generated and reranking-labeled data further boosts performance. Our findings aim to contribute to the reliable evaluation and development of perspective summarization methods.
Copilot Evaluation Harness: Evaluating LLM-Guided Software Programming
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Development Environments (IDEs) has become a focal point in modern software development. LLMs such as OpenAI GPT-3.5/4 and Code Llama offer the potential to significantly augment developer productivity by serving as intelligent, chat-driven programming assistants. However, utilizing LLMs out of the box is unlikely to be optimal for any given scenario. Rather, each system requires the LLM to be honed to its set of heuristics to ensure the best performance. In this paper, we introduce the Copilot evaluation harness: a set of data and tools for evaluating LLM-guided IDE interactions, covering various programming scenarios and languages. We propose our metrics as a more robust and information-dense evaluation than previous state of the art evaluation systems. We design and compute both static and execution based success metrics for scenarios encompassing a wide range of developer tasks, including code generation from natural language (generate), documentation generation from code (doc), test case generation (test), bug-fixing (fix), and workspace understanding and query resolution (workspace). These success metrics are designed to evaluate the performance of LLMs within a given IDE and its respective parameter space. Our learnings from evaluating three common LLMs using these metrics can inform the development and validation of future scenarios in LLM guided IDEs.
SemScore: Automated Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned LLMs based on Semantic Textual Similarity
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable advancements in their ability to generate fitting responses to natural language instructions. However, many current works rely on manual evaluation to judge the quality of generated responses. Since such manual evaluation is time-consuming, it does not easily scale to the evaluation of multiple models and model variants. In this short paper, we propose a straightforward but remarkably effective evaluation metric called SemScore, in which we directly compare model outputs to gold target responses using semantic textual similarity (STS). We conduct a comparative evaluation of the model outputs of 12 prominent instruction-tuned LLMs using 8 widely-used evaluation metrics for text generation. We find that our proposed SemScore metric outperforms all other, in many cases more complex, evaluation metrics in terms of correlation to human evaluation. These findings indicate the utility of our proposed metric for the evaluation of instruction-tuned LLMs.
Adaptive Machine Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments
The Internet of Things is an example domain where data is perpetually generated in ever-increasing quantities, reflecting the proliferation of connected devices and the formation of continuous data streams over time. Consequently, the demand for ad-hoc, cost-effective machine learning solutions must adapt to this evolving data influx. This study tackles the task of offloading in small gateways, exacerbated by their dynamic availability over time. An approach leveraging CPU utilization metrics using online and continual machine learning techniques is proposed to predict gateway availability. These methods are compared to popular machine learning algorithms and a recent time-series foundation model, Lag-Llama, for fine-tuned and zero-shot setups. Their performance is benchmarked on a dataset of CPU utilization measurements over time from an IoT gateway and focuses on model metrics such as prediction errors, training and inference times, and memory consumption. Our primary objective is to study new efficient ways to predict CPU performance in IoT environments. Across various scenarios, our findings highlight that ensemble and online methods offer promising results for this task in terms of accuracy while maintaining a low resource footprint.
The Efficiency Misnomer
Model efficiency is a critical aspect of developing and deploying machine learning models. Inference time and latency directly affect the user experience, and some applications have hard requirements. In addition to inference costs, model training also have direct financial and environmental impacts. Although there are numerous well-established metrics (cost indicators) for measuring model efficiency, researchers and practitioners often assume that these metrics are correlated with each other and report only few of them. In this paper, we thoroughly discuss common cost indicators, their advantages and disadvantages, and how they can contradict each other. We demonstrate how incomplete reporting of cost indicators can lead to partial conclusions and a blurred or incomplete picture of the practical considerations of different models. We further present suggestions to improve reporting of efficiency metrics.
Not All Errors are Equal: Learning Text Generation Metrics using Stratified Error Synthesis
Is it possible to build a general and automatic natural language generation (NLG) evaluation metric? Existing learned metrics either perform unsatisfactorily or are restricted to tasks where large human rating data is already available. We introduce SESCORE, a model-based metric that is highly correlated with human judgements without requiring human annotation, by utilizing a novel, iterative error synthesis and severity scoring pipeline. This pipeline applies a series of plausible errors to raw text and assigns severity labels by simulating human judgements with entailment. We evaluate SESCORE against existing metrics by comparing how their scores correlate with human ratings. SESCORE outperforms all prior unsupervised metrics on multiple diverse NLG tasks including machine translation, image captioning, and WebNLG text generation. For WMT 20/21 En-De and Zh-En, SESCORE improve the average Kendall correlation with human judgement from 0.154 to 0.195. SESCORE even achieves comparable performance to the best supervised metric COMET, despite receiving no human-annotated training data.
PATE: Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation
Evaluating anomaly detection algorithms in time series data is critical as inaccuracies can lead to flawed decision-making in various domains where real-time analytics and data-driven strategies are essential. Traditional performance metrics assume iid data and fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and specific characteristics of time series anomalies, such as early and delayed detections. We introduce Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation (PATE), a novel evaluation metric that incorporates the temporal relationship between prediction and anomaly intervals. PATE uses proximity-based weighting considering buffer zones around anomaly intervals, enabling a more detailed and informed assessment of a detection. Using these weights, PATE computes a weighted version of the area under the Precision and Recall curve. Our experiments with synthetic and real-world datasets show the superiority of PATE in providing more sensible and accurate evaluations than other evaluation metrics. We also tested several state-of-the-art anomaly detectors across various benchmark datasets using the PATE evaluation scheme. The results show that a common metric like Point-Adjusted F1 Score fails to characterize the detection performances well, and that PATE is able to provide a more fair model comparison. By introducing PATE, we redefine the understanding of model efficacy that steers future studies toward developing more effective and accurate detection models.
Metrics for Markov Decision Processes with Infinite State Spaces
We present metrics for measuring state similarity in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with infinitely many states, including MDPs with continuous state spaces. Such metrics provide a stable quantitative analogue of the notion of bisimulation for MDPs, and are suitable for use in MDP approximation. We show that the optimal value function associated with a discounted infinite horizon planning task varies continuously with respect to our metric distances.
ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics
As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of such metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.
PianoMotion10M: Dataset and Benchmark for Hand Motion Generation in Piano Performance
Recently, artificial intelligence techniques for education have been received increasing attentions, while it still remains an open problem to design the effective music instrument instructing systems. Although key presses can be directly derived from sheet music, the transitional movements among key presses require more extensive guidance in piano performance. In this work, we construct a piano-hand motion generation benchmark to guide hand movements and fingerings for piano playing. To this end, we collect an annotated dataset, PianoMotion10M, consisting of 116 hours of piano playing videos from a bird's-eye view with 10 million annotated hand poses. We also introduce a powerful baseline model that generates hand motions from piano audios through a position predictor and a position-guided gesture generator. Furthermore, a series of evaluation metrics are designed to assess the performance of the baseline model, including motion similarity, smoothness, positional accuracy of left and right hands, and overall fidelity of movement distribution. Despite that piano key presses with respect to music scores or audios are already accessible, PianoMotion10M aims to provide guidance on piano fingering for instruction purposes. The source code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/agnJason/PianoMotion10M.
System-Level Natural Language Feedback
Natural language (NL) feedback contains rich information about the user experience. Existing studies focus on an instance-level approach, where feedback is used to refine specific examples, disregarding its system-wide application. This paper proposes a general framework for unlocking the system-level use of NL feedback. We show how to use feedback to formalize system-level design decisions in a human-in-the-loop-process -- in order to produce better models. In particular this is done through: (i) metric design for tasks; and (ii) language model prompt design for refining model responses. We conduct two case studies of this approach for improving search query generation and dialog response generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the use of system-level feedback. We show the combination of system-level feedback and instance-level feedback brings further gains, and that human written instance-level feedback results in more grounded refinements than GPT-3.5 written ones, underlying the importance of human feedback for building systems.
Mercury: An Efficiency Benchmark for LLM Code Synthesis
Despite advancements in evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) for code synthesis, benchmarks have predominantly focused on functional correctness, overlooking the importance of code efficiency. We present Mercury, the first benchmark designated for assessing the code efficiency of LLM code synthesis tasks. Mercury consists of 1,889 programming tasks covering diverse difficulty levels alongside test case generators generating unlimited cases for comprehensive evaluation. Unlike existing benchmarks, Mercury integrates a novel metric Beyond@K to measure normalized code efficiency based on historical submissions, leading to a new evaluation indicator for code synthesis, which encourages generating functionally correct and computationally efficient code, mirroring the real-world software development standard. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate the remarkable capability to generate functionally correct code, there still exists a substantial gap in their efficiency output, underscoring a new frontier for LLM research and development.
AixBench: A Code Generation Benchmark Dataset
We present a benchmark dataset for evaluating method-level code generation task. The benchmark contains a dataset of 175 samples for automated evaluation and a dataset of 161 samples for manual evaluation. We also present a new metric for automatically evaluating the correctness of the generated code, and a set of criteria to manually evaluating the overall quality of the generated code.
I Need Help! Evaluating LLM's Ability to Ask for Users' Support: A Case Study on Text-to-SQL Generation
This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help
Large Language Model Evaluation via Matrix Entropy
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, extending their strong capabilities into multi-modal domains. Thus, it is vital to define proper and diversified metrics for the evaluation of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce matrix entropy, a novel metric rooted in information theory and geometry principles to quantify the data compression proficiency in LLMs. It reflects the model's ability to extract relevant information and eliminate unnecessary elements, thereby providing insight into the language model's intrinsic capability. Specifically, we demonstrate its applicability in both single-modal (language) and multi-modal settings. For language models, our findings reveal that the matrix entropy of representations follows a scaling law type reduction when the model scales up, serving as a complement to the traditional loss scaling law. For the multi-modal setting, we also propose an evaluation method based on matrix entropy for assessing alignment quality and we find that modern large multi-modal models exhibit great alignment performance.
ROME: Memorization Insights from Text, Probability and Hidden State in Large Language Models
Probing the memorization of large language models holds significant importance. Previous works have established metrics for quantifying memorization, explored various influencing factors, such as data duplication, model size, and prompt length, and evaluated memorization by comparing model outputs with training corpora. However, the training corpora are of enormous scale and its pre-processing is time-consuming. To explore memorization without accessing training data, we propose a novel approach, named ROME, wherein memorization is explored by comparing disparities across memorized and non-memorized. Specifically, models firstly categorize the selected samples into memorized and non-memorized groups, and then comparing the demonstrations in the two groups from the insights of text, probability, and hidden state. Experimental findings show the disparities in factors including word length, part-of-speech, word frequency, mean and variance, just to name a few.
Compression, Transduction, and Creation: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Generation
Natural language generation (NLG) spans a broad range of tasks, each of which serves for specific objectives and desires different properties of generated text. The complexity makes automatic evaluation of NLG particularly challenging. Previous work has typically focused on a single task and developed individual evaluation metrics based on specific intuitions. In this paper, we propose a unifying perspective that facilitates the design of metrics for a wide range of language generation tasks and quality aspects. Based on the nature of information change from input to output, we classify NLG tasks into compression (e.g., summarization), transduction (e.g., text rewriting), and creation (e.g., dialog). The information alignment, or overlap, between input, context, and output text plays a common central role in characterizing the generation. Using the uniform concept of information alignment, we develop a family of interpretable metrics for various NLG tasks and aspects, often without need of gold reference data. To operationalize the metrics, we train self-supervised models to approximate information alignment as a prediction task. Experiments show the uniformly designed metrics achieve stronger or comparable correlations with human judgement compared to state-of-the-art metrics in each of diverse tasks, including text summarization, style transfer, and knowledge-grounded dialog. With information alignment as the intermediate representation, we deliver a composable library for easy NLG evaluation and future metric design.
Efficiency-Effectiveness Reranking FLOPs for LLM-based Rerankers
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high computational demands often hinder practical deployment. Existing studies evaluate the efficiency of LLM-based rerankers using proxy metrics such as latency, the number of forward passes, input tokens, and output tokens. However, these metrics depend on hardware and running-time choices (\eg parallel or not, batch size, etc), and often fail to account for model size, making it difficult to interpret and obscuring the evaluation of the efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. To address this issue, we propose E2R-FLOPs, for LLM-based rerankers: ranking metrics per PetaFLOP (RPP) for relevance per compute and queries per PetaFLOP (QPP) for hardware-agnostic throughput. Companied with the new metrics, an interpretable FLOPs estimator is built to estimate the FLOPs of an LLM-based reranker even without running any experiments. Based on the proposed metrics, we conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of LLM-based rerankers with different architecture, studying the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off and bringing this issue to the attention of the research community.
HEVAL: Yet Another Human Evaluation Metric
Machine translation evaluation is a very important activity in machine translation development. Automatic evaluation metrics proposed in literature are inadequate as they require one or more human reference translations to compare them with output produced by machine translation. This does not always give accurate results as a text can have several different translations. Human evaluation metrics, on the other hand, lacks inter-annotator agreement and repeatability. In this paper we have proposed a new human evaluation metric which addresses these issues. Moreover this metric also provides solid grounds for making sound assumptions on the quality of the text produced by a machine translation.
The Fine Line: Navigating Large Language Model Pretraining with Down-streaming Capability Analysis
Uncovering early-stage metrics that reflect final model performance is one core principle for large-scale pretraining. The existing scaling law demonstrates the power-law correlation between pretraining loss and training flops, which serves as an important indicator of the current training state for large language models. However, this principle only focuses on the model's compression properties on the training data, resulting in an inconsistency with the ability improvements on the downstream tasks. Some follow-up works attempted to extend the scaling-law to more complex metrics (such as hyperparameters), but still lacked a comprehensive analysis of the dynamic differences among various capabilities during pretraining. To address the aforementioned limitations, this paper undertakes a comprehensive comparison of model capabilities at various pretraining intermediate checkpoints. Through this analysis, we confirm that specific downstream metrics exhibit similar training dynamics across models of different sizes, up to 67 billion parameters. In addition to our core findings, we've reproduced Amber and OpenLLaMA, releasing their intermediate checkpoints. This initiative offers valuable resources to the research community and facilitates the verification and exploration of LLM pretraining by open-source researchers. Besides, we provide empirical summaries, including performance comparisons of different models and capabilities, and tuition of key metrics for different training phases. Based on these findings, we provide a more user-friendly strategy for evaluating the optimization state, offering guidance for establishing a stable pretraining process.
OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics
Automatic metrics are essential for developing natural language generation (NLG) models, particularly for open-ended language generation tasks such as story generation. However, existing automatic metrics are observed to correlate poorly with human evaluation. The lack of standardized benchmark datasets makes it difficult to fully evaluate the capabilities of a metric and fairly compare different metrics. Therefore, we propose OpenMEVA, a benchmark for evaluating open-ended story generation metrics. OpenMEVA provides a comprehensive test suite to assess the capabilities of metrics, including (a) the correlation with human judgments, (b) the generalization to different model outputs and datasets, (c) the ability to judge story coherence, and (d) the robustness to perturbations. To this end, OpenMEVA includes both manually annotated stories and auto-constructed test examples. We evaluate existing metrics on OpenMEVA and observe that they have poor correlation with human judgments, fail to recognize discourse-level incoherence, and lack inferential knowledge (e.g., causal order between events), the generalization ability and robustness. Our study presents insights for developing NLG models and metrics in further research.
Measuring Fairness of Text Classifiers via Prediction Sensitivity
With the rapid growth in language processing applications, fairness has emerged as an important consideration in data-driven solutions. Although various fairness definitions have been explored in the recent literature, there is lack of consensus on which metrics most accurately reflect the fairness of a system. In this work, we propose a new formulation : ACCUMULATED PREDICTION SENSITIVITY, which measures fairness in machine learning models based on the model's prediction sensitivity to perturbations in input features. The metric attempts to quantify the extent to which a single prediction depends on a protected attribute, where the protected attribute encodes the membership status of an individual in a protected group. We show that the metric can be theoretically linked with a specific notion of group fairness (statistical parity) and individual fairness. It also correlates well with humans' perception of fairness. We conduct experiments on two text classification datasets : JIGSAW TOXICITY, and BIAS IN BIOS, and evaluate the correlations between metrics and manual annotations on whether the model produced a fair outcome. We observe that the proposed fairness metric based on prediction sensitivity is statistically significantly more correlated with human annotation than the existing counterfactual fairness metric.
Toward an Evaluation Science for Generative AI Systems
There is an increasing imperative to anticipate and understand the performance and safety of generative AI systems in real-world deployment contexts. However, the current evaluation ecosystem is insufficient: Commonly used static benchmarks face validity challenges, and ad hoc case-by-case audits rarely scale. In this piece, we advocate for maturing an evaluation science for generative AI systems. While generative AI creates unique challenges for system safety engineering and measurement science, the field can draw valuable insights from the development of safety evaluation practices in other fields, including transportation, aerospace, and pharmaceutical engineering. In particular, we present three key lessons: Evaluation metrics must be applicable to real-world performance, metrics must be iteratively refined, and evaluation institutions and norms must be established. Applying these insights, we outline a concrete path toward a more rigorous approach for evaluating generative AI systems.
SPECS: Specificity-Enhanced CLIP-Score for Long Image Caption Evaluation
As interest grows in generating long, detailed image captions, standard evaluation metrics become increasingly unreliable. N-gram-based metrics though efficient, fail to capture semantic correctness. Representational Similarity (RS) metrics, designed to address this, initially saw limited use due to high computational costs, while today, despite advances in hardware, they remain unpopular due to low correlation to human judgments. Meanwhile, metrics based on large language models (LLMs) show strong correlation with human judgments, but remain too expensive for iterative use during model development. We introduce SPECS (Specificity-Enhanced CLIPScore), a reference-free RS metric tailored to long image captioning. SPECS modifies CLIP with a new objective that emphasizes specificity: rewarding correct details and penalizing incorrect ones. We show that SPECS matches the performance of open-source LLM-based metrics in correlation to human judgments, while being far more efficient. This makes it a practical alternative for iterative checkpoint evaluation during image captioning model development.Our code can be found at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/SPECS.
Vidi: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Editing
Humans naturally share information with those they are connected to, and video has become one of the dominant mediums for communication and expression on the Internet. To support the creation of high-quality large-scale video content, a modern pipeline requires a comprehensive understanding of both the raw input materials (e.g., the unedited footage captured by cameras) and the editing components (e.g., visual effects). In video editing scenarios, models must process multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, text) with strong background knowledge and handle flexible input lengths (e.g., hour-long raw videos), which poses significant challenges for traditional models. In this report, we introduce Vidi, a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for a wide range of video understand editing scenarios. The first release focuses on temporal retrieval, i.e., identifying the time ranges within the input videos corresponding to a given text query, which plays a critical role in intelligent editing. The model is capable of processing hour-long videos with strong temporal understanding capability, e.g., retrieve time ranges for certain queries. To support a comprehensive evaluation in real-world scenarios, we also present the VUE-TR benchmark, which introduces five key advancements. 1) Video duration: significantly longer than existing temporal retrival datasets, 2) Audio support: includes audio-based queries, 3) Query format: diverse query lengths/formats, 4) Annotation quality: ground-truth time ranges are manually annotated. 5) Evaluation metric: a refined IoU metric to support evaluation over multiple time ranges. Remarkably, Vidi significantly outperforms leading proprietary models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini, on the temporal retrieval task, indicating its superiority in video editing scenarios.
EffEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Efficiency for MT Evaluation Metrics
Efficiency is a key property to foster inclusiveness and reduce environmental costs, especially in an era of LLMs. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of efficiency for MT evaluation metrics. Our approach involves replacing computation-intensive transformers with lighter alternatives and employing linear and quadratic approximations for alignment algorithms on top of LLM representations. We evaluate six (reference-free and reference-based) metrics across three MT datasets and examine 16 lightweight transformers. In addition, we look into the training efficiency of metrics like COMET by utilizing adapters. Our results indicate that (a) TinyBERT provides the optimal balance between quality and efficiency, (b) CPU speed-ups are more substantial than those on GPU; (c) WMD approximations yield no efficiency gains while reducing quality and (d) adapters enhance training efficiency (regarding backward pass speed and memory requirements) as well as, in some cases, metric quality. These findings can help to strike a balance between evaluation speed and quality, which is essential for effective NLG systems. Furthermore, our research contributes to the ongoing efforts to optimize NLG evaluation metrics with minimal impact on performance. To our knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of different aspects of efficiency for MT metrics conducted so far.
BLEU might be Guilty but References are not Innocent
The quality of automatic metrics for machine translation has been increasingly called into question, especially for high-quality systems. This paper demonstrates that, while choice of metric is important, the nature of the references is also critical. We study different methods to collect references and compare their value in automated evaluation by reporting correlation with human evaluation for a variety of systems and metrics. Motivated by the finding that typical references exhibit poor diversity, concentrating around translationese language, we develop a paraphrasing task for linguists to perform on existing reference translations, which counteracts this bias. Our method yields higher correlation with human judgment not only for the submissions of WMT 2019 English to German, but also for Back-translation and APE augmented MT output, which have been shown to have low correlation with automatic metrics using standard references. We demonstrate that our methodology improves correlation with all modern evaluation metrics we look at, including embedding-based methods. To complete this picture, we reveal that multi-reference BLEU does not improve the correlation for high quality output, and present an alternative multi-reference formulation that is more effective.
Which Prompts Make The Difference? Data Prioritization For Efficient Human LLM Evaluation
Human evaluation is increasingly critical for assessing large language models, capturing linguistic nuances, and reflecting user preferences more accurately than traditional automated metrics. However, the resource-intensive nature of this type of annotation process poses significant challenges. The key question driving our work: "is it feasible to minimize human-in-the-loop feedback by prioritizing data instances which most effectively distinguish between models?" We evaluate several metric-based methods and find that these metrics enhance the efficiency of human evaluations by minimizing the number of required annotations, thus saving time and cost, while ensuring a robust performance evaluation. We show that our method is effective across widely used model families, reducing instances of indecisive (or "tie") outcomes by up to 54% compared to a random sample when focusing on the top-20 percentile of prioritized instances. This potential reduction in required human effort positions our approach as a valuable strategy in future large language model evaluations.
An Evaluation Framework for Legal Document Summarization
A law practitioner has to go through numerous lengthy legal case proceedings for their practices of various categories, such as land dispute, corruption, etc. Hence, it is important to summarize these documents, and ensure that summaries contain phrases with intent matching the category of the case. To the best of our knowledge, there is no evaluation metric that evaluates a summary based on its intent. We propose an automated intent-based summarization metric, which shows a better agreement with human evaluation as compared to other automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE-L etc. in terms of human satisfaction. We also curate a dataset by annotating intent phrases in legal documents, and show a proof of concept as to how this system can be automated. Additionally, all the code and data to generate reproducible results is available on Github.
Measuring Data
We identify the task of measuring data to quantitatively characterize the composition of machine learning data and datasets. Similar to an object's height, width, and volume, data measurements quantify different attributes of data along common dimensions that support comparison. Several lines of research have proposed what we refer to as measurements, with differing terminology; we bring some of this work together, particularly in fields of computer vision and language, and build from it to motivate measuring data as a critical component of responsible AI development. Measuring data aids in systematically building and analyzing machine learning (ML) data towards specific goals and gaining better control of what modern ML systems will learn. We conclude with a discussion of the many avenues of future work, the limitations of data measurements, and how to leverage these measurement approaches in research and practice.
Reliable Measures of Spread in High Dimensional Latent Spaces
Understanding geometric properties of natural language processing models' latent spaces allows the manipulation of these properties for improved performance on downstream tasks. One such property is the amount of data spread in a model's latent space, or how fully the available latent space is being used. In this work, we define data spread and demonstrate that the commonly used measures of data spread, Average Cosine Similarity and a partition function min/max ratio I(V), do not provide reliable metrics to compare the use of latent space across models. We propose and examine eight alternative measures of data spread, all but one of which improve over these current metrics when applied to seven synthetic data distributions. Of our proposed measures, we recommend one principal component-based measure and one entropy-based measure that provide reliable, relative measures of spread and can be used to compare models of different sizes and dimensionalities.
Evaluating explainability for machine learning predictions using model-agnostic metrics
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have brought about a plethora of new challenges in terms of governance and regulation. AI systems are being integrated into various industries and sectors, creating a demand from decision-makers to possess a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the capabilities and limitations of these systems. One critical aspect of this demand is the ability to explain the results of machine learning models, which is crucial to promoting transparency and trust in AI systems, as well as fundamental in helping machine learning models to be trained ethically. In this paper, we present novel metrics to quantify the degree of which AI model predictions can be easily explainable by its features. Our metrics summarize different aspects of explainability into scalars, providing a more comprehensive understanding of model predictions and facilitating communication between decision-makers and stakeholders, thereby increasing the overall transparency and accountability of AI systems.
A Framework for Automated Measurement of Responsible AI Harms in Generative AI Applications
We present a framework for the automated measurement of responsible AI (RAI) metrics for large language models (LLMs) and associated products and services. Our framework for automatically measuring harms from LLMs builds on existing technical and sociotechnical expertise and leverages the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4. We use this framework to run through several case studies investigating how different LLMs may violate a range of RAI-related principles. The framework may be employed alongside domain-specific sociotechnical expertise to create measurements for new harm areas in the future. By implementing this framework, we aim to enable more advanced harm measurement efforts and further the responsible use of LLMs.
How Green are Neural Language Models? Analyzing Energy Consumption in Text Summarization Fine-tuning
Artificial intelligence systems significantly impact the environment, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These tasks often require extensive computational resources to train deep neural networks, including large-scale language models containing billions of parameters. This study analyzes the trade-offs between energy consumption and performance across three neural language models: two pre-trained models (T5-base and BART-base), and one large language model (LLaMA 3-8B). These models were fine-tuned for the text summarization task, focusing on generating research paper highlights that encapsulate the core themes of each paper. A wide range of evaluation metrics, including ROUGE, METEOR, MoverScore, BERTScore, and SciBERTScore, were employed to assess their performance. Furthermore, the carbon footprint associated with fine-tuning each model was measured, offering a comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact. This research underscores the importance of incorporating environmental considerations into the design and implementation of neural language models and calls for the advancement of energy-efficient AI methodologies.
Performance Modeling of Data Storage Systems using Generative Models
High-precision modeling of systems is one of the main areas of industrial data analysis. Models of systems, their digital twins, are used to predict their behavior under various conditions. We have developed several models of a storage system using machine learning-based generative models. The system consists of several components: hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state drive (SSD) storage pools with different RAID schemes and cache. Each storage component is represented by a probabilistic model that describes the probability distribution of the component performance in terms of IOPS and latency, depending on their configuration and external data load parameters. The results of the experiments demonstrate the errors of 4-10 % for IOPS and 3-16 % for latency predictions depending on the components and models of the system. The predictions show up to 0.99 Pearson correlation with Little's law, which can be used for unsupervised reliability checks of the models. In addition, we present novel data sets that can be used for benchmarking regression algorithms, conditional generative models, and uncertainty estimation methods in machine learning.
Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Survey of Resource-Efficient Large Language Models
The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Revisiting Instruction Fine-tuned Model Evaluation to Guide Industrial Applications
Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is a powerful paradigm that strengthens the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but in doing so induces new evaluation metric requirements. We show LLM-based metrics to be well adapted to these requirements, and leverage them to conduct an investigation of task-specialization strategies, quantifying the trade-offs that emerge in practical industrial settings. Our findings offer practitioners actionable insights for real-world IFT model deployment.
Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT
It is important to define meaningful and interpretable automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for dialog. This paper introduces the FED metric (fine-grained evaluation of dialog), an automatic evaluation metric which uses DialoGPT, without any fine-tuning or supervision. It also introduces the FED dataset which is constructed by annotating a set of human-system and human-human conversations with eighteen fine-grained dialog qualities. The FED metric (1) does not rely on a ground-truth response, (2) does not require training data and (3) measures fine-grained dialog qualities at both the turn and whole dialog levels. FED attains moderate to strong correlation with human judgement at both levels.
Memory in Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Evaluation and Evolution
Under a unified operational definition, we define LLM memory as a persistent state written during pretraining, finetuning, or inference that can later be addressed and that stably influences outputs. We propose a four-part taxonomy (parametric, contextual, external, procedural/episodic) and a memory quadruple (location, persistence, write/access path, controllability). We link mechanism, evaluation, and governance via the chain write -> read -> inhibit/update. To avoid distorted comparisons across heterogeneous setups, we adopt a three-setting protocol (parametric only, offline retrieval, online retrieval) that decouples capability from information availability on the same data and timeline. On this basis we build a layered evaluation: parametric (closed-book recall, edit differential, memorization/privacy), contextual (position curves and the mid-sequence drop), external (answer correctness vs snippet attribution/faithfulness), and procedural/episodic (cross-session consistency and timeline replay, E MARS+). The framework integrates temporal governance and leakage auditing (freshness hits, outdated answers, refusal slices) and uncertainty reporting via inter-rater agreement plus paired tests with multiple-comparison correction. For updating and forgetting, we present DMM Gov: coordinating DAPT/TAPT, PEFT, model editing (ROME, MEND, MEMIT, SERAC), and RAG to form an auditable loop covering admission thresholds, rollout, monitoring, rollback, and change audits, with specs for timeliness, conflict handling, and long-horizon consistency. Finally, we give four testable propositions: minimum identifiability; a minimal evaluation card; causally constrained editing with verifiable forgetting; and when retrieval with small-window replay outperforms ultra-long-context reading. This yields a reproducible, comparable, and governable coordinate system for research and deployment.
The Quest for Reliable Metrics of Responsible AI
The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including AI in Science (AIS), should be done following the principles of responsible AI. Progress in responsible AI is often quantified through evaluation metrics, yet there has been less work on assessing the robustness and reliability of the metrics themselves. We reflect on prior work that examines the robustness of fairness metrics for recommender systems as a type of AI application and summarise their key takeaways into a set of non-exhaustive guidelines for developing reliable metrics of responsible AI. Our guidelines apply to a broad spectrum of AI applications, including AIS.
Out of the BLEU: how should we assess quality of the Code Generation models?
In recent years, researchers have created and introduced a significant number of various code generation models. As human evaluation of every new model version is unfeasible, the community adopted automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU to approximate the results of human judgement. These metrics originate from the machine translation domain and it is unclear whether they are applicable for the code generation tasks and how well they agree with the human evaluation on this task. There are also other metrics, CodeBLEU and RUBY, developed to estimate the similarity of code, that take into account the properties of source code. However, for these metrics there are hardly any studies on their agreement with the human evaluation. Despite all that, minimal differences in the metric scores have been used in recent papers to claim superiority of some code generation models over the others. In this paper, we present a study on the applicability of six metrics -- BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, ChrF, CodeBLEU, and RUBY -- for evaluation of code generation models. We conduct a study on two different code generation datasets and use human annotators to assess the quality of all models run on these datasets. The results indicate that for the CoNaLa dataset of Python one-liners, none of the metrics can correctly emulate human judgement on which model is better with >95% certainty if the difference in model scores is less than 5 points. For the HearthStone dataset, which consists of classes of a particular structure, a difference in model scores of at least 2 points is enough to claim the superiority of one model over the other. Our findings suggest that the ChrF metric is a better fit for the evaluation of code generation models than the commonly used BLEU and CodeBLEU. Yet, finding a metric for code generation that closely agrees with humans requires additional work.
Optimizing the Interface Between Knowledge Graphs and LLMs for Complex Reasoning
Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) results in complex systems with numerous hyperparameters that directly affect performance. While such systems are increasingly common in retrieval-augmented generation, the role of systematic hyperparameter optimization remains underexplored. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of Cognee, a modular framework for end-to-end KG construction and retrieval. Using three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotPotQA, TwoWikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue) we optimize parameters related to chunking, graph construction, retrieval, and prompting. Each configuration is scored using established metrics (exact match, F1, and DeepEval's LLM-based correctness metric). Our results demonstrate that meaningful gains can be achieved through targeted tuning. While the gains are consistent, they are not uniform, with performance varying across datasets and metrics. This variability highlights both the value of tuning and the limitations of standard evaluation measures. While demonstrating the immediate potential of hyperparameter tuning, we argue that future progress will depend not only on architectural advances but also on clearer frameworks for optimization and evaluation in complex, modular systems.
Manifold Characteristics That Predict Downstream Task Performance
Pretraining methods are typically compared by evaluating the accuracy of linear classifiers, transfer learning performance, or visually inspecting the representation manifold's (RM) lower-dimensional projections. We show that the differences between methods can be understood more clearly by investigating the RM directly, which allows for a more detailed comparison. To this end, we propose a framework and new metric to measure and compare different RMs. We also investigate and report on the RM characteristics for various pretraining methods. These characteristics are measured by applying sequentially larger local alterations to the input data, using white noise injections and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial attacks, and then tracking each datapoint. We calculate the total distance moved for each datapoint and the relative change in distance between successive alterations. We show that self-supervised methods learn an RM where alterations lead to large but constant size changes, indicating a smoother RM than fully supervised methods. We then combine these measurements into one metric, the Representation Manifold Quality Metric (RMQM), where larger values indicate larger and less variable step sizes, and show that RMQM correlates positively with performance on downstream tasks.
Becoming self-instruct: introducing early stopping criteria for minimal instruct tuning
In this paper, we introduce the Instruction Following Score (IFS), a metric that detects language models' ability to follow instructions. The metric has a dual purpose. First, IFS can be used to distinguish between base and instruct models. We benchmark publicly available base and instruct models, and show that the ratio of well formatted responses to partial and full sentences can be an effective measure between those two model classes. Secondly, the metric can be used as an early stopping criteria for instruct tuning. We compute IFS for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of 7B and 13B LLaMA models, showing that models learn to follow instructions relatively early in the training process, and the further finetuning can result in changes in the underlying base model semantics. As an example of semantics change we show the objectivity of model predictions, as defined by an auxiliary metric ObjecQA. We show that in this particular case, semantic changes are the steepest when the IFS tends to plateau. We hope that decomposing instruct tuning into IFS and semantic factors starts a new trend in better controllable instruct tuning and opens possibilities for designing minimal instruct interfaces querying foundation models.
Fine-Tuned Machine Translation Metrics Struggle in Unseen Domains
We introduce a new, extensive multidimensional quality metrics (MQM) annotated dataset covering 11 language pairs in the biomedical domain. We use this dataset to investigate whether machine translation (MT) metrics which are fine-tuned on human-generated MT quality judgements are robust to domain shifts between training and inference. We find that fine-tuned metrics exhibit a substantial performance drop in the unseen domain scenario relative to metrics that rely on the surface form, as well as pre-trained metrics which are not fine-tuned on MT quality judgments.
BPMN Assistant: An LLM-Based Approach to Business Process Modeling
This paper presents BPMN Assistant, a tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for natural language-based creation and editing of BPMN diagrams. A specialized JSON-based representation is introduced as a structured alternative to the direct handling of XML to enhance the accuracy of process modifications. Process generation quality is evaluated using Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Relative Graph Edit Distance (RGED), while editing performance is evaluated with a binary success metric. Results show that JSON and XML achieve similar similarity scores in generation, but JSON offers greater reliability, faster processing, and significantly higher editing success rates. We discuss key trade-offs, limitations, and future improvements. The implementation is available at https://github.com/jtlicardo/bpmn-assistant.
Style over Substance: Failure Modes of LLM Judges in Alignment Benchmarking
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked an explosion of interest in post-training and an avalanche of new preference optimization (PO) methods. These methods claim superior alignment by virtue of better correspondence with human pairwise preferences, often measured by LLM judges. In this work, we attempt to answer the following question -- do LLM-judge preferences translate to progress on other, more concrete metrics for alignment, and if not, why not? We define a concrete metric for alignment, and introduce SOS-Bench, the largest standardized, reproducible LLM meta-benchmark to date. We find that (1) LLM-judgments do not correlate with concrete measures of safety, world knowledge, and instruction following; (2) LLM judges have powerful implicit biases, prioritizing style over factuality and safety; and (3) the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage of post-training, and not the PO stage, has the greatest impact on alignment, with data scaling and prompt diversity as the driving factors. Our codebase and complete results can be found at https://github.com/penfever/sos-bench.
Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models
Devising indicative evaluation metrics for the image generation task remains an open problem. The most widely used metric for measuring the similarity between real and generated images has been the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score. Because it does not differentiate the fidelity and diversity aspects of the generated images, recent papers have introduced variants of precision and recall metrics to diagnose those properties separately. In this paper, we show that even the latest version of the precision and recall metrics are not reliable yet. For example, they fail to detect the match between two identical distributions, they are not robust against outliers, and the evaluation hyperparameters are selected arbitrarily. We propose density and coverage metrics that solve the above issues. We analytically and experimentally show that density and coverage provide more interpretable and reliable signals for practitioners than the existing metrics. Code: https://github.com/clovaai/generative-evaluation-prdc.
Vote'n'Rank: Revision of Benchmarking with Social Choice Theory
The development of state-of-the-art systems in different applied areas of machine learning (ML) is driven by benchmarks, which have shaped the paradigm of evaluating generalisation capabilities from multiple perspectives. Although the paradigm is shifting towards more fine-grained evaluation across diverse tasks, the delicate question of how to aggregate the performances has received particular interest in the community. In general, benchmarks follow the unspoken utilitarian principles, where the systems are ranked based on their mean average score over task-specific metrics. Such aggregation procedure has been viewed as a sub-optimal evaluation protocol, which may have created the illusion of progress. This paper proposes Vote'n'Rank, a framework for ranking systems in multi-task benchmarks under the principles of the social choice theory. We demonstrate that our approach can be efficiently utilised to draw new insights on benchmarking in several ML sub-fields and identify the best-performing systems in research and development case studies. The Vote'n'Rank's procedures are more robust than the mean average while being able to handle missing performance scores and determine conditions under which the system becomes the winner.
Semantic Answer Similarity for Evaluating Question Answering Models
The evaluation of question answering models compares ground-truth annotations with model predictions. However, as of today, this comparison is mostly lexical-based and therefore misses out on answers that have no lexical overlap but are still semantically similar, thus treating correct answers as false. This underestimation of the true performance of models hinders user acceptance in applications and complicates a fair comparison of different models. Therefore, there is a need for an evaluation metric that is based on semantics instead of pure string similarity. In this short paper, we present SAS, a cross-encoder-based metric for the estimation of semantic answer similarity, and compare it to seven existing metrics. To this end, we create an English and a German three-way annotated evaluation dataset containing pairs of answers along with human judgment of their semantic similarity, which we release along with an implementation of the SAS metric and the experiments. We find that semantic similarity metrics based on recent transformer models correlate much better with human judgment than traditional lexical similarity metrics on our two newly created datasets and one dataset from related work.
Diagnose, Localize, Align: A Full-Stack Framework for Reliable LLM Multi-Agent Systems under Instruction Conflicts
Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.
Automotive Perception Software Development: An Empirical Investigation into Data, Annotation, and Ecosystem Challenges
Software that contains machine learning algorithms is an integral part of automotive perception, for example, in driving automation systems. The development of such software, specifically the training and validation of the machine learning components, require large annotated datasets. An industry of data and annotation services has emerged to serve the development of such data-intensive automotive software components. Wide-spread difficulties to specify data and annotation needs challenge collaborations between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and their suppliers of software components, data, and annotations. This paper investigates the reasons for these difficulties for practitioners in the Swedish automotive industry to arrive at clear specifications for data and annotations. The results from an interview study show that a lack of effective metrics for data quality aspects, ambiguities in the way of working, unclear definitions of annotation quality, and deficits in the business ecosystems are causes for the difficulty in deriving the specifications. We provide a list of recommendations that can mitigate challenges when deriving specifications and we propose future research opportunities to overcome these challenges. Our work contributes towards the on-going research on accountability of machine learning as applied to complex software systems, especially for high-stake applications such as automated driving.
GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation
Despite recent advances in text-to-3D generative methods, there is a notable absence of reliable evaluation metrics. Existing metrics usually focus on a single criterion each, such as how well the asset aligned with the input text. These metrics lack the flexibility to generalize to different evaluation criteria and might not align well with human preferences. Conducting user preference studies is an alternative that offers both adaptability and human-aligned results. User studies, however, can be very expensive to scale. This paper presents an automatic, versatile, and human-aligned evaluation metric for text-to-3D generative models. To this end, we first develop a prompt generator using GPT-4V to generate evaluating prompts, which serve as input to compare text-to-3D models. We further design a method instructing GPT-4V to compare two 3D assets according to user-defined criteria. Finally, we use these pairwise comparison results to assign these models Elo ratings. Experimental results suggest our metric strongly align with human preference across different evaluation criteria.
LaajMeter: A Framework for LaaJ Evaluation
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators in natural language processing tasks, a paradigm known as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ). While effective in general domains, LaaJs pose significant challenges in domain-specific contexts, where annotated data is scarce and expert evaluation is costly. In such cases, meta-evaluation is often performed using metrics that have not been validated for the specific domain in which they are applied. As a result, it becomes difficult to determine which metrics effectively identify LaaJ quality, and further, what threshold indicates sufficient evaluator performance. In this work, we introduce LaaJMeter, a simulation-based framework for controlled meta-evaluation of LaaJs. LaaJMeter enables engineers to generate synthetic data representing virtual models and judges, allowing systematic analysis of evaluation metrics under realistic conditions. This helps practitioners validate and refine LaaJs for specific evaluation tasks: they can test whether their metrics correctly distinguish between better and worse (virtual) LaaJs, and estimate appropriate thresholds for evaluator adequacy. We demonstrate the utility of LaaJMeter in a code translation task involving a legacy programming language, showing how different metrics vary in sensitivity to evaluator quality. Our results highlight the limitations of common metrics and the importance of principled metric selection. LaaJMeter provides a scalable and extensible solution for assessing LaaJs in low-resource settings, contributing to the broader effort to ensure trustworthy and reproducible evaluation in NLP.
State of What Art? A Call for Multi-Prompt LLM Evaluation
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of various evaluation benchmarks. These benchmarks typically rely on a single instruction template for evaluating all LLMs on a specific task. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the brittleness of results obtained via single-prompt evaluations across 6.5M instances, involving 20 different LLMs and 39 tasks from 3 benchmarks. To improve robustness of the analysis, we propose to evaluate LLMs with a set of diverse prompts instead. We discuss tailored evaluation metrics for specific use cases (e.g., LLM developers vs. developers interested in a specific downstream task), ensuring a more reliable and meaningful assessment of LLM capabilities. We then implement these criteria and conduct evaluations of multiple models, providing insights into the true strengths and limitations of current LLMs.
EnvBench: A Benchmark for Automated Environment Setup
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.
OmniBench-RAG: A Multi-Domain Evaluation Platform for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Tools
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.
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code
Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.
Unveiling Downstream Performance Scaling of LLMs: A Clustering-Based Perspective
The rapid advancements in computing dramatically increase the scale and cost of training Large Language Models (LLMs). Accurately predicting downstream task performance prior to model training is crucial for efficient resource allocation, yet remains challenging due to two primary constraints: (1) the "emergence phenomenon", wherein downstream performance metrics become meaningful only after extensive training, which limits the ability to use smaller models for prediction; (2) Uneven task difficulty distributions and the absence of consistent scaling laws, resulting in substantial metric variability. Existing performance prediction methods suffer from limited accuracy and reliability, thereby impeding the assessment of potential LLM capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a Clustering-On-Difficulty (COD) downstream performance prediction framework. COD first constructs a predictable support subset by clustering tasks based on difficulty features, strategically excluding non-emergent and non-scalable clusters. The scores on the selected subset serve as effective intermediate predictors of downstream performance on the full evaluation set. With theoretical support, we derive a mapping function that transforms performance metrics from the predictable subset to the full evaluation set, thereby ensuring accurate extrapolation of LLM downstream performance. The proposed method has been applied to predict performance scaling for a 70B LLM, providing actionable insights for training resource allocation and assisting in monitoring the training process. Notably, COD achieves remarkable predictive accuracy on the 70B LLM by leveraging an ensemble of small models, demonstrating an absolute mean deviation of 1.36% across eight important LLM evaluation benchmarks.
KPEval: Towards Fine-grained Semantic-based Evaluation of Keyphrase Extraction and Generation Systems
Despite the significant advancements in keyphrase extraction and keyphrase generation methods, the predominant approach for evaluation only relies on exact matching with human references and disregards reference-free attributes. This scheme fails to recognize systems that generate keyphrases that are semantically equivalent to the references or keyphrases that have practical utility. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different keyphrase systems, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework consisting of six critical dimensions: naturalness, faithfulness, saliency, coverage, diversity, and utility. For each dimension, we discuss the desiderata and design semantic-based metrics that align with the evaluation objectives. Rigorous meta-evaluation studies demonstrate that our evaluation strategy correlates better with human preferences compared to a range of previously used metrics. Using this framework, we re-evaluate 18 keyphrase systems and further discover that (1) the best model differs in different dimensions, with pre-trained language models achieving the best in most dimensions; (2) the utility in downstream tasks does not always correlate well with reference-based metrics; and (3) large language models exhibit a strong performance in reference-free evaluation.
Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review: A Benchmark
Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure.Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.
SDQM: Synthetic Data Quality Metric for Object Detection Dataset Evaluation
The performance of machine learning models depends heavily on training data. The scarcity of large-scale, well-annotated datasets poses significant challenges in creating robust models. To address this, synthetic data generated through simulations and generative models has emerged as a promising solution, enhancing dataset diversity and improving the performance, reliability, and resilience of models. However, evaluating the quality of this generated data requires an effective metric. This paper introduces the Synthetic Dataset Quality Metric (SDQM) to assess data quality for object detection tasks without requiring model training to converge. This metric enables more efficient generation and selection of synthetic datasets, addressing a key challenge in resource-constrained object detection tasks. In our experiments, SDQM demonstrated a strong correlation with the mean Average Precision (mAP) scores of YOLOv11, a leading object detection model, while previous metrics only exhibited moderate or weak correlations. Additionally, it provides actionable insights for improving dataset quality, minimizing the need for costly iterative training. This scalable and efficient metric sets a new standard for evaluating synthetic data. The code for SDQM is available at https://github.com/ayushzenith/SDQM
Weighting vectors for machine learning: numerical harmonic analysis applied to boundary detection
Metric space magnitude, an active field of research in algebraic topology, is a scalar quantity that summarizes the effective number of distinct points that live in a general metric space. The {\em weighting vector} is a closely-related concept that captures, in a nontrivial way, much of the underlying geometry of the original metric space. Recent work has demonstrated that when the metric space is Euclidean, the weighting vector serves as an effective tool for boundary detection. We recast this result and show the weighting vector may be viewed as a solution to a kernelized SVM. As one consequence, we apply this new insight to the task of outlier detection, and we demonstrate performance that is competitive or exceeds performance of state-of-the-art techniques on benchmark data sets. Under mild assumptions, we show the weighting vector, which has computational cost of matrix inversion, can be efficiently approximated in linear time. We show how nearest neighbor methods can approximate solutions to the minimization problems defined by SVMs.
CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis
Evaluation metrics play a vital role in the growth of an area as it defines the standard of distinguishing between good and bad models. In the area of code synthesis, the commonly used evaluation metric is BLEU or perfect accuracy, but they are not suitable enough to evaluate codes, because BLEU is originally designed to evaluate the natural language, neglecting important syntactic and semantic features of codes, and perfect accuracy is too strict thus it underestimates different outputs with the same semantic logic. To remedy this, we introduce a new automatic evaluation metric, dubbed CodeBLEU. It absorbs the strength of BLEU in the n-gram match and further injects code syntax via abstract syntax trees (AST) and code semantics via data-flow. We conduct experiments by evaluating the correlation coefficient between CodeBLEU and quality scores assigned by the programmers on three code synthesis tasks, i.e., text-to-code, code translation, and code refinement. Experimental results show that our proposed CodeBLEU can achieve a better correlation with programmer assigned scores compared with BLEU and accuracy.
An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software
The cycle of scientific discovery is frequently bottlenecked by the slow, manual creation of software to support computational experiments. To address this, we present an AI system that creates expert-level scientific software whose goal is to maximize a quality metric. The system uses a Large Language Model (LLM) and Tree Search (TS) to systematically improve the quality metric and intelligently navigate the large space of possible solutions. The system achieves expert-level results when it explores and integrates complex research ideas from external sources. The effectiveness of tree search is demonstrated across a wide range of benchmarks. In bioinformatics, it discovered 40 novel methods for single-cell data analysis that outperformed the top human-developed methods on a public leaderboard. In epidemiology, it generated 14 models that outperformed the CDC ensemble and all other individual models for forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations. Our method also produced state-of-the-art software for geospatial analysis, neural activity prediction in zebrafish, time series forecasting and numerical solution of integrals. By devising and implementing novel solutions to diverse tasks, the system represents a significant step towards accelerating scientific progress.
Measuring Recency Bias In Sequential Recommendation Systems
Recency bias in a sequential recommendation system refers to the overly high emphasis placed on recent items within a user session. This bias can diminish the serendipity of recommendations and hinder the system's ability to capture users' long-term interests, leading to user disengagement. We propose a simple yet effective novel metric specifically designed to quantify recency bias. Our findings also demonstrate that high recency bias measured in our proposed metric adversely impacts recommendation performance too, and mitigating it results in improved recommendation performances across all models evaluated in our experiments, thus highlighting the importance of measuring recency bias.
A Large-Scale Evaluation for Log Parsing Techniques: How Far Are We?
Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.
Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets
Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.
CSIM: A Copula-based similarity index sensitive to local changes for Image quality assessment
Image similarity metrics play an important role in computer vision applications, as they are used in image processing, computer vision and machine learning. Furthermore, those metrics enable tasks such as image retrieval, object recognition and quality assessment, essential in fields like healthcare, astronomy and surveillance. Existing metrics, such as PSNR, MSE, SSIM, ISSM and FSIM, often face limitations in terms of either speed, complexity or sensitivity to small changes in images. To address these challenges, a novel image similarity metric, namely CSIM, that combines real-time while being sensitive to subtle image variations is investigated in this paper. The novel metric uses Gaussian Copula from probability theory to transform an image into vectors of pixel distribution associated to local image patches. These vectors contain, in addition to intensities and pixel positions, information on the dependencies between pixel values, capturing the structural relationships within the image. By leveraging the properties of Copulas, CSIM effectively models the joint distribution of pixel intensities, enabling a more nuanced comparison of image patches making it more sensitive to local changes compared to other metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that CSIM outperforms existing similarity metrics in various image distortion scenarios, including noise, compression artifacts and blur. The metric's ability to detect subtle differences makes it suitable for applications requiring high precision, such as medical imaging, where the detection of minor anomalies can be of a high importance. The results obtained in this work can be reproduced from this Github repository: https://github.com/safouaneelg/copulasimilarity.
BEATS: Bias Evaluation and Assessment Test Suite for Large Language Models
In this research, we introduce BEATS, a novel framework for evaluating Bias, Ethics, Fairness, and Factuality in Large Language Models (LLMs). Building upon the BEATS framework, we present a bias benchmark for LLMs that measure performance across 29 distinct metrics. These metrics span a broad range of characteristics, including demographic, cognitive, and social biases, as well as measures of ethical reasoning, group fairness, and factuality related misinformation risk. These metrics enable a quantitative assessment of the extent to which LLM generated responses may perpetuate societal prejudices that reinforce or expand systemic inequities. To achieve a high score on this benchmark a LLM must show very equitable behavior in their responses, making it a rigorous standard for responsible AI evaluation. Empirical results based on data from our experiment show that, 37.65\% of outputs generated by industry leading models contained some form of bias, highlighting a substantial risk of using these models in critical decision making systems. BEATS framework and benchmark offer a scalable and statistically rigorous methodology to benchmark LLMs, diagnose factors driving biases, and develop mitigation strategies. With the BEATS framework, our goal is to help the development of more socially responsible and ethically aligned AI models.
Project and Forget: Solving Large-Scale Metric Constrained Problems
Given a set of dissimilarity measurements amongst data points, determining what metric representation is most "consistent" with the input measurements or the metric that best captures the relevant geometric features of the data is a key step in many machine learning algorithms. Existing methods are restricted to specific kinds of metrics or small problem sizes because of the large number of metric constraints in such problems. In this paper, we provide an active set algorithm, Project and Forget, that uses Bregman projections, to solve metric constrained problems with many (possibly exponentially) inequality constraints. We provide a theoretical analysis of Project and Forget and prove that our algorithm converges to the global optimal solution and that the L_2 distance of the current iterate to the optimal solution decays asymptotically at an exponential rate. We demonstrate that using our method we can solve large problem instances of three types of metric constrained problems: general weight correlation clustering, metric nearness, and metric learning; in each case, out-performing the state of the art methods with respect to CPU times and problem sizes.
Spectral Alignment as Predictor of Loss Explosion in Neural Network Training
Loss explosions in training deep neural networks can nullify multi-million dollar training runs. Conventional monitoring metrics like weight and gradient norms are often lagging and ambiguous predictors, as their values vary dramatically across different models and even between layers of the same model, making it difficult to establish a unified standard for detecting impending failure. We introduce Spectral Alignment (SA), a novel, theoretically-grounded metric that monitors the distributional alignment between layer inputs and the principal singular vectors of weight matrices. We show that a collapse in the sign diversity of this alignment is a powerful early predictor of representational collapse and training divergence. Empirical results on language models demonstrate that monitoring the SA distribution provides a significantly earlier and clearer warning of loss explosions than traditional scalar metrics. SA's low computational overhead makes it a practical tool for safeguarding model training.
Quantifying Variance in Evaluation Benchmarks
Evaluation benchmarks are the cornerstone of measuring capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as well as driving progress in said capabilities. Originally designed to make claims about capabilities (or lack thereof) in fully pretrained models, evaluation benchmarks are now also extensively used to decide between various training choices. Despite this widespread usage, we rarely quantify the variance in our evaluation benchmarks, which dictates whether differences in performance are meaningful. Here, we define and measure a range of metrics geared towards measuring variance in evaluation benchmarks, including seed variance across initialisations, and monotonicity during training. By studying a large number of models -- both openly available and pretrained from scratch -- we provide empirical estimates for a variety of variance metrics, with considerations and recommendations for practitioners. We also evaluate the utility and tradeoffs of continuous versus discrete performance measures and explore options for better understanding and reducing this variance. We find that simple changes, such as framing choice tasks (like MMLU) as completion tasks, can often reduce variance for smaller scale (sim7B) models, while more involved methods inspired from human testing literature (such as item analysis and item response theory) struggle to meaningfully reduce variance. Overall, our work provides insights into variance in evaluation benchmarks, suggests LM-specific techniques to reduce variance, and more generally encourages practitioners to carefully factor in variance when comparing models.
Cheaply Evaluating Inference Efficiency Metrics for Autoregressive Transformer APIs
Large language models (LLMs) power many state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing. However, these models are extremely computationally expensive, even at inference time, raising the natural question: when is the extra cost of deploying a larger model worth the anticipated boost in capabilities? Better understanding this tradeoff fundamentally could benefit from an inference efficiency metric that is both (i) easily comparable across models from different providers, and (ii) representative of the true cost of running queries in an isolated performance environment. Unfortunately, access to LLMs today is largely restricted to black-box text generation APIs and raw runtimes measured through this interface do not satisfy these desiderata: model providers can apply various software and hardware optimizations orthogonal to the model, and models served on shared infrastructure are susceptible to performance contention. To circumvent these problems, we propose a new metric for comparing inference efficiency across models. This metric puts models on equal footing as though they were served (i) on uniform hardware and software, and (ii) without performance contention. We call this metric the idealized runtime, and we propose a methodology to efficiently estimate this metric for autoregressive Transformer models. We also propose cost-aware variants that incorporate the number of accelerators needed to serve the model. Using these metrics, we compare ten state-of-the-art LLMs to provide the first analysis of inference efficiency-capability tradeoffs; we make several observations from this analysis, including the fact that the superior inference runtime performance of certain APIs is often a byproduct of optimizations within the API rather than the underlying model. Our methodology also facilitates the efficient comparison of different software and hardware stacks.
RaTEScore: A Metric for Radiology Report Generation
This paper introduces a novel, entity-aware metric, termed as Radiological Report (Text) Evaluation (RaTEScore), to assess the quality of medical reports generated by AI models. RaTEScore emphasizes crucial medical entities such as diagnostic outcomes and anatomical details, and is robust against complex medical synonyms and sensitive to negation expressions. Technically, we developed a comprehensive medical NER dataset, RaTE-NER, and trained an NER model specifically for this purpose. This model enables the decomposition of complex radiological reports into constituent medical entities. The metric itself is derived by comparing the similarity of entity embeddings, obtained from a language model, based on their types and relevance to clinical significance. Our evaluations demonstrate that RaTEScore aligns more closely with human preference than existing metrics, validated both on established public benchmarks and our newly proposed RaTE-Eval benchmark.
Reinforcement Learning from Automatic Feedback for High-Quality Unit Test Generation
Software testing is a crucial aspect of software development, and the creation of high-quality tests that adhere to best practices is essential for effective maintenance. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity for code generation, including the automated creation of test cases. However, these LLMs are often trained on vast amounts of publicly available code, which may include test cases that do not adhere to best practices and may even contain test smells (anti-patterns). To address this issue, we propose a novel technique called Reinforcement Learning from Static Quality Metrics (RLSQM). To begin, we analyze the anti-patterns generated by the LLM and show that LLMs can generate undesirable test smells. Thus, we train specific reward models for each static quality metric, then utilize Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train models for optimizing a single quality metric at a time. Furthermore, we amalgamate these rewards into a unified reward model aimed at capturing different best practices and quality aspects of tests. By comparing RL-trained models with those trained using supervised learning, we provide insights into how reliably utilize RL to improve test generation quality and into the effects of various training strategies. Our experimental results demonstrate that the RL-optimized model consistently generated high-quality test cases compared to the base LLM, improving the model by up to 21%, and successfully generates nearly 100% syntactically correct code. RLSQM also outperformed GPT-4 on four out of seven metrics. This represents a significant step towards enhancing the overall efficiency and reliability of software testing through Reinforcement Learning and static quality metrics. Our data are available at this link: https://figshare.com/s/ded476c8d4c221222849.
Artificial Intuition: Efficient Classification of Scientific Abstracts
It is desirable to coarsely classify short scientific texts, such as grant or publication abstracts, for strategic insight or research portfolio management. These texts efficiently transmit dense information to experts possessing a rich body of knowledge to aid interpretation. Yet this task is remarkably difficult to automate because of brevity and the absence of context. To address this gap, we have developed a novel approach to generate and appropriately assign coarse domain-specific labels. We show that a Large Language Model (LLM) can provide metadata essential to the task, in a process akin to the augmentation of supplemental knowledge representing human intuition, and propose a workflow. As a pilot study, we use a corpus of award abstracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We develop new assessment tools in concert with established performance metrics.
PET2Rep: Towards Vision-Language Model-Drived Automated Radiology Report Generation for Positron Emission Tomography
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a cornerstone of modern oncologic and neurologic imaging, distinguished by its unique ability to illuminate dynamic metabolic processes that transcend the anatomical focus of traditional imaging technologies. Radiology reports are essential for clinical decision making, yet their manual creation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent advancements of vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential in medical applications, presenting a promising avenue for automating report generation. However, existing applications of VLMs in the medical domain have predominantly focused on structural imaging modalities, while the unique characteristics of molecular PET imaging have largely been overlooked. To bridge the gap, we introduce PET2Rep, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of general and medical VLMs for radiology report generation for PET images. PET2Rep stands out as the first dedicated dataset for PET report generation with metabolic information, uniquely capturing whole-body image-report pairs that cover dozens of organs to fill the critical gap in existing benchmarks and mirror real-world clinical comprehensiveness. In addition to widely recognized natural language generation metrics, we introduce a series of clinical efficiency metrics to evaluate the quality of radiotracer uptake pattern description in key organs in generated reports. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of 30 cutting-edge general-purpose and medical-specialized VLMs. The results show that the current state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on PET report generation task, falling considerably short of fulfilling practical needs. Moreover, we identify several key insufficiency that need to be addressed to advance the development in medical applications.
MaintainCoder: Maintainable Code Generation Under Dynamic Requirements
Modern code generation has made significant strides in functional correctness and execution efficiency. However, these systems often overlook a critical dimension in real-world software development: maintainability. To handle dynamic requirements with minimal rework, we propose MaintainCoder as a pioneering solution. It integrates the Waterfall model, design patterns, and multi-agent collaboration to systematically enhance cohesion, reduce coupling, achieving clear responsibility boundaries and better maintainability. We also introduce MaintainCoder, a benchmark comprising requirement changes and novel dynamic metrics on maintenance efforts. Experiments demonstrate that existing code generation methods struggle to meet maintainability standards when requirements evolve. In contrast, MaintainCoder improves dynamic maintainability metrics by more than 60% with even higher correctness of initial codes. Furthermore, while static metrics fail to accurately reflect maintainability and even contradict each other, our proposed dynamic metrics exhibit high consistency. Our work not only provides the foundation for maintainable code generation, but also highlights the need for more realistic and comprehensive code generation research. Resources: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/MaintainCoder.
Distribution Density, Tails, and Outliers in Machine Learning: Metrics and Applications
We develop techniques to quantify the degree to which a given (training or testing) example is an outlier in the underlying distribution. We evaluate five methods to score examples in a dataset by how well-represented the examples are, for different plausible definitions of "well-represented", and apply these to four common datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. Despite being independent approaches, we find all five are highly correlated, suggesting that the notion of being well-represented can be quantified. Among other uses, we find these methods can be combined to identify (a) prototypical examples (that match human expectations); (b) memorized training examples; and, (c) uncommon submodes of the dataset. Further, we show how we can utilize our metrics to determine an improved ordering for curriculum learning, and impact adversarial robustness. We release all metric values on training and test sets we studied.
How to Evaluate Speech Translation with Source-Aware Neural MT Metrics
Automatic evaluation of speech-to-text translation (ST) systems is typically performed by comparing translation hypotheses with one or more reference translations. While effective to some extent, this approach inherits the limitation of reference-based evaluation that ignores valuable information from the source input. In machine translation (MT), recent progress has shown that neural metrics incorporating the source text achieve stronger correlation with human judgments. Extending this idea to ST, however, is not trivial because the source is audio rather than text, and reliable transcripts or alignments between source and references are often unavailable. In this work, we conduct the first systematic study of source-aware metrics for ST, with a particular focus on real-world operating conditions where source transcripts are not available. We explore two complementary strategies for generating textual proxies of the input audio, automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts, and back-translations of the reference translation, and introduce a novel two-step cross-lingual re-segmentation algorithm to address the alignment mismatch between synthetic sources and reference translations. Our experiments, carried out on two ST benchmarks covering 79 language pairs and six ST systems with diverse architectures and performance levels, show that ASR transcripts constitute a more reliable synthetic source than back-translations when word error rate is below 20%, while back-translations always represent a computationally cheaper but still effective alternative. Furthermore, our cross-lingual re-segmentation algorithm enables robust use of source-aware MT metrics in ST evaluation, paving the way toward more accurate and principled evaluation methodologies for speech translation.
signwriting-evaluation: Effective Sign Language Evaluation via SignWriting
The lack of automatic evaluation metrics tailored for SignWriting presents a significant obstacle in developing effective transcription and translation models for signed languages. This paper introduces a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics specifically designed for SignWriting, including adaptations of standard metrics such as BLEU and chrF, the application of CLIPScore to SignWriting images, and a novel symbol distance metric unique to our approach. We address the distinct challenges of evaluating single signs versus continuous signing and provide qualitative demonstrations of metric efficacy through score distribution analyses and nearest-neighbor searches within the SignBank corpus. Our findings reveal the strengths and limitations of each metric, offering valuable insights for future advancements using SignWriting. This work contributes essential tools for evaluating SignWriting models, facilitating progress in the field of sign language processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/sign-language-processing/signwriting-evaluation.
FISHER: A Foundation Model for Multi-Modal Industrial Signal Comprehensive Representation
With the rapid deployment of SCADA systems, how to effectively analyze industrial signals and detect abnormal states is an urgent need for the industry. Due to the significant heterogeneity of these signals, which we summarize as the M5 problem, previous works only focus on small sub-problems and employ specialized models, failing to utilize the synergies between modalities and the powerful scaling law. However, we argue that the M5 signals can be modeled in a unified manner due to the intrinsic similarity. As a result, we propose FISHER, a Foundation model for multi-modal Industrial Signal compreHEnsive Representation. To support arbitrary sampling rates, FISHER considers the increment of sampling rate as the concatenation of sub-band information. Specifically, FISHER takes the STFT sub-band as the modeling unit and adopts a teacher student SSL framework for pre-training. We also develop the RMIS benchmark, which evaluates the representations of M5 industrial signals on multiple health management tasks. Compared with top SSL models, FISHER showcases versatile and outstanding capabilities with a general performance gain up to 5.03%, along with much more efficient scaling curves. We also investigate the scaling law on downstream tasks and derive potential avenues for future works. FISHER is now open-sourced on https://github.com/jianganbai/FISHER
KPQA: A Metric for Generative Question Answering Using Keyphrase Weights
In the automatic evaluation of generative question answering (GenQA) systems, it is difficult to assess the correctness of generated answers due to the free-form of the answer. Especially, widely used n-gram similarity metrics often fail to discriminate the incorrect answers since they equally consider all of the tokens. To alleviate this problem, we propose KPQA-metric, a new metric for evaluating the correctness of GenQA. Specifically, our new metric assigns different weights to each token via keyphrase prediction, thereby judging whether a generated answer sentence captures the key meaning of the reference answer. To evaluate our metric, we create high-quality human judgments of correctness on two GenQA datasets. Using our human-evaluation datasets, we show that our proposed metric has a significantly higher correlation with human judgments than existing metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/hwanheelee1993/KPQA.
AnyLoss: Transforming Classification Metrics into Loss Functions
Many evaluation metrics can be used to assess the performance of models in binary classification tasks. However, most of them are derived from a confusion matrix in a non-differentiable form, making it very difficult to generate a differentiable loss function that could directly optimize them. The lack of solutions to bridge this challenge not only hinders our ability to solve difficult tasks, such as imbalanced learning, but also requires the deployment of computationally expensive hyperparameter search processes in model selection. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose approach that transforms any confusion matrix-based metric into a loss function, AnyLoss, that is available in optimization processes. To this end, we use an approximation function to make a confusion matrix represented in a differentiable form, and this approach enables any confusion matrix-based metric to be directly used as a loss function. The mechanism of the approximation function is provided to ensure its operability and the differentiability of our loss functions is proved by suggesting their derivatives. We conduct extensive experiments under diverse neural networks with many datasets, and we demonstrate their general availability to target any confusion matrix-based metrics. Our method, especially, shows outstanding achievements in dealing with imbalanced datasets, and its competitive learning speed, compared to multiple baseline models, underscores its efficiency.
Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning
One major obstacle towards AI is the poor ability of models to solve new problems quicker, and without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. To better understand this issue, we study the problem of continual learning, where the model observes, once and one by one, examples concerning a sequence of tasks. First, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate models learning over a continuum of data. These metrics characterize models not only by their test accuracy, but also in terms of their ability to transfer knowledge across tasks. Second, we propose a model for continual learning, called Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM) that alleviates forgetting, while allowing beneficial transfer of knowledge to previous tasks. Our experiments on variants of the MNIST and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrate the strong performance of GEM when compared to the state-of-the-art.
USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation
The lack of meaningful automatic evaluation metrics for dialog has impeded open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for evaluating dialog models. To this end, this paper presents USR, an UnSupervised and Reference-free evaluation metric for dialog. USR is a reference-free metric that trains unsupervised models to measure several desirable qualities of dialog. USR is shown to strongly correlate with human judgment on both Topical-Chat (turn-level: 0.42, system-level: 1.0) and PersonaChat (turn-level: 0.48 and system-level: 1.0). USR additionally produces interpretable measures for several desirable properties of dialog.
Leveraging Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models for Code Optimization
Code optimization is a daunting task that requires a significant level of expertise from experienced programmers. This level of expertise is not sufficient when compared to the rapid development of new hardware architectures. Towards advancing the whole code optimization process, recent approaches rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper introduces a new framework to decrease the complexity of code optimization. The proposed framework builds on large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) and enables LLMs to receive feedback from their environment (i.e., unit tests) during the fine-tuning process. We compare our framework with existing state-of-the-art models and show that it is more efficient with respect to speed and computational usage, as a result of the decrement in training steps and its applicability to models with fewer parameters. Additionally, our framework reduces the possibility of logical and syntactical errors. Toward evaluating our approach, we run several experiments on the PIE dataset using a CodeT5 language model and RRHF, a new reinforcement learning algorithm. We adopt a variety of evaluation metrics with regards to optimization quality, and speedup. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework has similar results in comparison with existing models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models. In particular, we accomplish an increase of 5.6% and 2.2 over the baseline models concerning the %OP T and SP metrics.
Neural Architecture Search: Two Constant Shared Weights Initialisations
In the last decade, zero-cost metrics have gained prominence in neural architecture search (NAS) due to their ability to evaluate architectures without training. These metrics are significantly faster and less computationally expensive than traditional NAS methods and provide insights into neural architectures' internal workings. This paper introduces epsinas, a novel zero-cost NAS metric that assesses architecture potential using two constant shared weight initialisations and the statistics of their outputs. We show that the dispersion of raw outputs, normalised by their average magnitude, strongly correlates with trained accuracy. This effect holds across image classification and language tasks on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, and NAS-Bench-NLP. Our method requires no data labels, operates on a single minibatch, and eliminates the need for gradient computation, making it independent of training hyperparameters, loss metrics, and human annotations. It evaluates a network in a fraction of a GPU second and integrates seamlessly into existing NAS frameworks. The code supporting this study can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/egracheva/epsinas.
Reward Reports for Reinforcement Learning
Building systems that are good for society in the face of complex societal effects requires a dynamic approach. Recent approaches to machine learning (ML) documentation have demonstrated the promise of discursive frameworks for deliberation about these complexities. However, these developments have been grounded in a static ML paradigm, leaving the role of feedback and post-deployment performance unexamined. Meanwhile, recent work in reinforcement learning has shown that the effects of feedback and optimization objectives on system behavior can be wide-ranging and unpredictable. In this paper we sketch a framework for documenting deployed and iteratively updated learning systems, which we call Reward Reports. Taking inspiration from various contributions to the technical literature on reinforcement learning, we outline Reward Reports as living documents that track updates to design choices and assumptions behind what a particular automated system is optimizing for. They are intended to track dynamic phenomena arising from system deployment, rather than merely static properties of models or data. After presenting the elements of a Reward Report, we discuss a concrete example: Meta's BlenderBot 3 chatbot. Several others for game-playing (DeepMind's MuZero), content recommendation (MovieLens), and traffic control (Project Flow) are included in the appendix.
The Devil is in the Errors: Leveraging Large Language Models for Fine-grained Machine Translation Evaluation
Automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) is a critical tool driving the rapid iterative development of MT systems. While considerable progress has been made on estimating a single scalar quality score, current metrics lack the informativeness of more detailed schemes that annotate individual errors, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). In this paper, we help fill this gap by proposing AutoMQM, a prompting technique which leverages the reasoning and in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and asks them to identify and categorize errors in translations. We start by evaluating recent LLMs, such as PaLM and PaLM-2, through simple score prediction prompting, and we study the impact of labeled data through in-context learning and finetuning. We then evaluate AutoMQM with PaLM-2 models, and we find that it improves performance compared to just prompting for scores (with particularly large gains for larger models) while providing interpretability through error spans that align with human annotations.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) at First Glance: Studying the Security and Maintainability of MCP Servers
Although Foundation Models (FMs), such as GPT-4, are increasingly used in domains like finance and software engineering, reliance on textual interfaces limits these models' real-world interaction. To address this, FM providers introduced tool calling-triggering a proliferation of frameworks with distinct tool interfaces. In late 2024, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to standardize this tool ecosystem, which has become the de facto standard with over eight million weekly SDK downloads. Despite its adoption, MCP's AI-driven, non-deterministic control flow introduces new risks to sustainability, security, and maintainability, warranting closer examination. Towards this end, we present the first large-scale empirical study of MCP servers. Using state-of-the-art health metrics and a hybrid analysis pipeline, combining a general-purpose static analysis tool with an MCP-specific scanner, we evaluate 1,899 open-source MCP servers to assess their health, security, and maintainability. Despite MCP servers demonstrating strong health metrics, we identify eight distinct vulnerabilities - only three overlapping with traditional software vulnerabilities. Additionally, 7.2% of servers contain general vulnerabilities and 5.5% exhibit MCP-specific tool poisoning. Regarding maintainability, while 66% exhibit code smells, 14.4% contain nine bug patterns overlapping with traditional open-source software projects. These findings highlight the need for MCP-specific vulnerability detection techniques while reaffirming the value of traditional analysis and refactoring practices.
Tracing LLM Reasoning Processes with Strategic Games: A Framework for Planning, Revision, and Resource-Constrained Decision Making
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks that require complex reasoning. Most benchmarks focus on final outcomes but overlook the intermediate reasoning steps - such as planning, revision, and decision making under resource constraints. We argue that measuring these internal processes is essential for understanding model behavior and improving reliability. We propose using strategic games as a natural evaluation environment: closed, rule-based systems with clear states, limited resources, and automatic feedback. We introduce a framework that evaluates LLMs along three core dimensions: planning, revision, and resource-constrained decision making. To operationalize this, we define metrics beyond win rate, including overcorrection risk rate, correction success rate, improvement slope, and over-budget ratio. In 4320 adversarial rounds across 12 leading models, ChatGPT-o3-mini achieves the top composite score, with a win rate of 74.7 percent, a correction success rate of 78.6 percent, and an improvement slope of 0.041. By contrast, Qwen-Plus, despite an overcorrection risk rate of 81.6 percent, wins only 25.6 percent of its matches - primarily due to excessive resource use. We also observe a negative correlation between overcorrection risk rate and correction success rate (Pearson r = -0.51, p = 0.093), suggesting that more frequent edits do not always improve outcomes. Our findings highlight the value of assessing not only what LLMs decide but how they arrive at those decisions
Towards Fine-Grained Text-to-3D Quality Assessment: A Benchmark and A Two-Stage Rank-Learning Metric
Recent advances in Text-to-3D (T23D) generative models have enabled the synthesis of diverse, high-fidelity 3D assets from textual prompts. However, existing challenges restrict the development of reliable T23D quality assessment (T23DQA). First, existing benchmarks are outdated, fragmented, and coarse-grained, making fine-grained metric training infeasible. Moreover, current objective metrics exhibit inherent design limitations, resulting in non-representative feature extraction and diminished metric robustness. To address these limitations, we introduce T23D-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for compositional T23D generation. We define five components with twelve sub-components for compositional prompts, which are used to generate 3,600 textured meshes from ten state-of-the-art generative models. A large-scale subjective experiment is conducted to collect 129,600 reliable human ratings across different perspectives. Based on T23D-CompBench, we further propose Rank2Score, an effective evaluator with two-stage training for T23DQA. Rank2Score enhances pairwise training via supervised contrastive regression and curriculum learning in the first stage, and subsequently refines predictions using mean opinion scores to achieve closer alignment with human judgments in the second stage. Extensive experiments and downstream applications demonstrate that Rank2Score consistently outperforms existing metrics across multiple dimensions and can additionally serve as a reward function to optimize generative models. The project is available at https://cbysjtu.github.io/Rank2Score/.
MEMTRACK: Evaluating Long-Term Memory and State Tracking in Multi-Platform Dynamic Agent Environments
Recent works on context and memory benchmarking have primarily focused on conversational instances but the need for evaluating memory in dynamic enterprise environments is crucial for its effective application. We introduce MEMTRACK, a benchmark designed to evaluate long-term memory and state tracking in multi-platform agent environments. MEMTRACK models realistic organizational workflows by integrating asynchronous events across multiple communication and productivity platforms such as Slack, Linear and Git. Each benchmark instance provides a chronologically platform-interleaved timeline, with noisy, conflicting, cross-referring information as well as potential codebase/file-system comprehension and exploration. Consequently, our benchmark tests memory capabilities such as acquistion, selection and conflict resolution. We curate the MEMTRACK dataset through both manual expert driven design and scalable agent based synthesis, generating ecologically valid scenarios grounded in real world software development processes. We introduce pertinent metrics for Correctness, Efficiency, and Redundancy that capture the effectiveness of memory mechanisms beyond simple QA performance. Experiments across SoTA LLMs and memory backends reveal challenges in utilizing memory across long horizons, handling cross-platform dependencies, and resolving contradictions. Notably, the best performing GPT-5 model only achieves a 60\% Correctness score on MEMTRACK. This work provides an extensible framework for advancing evaluation research for memory-augmented agents, beyond existing focus on conversational setups, and sets the stage for multi-agent, multi-platform memory benchmarking in complex organizational settings
CodeScore: Evaluating Code Generation by Learning Code Execution
A proper code evaluation metric (CEM) profoundly impacts the evolution of code generation, which is an important research field in NLP and software engineering. Prevailing match-based CEMs (e.g., BLEU, Accuracy, and CodeBLEU) suffer from two significant drawbacks. 1. They primarily measure the surface differences between codes without considering their functional equivalence. However, functional equivalence is pivotal in evaluating the effectiveness of code generation, as different codes can perform identical operations. 2. They are predominantly designed for the Ref-only input format. However, code evaluation necessitates versatility in input formats. Aside from Ref-only, there are NL-only and Ref\&NL formats, which existing match-based CEMs cannot effectively accommodate. In this paper, we propose CodeScore, a large language model (LLM)-based CEM, which estimates the functional correctness of generated code on three input types. To acquire CodeScore, we present UniCE, a unified code generation learning framework, for LLMs to learn code execution (i.e., learning PassRatio and Executability of generated code) with unified input. Extensive experimental results on multiple code evaluation datasets demonstrate that CodeScore absolutely improves up to 58.87% correlation with functional correctness compared to other CEMs, achieves state-of-the-art performance, and effectively handles three input formats.
Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
Despite rapid progress on AI benchmarks, the real-world meaning of benchmark performance remains unclear. To quantify the capabilities of AI systems in terms of human capabilities, we propose a new metric: 50%-task-completion time horizon. This is the time humans typically take to complete tasks that AI models can complete with 50% success rate. We first timed humans with relevant domain expertise on a combination of RE-Bench, HCAST, and 66 novel shorter tasks. On these tasks, current frontier AI models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet have a 50% time horizon of around 50 minutes. Furthermore, frontier AI time horizon has been doubling approximately every seven months since 2019, though the trend may have accelerated in 2024. The increase in AI models' time horizons seems to be primarily driven by greater reliability and ability to adapt to mistakes, combined with better logical reasoning and tool use capabilities. We discuss the limitations of our results -- including their degree of external validity -- and the implications of increased autonomy for dangerous capabilities. If these results generalize to real-world software tasks, extrapolation of this trend predicts that within 5 years, AI systems will be capable of automating many software tasks that currently take humans a month.
FineD-Eval: Fine-grained Automatic Dialogue-Level Evaluation
Recent model-based reference-free metrics for open-domain dialogue evaluation exhibit promising correlations with human judgment. However, they either perform turn-level evaluation or look at a single dialogue quality dimension. One would expect a good evaluation metric to assess multiple quality dimensions at the dialogue level. To this end, we are motivated to propose a multi-dimensional dialogue-level metric, which consists of three sub-metrics with each targeting a specific dimension. The sub-metrics are trained with novel self-supervised objectives and exhibit strong correlations with human judgment for their respective dimensions. Moreover, we explore two approaches to combine the sub-metrics: metric ensemble and multitask learning. Both approaches yield a holistic metric that significantly outperforms individual sub-metrics. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art metric, the combined metrics achieve around 16% relative improvement on average across three high-quality dialogue-level evaluation benchmarks.
metric-learn: Metric Learning Algorithms in Python
metric-learn is an open source Python package implementing supervised and weakly-supervised distance metric learning algorithms. As part of scikit-learn-contrib, it provides a unified interface compatible with scikit-learn which allows to easily perform cross-validation, model selection, and pipelining with other machine learning estimators. metric-learn is thoroughly tested and available on PyPi under the MIT licence.
Dissecting graph measure performance for node clustering in LFR parameter space
Graph measures that express closeness or distance between nodes can be employed for graph nodes clustering using metric clustering algorithms. There are numerous measures applicable to this task, and which one performs better is an open question. We study the performance of 25 graph measures on generated graphs with different parameters. While usually measure comparisons are limited to general measure ranking on a particular dataset, we aim to explore the performance of various measures depending on graph features. Using an LFR graph generator, we create a dataset of 11780 graphs covering the whole LFR parameter space. For each graph, we assess the quality of clustering with k-means algorithm for each considered measure. Based on this, we determine the best measure for each area of the parameter space. We find that the parameter space consists of distinct zones where one particular measure is the best. We analyze the geometry of the resulting zones and describe it with simple criteria. Given particular graph parameters, this allows us to recommend a particular measure to use for clustering.
Using LLMs to Establish Implicit User Sentiment of Software Desirability
This study explores the use of LLMs for providing quantitative zero-shot sentiment analysis of implicit software desirability, addressing a critical challenge in product evaluation where traditional review scores, though convenient, fail to capture the richness of qualitative user feedback. Innovations include establishing a method that 1) works with qualitative user experience data without the need for explicit review scores, 2) focuses on implicit user satisfaction, and 3) provides scaled numerical sentiment analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of user sentiment, instead of simply classifying sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative. Data is collected using the Microsoft Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT), a well-known qualitative user experience analysis tool. For initial exploration, the PDT metric was given to users of two software systems. PDT data was fed through several LLMs (Claude Sonnet 3 and 3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) and through a leading transfer learning technique, Twitter-Roberta-Base-Sentiment, and Vader, a leading sentiment analysis tool. Each system was asked to evaluate the data in two ways, by looking at the sentiment expressed in the PDT word/explanation pairs; and by looking at the sentiment expressed by the users in their grouped selection of five words and explanations, as a whole. Each LLM provided a sentiment score, its confidence (low, medium, high) in the score, and an explanation of the score. All LLMs tested were able to statistically detect user sentiment from the users' grouped data, whereas TRBS and Vader were not. The confidence and explanation of confidence provided by the LLMs assisted in understanding user sentiment. This study adds deeper understanding of evaluating user experiences, toward the goal of creating a universal tool that quantifies implicit sentiment.
Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models
Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fr\'echet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.
On the Evaluation Metrics for Paraphrase Generation
In this paper we revisit automatic metrics for paraphrase evaluation and obtain two findings that disobey conventional wisdom: (1) Reference-free metrics achieve better performance than their reference-based counterparts. (2) Most commonly used metrics do not align well with human annotation. Underlying reasons behind the above findings are explored through additional experiments and in-depth analyses. Based on the experiments and analyses, we propose ParaScore, a new evaluation metric for paraphrase generation. It possesses the merits of reference-based and reference-free metrics and explicitly models lexical divergence. Experimental results demonstrate that ParaScore significantly outperforms existing metrics.
A Survey on Large Language Model Benchmarks
In recent years, with the rapid development of the depth and breadth of large language models' capabilities, various corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been emerging in increasing numbers. As a quantitative assessment tool for model performance, benchmarks are not only a core means to measure model capabilities but also a key element in guiding the direction of model development and promoting technological innovation. We systematically review the current status and development of large language model benchmarks for the first time, categorizing 283 representative benchmarks into three categories: general capabilities, domain-specific, and target-specific. General capability benchmarks cover aspects such as core linguistics, knowledge, and reasoning; domain-specific benchmarks focus on fields like natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, and engineering technology; target-specific benchmarks pay attention to risks, reliability, agents, etc. We point out that current benchmarks have problems such as inflated scores caused by data contamination, unfair evaluation due to cultural and linguistic biases, and lack of evaluation on process credibility and dynamic environments, and provide a referable design paradigm for future benchmark innovation.
Signal and Noise: A Framework for Reducing Uncertainty in Language Model Evaluation
Developing large language models is expensive and involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we analyze specific properties which make a benchmark more reliable for such decisions, and interventions to design higher-quality evaluation benchmarks. We introduce two key metrics that show differences in current benchmarks: signal, a benchmark's ability to separate better models from worse models, and noise, a benchmark's sensitivity to random variability between training steps. We demonstrate that benchmarks with a better signal-to-noise ratio are more reliable when making decisions at small scale, and those with less noise have lower scaling law prediction error. These results suggest that improving signal or noise will lead to more useful benchmarks, so we introduce three interventions designed to directly affect signal or noise. For example, we propose that switching to a metric that has better signal and noise (e.g., perplexity rather than accuracy) leads to better reliability and improved scaling law error. We also find that filtering noisy subtasks, to improve an aggregate signal-to-noise ratio, leads to more reliable multi-task evaluations. We also find that averaging the output of a model's intermediate checkpoints to reduce noise leads to consistent improvements. We conclude by recommending that those creating new benchmarks, or selecting which existing benchmarks to use, aim for high signal and low noise. We use 30 benchmarks for these experiments, and 375 open-weight language models from 60M to 32B parameters, resulting in a new, publicly available dataset of 900K evaluation benchmark results, totaling 200M instances.
Wild SBOMs: a Large-scale Dataset of Software Bills of Materials from Public Code
Developers gain productivity by reusing readily available Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) components. Such practices also bring some difficulties, such as managing licensing, components and related security. One approach to handle those difficulties is to use Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). While there have been studies on the readiness of practitioners to embrace SBOMs and on the SBOM tools ecosystem, a large scale study on SBOM practices based on SBOM files produced in the wild is still lacking. A starting point for such a study is a large dataset of SBOM files found in the wild. We introduce such a dataset, consisting of over 78 thousand unique SBOM files, deduplicated from those found in over 94 million repositories. We include metadata that contains the standard and format used, quality score generated by the tool sbomqs, number of revisions, filenames and provenance information. Finally, we give suggestions and examples of research that could bring new insights on assessing and improving SBOM real practices.
Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits
Proper evaluations are crucial for better understanding, troubleshooting, interpreting model behaviors and further improving model performance. While using scalar-based error metrics provides a fast way to overview model performance, they are often too abstract to display certain weak spots and lack information regarding important model properties, such as robustness. This not only hinders machine learning models from being more interpretable and gaining trust, but also can be misleading to both model developers and users. Additionally, conventional evaluation procedures often leave researchers unclear about where and how model fails, which complicates model comparisons and further developments. To address these issues, we propose a novel evaluation workflow, named Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO) Evaluation. The goal of NERO evaluation is to turn focus from traditional scalar-based metrics onto evaluating and visualizing models equivariance, closely capturing model robustness, as well as to allow researchers quickly investigating interesting or unexpected model behaviors. NERO evaluation is consist of a task-agnostic interactive interface and a set of visualizations, called NERO plots, which reveals the equivariance property of the model. Case studies on how NERO evaluation can be applied to multiple research areas, including 2D digit recognition, object detection, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and 3D point cloud classification, demonstrate that NERO evaluation can quickly illustrate different model equivariance, and effectively explain model behaviors through interactive visualizations of the model outputs. In addition, we propose consensus, an alternative to ground truths, to be used in NERO evaluation so that model equivariance can still be evaluated with new, unlabeled datasets.
A Benchmark Study on Calibration
Deep neural networks are increasingly utilized in various machine learning tasks. However, as these models grow in complexity, they often face calibration issues, despite enhanced prediction accuracy. Many studies have endeavored to improve calibration performance through the use of specific loss functions, data preprocessing and training frameworks. Yet, investigations into calibration properties have been somewhat overlooked. Our study leverages the Neural Architecture Search (NAS) search space, offering an exhaustive model architecture space for thorough calibration properties exploration. We specifically create a model calibration dataset. This dataset evaluates 90 bin-based and 12 additional calibration measurements across 117,702 unique neural networks within the widely employed NATS-Bench search space. Our analysis aims to answer several longstanding questions in the field, using our proposed dataset: (i) Can model calibration be generalized across different datasets? (ii) Can robustness be used as a calibration measurement? (iii) How reliable are calibration metrics? (iv) Does a post-hoc calibration method affect all models uniformly? (v) How does calibration interact with accuracy? (vi) What is the impact of bin size on calibration measurement? (vii) Which architectural designs are beneficial for calibration? Additionally, our study bridges an existing gap by exploring calibration within NAS. By providing this dataset, we enable further research into NAS calibration. As far as we are aware, our research represents the first large-scale investigation into calibration properties and the premier study of calibration issues within NAS. The project page can be found at https://www.taolinwei.com/calibration-study
Queries, Representation & Detection: The Next 100 Model Fingerprinting Schemes
The deployment of machine learning models in operational contexts represents a significant investment for any organisation. Consequently, the risk of these models being misappropriated by competitors needs to be addressed. In recent years, numerous proposals have been put forth to detect instances of model stealing. However, these proposals operate under implicit and disparate data and model access assumptions; as a consequence, it remains unclear how they can be effectively compared to one another. Our evaluation shows that a simple baseline that we introduce performs on par with existing state-of-the-art fingerprints, which, on the other hand, are much more complex. To uncover the reasons behind this intriguing result, this paper introduces a systematic approach to both the creation of model fingerprinting schemes and their evaluation benchmarks. By dividing model fingerprinting into three core components -- Query, Representation and Detection (QuRD) -- we are able to identify sim100 previously unexplored QuRD combinations and gain insights into their performance. Finally, we introduce a set of metrics to compare and guide the creation of more representative model stealing detection benchmarks. Our approach reveals the need for more challenging benchmarks and a sound comparison with baselines. To foster the creation of new fingerprinting schemes and benchmarks, we open-source our fingerprinting toolbox.
Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning
Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.
Data Splits and Metrics for Method Benchmarking on Surgical Action Triplet Datasets
In addition to generating data and annotations, devising sensible data splitting strategies and evaluation metrics is essential for the creation of a benchmark dataset. This practice ensures consensus on the usage of the data, homogeneous assessment, and uniform comparison of research methods on the dataset. This study focuses on CholecT50, which is a 50 video surgical dataset that formalizes surgical activities as triplets of <instrument, verb, target>. In this paper, we introduce the standard splits for the CholecT50 and CholecT45 datasets and show how they compare with existing use of the dataset. CholecT45 is the first public release of 45 videos of CholecT50 dataset. We also develop a metrics library, ivtmetrics, for model evaluation on surgical triplets. Furthermore, we conduct a benchmark study by reproducing baseline methods in the most predominantly used deep learning frameworks (PyTorch and TensorFlow) to evaluate them using the proposed data splits and metrics and release them publicly to support future research. The proposed data splits and evaluation metrics will enable global tracking of research progress on the dataset and facilitate optimal model selection for further deployment.
Signal-to-Noise Ratio: A Robust Distance Metric for Deep Metric Learning
Deep metric learning, which learns discriminative features to process image clustering and retrieval tasks, has attracted extensive attention in recent years. A number of deep metric learning methods, which ensure that similar examples are mapped close to each other and dissimilar examples are mapped farther apart, have been proposed to construct effective structures for loss functions and have shown promising results. In this paper, different from the approaches on learning the loss structures, we propose a robust SNR distance metric based on Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for measuring the similarity of image pairs for deep metric learning. By exploring the properties of our SNR distance metric from the view of geometry space and statistical theory, we analyze the properties of our metric and show that it can preserve the semantic similarity between image pairs, which well justify its suitability for deep metric learning. Compared with Euclidean distance metric, our SNR distance metric can further jointly reduce the intra-class distances and enlarge the inter-class distances for learned features. Leveraging our SNR distance metric, we propose Deep SNR-based Metric Learning (DSML) to generate discriminative feature embeddings. By extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, including CARS196, CUB200-2011 and CIFAR10, our DSML has shown its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we extend our SNR distance metric to deep hashing learning, and conduct experiments on two benchmarks, including CIFAR10 and NUS-WIDE, to demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our SNR distance metric.
TransBench: Benchmarking Machine Translation for Industrial-Scale Applications
Machine translation (MT) has become indispensable for cross-border communication in globalized industries like e-commerce, finance, and legal services, with recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) significantly enhancing translation quality. However, applying general-purpose MT models to industrial scenarios reveals critical limitations due to domain-specific terminology, cultural nuances, and stylistic conventions absent in generic benchmarks. Existing evaluation frameworks inadequately assess performance in specialized contexts, creating a gap between academic benchmarks and real-world efficacy. To address this, we propose a three-level translation capability framework: (1) Basic Linguistic Competence, (2) Domain-Specific Proficiency, and (3) Cultural Adaptation, emphasizing the need for holistic evaluation across these dimensions. We introduce TransBench, a benchmark tailored for industrial MT, initially targeting international e-commerce with 17,000 professionally translated sentences spanning 4 main scenarios and 33 language pairs. TransBench integrates traditional metrics (BLEU, TER) with Marco-MOS, a domain-specific evaluation model, and provides guidelines for reproducible benchmark construction. Our contributions include: (1) a structured framework for industrial MT evaluation, (2) the first publicly available benchmark for e-commerce translation, (3) novel metrics probing multi-level translation quality, and (4) open-sourced evaluation tools. This work bridges the evaluation gap, enabling researchers and practitioners to systematically assess and enhance MT systems for industry-specific needs.
Regression Language Models for Code
We study code-to-metric regression: predicting numeric outcomes of code executions, a challenging task due to the open-ended nature of programming languages. While prior methods have resorted to heavy and domain-specific feature engineering, we show that a single unified Regression Language Model (RLM) can simultaneously predict directly from text, (i) the memory footprint of code across multiple high-level languages such as Python and C++, (ii) the latency of Triton GPU kernels, and (iii) the accuracy and speed of trained neural networks represented in ONNX. In particular, a relatively small 300M parameter RLM initialized from T5Gemma, obtains > 0.9 Spearman-rank on competitive programming submissions from APPS, and a single unified model achieves > 0.5 average Spearman-rank across 17 separate languages from CodeNet. Furthermore, the RLM can obtain the highest average Kendall-Tau of 0.46 on five classic NAS design spaces previously dominated by graph neural networks, and simultaneously predict architecture latencies on numerous hardware platforms.
Automatic Evaluation of Healthcare LLMs Beyond Question-Answering
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) benchmarks are often based on open-ended or close-ended QA evaluations, avoiding the requirement of human labor. Close-ended measurements evaluate the factuality of responses but lack expressiveness. Open-ended capture the model's capacity to produce discourse responses but are harder to assess for correctness. These two approaches are commonly used, either independently or together, though their relationship remains poorly understood. This work is focused on the healthcare domain, where both factuality and discourse matter greatly. It introduces a comprehensive, multi-axis suite for healthcare LLM evaluation, exploring correlations between open and close benchmarks and metrics. Findings include blind spots and overlaps in current methodologies. As an updated sanity check, we release a new medical benchmark--CareQA--, with both open and closed variants. Finally, we propose a novel metric for open-ended evaluations --Relaxed Perplexity-- to mitigate the identified limitations.
Mitigating Metric Bias in Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding
While Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding using metrics such as COMET or MetricX has outperformed traditional decoding methods such as greedy or beam search, it introduces a challenge we refer to as metric bias. As MBR decoding aims to produce translations that score highly according to a specific utility metric, this very process makes it impossible to use the same metric for both decoding and evaluation, as improvements might simply be due to reward hacking rather than reflecting real quality improvements. In this work we find that compared to human ratings, neural metrics not only overestimate the quality of MBR decoding when the same metric is used as the utility metric, but they also overestimate the quality of MBR/QE decoding with other neural utility metrics as well. We also show that the metric bias issue can be mitigated by using an ensemble of utility metrics during MBR decoding: human evaluations show that MBR decoding using an ensemble of utility metrics outperforms a single utility metric.
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages
Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406).
Information Capacity: Evaluating the Efficiency of Large Language Models via Text Compression
Recent years have witnessed the rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) and their expanding applications, leading to soaring demands for computational resources. The widespread adoption of test-time scaling further aggravates the tension between model capability and resource consumption, highlighting the importance of inference efficiency. However, a unified metric that accurately reflects an LLM's efficiency across different model sizes and architectures remains absent. Motivated by the correlation between compression and intelligence, we introduce information capacity, a measure of model efficiency based on text compression performance relative to computational complexity. Larger models can predict the next token more accurately, achieving greater compression gains but at higher computational costs. Empirical evaluations on mainstream open-source models show that models of varying sizes within a series exhibit consistent information capacity. This metric enables a fair efficiency comparison across model series and accurate performance prediction within a model series. A distinctive feature of information capacity is that it incorporates tokenizer efficiency, which affects both input and output token counts but is often neglected in LLM evaluations. We assess the information capacity of 49 models on 5 heterogeneous datasets and observe consistent results on the influences of tokenizer efficiency, pretraining data, and the mixture-of-experts architecture.
