Daily Papers

Reliable evaluation is essential for the development of vision-language models (VLMs). However, Japanese VQA benchmarks have undergone far less iterative refinement than their English counterparts. As a result, many existing benchmarks contain issues such as ambiguous questions, incorrect answers, and instances that can be solved without visual grounding, undermining evaluation reliability and leading to misleading conclusions in model comparisons. To address these limitations, we introduce JAMMEval, a refined collection of Japanese benchmarks for reliable VLM evaluation. It is constructed by systematically refining seven existing Japanese benchmark datasets through two rounds of human annotation, improving both data quality and evaluation reliability. In our experiments, we evaluate open-weight and proprietary VLMs on JAMMEval and analyze the capabilities of recent models on Japanese VQA. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our refinement by showing that the resulting benchmarks yield evaluation scores that better reflect model capability, exhibit lower run-to-run variance, and improve the ability to distinguish between models of different capability levels. We release our dataset and code to advance reliable evaluation of VLMs.

We present BIS Reasoning 1.0, the first large-scale Japanese dataset of syllogistic reasoning problems explicitly designed to evaluate belief-inconsistent reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets such as NeuBAROCO and JFLD, which focus on general or belief-aligned reasoning, BIS Reasoning 1.0 introduces logically valid yet belief-inconsistent syllogisms to uncover reasoning biases in LLMs trained on human-aligned corpora. We benchmark state-of-the-art models - including GPT models, Claude models, and leading Japanese LLMs - revealing significant variance in performance, with GPT-4o achieving 79.54% accuracy. Our analysis identifies critical weaknesses in current LLMs when handling logically valid but belief-conflicting inputs. These findings have important implications for deploying LLMs in high-stakes domains such as law, healthcare, and scientific literature, where truth must override intuitive belief to ensure integrity and safety.

Accelerating research on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in non-English languages is crucial for enhancing user experiences across broader populations. In this paper, we introduce JMMMU (Japanese MMMU), the first large-scale Japanese benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs on expert-level tasks based on the Japanese cultural context. To facilitate comprehensive culture-aware evaluation, JMMMU features two complementary subsets: (i) culture-agnostic (CA) subset, where the culture-independent subjects (e.g., Math) are selected and translated into Japanese, enabling one-to-one comparison with its English counterpart MMMU; and (ii) culture-specific (CS) subset, comprising newly crafted subjects that reflect Japanese cultural context. Using the CA subset, we observe performance drop in many LMMs when evaluated in Japanese, which is purely attributable to language variation. Using the CS subset, we reveal their inadequate Japanese cultural understanding. Further, by combining both subsets, we identify that some LMMs perform well on the CA subset but not on the CS subset, exposing a shallow understanding of the Japanese language that lacks depth in cultural understanding. We hope this work will not only help advance LMM performance in Japanese but also serve as a guideline to create high-standard, culturally diverse benchmarks for multilingual LMM development. The project page is https://mmmu-japanese-benchmark.github.io/JMMMU/.

Open Japanese large language models (LLMs) have been trained on the Japanese portions of corpora such as CC-100, mC4, and OSCAR. However, these corpora were not created for the quality of Japanese texts. This study builds a large Japanese web corpus by extracting and refining text from the Common Crawl archive (21 snapshots of approximately 63.4 billion pages crawled between 2020 and 2023). This corpus consists of approximately 312.1 billion characters (approximately 173 million pages), which is the largest of all available training corpora for Japanese LLMs, surpassing CC-100 (approximately 25.8 billion characters), mC4 (approximately 239.7 billion characters) and OSCAR 23.10 (approximately 74 billion characters). To confirm the quality of the corpus, we performed continual pre-training on Llama 2 7B, 13B, 70B, Mistral 7B v0.1, and Mixtral 8x7B Instruct as base LLMs and gained consistent (6.6-8.1 points) improvements on Japanese benchmark datasets. We also demonstrate that the improvement on Llama 2 13B brought from the presented corpus was the largest among those from other existing corpora.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, prompting the development of various debiasing methods. However, debiasing methods may degrade the capabilities of LLMs. Previous research has evaluated the impact of bias mitigation primarily through tasks measuring general language understanding, which are often unrelated to social biases. In contrast, cultural commonsense is closely related to social biases, as both are rooted in social norms and values. The impact of bias mitigation on cultural commonsense in LLMs has not been well investigated. Considering this gap, we propose SOBACO (SOcial BiAs and Cultural cOmmonsense benchmark), a Japanese benchmark designed to evaluate social biases and cultural commonsense in LLMs in a unified format. We evaluate several LLMs on SOBACO to examine how debiasing methods affect cultural commonsense in LLMs. Our results reveal that the debiasing methods degrade the performance of the LLMs on the cultural commonsense task (up to 75% accuracy deterioration). These results highlight the importance of developing debiasing methods that consider the trade-off with cultural commonsense to improve fairness and utility of LLMs.

With the recent development of large language models (LLMs), models that focus on certain domains and languages have been discussed for their necessity. There is also a growing need for benchmarks to evaluate the performance of current LLMs in each domain. Therefore, in this study, we constructed a benchmark comprising multiple tasks specific to the Japanese and financial domains and performed benchmark measurements on some models. Consequently, we confirmed that GPT-4 is currently outstanding, and that the constructed benchmarks function effectively. According to our analysis, our benchmark can differentiate benchmark scores among models in all performance ranges by combining tasks with different difficulties.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have undergone a rapid evolution, giving rise to significant advancements in the realm of multimodal understanding tasks. However, the majority of these models are trained and evaluated on English-centric datasets, leaving a gap in the development and evaluation of VLMs for other languages, such as Japanese. This gap can be attributed to the lack of methodologies for constructing VLMs and the absence of benchmarks to accurately measure their performance. To address this issue, we introduce a novel benchmark, Japanese Heron-Bench, for evaluating Japanese capabilities of VLMs. The Japanese Heron-Bench consists of a variety of imagequestion answer pairs tailored to the Japanese context. Additionally, we present a baseline Japanese VLM that has been trained with Japanese visual instruction tuning datasets. Our Heron-Bench reveals the strengths and limitations of the proposed VLM across various ability dimensions. Furthermore, we clarify the capability gap between strong closed models like GPT-4V and the baseline model, providing valuable insights for future research in this domain. We release the benchmark dataset and training code to facilitate further developments in Japanese VLM research.

With the development of large language models (LLMs), social biases in these LLMs have become a pressing issue. Although there are various benchmarks for social biases across languages, the extent to which Japanese LLMs exhibit social biases has not been fully investigated. In this study, we construct the Japanese Bias Benchmark dataset for Question Answering (JBBQ) based on the English bias benchmark BBQ, with analysis of social biases in Japanese LLMs. The results show that while current open Japanese LLMs with more parameters show improved accuracies on JBBQ, their bias scores increase. In addition, prompts with a warning about social biases and chain-of-thought prompting reduce the effect of biases in model outputs, but there is room for improvement in extracting the correct evidence from contexts in Japanese. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/ynklab/JBBQ_data.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks involving temporal inference remain challenging for pre-trained language models (LMs). Although various datasets have been created for this task, they primarily focus on English and do not address the need for resources in other languages. It is unclear whether current LMs realize the generalization capacity for temporal inference across languages. In this paper, we present Jamp, a Japanese NLI benchmark focused on temporal inference. Our dataset includes a range of temporal inference patterns, which enables us to conduct fine-grained analysis. To begin the data annotation process, we create diverse inference templates based on the formal semantics test suites. We then automatically generate diverse NLI examples by using the Japanese case frame dictionary and well-designed templates while controlling the distribution of inference patterns and gold labels. We evaluate the generalization capacities of monolingual/multilingual LMs by splitting our dataset based on tense fragments (i.e., temporal inference patterns). Our findings demonstrate that LMs struggle with specific linguistic phenomena, such as habituality, indicating that there is potential for the development of more effective NLI models across languages.

Large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise in medical applications, but their ability to detect and correct errors in clinical texts -- a prerequisite for safe deployment -- remains under-evaluated, particularly beyond English. We introduce MedRECT, a cross-lingual benchmark (Japanese/English) that formulates medical error handling as three subtasks: error detection, error localization (sentence extraction), and error correction. MedRECT is built with a scalable, automated pipeline from the Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations (JMLE) and a curated English counterpart, yielding MedRECT-ja (663 texts) and MedRECT-en (458 texts) with comparable error/no-error balance. We evaluate 9 contemporary LLMs spanning proprietary, open-weight, and reasoning families. Key findings: (i) reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, with up to 13.5% relative improvement in error detection and 51.0% in sentence extraction; (ii) cross-lingual evaluation reveals 5-10% performance gaps from English to Japanese, with smaller disparities for reasoning models; (iii) targeted LoRA fine-tuning yields asymmetric improvements in error correction performance (Japanese: +0.078, English: +0.168) while preserving reasoning capabilities; and (iv) our fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance on structured medical error correction tasks. To our knowledge, MedRECT is the first comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark for medical error correction, providing a reproducible framework and resources for developing safer medical LLMs across languages.

This work addresses the scarcity of high-quality, large-scale resources for Japanese Vision-and-Language (V&L) modeling. We present a scalable and reproducible pipeline that integrates large-scale web collection with rigorous filtering/deduplication, object-detection-driven evidence extraction, and Large Language Model (LLM)-based refinement under grounding constraints. Using this pipeline, we build two resources: an image-caption dataset (DEJIMA-Cap) and a VQA dataset (DEJIMA-VQA), each containing 3.88M image-text pairs, far exceeding the size of existing Japanese V&L datasets. Human evaluations demonstrate that DEJIMA achieves substantially higher Japaneseness and linguistic naturalness than datasets constructed via translation or manual annotation, while maintaining factual correctness at a level comparable to human-annotated corpora. Quantitative analyses of image feature distributions further confirm that DEJIMA broadly covers diverse visual domains characteristic of Japan, complementing its linguistic and cultural representativeness. Models trained on DEJIMA exhibit consistent improvements across multiple Japanese multimodal benchmarks, confirming that culturally grounded, large-scale resources play a key role in enhancing model performance. All data sources and modules in our pipeline are licensed for commercial use, and we publicly release the resulting dataset and metadata to encourage further research and industrial applications in Japanese V&L modeling.

Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) achieve their strongest performance when they reason in English, the language for which reasoning-oriented training data is most abundant. However, reasoning trace is a clue for model interpretability and safety, and useful in practice for both the model users and for model developers. Thus, it is desirable to be able to develop a model that reasons in a language of the user's choice, while still maintaining strong reasoning performance. To this end, we study the feasibility of training a model that reasons in Japanese. We develop a Japanese-reasoning variant of Qwen-3-Swallow-8B, which is a Japanese LLM continually pretrained from Qwen-3-8B, with GRPO and evaluate it across coding, math, and science benchmarks. The study shows that reasoning-language control is feasible by training a Japanese continually pretrained model with GRPO. However, its performance is at best on par with strong English-reasoning baselines on several benchmarks. We also evaluate the trained model on Japanese cultural benchmarks and observe that the model's performance is worse than the baseline models, suggesting that the reasoning in Japanese does not immediately improve performance on culturally relevant tasks for free.

Financial analysis presents complex challenges that could leverage large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, the scarcity of challenging financial datasets, particularly for Japanese financial data, impedes academic innovation in financial analytics. As LLMs advance, this lack of accessible research resources increasingly hinders their development and evaluation in this specialized domain. To address this gap, we introduce EDINET-Bench, an open-source Japanese financial benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of LLMs on challenging financial tasks including accounting fraud detection, earnings forecasting, and industry prediction. EDINET-Bench is constructed by downloading annual reports from the past 10 years from Japan's Electronic Disclosure for Investors' NETwork (EDINET) and automatically assigning labels corresponding to each evaluation task. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle, performing only slightly better than logistic regression in binary classification for fraud detection and earnings forecasting. These results highlight significant challenges in applying LLMs to real-world financial applications and underscore the need for domain-specific adaptation. Our dataset, benchmark construction code, and evaluation code is publicly available to facilitate future research in finance with LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used in various fields, including finance. However, Japanese financial-specific LLMs have not been proposed yet. Hence, this study aims to construct a Japanese financial-specific LLM through continual pre-training. Before tuning, we constructed Japanese financial-focused datasets for continual pre-training. As a base model, we employed a Japanese LLM that achieved state-of-the-art performance on Japanese financial benchmarks among the 10-billion-class parameter models. After continual pre-training using the datasets and the base model, the tuned model performed better than the original model on the Japanese financial benchmarks. Moreover, the outputs comparison results reveal that the tuned model's outputs tend to be better than the original model's outputs in terms of the quality and length of the answers. These findings indicate that domain-specific continual pre-training is also effective for LLMs. The tuned model is publicly available on Hugging Face.

Large-scale and high-quality image-text pair datasets play an important role in developing high-performing Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In this work, we introduce WAON, a large-scale and high-quality Japanese image-text pair dataset containing approximately 155 million examples, collected from Common Crawl. Our dataset construction pipeline employs various techniques, including filtering and deduplication, which have been shown to be effective in previous studies. To evaluate its effectiveness, we also construct WAON-Bench, a manually curated benchmark for Japanese cultural image classification, consisting of 374 classes. To assess the effectiveness of our dataset, we conduct experiments using both WAON and the Japanese subset of ReLAION, one of the most widely used vision-language datasets. We fine-tune SigLIP2, a strong multilingual model, on both datasets. The results demonstrate that WAON enhances model performance on WAON-Bench more efficiently than ReLAION and achieves higher accuracy across all evaluated benchmarks. Furthermore, the model fine-tuned on WAON achieves state-of-the-art performance on several Japanese cultural benchmarks. We release our dataset, model, and code at https://speed1313.github.io/WAON.

The domain adaptation of language models, including large language models (LLMs), has become increasingly important as the use of such models continues to expand. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of Composition to Augment Language Models (CALM) in adapting to the financial domain. CALM is a model to extend the capabilities of existing models by introducing cross-attention between two LLMs with different functions. In our experiments, we developed a CALM to enhance the financial performance of an LLM with strong response capabilities by leveraging a financial-specialized LLM. Notably, the CALM was trained using a financial dataset different from the one used to train the financial-specialized LLM, confirming CALM's ability to adapt to various datasets. The models were evaluated through quantitative Japanese financial benchmarks and qualitative response comparisons, demonstrating that CALM enables superior responses with higher scores than the original models and baselines. Additionally, comparative experiments on connection points revealed that connecting the middle layers of the models is most effective in facilitating adaptation to the financial domain. These findings confirm that CALM is a practical approach for adapting LLMs to the financial domain.

We present a novel application of evolutionary algorithms to automate the creation of powerful foundation models. While model merging has emerged as a promising approach for LLM development due to its cost-effectiveness, it currently relies on human intuition and domain knowledge, limiting its potential. Here, we propose an evolutionary approach that overcomes this limitation by automatically discovering effective combinations of diverse open-source models, harnessing their collective intelligence without requiring extensive additional training data or compute. Our approach operates in both parameter space and data flow space, allowing for optimization beyond just the weights of the individual models. This approach even facilitates cross-domain merging, generating models like a Japanese LLM with Math reasoning capabilities. Surprisingly, our Japanese Math LLM achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of established Japanese LLM benchmarks, even surpassing models with significantly more parameters, despite not being explicitly trained for such tasks. Furthermore, a culturally-aware Japanese VLM generated through our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in describing Japanese culture-specific content, outperforming previous Japanese VLMs. This work not only contributes new state-of-the-art models back to the open-source community, but also introduces a new paradigm for automated model composition, paving the way for exploring alternative, efficient approaches to foundation model development.

Several previous studies have considered language- and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) as separate topics. This study explores the combination of a non-English language and a high-demand industry domain, focusing on a Japanese business-specific LLM. This type of a model requires expertise in the business domain, strong language skills, and regular updates of its knowledge. We trained a 13-billion-parameter LLM from scratch using a new dataset of business texts and patents, and continually pretrained it with the latest business documents. Further we propose a new benchmark for Japanese business domain question answering (QA) and evaluate our models on it. The results show that our pretrained model improves QA accuracy without losing general knowledge, and that continual pretraining enhances adaptation to new information. Our pretrained model and business domain benchmark are publicly available.

We introduce JP-TL-Bench, a lightweight, open benchmark designed to guide the iterative development of Japanese-English translation systems. In this context, the challenge is often "which of these two good translations is better?" rather than "is this translation acceptable?" This distinction matters for Japanese-English, where subtle choices in politeness, implicature, ellipsis, and register strongly affect perceived naturalness. JP-TL-Bench uses a protocol built to make LLM judging both reliable and affordable: it evaluates a candidate model via reference-free, pairwise LLM comparisons against a fixed, versioned anchor set. Pairwise results are aggregated with a Bradley-Terry model and reported as win rates plus a normalized 0-10 "LT" score derived from a logistic transform of fitted log-strengths. Because each candidate is scored against the same frozen anchor set, scores are structurally stable given the same base set, judge, and aggregation code.

SpeechLLMs typically combine ASR-trained encoders with text-based LLM backbones, leading them to inherit written-style output patterns unsuitable for text-to-speech synthesis. This mismatch is particularly pronounced in Japanese, where spoken and written registers differ substantially in politeness markers, sentence-final particles, and syntactic complexity. We propose a preference-based alignment approach to adapt Japanese SpeechLLMs for speech-worthy outputs: text that is concise, conversational, and readily synthesized as natural speech. To rigorously evaluate this task, we introduce SpokenElyza, a benchmark for Japanese speech-worthiness derived from ELYZA-tasks-100 with auditory verification by native experts. Experiments show that our approach achieves substantial improvement on SpokenElyza while largely preserving performance on the original written-style evaluation. We will release SpokenElyza to support future research on Japanese spoken dialog systems.

We introduce JBE-QA, a Japanese Bar Exam Question-Answering dataset to evaluate large language models' legal knowledge. Derived from the multiple-choice (tanto-shiki) section of the Japanese bar exam (2015-2024), JBE-QA provides the first comprehensive benchmark for Japanese legal-domain evaluation of LLMs. It covers the Civil Code, the Penal Code, and the Constitution, extending beyond the Civil Code focus of prior Japanese resources. Each question is decomposed into independent true/false judgments with structured contextual fields. The dataset contains 3,464 items with balanced labels. We evaluate 26 LLMs, including proprietary, open-weight, Japanese-specialised, and reasoning models. Our results show that proprietary models with reasoning enabled perform best, and the Constitution questions are generally easier than the Civil Code or the Penal Code questions.

We introduce RakutenAI-7B, a suite of Japanese-oriented large language models that achieve the best performance on the Japanese LM Harness benchmarks among the open 7B models. Along with the foundation model, we release instruction- and chat-tuned models, RakutenAI-7B-instruct and RakutenAI-7B-chat respectively, under the Apache 2.0 license.

Why do we build local large language models (LLMs)? What should a local LLM learn from the target language? Which abilities can be transferred from other languages? Do language-specific scaling laws exist? To explore these research questions, we evaluated 35 Japanese, English, and multilingual LLMs on 19 evaluation benchmarks for Japanese and English, taking Japanese as a local language. Adopting an observational approach, we analyzed correlations of benchmark scores, and conducted principal component analysis (PCA) on the scores to derive ability factors of local LLMs. We found that training on English text can improve the scores of academic subjects in Japanese (JMMLU). In addition, it is unnecessary to specifically train on Japanese text to enhance abilities for solving Japanese code generation, arithmetic reasoning, commonsense, and reading comprehension tasks. In contrast, training on Japanese text could improve question-answering tasks about Japanese knowledge and English-Japanese translation, which indicates that abilities for solving these two tasks can be regarded as Japanese abilities for LLMs. Furthermore, we confirmed that the Japanese abilities scale with the computational budget for Japanese text.

Japanese finance combines agglutinative, head-final linguistic structure, mixed writing systems, and high-context communication norms that rely on indirect expression and implicit commitment, posing a substantial challenge for LLMs. We introduce Ebisu, a benchmark for native Japanese financial language understanding, comprising two linguistically and culturally grounded, expert-annotated tasks: JF-ICR, which evaluates implicit commitment and refusal recognition in investor-facing Q&A, and JF-TE, which assesses hierarchical extraction and ranking of nested financial terminology from professional disclosures. We evaluate a diverse set of open-source and proprietary LLMs spanning general-purpose, Japanese-adapted, and financial models. Results show that even state-of-the-art systems struggle on both tasks. While increased model scale yields limited improvements, language- and domain-specific adaptation does not reliably improve performance, leaving substantial gaps unresolved. Ebisu provides a focused benchmark for advancing linguistically and culturally grounded financial NLP. All datasets and evaluation scripts are publicly released.

We present a Japanese domain-specific language model for the pharmaceutical field, developed through continual pretraining on 2 billion Japanese pharmaceutical tokens and 8 billion English biomedical tokens. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce three new benchmarks: YakugakuQA, based on national pharmacist licensing exams; NayoseQA, which tests cross-lingual synonym and terminology normalization; and SogoCheck, a novel task designed to assess consistency reasoning between paired statements. We evaluate our model against both open-source medical LLMs and commercial models, including GPT-4o. Results show that our domain-specific model outperforms existing open models and achieves competitive performance with commercial ones, particularly on terminology-heavy and knowledge-based tasks. Interestingly, even GPT-4o performs poorly on SogoCheck, suggesting that cross-sentence consistency reasoning remains an open challenge. Our benchmark suite offers a broader diagnostic lens for pharmaceutical NLP, covering factual recall, lexical variation, and logical consistency. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building practical, secure, and cost-effective language models for Japanese domain-specific applications, and provides reusable evaluation resources for future research in pharmaceutical and healthcare NLP. Our model, codes, and datasets are released at https://github.com/EQUES-Inc/pharma-LLM-eval.

We introduce JFinTEB, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating Japanese financial text embeddings. Existing embedding benchmarks provide limited coverage of language-specific and domain-specific aspects found in Japanese financial texts. Our benchmark encompasses diverse task categories including retrieval and classification tasks that reflect realistic and well-defined financial text processing scenarios. The retrieval tasks leverage instruction-following datasets and financial text generation queries, while classification tasks cover sentiment analysis, document categorization, and domain-specific classification challenges derived from economic survey data. We conduct extensive evaluations across a wide range of embedding models, including Japanese-specific models of various sizes, multilingual models, and commercial embedding services. We publicly release JFinTEB datasets and evaluation framework at https://github.com/retarfi/JFinTEB to facilitate future research and provide a standardized evaluation protocol for the Japanese financial text mining community. This work addresses a critical gap in Japanese financial text processing resources and establishes a foundation for advancing domain-specific embedding research.

Japanese scene text poses challenges that multilingual benchmarks often fail to capture, including mixed scripts, frequent vertical writing, and a character inventory far larger than the Latin alphabet. Although Japanese is included in several multilingual benchmarks, these resources do not adequately capture the language-specific complexities. Meanwhile, existing Japanese visual text datasets have primarily focused on scanned documents, leaving in-the-wild scene text underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce JaWildText, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Japanese scene text understanding. JaWildText contains 3,241 instances from 2,961 images newly captured in Japan, with 1.12 million annotated characters spanning 3,643 unique character types. It comprises three complementary tasks that vary in visual organization, output format, and writing style: (i) Dense Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), which requires reasoning over multiple pieces of visual text evidence; (ii) Receipt Key Information Extraction (KIE), which tests layout-aware structured extraction from mobile-captured receipts; and (iii) Handwriting OCR, which evaluates page-level transcription across various media and writing directions. We evaluate 14 open-weight VLMs and find that the best model achieves an average score of 0.64 across the three tasks. Error analyses show recognition remains the dominant bottleneck, especially for kanji. JaWildText enables fine-grained, script-aware diagnosis of Japanese scene text capabilities, and will be released with evaluation code.

Understanding chart and table images is essential for applying vision-language models (VLMs) to real-world document understanding. While English benchmarks have advanced rapidly, non-English counterparts remain scarce, leaving it unclear whether this progress generalizes across languages. A key obstacle is the difficulty of collecting realistic and diverse non-English chart and table images at scale. To address this, we leverage governmental white papers as a scalable source for benchmark construction beyond English, as they contain naturally occurring charts and tables across diverse formats and domains and are freely accessible in many countries. As a first instantiation, we introduce HakushoBench, a challenging Japanese chart and table VQA benchmark built from 33 governmental white papers. HakushoBench contains 2,053 images spanning over 10 image types, with manually annotated QA pairs, designed to assess deep and holistic understanding of charts and tables, rather than local visual cues alone. Experiments across a broad range of VLMs demonstrate that HakushoBench remains challenging for open-weight models: the best open-weight model achieves only 58.6% accuracy, and a 34.9-point gap between open-weight and proprietary models highlights substantial room for improvement in complex chart and table understanding. We release our dataset and code.

This paper introduces LegalRikai: Open Benchmark, a new benchmark comprising four complex tasks that emulate Japanese corporate legal practices. The benchmark was created by legal professionals under the supervision of an attorney. This benchmark has 100 samples that require long-form, structured outputs, and we evaluated them against multiple practical criteria. We conducted both human and automated evaluations using leading LLMs, including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.1. Our human evaluation revealed that abstract instructions prompted unnecessary modifications, highlighting model weaknesses in document-level editing that were missed by conventional short-text tasks. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that automated evaluation aligns well with human judgment on criteria with clear linguistic grounding, and assessing structural consistency remains a challenge. The result demonstrates the utility of automated evaluation as a screening tool when expert availability is limited. We propose a dataset evaluation framework to promote more practice-oriented research in the legal domain.

Recent developments in Japanese large language models (LLMs) primarily focus on general domains, with fewer advancements in Japanese biomedical LLMs. One obstacle is the absence of a comprehensive, large-scale benchmark for comparison. Furthermore, the resources for evaluating Japanese biomedical LLMs are insufficient. To advance this field, we propose a new benchmark including eight LLMs across four categories and 20 Japanese biomedical datasets across five tasks. Experimental results indicate that: (1) LLMs with a better understanding of Japanese and richer biomedical knowledge achieve better performance in Japanese biomedical tasks, (2) LLMs that are not mainly designed for Japanese biomedical domains can still perform unexpectedly well, and (3) there is still much room for improving the existing LLMs in certain Japanese biomedical tasks. Moreover, we offer insights that could further enhance development in this field. Our evaluation tools tailored to our benchmark as well as the datasets are publicly available in https://huggingface.co/datasets/Coldog2333/JMedBench to facilitate future research.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable performance in medical licensing exams. However, comprehensive evaluation of LLMs across various healthcare roles, particularly in high-stakes clinical scenarios, remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks are typically text-based, English-centric, and focus primarily on medicines, which limits their ability to assess broader healthcare knowledge and multimodal reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce KokushiMD-10, the first multimodal benchmark constructed from ten Japanese national healthcare licensing exams. This benchmark spans multiple fields, including Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, and allied health professions. It contains over 11588 real exam questions, incorporating clinical images and expert-annotated rationales to evaluate both textual and visual reasoning. We benchmark over 30 state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini, across both text and image-based settings. Despite promising results, no model consistently meets passing thresholds across domains, highlighting the ongoing challenges in medical AI. KokushiMD-10 provides a comprehensive and linguistically grounded resource for evaluating and advancing reasoning-centric medical AI across multilingual and multimodal clinical tasks.

This paper introduces JMMMU-Pro, an image-based Japanese Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark, and Vibe Benchmark Construction, a scalable construction method. Following the evolution from MMMU to MMMU-Pro, JMMMU-Pro extends JMMMU by composing the question image and question text into a single image, thereby creating a benchmark that requires integrated visual-textual understanding through visual perception. To build JMMMU-Pro, we propose Vibe Benchmark Construction, a methodology in which an image generative model (e.g., Nano Banana Pro) produces candidate visual questions, and humans verify the outputs and, when necessary, regenerate with adjusted prompts to ensure quality. By leveraging Nano Banana Pro's highly realistic image generation capabilities and its ability to embed clean Japanese text, we construct a high-quality benchmark at low cost, covering a wide range of background and layout designs. Experimental results show that all open-source LMMs struggle substantially with JMMMU-Pro, underscoring JMMMU-Pro as an important benchmark for guiding future efforts in the open-source community. We believe that JMMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool for assessing the Japanese capabilities of LMMs and that our Vibe Benchmark Construction also offers an efficient guideline for future development of image-based VQA benchmarks.

The creation of instruction data and evaluation benchmarks for serving Large language models often involves enormous human annotation. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when rapidly developing such resources for a non-English language like Japanese. Instead of following the popular practice of directly translating existing English resources into Japanese (e.g., Japanese-Alpaca), we propose an efficient self-instruct method based on GPT-4. We first translate a small amount of English instructions into Japanese and post-edit them to obtain native-level quality. GPT-4 then utilizes them as demonstrations to automatically generate Japanese instruction data. We also construct an evaluation benchmark containing 80 questions across 8 categories, using GPT-4 to automatically assess the response quality of LLMs without human references. The empirical results suggest that the models fine-tuned on our GPT-4 self-instruct data significantly outperformed the Japanese-Alpaca across all three base pre-trained models. Our GPT-4 self-instruct data allowed the LLaMA 13B model to defeat GPT-3.5 (Davinci-003) with a 54.37\% win-rate. The human evaluation exhibits the consistency between GPT-4's assessments and human preference. Our high-quality instruction data and evaluation benchmark have been released here.

We present the JVNV, a Japanese emotional speech corpus with verbal content and nonverbal vocalizations whose scripts are generated by a large-scale language model. Existing emotional speech corpora lack not only proper emotional scripts but also nonverbal vocalizations (NVs) that are essential expressions in spoken language to express emotions. We propose an automatic script generation method to produce emotional scripts by providing seed words with sentiment polarity and phrases of nonverbal vocalizations to ChatGPT using prompt engineering. We select 514 scripts with balanced phoneme coverage from the generated candidate scripts with the assistance of emotion confidence scores and language fluency scores. We demonstrate the effectiveness of JVNV by showing that JVNV has better phoneme coverage and emotion recognizability than previous Japanese emotional speech corpora. We then benchmark JVNV on emotional text-to-speech synthesis using discrete codes to represent NVs. We show that there still exists a gap between the performance of synthesizing read-aloud speech and emotional speech, and adding NVs in the speech makes the task even harder, which brings new challenges for this task and makes JVNV a valuable resource for relevant works in the future. To our best knowledge, JVNV is the first speech corpus that generates scripts automatically using large language models.

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity among speakers of diverse languages, we believe that it is crucial to benchmark them to better understand model behaviors, failures, and limitations in languages beyond English. In this work, we evaluate LLM APIs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, and GPT-4) on the Japanese national medical licensing examinations from the past five years, including the current year. Our team comprises native Japanese-speaking NLP researchers and a practicing cardiologist based in Japan. Our experiments show that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT and GPT-3 and passes all six years of the exams, highlighting LLMs' potential in a language that is typologically distant from English. However, our evaluation also exposes critical limitations of the current LLM APIs. First, LLMs sometimes select prohibited choices that should be strictly avoided in medical practice in Japan, such as suggesting euthanasia. Further, our analysis shows that the API costs are generally higher and the maximum context size is smaller for Japanese because of the way non-Latin scripts are currently tokenized in the pipeline. We release our benchmark as Igaku QA as well as all model outputs and exam metadata. We hope that our results and benchmark will spur progress on more diverse applications of LLMs. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/jungokasai/IgakuQA.

While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled. Here we introduce Sarashina2.2-TTS (https://github.com/sbintuitions/sarashina2.2-tts), a Japanese-centric LLM-TTS system that tackles these challenges through a dual approach: data strategy and evaluation methodology. First, we scale training to approximately 361k hours of speech, incorporating a balanced mix of Japanese and English data. Furthermore, we design a targeted data augmentation pipeline covering all 2,136 Joyo (regular-use) kanji designated by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs to efficiently address kanji polyphony disambiguation. Second, we introduce the Joyo Kanji Yomi Benchmark (https://github.com/sbintuitions/JoyoKanji-Yomi-Benchmark), covering all 2,136 Joyo kanji and their 4,378 readings. Alongside this benchmark, we propose Kana-CER, a metric that compares synthesized speech against reference readings in the kana space, eliminating orthographic variations to directly measure pronunciation correctness. Experiments demonstrate that our targeted data augmentation significantly improves reading accuracy. Overall, Sarashina2.2-TTS achieves state-of-the-art kanji-level reading accuracy and matches top baselines on general sentence-level pronunciation, while delivering the highest speaker similarity in zero-shot Japanese speech synthesis. Furthermore, cross-lingual evaluation reveals that Sarashina2.2-TTS is the only system that maintains stable Japanese pronunciation regardless of the prompt language, confirming that our balanced training approach improves cross-lingual robustness.

Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), achieving reliable performance on highly professional and structured examinations remains a significant challenge. The Japanese bar examination is a particularly demanding benchmark, requiring not only advanced legal reasoning but also strict adherence to complex answer formats that involve joint evaluation of multiple propositions. While recent studies have reported improvements by decomposing such questions into simpler true--false judgments, these approaches have not been systematically evaluated under the original exam format and scoring scheme, leaving open the question of whether they truly capture exam-level competence. In this paper, we present a self-verification model trained on a newly constructed dataset that faithfully replicates the authentic format and evaluation scale of the exam. Our model is able to exceed the official passing score when evaluated on the actual exam scale, marking the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of an LLM passing the Japanese bar examination without altering its original question structure or scoring rules. We further conduct extensive comparisons with alternative strategies, including multi-agent inference and decomposition-based supervision, and find that these methods fail to achieve comparable performance. Our results highlight the importance of format-faithful supervision and consistency verification, and suggest that carefully designed single-model approaches can outperform more complex systems in high-stakes professional reasoning tasks. Our dataset and codes are publicly available.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework in which a Generator, such as a Large Language Model (LLM), produces answers by retrieving documents from an external collection using a Retriever. In practice, Generators must integrate evidence from long contexts, perform multi-step reasoning, interpret tables, and abstain when evidence is missing. However, existing benchmarks for Generators provide limited coverage, with none enabling simultaneous evaluation of multiple capabilities under unified conditions. To bridge the gap between existing evaluations and practical use, we introduce LIT-RAGBench (the Logic, Integration, Table, Reasoning, and Abstention RAG Generator Benchmark), which defines five categories: Integration, Reasoning, Logic, Table, and Abstention, each further divided into practical evaluation aspects. LIT-RAGBench systematically covers patterns combining multiple aspects across categories. By using fictional entities and scenarios, LIT-RAGBench evaluates answers grounded in the provided external documents. The dataset consists of 114 human-constructed Japanese questions and an English version generated by machine translation with human curation. We use LLM-as-a-Judge for scoring and report category-wise and overall accuracy. Across API-based and open-weight models, no model exceeds 90% overall accuracy. By making strengths and weaknesses measurable within each category, LIT-RAGBench serves as a valuable metric for model selection in practical RAG deployments and for building RAG-specialized models. We release LIT-RAGBench, including the dataset and evaluation code, at https://github.com/Koki-Itai/LIT-RAGBench.

We introduce PLaMo-100B, a large-scale language model designed for Japanese proficiency. The model was trained from scratch using 2 trillion tokens, with architecture such as QK Normalization and Z-Loss to ensure training stability during the training process. Post-training techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning and Direct Preference Optimization, were applied to refine the model's performance. Benchmark evaluations suggest that PLaMo-100B performs well, particularly in Japanese-specific tasks, achieving results that are competitive with frontier models like GPT-4.

Kuzushiji, a pre-modern Japanese cursive script, can currently be read and understood by only a few thousand trained experts in Japan. With the rapid development of deep learning, researchers have begun applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques to transcribe Kuzushiji into modern Japanese. Although existing OCR methods perform well on clean pre-modern Japanese documents written in Kuzushiji, they often fail to consider various types of noise, such as document degradation and seals, which significantly affect recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, no existing dataset specifically addresses these challenges. To address this gap, we introduce the Degraded Kuzushiji Documents with Seals (DKDS) dataset as a new benchmark for related tasks. We describe the dataset construction process, which required the assistance of a trained Kuzushiji expert, and define two benchmark tracks: (1) text and seal detection and (2) document binarization. For the text and seal detection track, we provide baseline results using multiple versions of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) models for detecting Kuzushiji characters and seals. For the document binarization track, we present baseline results from traditional binarization algorithms, traditional algorithms combined with K-means clustering, and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based methods. The DKDS dataset and the implementation code for baseline methods are available at https://ruiyangju.github.io/DKDS.

Nowadays, large multilingual translation models demonstrate impressive translation capabilities in the machine translation benchmarks. This raises a practical question to the developers: is it worth developing translation models specialized for a particular language pair if you only need to support that language pair? To give an anecdotal answer to this question, we develop a family of small language models (0.8B, 1.4B, 3.3B, and 7B parameters) specialized for Japanese-English bidirectional translation. We employ a two-stage supervised fine-tuning approach followed by Multi-Objective GRPO (Ichihara et al. 2025) to train models on synthetically generated parallel corpora. We evaluate our models on WMT and real-world translation benchmarks across business, legal, medical, financial, and patent domains. While multilingual models achieve strong performance on WMT benchmarks, our compact models outperform them on real-world benchmarks, suggesting the practical utility of developing specialized translation models even in the era of large multilingual models.

Much of machine learning research focuses on producing models which perform well on benchmark tasks, in turn improving our understanding of the challenges associated with those tasks. From the perspective of ML researchers, the content of the task itself is largely irrelevant, and thus there have increasingly been calls for benchmark tasks to more heavily focus on problems which are of social or cultural relevance. In this work, we introduce Kuzushiji-MNIST, a dataset which focuses on Kuzushiji (cursive Japanese), as well as two larger, more challenging datasets, Kuzushiji-49 and Kuzushiji-Kanji. Through these datasets, we wish to engage the machine learning community into the world of classical Japanese literature. Dataset available at https://github.com/rois-codh/kmnist

Manga, or Japanese comics, is a richly multimodal narrative form that blends images and text in complex ways. Teaching large multimodal models (LMMs) to understand such narratives at a human-like level could help manga creators reflect on and refine their stories. To this end, we introduce two benchmarks for multimodal manga understanding: MangaOCR, which targets in-page text recognition, and MangaVQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate contextual understanding through visual question answering. MangaVQA consists of 526 high-quality, manually constructed question-answer pairs, enabling reliable evaluation across diverse narrative and visual scenarios. Building on these benchmarks, we develop MangaLMM, a manga-specialized model finetuned from the open-source LMM Qwen2.5-VL to jointly handle both tasks. Through extensive experiments, including comparisons with proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5, we assess how well LMMs understand manga. Our benchmark and model provide a comprehensive foundation for evaluating and advancing LMMs in the richly narrative domain of manga.

This paper introduces JiraiBench, the first bilingual benchmark for evaluating large language models' effectiveness in detecting self-destructive content across Chinese and Japanese social media communities. Focusing on the transnational "Jirai" (landmine) online subculture that encompasses multiple forms of self-destructive behaviors including drug overdose, eating disorders, and self-harm, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework incorporating both linguistic and cultural dimensions. Our dataset comprises 10,419 Chinese posts and 5,000 Japanese posts with multidimensional annotation along three behavioral categories, achieving substantial inter-annotator agreement. Experimental evaluations across four state-of-the-art models reveal significant performance variations based on instructional language, with Japanese prompts unexpectedly outperforming Chinese prompts when processing Chinese content. This emergent cross-cultural transfer suggests that cultural proximity can sometimes outweigh linguistic similarity in detection tasks. Cross-lingual transfer experiments with fine-tuned models further demonstrate the potential for knowledge transfer between these language systems without explicit target language training. These findings highlight the need for culturally-informed approaches to multilingual content moderation and provide empirical evidence for the importance of cultural context in developing more effective detection systems for vulnerable online communities.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to generate structured outputs such as JSON, SQL, and code, yet public resources remain limited for evaluating generation that must simultaneously satisfy industry-standard XML and domain vocabulary constraints. This paper presents Ishigaki-IDS-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating the ability to generate Information Delivery Specification (IDS) XML from Building Information Modeling (BIM) information requirements. The benchmark contains 166 BIM/IDS expert-authored and verified examples created by expanding 83 practical scenarios into Japanese and English, corresponding gold IDS files, and metadata for input format, language, turn setting, IFC version, and construction domain. Its evaluation combines IDSAuditTool-based Processability, Structure, and Content audits with content-agreement evaluation against gold IDS files. In zero-shot evaluation over 10 LLMs, the best model reaches 65.6% macro F1 for content agreement, while only 27.7% of outputs pass the Content audit. These results show that current LLMs can express part of the information requirements as IDS, but still struggle to stably generate XML that satisfies the IDS standard and IFC vocabulary constraints. Ishigaki-IDS-Bench supports comparative evaluation, failure analysis, and the development of constrained structured generation methods that conform to domain standards. We release the evaluation scripts and benchmark data under the CC BY 4.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) are widely used benchmark tasks for compositional evaluation of pre-trained language models. Despite growing interest in linguistic universals, most NLI/STS studies have focused almost exclusively on English. In particular, there are no available multilingual NLI/STS datasets in Japanese, which is typologically different from English and can shed light on the currently controversial behavior of language models in matters such as sensitivity to word order and case particles. Against this background, we introduce JSICK, a Japanese NLI/STS dataset that was manually translated from the English dataset SICK. We also present a stress-test dataset for compositional inference, created by transforming syntactic structures of sentences in JSICK to investigate whether language models are sensitive to word order and case particles. We conduct baseline experiments on different pre-trained language models and compare the performance of multilingual models when applied to Japanese and other languages. The results of the stress-test experiments suggest that the current pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order and case marking.

The CUTE benchmark showed that LLMs struggle with character understanding in English. We extend it to more languages with diverse scripts and writing systems, introducing EXECUTE. Our simplified framework allows easy expansion to any language. Tests across multiple LLMs reveal that challenges in other languages are not always on the character level as in English. Some languages show word-level processing issues, some show no issues at all. We also examine sub-character tasks in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to assess LLMs' understanding of character components.

Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are pivotal for advancing perception in intelligent agents. Yet, evaluation of VLMs remains limited to predominantly English-centric benchmarks in which the image-text pairs comprise short texts. To evaluate VLM fine-grained abilities, in four languages under long-text settings, we introduce a novel multilingual benchmark VLURes featuring eight vision-and-language tasks, and a pioneering unrelatedness task, to probe the fine-grained Visual and Linguistic Understanding capabilities of VLMs across English, Japanese, and low-resource languages, Swahili, and Urdu. Our datasets, curated from web resources in the target language, encompass ten diverse image categories and rich textual context, introducing valuable vision-language resources for Swahili and Urdu. By prompting VLMs to generate responses and rationales, evaluated automatically and by native speakers, we uncover performance disparities across languages and tasks critical to intelligent agents, such as object recognition, scene understanding, and relationship understanding. We conducted evaluations of ten VLMs with VLURes. The best performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an overall accuracy of 90.8% and lags human performance by 6.7%, though the gap is larger for open-source models. The gap highlights VLURes' critical role in developing intelligent agents to tackle multi-modal visual reasoning.

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a quantitative evaluation of performance on the MCoNaLa dataset by testing with state-of-the-art code generation systems. While the difficulties vary across these three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.

Speaker diarization is the task of partitioning audio into segments according to speaker identity, answering the question of "who spoke when" in multi-speaker conversation recordings. While diarization is an essential task for many downstream applications, it remains an unsolved problem. Errors in diarization propagate to downstream systems and cause wide-ranging failures. To this end, we examine exact failure modes by evaluating five state-of-the-art diarization models, across four diarization datasets spanning multiple languages and acoustic conditions. The evaluation datasets consist of 196.6 hours of multilingual audio, including English, Mandarin, German, Japanese, and Spanish. Overall, we find that PyannoteAI achieves the best performance at 11.2% DER, while DiariZen provides a competitive open-source alternative at 13.3% DER. When analyzing failure cases, we find that the primary cause of diarization errors stem from missed speech segments followed by speaker confusion, especially in high-speaker count settings.

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

While modern ASR systems achieve low error rates on high-resource benchmarks, such performance often overestimates real-world robustness. Existing evaluations address challenges in isolation, lacking a unified benchmark for domain terminology, age variation, dialects, accents, and low-resource languages, particularly across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, representing over one billion under-evaluated speakers. To address this gap, we introduce GigaSpeechBench, a comprehensive multilingual and multidimensional in-the-wild ASR & AST benchmark comprising 680 hours of human-annotated speech. It features five modules: (1) 12 low-resource Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian languages, plus challenging Japanese and Korean; (2) 6 Chinese dialects; (3) 6 English accents; (4) dense terminology across 12 vertical domains for Chinese and English; and (5) older adult and child speech. We further provide human-annotated Chinese and English translations for 11 languages to support AST evaluation. Extensive evaluations of leading foundation models and commercial APIs reveal significant performance degradation in these challenging settings, exposing critical evaluation blind spots.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show promising capabilities for automating computer-use tasks and facilitating accessibility, but existing interactive benchmarks are mostly English-only, covering web-use or Windows, Linux, and Android environments, but not macOS. macOS is a major OS with distinctive GUI patterns and exclusive applications. To bridge the gaps, we present macOSWorld, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating GUI agents on macOS. macOSWorld features 202 multilingual interactive tasks across 30 applications (28 macOS-exclusive), with task instructions and OS interfaces offered in 5 languages (English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian). As GUI agents are shown to be vulnerable to deception attacks, macOSWorld also includes a dedicated safety benchmarking subset. Our evaluation on six GUI agents reveals a dramatic gap: proprietary computer-use agents lead at above 30% success rate, while open-source lightweight research models lag at below 2%, highlighting the need for macOS domain adaptation. Multilingual benchmarks also expose common weaknesses, especially in Arabic, with a 27.5% average degradation compared to English. Results from safety benchmarking also highlight that deception attacks are more general and demand immediate attention. macOSWorld is available at https://github.com/showlab/macosworld.

In adapting LLMs to specific domains, achieving both domain expertise and reasoning ability remains an urgent challenge. This study proposes a general method for constructing high-quality synthetic instruction data for any domain, starting from domain-specific vocabulary. As a demonstration, we applied this method to the financial domain and constructed a large-scale instruction dataset totaling approximately 9.5 billion tokens with Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. Evaluation results confirmed performance improvements over baseline models on financial benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. We also report findings on the impact of reasoning trace length on performance and its limitations. Lastly, we open-source our models and datasets on https://huggingface.co/nri-ai .

Research on food image understanding using recipe data has been a long-standing focus due to the diversity and complexity of the data. Moreover, food is inextricably linked to people's lives, making it a vital research area for practical applications such as dietary management. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, not only in their vast knowledge but also in their ability to handle languages naturally. While English is predominantly used, they can also support multiple languages including Japanese. This suggests that MLLMs are expected to significantly improve performance in food image understanding tasks. We fine-tuned open MLLMs LLaVA-1.5 and Phi-3 Vision on a Japanese recipe dataset and benchmarked their performance against the closed model GPT-4o. We then evaluated the content of generated recipes, including ingredients and cooking procedures, using 5,000 evaluation samples that comprehensively cover Japanese food culture. Our evaluation demonstrates that the open models trained on recipe data outperform GPT-4o, the current state-of-the-art model, in ingredient generation. Our model achieved F1 score of 0.531, surpassing GPT-4o's F1 score of 0.481, indicating a higher level of accuracy. Furthermore, our model exhibited comparable performance to GPT-4o in generating cooking procedure text.

In this paper we present AnswerCarefully, a dataset for promoting the safety and appropriateness of Japanese LLM outputs. The dataset consists of 1,800 pairs of questions and reference answers, where the questions require special attention in answering. It covers a wide range of risk categories established in prior English-language datasets, but the data samples are original in that they are manually created to reflect the socio-cultural context of LLM usage in Japan. We show that using this dataset for instruction to fine-tune a Japanese LLM led to improved output safety without compromising the utility of general responses. We also report the results of a safety evaluation of 12 Japanese LLMs using this dataset as a benchmark. Finally, we describe the latest update on the dataset which provides English translations and annotations of the questions, aimed at facilitating the derivation of similar datasets in different languages and regions.

Script identification plays a vital role in applications that involve handwriting and document analysis within a multi-script and multi-lingual environment. Moreover, it exhibits a profound connection with human cognition. This paper provides a new database for benchmarking script identification algorithms, which contains both printed and handwritten documents collected from a wide variety of scripts, such as Arabic, Bengali (Bangla), Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Devanagari, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Roman, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. The dataset consists of 1,135 documents scanned from local newspaper and handwritten letters as well as notes from different native writers. Further, these documents are segmented into lines and words, comprising a total of 13,979 and 86,655 lines and words, respectively, in the dataset. Easy-to-go benchmarks are proposed with handcrafted and deep learning methods. The benchmark includes results at the document, line, and word levels with printed and handwritten documents. Results of script identification independent of the document/line/word level and independent of the printed/handwritten letters are also given. The new multi-lingual database is expected to create new script identifiers, present various challenges, including identifying handwritten and printed samples and serve as a foundation for future research in script identification based on the reported results of the three benchmarks.

Neural Information Retrieval has advanced rapidly in high-resource languages, but progress in lower-resource ones such as Japanese has been hindered by data scarcity, among other challenges. Consequently, multilingual models have dominated Japanese retrieval, despite their computational inefficiencies and inability to capture linguistic nuances. While recent multi-vector monolingual models like JaColBERT have narrowed this gap, they still lag behind multilingual methods in large-scale evaluations. This work addresses the suboptimal training methods of multi-vector retrievers in lower-resource settings, focusing on Japanese. We systematically evaluate and improve key aspects of the inference and training settings of JaColBERT, and more broadly, multi-vector models. We further enhance performance through a novel checkpoint merging step, showcasing it to be an effective way of combining the benefits of fine-tuning with the generalization capabilities of the original checkpoint. Building on our analysis, we introduce a novel training recipe, resulting in the JaColBERTv2.5 model. JaColBERTv2.5, with only 110 million parameters and trained in under 15 hours on 4 A100 GPUs, significantly outperforms all existing methods across all common benchmarks, reaching an average score of 0.754, significantly above the previous best of 0.720. To support future research, we make our final models, intermediate checkpoints and all data used publicly available.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential in medicine, yet clinical adoption is hindered by concerns over factual accuracy, language-specific limitations (e.g., Japanese), and critically, their reliability when required to generate reasoning explanations -- a prerequisite for trust. This paper introduces Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B, a 72B-parameter model optimized for the Japanese medical domain to achieve both high accuracy and stable reasoning. We employ a two-stage fine-tuning process on the Qwen2.5-72B base model: first, Continued Pretraining (CPT) on a comprehensive Japanese medical corpus instills deep domain knowledge. Second, Reasoning Preference Optimization (RPO), a preference-based method, enhances the generation of reliable reasoning pathways while preserving high answer accuracy. Evaluations on the Japanese Medical Licensing Exam benchmark (IgakuQA) show Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B achieves state-of-the-art performance (0.868 accuracy), surpassing strong proprietary models like GPT-4o (0.866). Crucially, unlike baseline or CPT-only models which exhibit significant accuracy degradation (up to 11.5\% and 3.8\% respectively on IgakuQA) when prompted for explanations, our model maintains its high accuracy (0.868) under such conditions. This highlights RPO's effectiveness in stabilizing reasoning generation. This work underscores the importance of optimizing for reliable explanations alongside accuracy. We release the Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B model weights to foster research into trustworthy LLMs for specialized, high-stakes applications.

Kamon (family crests) are an important part of Japanese culture and a natural test case for compositional visual recognition: each crest combines a small number of symbolic choices, but the space of possible descriptions is sparse. We introduce KamonBench, a grammar-based image-to-structure benchmark with 20,000 synthetic composite crests and auxiliary component examples. Each composite crest is paired with a formal kamon description language - "kamon yōgo" - description, a segmented Japanese analysis, an English translation, and a non-linguistic program code. Because each synthetic crest is generated from known factors, namely container, modifier, and motif, KamonBench supports evaluation beyond caption-level accuracy: direct program-code factor metrics, controlled factor-pair recombination splits, counterfactual motif-sensitivity groups under fixed container-modifier contexts, and linear probes of factor accessibility. We include baseline results for a ViT encoder/Transformer decoder and two VGG n-gram decoders, with and without learned positional masks. KamonBench therefore provides a controlled testbed for sparse compositional visual recognition and factor recovery in vision-language models.

Despite recent advances, efficient and robust turn-taking detection remains a significant challenge in industrial-grade Voice AI agent deployments. Many existing systems rely solely on acoustic or semantic cues, leading to suboptimal accuracy and stability, while recent attempts to endow large language models with full-duplex capabilities require costly full-duplex data and incur substantial training and deployment overheads, limiting real-time performance. In this paper, we propose JAL-Turn, a lightweight and efficient speech-only turn-taking framework that adopts a joint acoustic-linguistic modeling paradigm, in which a cross-attention module adaptively integrates pre-trained acoustic representations with linguistic features to support low-latency prediction of hold vs shift states. By sharing a frozen ASR encoder, JAL-Turn enables turn-taking prediction to run fully in parallel with speech recognition, introducing no additional end-to-end latency or computational overhead. In addition, we introduce a scalable data construction pipeline that automatically derives reliable turn-taking labels from large-scale real-world dialogue corpora. Extensive experiments on public multilingual benchmarks and an in-house Japanese customer-service dataset show that JAL-Turn consistently outperforms strong state-of-the-art baselines in detection accuracy while maintaining superior real-time performance.

Finetuning Pretrained Language Models (PLM) for IR has been de facto the standard practice since their breakthrough effectiveness few years ago. But, is this approach well understood? In this paper, we study the impact of the pretraining collection on the final IR effectiveness. In particular, we challenge the current hypothesis that PLM shall be trained on a large enough generic collection and we show that pretraining from scratch on the collection of interest is surprisingly competitive with the current approach. We benchmark first-stage ranking rankers and cross-encoders for reranking on the task of general passage retrieval on MSMARCO, Mr-Tydi for Arabic, Japanese and Russian, and TripClick for specific domain. Contrary to popular belief, we show that, for finetuning first-stage rankers, models pretrained solely on their collection have equivalent or better effectiveness compared to more general models. However, there is a slight effectiveness drop for rerankers pretrained only on the target collection. Overall, our study sheds a new light on the role of the pretraining collection and should make our community ponder on building specialized models by pretraining from scratch. Last but not least, doing so could enable better control of efficiency, data bias and replicability, which are key research questions for the IR community.

Instruction following is a core capability of modern Large language models (LLMs), making evaluating this capability essential to understanding these models. The Instruction Following Evaluation (IFEval) benchmark from the literature does this using objective criteria, offering a measure of LLM performance without subjective AI or human judgement. However, it only includes English instructions, limiting its ability to assess LLMs in other languages. We propose the Multilingual Instruction Following Evaluation (M-IFEval) benchmark, expanding the evaluation to French, Japanese, and Spanish, with both general and language-specific instructions. Applying this benchmark to 8 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that benchmark performance across languages and instruction types can vary widely, underscoring the importance of a multilingual benchmark for evaluating LLMs in a diverse cultural context.

Granite-speech LLMs are compact and efficient speech language models specifically designed for English ASR and automatic speech translation (AST). The models were trained by modality aligning the 2B and 8B parameter variants of granite-3.3-instruct to speech on publicly available open-source corpora containing audio inputs and text targets consisting of either human transcripts for ASR or automatically generated translations for AST. Comprehensive benchmarking shows that on English ASR, which was our primary focus, they outperform several competitors' models that were trained on orders of magnitude more proprietary data, and they keep pace on English-to-X AST for major European languages, Japanese, and Chinese. The speech-specific components are: a conformer acoustic encoder using block attention and self-conditioning trained with connectionist temporal classification, a windowed query-transformer speech modality adapter used to do temporal downsampling of the acoustic embeddings and map them to the LLM text embedding space, and LoRA adapters to further fine-tune the text LLM. Granite-speech-3.3 operates in two modes: in speech mode, it performs ASR and AST by activating the encoder, projector, and LoRA adapters; in text mode, it calls the underlying granite-3.3-instruct model directly (without LoRA), essentially preserving all the text LLM capabilities and safety. Both models are freely available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-speech-3.3-2b and https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-speech-3.3-8b) and can be used for both research and commercial purposes under a permissive Apache 2.0 license.

As multilingual large language models become more widely used, ensuring their safety and fairness across diverse linguistic contexts presents unique challenges. While existing research on machine unlearning has primarily focused on monolingual settings, typically English, multilingual environments introduce additional complexities due to cross-lingual knowledge transfer and biases embedded in both pretraining and fine-tuning data. In this work, we study multilingual unlearning using the Aya-Expanse 8B model under two settings: (1) data unlearning and (2) concept unlearning. We extend benchmarks for factual knowledge and stereotypes to ten languages through translation: English, French, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Farsi, Korean, Hindi, Hebrew, and Indonesian. These languages span five language families and a wide range of resource levels. Our experiments show that unlearning in high-resource languages is generally more stable, with asymmetric transfer effects observed between typologically related languages. Furthermore, our analysis of linguistic distances indicates that syntactic similarity is the strongest predictor of cross-lingual unlearning behavior.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems. We released the challenge on the Codalab evaluation system for further research.

Quantization techniques are widely used to improve inference speed and deployment of large language models. While a wide body of work examines the impact of quantized LLMs on English tasks, none have examined the effect of quantization across languages. We conduct a thorough analysis of quantized multilingual LLMs, focusing on their performance across languages and at varying scales. We use automatic benchmarks, LLM-as-a-Judge methods, and human evaluation, finding that (1) harmful effects of quantization are apparent in human evaluation, and automatic metrics severely underestimate the detriment: a 1.7% average drop in Japanese across automatic tasks corresponds to a 16.0% drop reported by human evaluators on realistic prompts; (2) languages are disparately affected by quantization, with non-Latin script languages impacted worst; and (3) challenging tasks such as mathematical reasoning degrade fastest. As the ability to serve low-compute models is critical for wide global adoption of NLP technologies, our results urge consideration of multilingual performance as a key evaluation criterion for efficient models.

Lecture transcript translation helps learners understand online courses, however, building a high-quality lecture machine translation system lacks publicly available parallel corpora. To address this, we examine a framework for parallel corpus mining, which provides a quick and effective way to mine a parallel corpus from publicly available lectures on Coursera. To create the parallel corpora, we propose a dynamic programming based sentence alignment algorithm which leverages the cosine similarity of machine-translated sentences. The sentence alignment F1 score reaches 96%, which is higher than using the BERTScore, LASER, or sentBERT methods. For both English--Japanese and English--Chinese lecture translations, we extracted parallel corpora of approximately 50,000 lines and created development and test sets through manual filtering for benchmarking translation performance. Through machine translation experiments, we show that the mined corpora enhance the quality of lecture transcript translation when used in conjunction with out-of-domain parallel corpora via multistage fine-tuning. Furthermore, this study also suggests guidelines for gathering and cleaning corpora, mining parallel sentences, cleaning noise in the mined data, and creating high-quality evaluation splits. For the sake of reproducibility, we have released the corpora as well as the code to create them. The dataset is available at https://github.com/shyyhs/CourseraParallelCorpusMining.

Pre-training large-scale neural language models on raw texts has made a significant contribution to improving transfer learning in natural language processing (NLP). With the introduction of transformer-based language models, such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), the performance of information extraction from a free text by NLP has significantly improved for both the general domain and medical domain; however, it is difficult to train specific BERT models that perform well for domains in which there are few publicly available databases of high quality and large size. We hypothesized that this problem can be addressed by up-sampling a domain-specific corpus and using it for pre-training with a larger corpus in a balanced manner. Our proposed method consists of a single intervention with one option: simultaneous pre-training after up-sampling and amplified vocabulary. We conducted three experiments and evaluated the resulting products. We confirmed that our Japanese medical BERT outperformed conventional baselines and the other BERT models in terms of the medical document classification task and that our English BERT pre-trained using both the general and medical-domain corpora performed sufficiently well for practical use in terms of the biomedical language understanding evaluation (BLUE) benchmark. Moreover, our enhanced biomedical BERT model, in which clinical notes were not used during pre-training, showed that both the clinical and biomedical scores of the BLUE benchmark were 0.3 points above that of the ablation model trained without our proposed method. Well-balanced pre-training by up-sampling instances derived from a corpus appropriate for the target task allows us to construct a high-performance BERT model.

Comics have long been a popular form of storytelling, offering visually engaging narratives that captivate audiences worldwide. However, the visual nature of comics presents a significant barrier for visually impaired readers, limiting their access to these engaging stories. In this work, we provide a pragmatic solution to this accessibility challenge by developing an automated system that generates text-based literary narratives from manga comics. Our approach aims to create an evocative and immersive prose that not only conveys the original narrative but also captures the depth and complexity of characters, their interactions, and the vivid settings in which they reside. To this end we make the following contributions: (1) We present a unified model, Magiv3, that excels at various functional tasks pertaining to comic understanding, such as localising panels, characters, texts, and speech-bubble tails, performing OCR, grounding characters etc. (2) We release human-annotated captions for over 3300 Japanese comic panels, along with character grounding annotations, and benchmark large vision-language models in their ability to understand comic images. (3) Finally, we demonstrate how integrating large vision-language models with Magiv3, can generate seamless literary narratives that allows visually impaired audiences to engage with the depth and richness of comic storytelling.

Benchmarks of the multilingual capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models compare generated images prompted in a test language to an expected image distribution over a concept set. One such benchmark, "Conceptual Coverage Across Languages" (CoCo-CroLa), assesses the tangible noun inventory of T2I models by prompting them to generate pictures from a concept list translated to seven languages and comparing the output image populations. Unfortunately, we find that this benchmark contains translation errors of varying severity in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. We provide corrections for these errors and analyze how impactful they are on the utility and validity of CoCo-CroLa as a benchmark. We reassess multiple baseline T2I models with the revisions, compare the outputs elicited under the new translations to those conditioned on the old, and show that a correction's impactfulness on the image-domain benchmark results can be predicted in the text domain with similarity scores. Our findings will guide the future development of T2I multilinguality metrics by providing analytical tools for practical translation decisions.

We introduce Drivelology, a unique linguistic phenomenon characterised as "nonsense with depth", utterances that are syntactically coherent yet pragmatically paradoxical, emotionally loaded, or rhetorically subversive. While such expressions may resemble surface-level nonsense, they encode implicit meaning requiring contextual inference, moral reasoning, or emotional interpretation. We find that current large language models (LLMs), despite excelling at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, consistently fail to grasp the layered semantics of Drivelological text. To investigate this, we construct a small but diverse benchmark dataset of over 1,200 meticulously curated examples, with select instances in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean. Annotation was especially challenging: each of the examples required careful expert review to verify that it truly reflected Drivelological characteristics. The process involved multiple rounds of discussion and adjudication to address disagreements, highlighting the subtle and subjective nature of the Drivelology. We evaluate a range of LLMs on classification, generation, and reasoning tasks. Our results reveal clear limitations of LLMs: models often confuse Drivelology with shallow nonsense, produce incoherent justifications, or miss the implied rhetorical function altogether. These findings highlight a deeper representational gap in LLMs' pragmatic understanding and challenge the assumption that statistical fluency implies cognitive comprehension. We release our dataset and code to facilitate further research in modelling linguistic depth beyond surface-level coherence.

Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has achieved SOTA performance for visually-rich document understanding tasks recently, which demonstrates the great potential for joint learning across different modalities. In this paper, we present LayoutXLM, a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding, which aims to bridge the language barriers for visually-rich document understanding. To accurately evaluate LayoutXLM, we also introduce a multilingual form understanding benchmark dataset named XFUND, which includes form understanding samples in 7 languages (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese), and key-value pairs are manually labeled for each language. Experiment results show that the LayoutXLM model has significantly outperformed the existing SOTA cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset. The pre-trained LayoutXLM model and the XFUND dataset are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutxlm.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance in domains like mathematics, factual QA, and code generation, yet their multilingual reasoning capabilities in these tasks remain underdeveloped. Especially for low-resource languages such as Swahili or Thai, LLMs can often misinterpret prompts or default to reasoning in English. This implicit bias toward high-resource languages undermines factual accuracy, interpretability, and trust. Current multilingual benchmarks focus only on final answers, overlooking whether models actually reason in the target language. To address this gap, we introduce GeoFact-X, a geography-based multilingual factual reasoning benchmark with annotated reasoning traces in five languages: English, Hindi, Japanese, Swahili, and Thai. We further propose BRIDGE, a novel training method that guides supervised fine-tuning and test-time reinforcement learning with a language-consistency reward to align reasoning with the input language. Finally, we develop an automatic evaluation protocol using LLM-as-a-judge to assess answer correctness and the quality and language consistency of reasoning traces, enabling nuanced and scalable analysis beyond surface-level metrics. Our results show that BRIDGE significantly enhances multilingual reasoning fidelity, demonstrating that reasoning-aware multilingual reinforcement learning is crucial for robust cross-lingual generalization. https://jd730.github.io/projects/GeoFact-X_BRIDGE

This study presents a novel benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) using challenges derived from the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) Excel competitions. We introduce a methodology for converting 113 existing FMWC challenges into programmatically evaluable JSON formats and use this dataset to compare the performance of several leading LLMs. Our findings demonstrate significant variations in performance across different challenge categories, with models showing specific strengths in pattern recognition tasks but struggling with complex numerical reasoning. The benchmark provides a standardized framework for assessing LLM capabilities in realistic business-oriented tasks rather than abstract academic problems. This research contributes to the growing field of AI benchmarking by establishing proficiency among the 1.5 billion people who daily use Microsoft Excel as a meaningful evaluation metric that bridges the gap between academic AI benchmarks and practical business applications.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in linguistic capabilities, robust multilingual evaluation has become essential for promoting equitable technological progress. This position paper examines over 2,000 multilingual (non-English) benchmarks from 148 countries, published between 2021 and 2024, to evaluate past, present, and future practices in multilingual benchmarking. Our findings reveal that, despite significant investments amounting to tens of millions of dollars, English remains significantly overrepresented in these benchmarks. Additionally, most benchmarks rely on original language content rather than translations, with the majority sourced from high-resource countries such as China, India, Germany, the UK, and the USA. Furthermore, a comparison of benchmark performance with human judgments highlights notable disparities. STEM-related tasks exhibit strong correlations with human evaluations (0.70 to 0.85), while traditional NLP tasks like question answering (e.g., XQuAD) show much weaker correlations (0.11 to 0.30). Moreover, translating English benchmarks into other languages proves insufficient, as localized benchmarks demonstrate significantly higher alignment with local human judgments (0.68) than their translated counterparts (0.47). This underscores the importance of creating culturally and linguistically tailored benchmarks rather than relying solely on translations. Through this comprehensive analysis, we highlight six key limitations in current multilingual evaluation practices, propose the guiding principles accordingly for effective multilingual benchmarking, and outline five critical research directions to drive progress in the field. Finally, we call for a global collaborative effort to develop human-aligned benchmarks that prioritize real-world applications.

Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce ScholarBench, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. ScholarBench targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, ScholarBench evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.

The rapid proliferation of LLMs has created a critical evaluation paradox: while LLMs claim multilingual proficiency, comprehensive non-machine-translated benchmarks exist for fewer than 30 languages, leaving >98% of the world's 7,000 languages in an empirical void. Traditional benchmark construction faces scaling challenges such as cost, scarcity of domain experts, and data contamination. We evaluate the validity of a simpler alternative: can translation quality alone indicate a model's broader multilingual capabilities? Through systematic evaluation of 14 models (1B-72B parameters) across 9 diverse benchmarks and 7 translation metrics, we find that translation performance is a good indicator of downstream task success (e.g., Phi-4, median Pearson r: MetricX = 0.89, xCOMET = 0.91, SSA-COMET = 0.87). These results suggest that the representational abilities supporting faithful translation overlap with those required for multilingual understanding. Translation quality, thus emerges as a strong, inexpensive first-pass proxy of multilingual performance, enabling a translation-first screening with targeted follow-up for specific tasks.

Benchmark quality is critical for meaningful evaluation and sustained progress in time series forecasting, particularly given the recent rise of pretrained models. Existing benchmarks often have narrow domain coverage or overlook important real-world settings, such as tasks with covariates. Additionally, their aggregation procedures often lack statistical rigor, making it unclear whether observed performance differences reflect true improvements or random variation. Many benchmarks also fail to provide infrastructure for consistent evaluation or are too rigid to integrate into existing pipelines. To address these gaps, we propose fev-bench, a benchmark comprising 100 forecasting tasks across seven domains, including 46 tasks with covariates. Supporting the benchmark, we introduce fev, a lightweight Python library for benchmarking forecasting models that emphasizes reproducibility and seamless integration with existing workflows. Usingfev, fev-bench employs principled aggregation methods with bootstrapped confidence intervals to report model performance along two complementary dimensions: win rates and skill scores. We report results on fev-bench for various pretrained, statistical and baseline models, and identify promising directions for future research.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools capable of handling diverse tasks. Comparing and selecting appropriate LLMs for specific tasks requires systematic evaluation methods, as models exhibit varying capabilities across different domains. However, finding suitable benchmarks is difficult given the many available options. This complexity not only increases the risk of benchmark misuse and misinterpretation but also demands substantial effort from LLM users, seeking the most suitable benchmarks for their specific needs. To address these issues, we introduce BenchmarkCards, an intuitive and validated documentation framework that standardizes critical benchmark attributes such as objectives, methodologies, data sources, and limitations. Through user studies involving benchmark creators and users, we show that BenchmarkCards can simplify benchmark selection and enhance transparency, facilitating informed decision-making in evaluating LLMs. Data & Code: https://github.com/SokolAnn/BenchmarkCards

A well-formulated benchmark plays a critical role in spurring advancements in the natural language processing (NLP) field, as it allows objective and precise evaluation of diverse models. As modern language models (LMs) have become more elaborate and sophisticated, more difficult benchmarks that require linguistic knowledge and reasoning have been proposed. However, most of these benchmarks only support English, and great effort is necessary to construct benchmarks for other low resource languages. To this end, we propose a new benchmark named Korean balanced evaluation of significant tasks (KoBEST), which consists of five Korean-language downstream tasks. Professional Korean linguists designed the tasks that require advanced Korean linguistic knowledge. Moreover, our data is purely annotated by humans and thoroughly reviewed to guarantee high data quality. We also provide baseline models and human performance results. Our dataset is available on the Huggingface.

Previous multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on simple understanding tasks, but for large language models(LLMs), we emphasize proficiency in instruction following, reasoning, long context understanding, code generation, and so on. However, measuring these advanced capabilities across languages is underexplored. To address the disparity, we introduce BenchMAX, a multi-way multilingual evaluation benchmark that allows for fair comparisons of these important abilities across languages. To maintain high quality, three distinct native-speaking annotators independently annotate each sample within all tasks after the data was machine-translated from English into 16 other languages. Additionally, we present a novel translation challenge stemming from dataset construction. Extensive experiments on BenchMAX reveal varying effectiveness of core capabilities across languages, highlighting performance gaps that cannot be bridged by simply scaling up model size. BenchMAX serves as a comprehensive multilingual evaluation platform, providing a promising test bed to promote the development of multilingual language models. The dataset and code are publicly accessible.

We introduce EQ-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate aspects of emotional intelligence in Large Language Models (LLMs). We assess the ability of LLMs to understand complex emotions and social interactions by asking them to predict the intensity of emotional states of characters in a dialogue. The benchmark is able to discriminate effectively between a wide range of models. We find that EQ-Bench correlates strongly with comprehensive multi-domain benchmarks like MMLU (Hendrycks et al., 2020) (r=0.97), indicating that we may be capturing similar aspects of broad intelligence. Our benchmark produces highly repeatable results using a set of 60 English-language questions. We also provide open-source code for an automated benchmarking pipeline at https://github.com/EQ-bench/EQ-Bench and a leaderboard at https://eqbench.com

The availability of compute and data to train larger and larger language models increases the demand for robust methods of benchmarking the true progress of LM training. Recent years witnessed significant progress in standardized benchmarking for English. Benchmarks such as GLUE, SuperGLUE, or KILT have become de facto standard tools to compare large language models. Following the trend to replicate GLUE for other languages, the KLEJ benchmark has been released for Polish. In this paper, we evaluate the progress in benchmarking for low-resourced languages. We note that only a handful of languages have such comprehensive benchmarks. We also note the gap in the number of tasks being evaluated by benchmarks for resource-rich English/Chinese and the rest of the world. In this paper, we introduce LEPISZCZE (the Polish word for glew, the Middle English predecessor of glue), a new, comprehensive benchmark for Polish NLP with a large variety of tasks and high-quality operationalization of the benchmark. We design LEPISZCZE with flexibility in mind. Including new models, datasets, and tasks is as simple as possible while still offering data versioning and model tracking. In the first run of the benchmark, we test 13 experiments (task and dataset pairs) based on the five most recent LMs for Polish. We use five datasets from the Polish benchmark and add eight novel datasets. As the paper's main contribution, apart from LEPISZCZE, we provide insights and experiences learned while creating the benchmark for Polish as the blueprint to design similar benchmarks for other low-resourced languages.

Legal NLP benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate a single language or aggregate tasks that differ fundamentally across jurisdictions, making cross-lingual comparison impossible. We introduce Multi-Legal-Bench, the first cross-jurisdictional legal benchmark that evaluates identical tasks across six countries (Ukraine, France, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania), four language families, and 134 million court decisions. The benchmark defines five tasks court-type classification, judgment form classification, case-outcome prediction, legal norm extraction, and cause category prediction mapped to structured metadata from national court registries, forming a deliberately sparse 5x6 task-jurisdiction matrix (20 of 30 cells filled). We evaluate 7 frontier LLMs under zero-shot and 3-shot prompting via AWS Bedrock, with 4 additional small/medium models (3-12B) for scaling analysis. Our results reveal that: (1) task-dependent few-shot effects discovered in Ukrainian replicate across all jurisdictions; (2) no single model dominates any language rankings shift with both task and jurisdiction; (3) cross-lingual few-shot transfer does not follow language proximity: UA->FR (Romance, -2.1 pp) transfers better than UA->PL (Slavic, -13.7 pp), with label-set alignment predicting transfer quality better than language family; and (4) tokenizer fertility, despite a 2.3x spread, does not significantly predict cross-lingual accuracy (r=-0.27, p=0.14), suggesting that model architecture and pretraining data dominate tokenizer efficiency. We release all data, prompts, and model predictions.

Code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate LLMs' capabilities. However, after consolidating the latest 24 benchmarks, we noticed three significant imbalances. First, imbalanced programming language. 95.8% of benchmarks involve Python, while only 5 benchmarks involve Java. Second, imbalanced code granularity. Function-/statement-level benchmarks account for over 83.3% of benchmarks. Only a mere handful extends to class-/project-levels, and all are limited to Python. Third, lacking advanced features. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic coding skills, while overlooking advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features (i.e., encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism). To fill these gaps, we propose JavaBench, a project-level Java benchmark that exercises OOP features. It comprises four Java projects with 389 methods in 106 Java classes. The test coverage is up to 92%, and JavaBench is attested by 282 undergraduate students, reaching a 90.93/100 average score (i.e., pass rate against the test suite), ensuring the quality of documentation, code skeleton, and tests. To better evaluate LLM's capability against JavaBench, we introduce a systematic evaluation design covering three context settings and five synthesis strategies at two granularities using three hierarchical metrics. Our extensive experiment yields several interesting findings. First, we noticed that regarding project-level Java programming, LLMs are far behind undergraduate students (no project can be correctly completed by any studied LLMs, and at most 41.17% Pass@5 in a more relaxed evaluation). Second, using method signature as prompt context may strike an ideal balance for project-level code generation. JavaBench is publicly available at https://github.com/java-bench/JavaBench.

The rapid proliferation of benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for systematic methods to assess benchmark quality itself. We propose Benchmark^2, a comprehensive framework comprising three complementary metrics: (1) Cross-Benchmark Ranking Consistency, measuring whether a benchmark produces model rankings aligned with peer benchmarks; (2) Discriminability Score, quantifying a benchmark's ability to differentiate between models; and (3) Capability Alignment Deviation, identifying problematic instances where stronger models fail but weaker models succeed within the same model family. We conduct extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks spanning mathematics, reasoning, and knowledge domains, evaluating 11 LLMs across four model families. Our analysis reveals significant quality variations among existing benchmarks and demonstrates that selective benchmark construction based on our metrics can achieve comparable evaluation performance with substantially reduced test sets.

With the advent of highly capable instruction-tuned neural language models, benchmarking in natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly shifting towards pairwise comparison leaderboards, such as LMSYS Arena, from traditional global pointwise scores (e.g., GLUE, BIG-bench, SWE-bench). This paper empirically investigates the strengths and weaknesses of both global scores and pairwise comparisons to aid decision-making in selecting appropriate model evaluation strategies. Through computational experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets using standard global metrics and the popular Bradley-Terry model for pairwise comparisons, we found that while global scores provide more reliable overall rankings, they can underestimate strong models with rare, significant errors or low confidence. Conversely, pairwise comparisons are particularly effective for identifying strong contenders among models with lower global scores, especially where quality metrics are hard to define (e.g., text generation), though they require more comparisons to converge if ties are frequent. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/HSPyroblast/srw-ranking under a permissive license.

Transformers do not scale very well to long sequence lengths largely because of quadratic self-attention complexity. In the recent months, a wide spectrum of efficient, fast Transformers have been proposed to tackle this problem, more often than not claiming superior or comparable model quality to vanilla Transformer models. To this date, there is no well-established consensus on how to evaluate this class of models. Moreover, inconsistent benchmarking on a wide spectrum of tasks and datasets makes it difficult to assess relative model quality amongst many models. This paper proposes a systematic and unified benchmark, LRA, specifically focused on evaluating model quality under long-context scenarios. Our benchmark is a suite of tasks consisting of sequences ranging from 1K to 16K tokens, encompassing a wide range of data types and modalities such as text, natural, synthetic images, and mathematical expressions requiring similarity, structural, and visual-spatial reasoning. We systematically evaluate ten well-established long-range Transformer models (Reformers, Linformers, Linear Transformers, Sinkhorn Transformers, Performers, Synthesizers, Sparse Transformers, and Longformers) on our newly proposed benchmark suite. LRA paves the way towards better understanding this class of efficient Transformer models, facilitates more research in this direction, and presents new challenging tasks to tackle. Our benchmark code will be released at https://github.com/google-research/long-range-arena.

The Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard has been instrumental in benchmarking Korean Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it has certain limitations. Notably, the disconnect between quantitative improvements on the overly academic leaderboard benchmarks and the qualitative impact of the models should be addressed. Furthermore, the benchmark suite is largely composed of translated versions of their English counterparts, which may not fully capture the intricacies of the Korean language. To address these issues, we propose Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2, an improved version of the earlier Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard. The original benchmarks are entirely replaced with new tasks that are more closely aligned with real-world capabilities. Additionally, four new native Korean benchmarks are introduced to better reflect the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. Through these refinements, Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2 seeks to provide a more meaningful evaluation for advancing Korean LLMs.

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.

We present a new reproducible benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation in the real world, specifically focusing on pick-and-place. Our benchmark uses the YCB objects, a commonly used dataset in the robotics community, to ensure that our results are comparable to other studies. Additionally, the benchmark is designed to be easily reproducible in the real world, making it accessible to researchers and practitioners. We also provide our experimental results and analyzes for model-based and model-free 6D robotic grasping on the benchmark, where representative algorithms are evaluated for object perception, grasping planning, and motion planning. We believe that our benchmark will be a valuable tool for advancing the field of robot manipulation. By providing a standardized evaluation framework, researchers can more easily compare different techniques and algorithms, leading to faster progress in developing robot manipulation methods.

Spreadsheets are widely used for business analysis, financial modeling, reporting, and decision-making. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate isolated operations such as single-formula generation or local cell edits, and therefore fail to capture end-to-end workflows in realistic business settings. We introduce SpreadsheetBench 2, a workflow-level benchmark for spreadsheet agents that covers three task categories: generation, debugging, and visualization. The benchmark is constructed from authentic business data, including financial reports and corporate filings, and is annotated and validated by domain experts. The benchmark contains 321 tasks; each instance averages 11.8 worksheets and requires 593.5 cell modifications, reflecting large multi-sheet workbooks with cross-sheet dependencies. We evaluate eight frontier large language models under a unified multi-turn agent scaffold, and additionally include several LLM-based spreadsheet products as complementary baselines. Results show that current systems remain far from reliable on real-world workflows: the best model achieves 34.89\% overall task accuracy, and debugging accuracy is as low as 12.00\%. Trajectory analysis and a failure taxonomy further indicate that insufficient spreadsheet inspection and incorrect target-cell selection are the dominant bottlenecks. Together, these findings position SpreadsheetBench 2 as a challenging testbed for advancing reliable spreadsheet automation. Project page: https://spreadsheetbench.github.io/

Despite the recent advances in Large Language Models, benchmarks for evaluating legal writing remain scarce due to the inherent complexity of assessing open-ended responses in this domain. One of the key challenges in evaluating language models on domain-specific tasks is finding test datasets that are public, frequently updated, and contain comprehensive evaluation guidelines. The Brazilian Bar Examination meets these requirements. We introduce oab-bench, a benchmark comprising 105 questions across seven areas of law from recent editions of the exam. The benchmark includes comprehensive evaluation guidelines and reference materials used by human examiners to ensure consistent grading. We evaluate the performance of four LLMs on oab-bench, finding that Claude-3.5 Sonnet achieves the best results with an average score of 7.93 out of 10, passing all 21 exams. We also investigated whether LLMs can serve as reliable automated judges for evaluating legal writing. Our experiments show that frontier models like OpenAI's o1 achieve a strong correlation with human scores when evaluating approved exams, suggesting their potential as reliable automated evaluators despite the inherently subjective nature of legal writing assessment. The source code and the benchmark -- containing questions, evaluation guidelines, model-generated responses, and their respective automated evaluations -- are publicly available.

The evaluation of large language models is an essential task in the field of language understanding and generation. As language models continue to advance, the need for effective benchmarks to assess their performance has become imperative. In the context of Traditional Chinese, there is a scarcity of comprehensive and diverse benchmarks to evaluate the capabilities of language models, despite the existence of certain benchmarks such as DRCD, TTQA, CMDQA, and FGC dataset. To address this gap, we propose a novel set of benchmarks that leverage existing English datasets and are tailored to evaluate language models in Traditional Chinese. These benchmarks encompass a wide range of tasks, including contextual question-answering, summarization, classification, and table understanding. The proposed benchmarks offer a comprehensive evaluation framework, enabling the assessment of language models' capabilities across different tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5, Taiwan-LLaMa-v1.0, and Model 7-C, our proprietary model, on these benchmarks. The evaluation results highlight that our model, Model 7-C, achieves performance comparable to GPT-3.5 with respect to a part of the evaluated capabilities. In an effort to advance the evaluation of language models in Traditional Chinese and stimulate further research in this field, we have open-sourced our benchmark and opened the model for trial.

Various benchmarks have been proposed to assess the performance of large language models (LLMs) in different coding scenarios. We refer to them as code-related benchmarks. However, there are no systematic guidelines by which such a benchmark should be developed to ensure its quality, reliability, and reproducibility. We propose How2Bench, which is comprised of a 55- 55-criteria checklist as a set of guidelines to govern the development of code-related benchmarks comprehensively. Using HOW2BENCH, we profiled 274 benchmarks released within the past decade and found concerning issues. Nearly 70% of the benchmarks did not take measures for data quality assurance; over 10% did not even open source or only partially open source. Many highly cited benchmarks have loopholes, including duplicated samples, incorrect reference codes/tests/prompts, and unremoved sensitive/confidential information. Finally, we conducted a human study involving 49 participants, which revealed significant gaps in awareness of the importance of data quality, reproducibility, and transparency.

Extensive research has been conducted to explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in table reasoning. However, the essential task of transforming tables information into reports remains a significant challenge for industrial applications. This task is plagued by two critical issues: 1) the complexity and diversity of tables lead to suboptimal reasoning outcomes; and 2) existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of this task. To fill this gap, we propose the table-to-report task and construct a bilingual benchmark named T2R-bench, where the key information flow from the tables to the reports for this task. The benchmark comprises 457 industrial tables, all derived from real-world scenarios and encompassing 19 industry domains as well as 4 types of industrial tables. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation criteria to fairly measure the quality of report generation. The experiments on 25 widely-used LLMs reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Deepseek-R1 only achieves performance with 62.71 overall score, indicating that LLMs still have room for improvement on T2R-bench. Source code and data will be available after acceptance.

As large language models (LLMs) become key advisors in various domains, their cultural sensitivity and reasoning skills are crucial in multicultural environments. We introduce Nunchi-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' cultural understanding, with a focus on Korean superstitions. The benchmark consists of 247 questions spanning 31 topics, assessing factual knowledge, culturally appropriate advice, and situational interpretation. We evaluate multilingual LLMs in both Korean and English to analyze their ability to reason about Korean cultural contexts and how language variations affect performance. To systematically assess cultural reasoning, we propose a novel evaluation strategy with customized scoring metrics that capture the extent to which models recognize cultural nuances and respond appropriately. Our findings highlight significant challenges in LLMs' cultural reasoning. While models generally recognize factual information, they struggle to apply it in practical scenarios. Furthermore, explicit cultural framing enhances performance more effectively than relying solely on the language of the prompt. To support further research, we publicly release Nunchi-Bench alongside a leaderboard.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, the need for up-to-date and well-organized benchmarks becomes increasingly critical. However, many existing datasets are scattered, difficult to manage, and make it challenging to perform evaluations tailored to specific needs or domains, despite the growing importance of domain-specific models in areas such as math or code. In this paper, we introduce BenchHub, a dynamic benchmark repository that empowers researchers and developers to evaluate LLMs more effectively. BenchHub aggregates and automatically classifies benchmark datasets from diverse domains, integrating 303K questions across 38 benchmarks. It is designed to support continuous updates and scalable data management, enabling flexible and customizable evaluation tailored to various domains or use cases. Through extensive experiments with various LLM families, we demonstrate that model performance varies significantly across domain-specific subsets, emphasizing the importance of domain-aware benchmarking. We believe BenchHub can encourage better dataset reuse, more transparent model comparisons, and easier identification of underrepresented areas in existing benchmarks, offering a critical infrastructure for advancing LLM evaluation research.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates robust evaluation methodologies. Current benchmarking approaches often rely on comparing model outputs against predefined prompts and reference outputs. Relying on predefined reference outputs hinders flexible adaptation of benchmarks to the rapidly evolving capabilities of LLMs. This limitation necessitates periodic efforts to prepare new benchmarks. To keep pace with rapidly evolving LLM capabilities, we propose a more flexible benchmarking approach. Our method, \textbf{Varco Arena}, provides reference-free benchmarking of LLMs in tournament style. \textbf{Varco Arena} directly compares LLM outputs across a diverse set of prompts, determining model rankings through a single-elimination tournament structure. This direct pairwise comparison offers two key advantages: (1) Direct comparison, unmediated by reference text, more effectively orders competing LLMs, resulting in more reliable rankings, and (2) reference-free approach to benchmarking adds flexibility in updating benchmark prompts by eliminating the need for quality references. Our empirical results, supported by simulation experiments, demonstrate that the \textbf{Varco Arena} tournament approach aligns better with the current Elo model for benchmarking LLMs. The alignment is measured in terms of Spearman correlation, showing improvement over current practice of benchmarking that use reference outputs as comparison anchors.

Large Language Models (LLMs) vary in their abilities on a range of tasks. Initiatives such as the Open LLM Leaderboard aim to quantify these differences with several large benchmarks (sets of test items to which an LLM can respond either correctly or incorrectly). However, high correlations within and between benchmark scores suggest that (1) there exists a small set of common underlying abilities that these benchmarks measure, and (2) items tap into redundant information and the benchmarks may thus be considerably compressed. We use data from n > 5000 LLMs to identify the most informative items of six benchmarks, ARC, GSM8K, HellaSwag, MMLU, TruthfulQA and WinoGrande (with d=28,632 items in total). From them we distill a sparse benchmark, metabench, that has less than 3% of the original size of all six benchmarks combined. This new sparse benchmark goes beyond point scores by yielding estimators of the underlying benchmark-specific abilities. We show that these estimators (1) can be used to reconstruct each original individual benchmark score with, on average, 1.5% root mean square error (RMSE), (2) reconstruct the original total score with 0.8% RMSE, and (3) have a single underlying common factor whose Spearman correlation with the total score is r = 0.93.

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.

We introduce AInsteinBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating whether large language model (LLM) agents can operate as scientific computing development agents within real research software ecosystems. Unlike existing scientific reasoning benchmarks which focus on conceptual knowledge, or software engineering benchmarks that emphasize generic feature implementation and issue resolving, AInsteinBench evaluates models in end-to-end scientific development settings grounded in production-grade scientific repositories. The benchmark consists of tasks derived from maintainer-authored pull requests across six widely used scientific codebases, spanning quantum chemistry, quantum computing, molecular dynamics, numerical relativity, fluid dynamics, and cheminformatics. All benchmark tasks are carefully curated through multi-stage filtering and expert review to ensure scientific challenge, adequate test coverage, and well-calibrated difficulty. By leveraging evaluation in executable environments, scientifically meaningful failure modes, and test-driven verification, AInsteinBench measures a model's ability to move beyond surface-level code generation toward the core competencies required for computational scientific research.

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

Bug-fix benchmarks are fundamental in advancing various sub-fields of software engineering such as automatic program repair (APR) and fault localization (FL). A good benchmark must include recent examples that accurately reflect technologies and development practices of today. To be executable in the long term, a benchmark must feature test suites that do not degrade overtime due to, for example, dependencies that are no longer available. Existing benchmarks fail in meeting both criteria. For instance, Defects4J, one of the foremost Java benchmarks, last received an update in 2020. Moreover, full-reproducibility has been neglected by the majority of existing benchmarks. In this paper, we present GitBug-Actions: a novel tool for building bug-fix benchmarks with modern and fully-reproducible bug-fixes. GitBug-Actions relies on the most popular CI platform, GitHub Actions, to detect bug-fixes and smartly locally execute the CI pipeline in a controlled and reproducible environment. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to rely on GitHub Actions to collect bug-fixes. To demonstrate our toolchain, we deploy GitBug-Actions to build a proof-of-concept Go bug-fix benchmark containing executable, fully-reproducible bug-fixes from different repositories. A video demonstrating GitBug-Actions is available at: https://youtu.be/aBWwa1sJYBs.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable promise in code generation, real-world software development demands advanced repository-level reasoning. This includes understanding dependencies, project structures, and managing multi-file changes. However, the ability of LLMs to effectively comprehend and handle complex code repositories has yet to be fully explored. To address challenges, we introduce a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate repository dependency understanding (DependEval). Benchmark is based on 15,576 repositories collected from real-world websites. It evaluates models on three core tasks: Dependency Recognition, Repository Construction, and Multi-file Editing, across 8 programming languages from actual code repositories. Our evaluation of over 25 LLMs reveals substantial performance gaps and provides valuable insights into repository-level code understanding.

Advancements in LLMs have enhanced task automation in software engineering; however, current evaluations primarily focus on natural language tasks, overlooking code quality. Most benchmarks prioritize high-level reasoning over executable code and real-world performance, leaving gaps in understanding true capabilities and risks associated with these models in production. To address this issue, we propose MERA Code, a new addition to the MERA benchmark family, specifically focused on evaluating code for the latest code generation LLMs in Russian. This benchmark includes 11 evaluation tasks that span 8 programming languages. Our proposed evaluation methodology features a taxonomy that outlines the practical coding skills necessary for models to complete these tasks. The benchmark comprises an open-source codebase for users to conduct MERA assessments, a scoring system compatible with various programming environments, and a platform featuring a leaderboard and submission system. We evaluate open LLMs and frontier API models, analyzing their limitations in terms of practical coding tasks in non-English languages. We are publicly releasing MERA to guide future research, anticipate groundbreaking features in model development, and standardize evaluation procedures.

Benchmarks are widely used to evaluate task completion by Large Language Models (LLMs), but this approach has accumulated construction-validity problems, and a passing score may not show whether the requested task was delivered. We study both problems. In a controlled code-as-spec setup, two production Copilot CLI agents (claude-opus-4.7, gpt-5.5) re-implement a React Fluent-UI data table in Angular as a reusable library under a hidden 222-test Playwright oracle across 18 runs and three oracle-availability conditions. Alongside the score, we run a mechanical library audit and check each verdict with a no-op ablation. Without the oracle, the library is present but unfinished, revealed by scores. With the oracle in the loop, the score reaches near-perfect, but from a demo holding the tested behavior directly, the library left dead or absent. We call this building to the test; the broader disposition behind both we call validation self-awareness. The agent does not, on its own, validate what it ships as a user would. Prevalence remains an open question across other agents, signals, and model families. Beyond benchmark scores, dispositions like validation self-awareness merit research attention.

Large language models are increasingly consulted for Islamic knowledge, yet no comprehensive benchmark evaluates their performance across core Islamic disciplines. We introduce IslamicMMLU, a benchmark of 10,013 multiple-choice questions spanning three tracks: Quran (2,013 questions), Hadith (4,000 questions), and Fiqh (jurisprudence, 4,000 questions). Each track is formed of multiple types of questions to examine LLMs capabilities handling different aspects of Islamic knowledge. The benchmark is used to create the IslamicMMLU public leaderboard for evaluating LLMs, and we initially evaluate 26 LLMs, where their averaged accuracy across the three tracks varied between 39.8\% to 93.8\% (by Gemini 3 Flash). The Quran track shows the widest span (99.3\% to 32.4\%), while the Fiqh track includes a novel madhab (Islamic school of jurisprudence) bias detection task revealing variable school-of-thought preferences across models. Arabic-specific models show mixed results, but they all underperform compared to frontier models. The evaluation code and leaderboard are made publicly available.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in math and code reasoning capabilities. However, existing code benchmark are limited in their ability to evaluate the full spectrum of these capabilities, particularly at the competitive level. To bridge this gap, we introduce OJBench, a novel and challenging benchmark designed to assess the competitive-level code reasoning abilities of LLMs. OJBench comprises 232 programming competition problems from NOI and ICPC, providing a more rigorous test of models' reasoning skills. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation using OJBench on 37 models, including both closed-source and open-source models, reasoning-oriented and non-reasoning-oriented models. Our results indicate that even state-of-the-art reasoning-oriented models, such as o4-mini and Gemini-2.5-pro-exp, struggle with highly challenging competition-level problems. This highlights the significant challenges that models face in competitive-level code reasoning.

Benchmarks are fundamental for evaluating and advancing LLMs and MLLMs by providing standardized and explicit measures of performance. However, their construction is labor-intensive and hard to reuse, raising concerns about sustainability and scalability. Moreover, existing benchmarks often quickly reach performance saturation after their release, resulting in insufficient discrimination among state-of-the-art models. To address these challenges, we introduce Benchmark Agent, a fully autonomous agentic system designed for benchmark building. Our framework orchestrates the complete benchmark construction pipeline, from user query analysis and subtask design to data annotation and quality control. To assess Benchmark Agent, we implement it to produce 15 representative benchmarks, spanning diverse evaluation scenarios, including text understanding, multimodal understanding, and domain-specific reasoning. Extensive experiments, including human evaluation, LLM-as-a-judge assessment, and consistency checks, demonstrate Benchmark Agent can generate high-quality benchmark samples with minimal human involvement. More importantly, through continual evaluation, we observe several insightful findings, including that current models struggle with certain domain-specific reasoning tasks. We believe that rapidly evolving benchmarks can contribute significantly to the research community. The preview and code will be publicly available at the demo page and code repository.

Multi-lingual competence in large language models is often evaluated via static data benchmarks such as Belebele, M-MMLU and M-GSM. However, these evaluations often fail to provide an adequate understanding of the practical performance and robustness of models across multi-lingual settings. In response, we create multi-lingual functional benchmarks -- Cross-Lingual Grade School Math Symbolic (CL-GSM Symbolic) and Cross-Lingual Instruction-Following Eval (CL-IFEval)-- by translating existing functional benchmark templates from English to five additional languages that span the range of resources available for NLP: French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and Yoruba. Our results reveal that some static multi-lingual benchmarks capture functional performance much more closely than others (i.e. across models, there is a 24%, 17% and 18% decrease in performance between M-GSM and CL-GSM Symbolic in English, French and Spanish respectively; similarly there's a 15 - 24% performance drop across languages between Belebele and CL-IFEval, and only a 0.5% to 3% performance drop between M-MMLU and CL-IFEval). Similarly, we find that model robustness across languages varies significantly, with certain languages (eg. Arabic, English) being the most consistently well performing across evaluation iterations.

Rubric-based evaluation has become a prevailing paradigm for evaluating instruction following in large language models (LLMs). Despite its widespread use, the reliability of these rubric-level evaluations remains unclear, calling for meta-evaluation. However, prior meta-evaluation efforts largely focus on the response level, failing to assess the fine-grained judgment accuracy that rubric-based evaluation relies on. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricEval. Our benchmark features: (1) the first rubric-level meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction following, (2) diverse instructions and responses spanning multiple categories and model sources, and (3) a substantial set of 3,486 quality-controlled instances, along with Easy/Hard subsets that better differentiates judge performance. Our experiments reveal that rubric-level judging remains far from solved: even GPT-4o, a widely adopted judge in instruction-following benchmarks, achieves only 55.97% on Hard subset. Considering evaluation paradigm, rubric-level evaluation outperforms checklist-level, explicit reasoning improves accuracy, and both together reduce inter-judge variance. Through our established rubric taxonomy, we further identify common failure modes and offer actionable insights for reliable instruction-following evaluation.

Current benchmarks for evaluating neural code models focus on only a small subset of programming languages, excluding many popular languages such as Go or Rust. To ameliorate this issue, we present the BabelCode framework for execution-based evaluation of any benchmark in any language. BabelCode enables new investigations into the qualitative performance of models' memory, runtime, and individual test case results. Additionally, we present a new code translation dataset called Translating Python Programming Puzzles (TP3) from the Python Programming Puzzles (Schuster et al. 2021) benchmark that involves translating expert-level python functions to any language. With both BabelCode and the TP3 benchmark, we investigate if balancing the distributions of 14 languages in a training dataset improves a large language model's performance on low-resource languages. Training a model on a balanced corpus results in, on average, 12.34% higher pass@k across all tasks and languages compared to the baseline. We find that this strategy achieves 66.48% better pass@k on low-resource languages at the cost of only a 12.94% decrease to high-resource languages. In our three translation tasks, this strategy yields, on average, 30.77% better low-resource pass@k while having 19.58% worse high-resource pass@k.

With the increasing code reasoning capabilities of existing large language models (LLMs) and breakthroughs in reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and o3, there is a growing need to develop more challenging and comprehensive benchmarks that effectively test their sophisticated competition-level coding abilities. Existing benchmarks, like LiveCodeBench and USACO, fall short due to the unavailability of private test cases, lack of support for special judges, and misaligned execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeElo, a standardized competition-level code generation benchmark that effectively addresses all these challenges for the first time. CodeElo benchmark is mainly based on the official CodeForces platform and tries to align with the platform as much as possible. We compile the recent six months of contest problems on CodeForces with detailed information such as contest divisions, problem difficulty ratings, and problem algorithm tags. We introduce a unique judging method in which problems are submitted directly to the platform and develop a reliable Elo rating calculation system that aligns with the platform and is comparable with human participants but has lower variance. By testing on our CodeElo, we provide the Elo ratings of 30 existing popular open-source and 3 proprietary LLMs for the first time. The results show that o1-mini and QwQ-32B-Preview stand out significantly, achieving Elo ratings of 1578 and 1261, respectively, while other models struggle even with the easiest problems, placing in the lowest 20 percent among all human participants. Detailed analysis experiments are also conducted to provide insights into performance across algorithms and comparisons between using C++ and Python, which can suggest directions for future studies.

Multilingual benchmarks guide the development of frontier models. Yet multilingual evaluations reported by frontier models are structured similar to popular reasoning and knowledge benchmarks, but across many languages. We show such benchmarks, and consequently multilingual evaluations, measure mathematical reasoning and factual recall, not multilingual proficiency. For example, thinking variants dramatically outperform instruct variants on these benchmarks, yet often perform worse on real-world multilingual tasks, such as LMArena. We propose a simple alternative: evaluate multilingual capability via round-trip translation. Given text in a source language, translate it to a target language and back; semantic gaps between the original and result expose failures in multilingual generation capabilities. Round-trip translation correlates almost perfectly (ho = 0.94) with user ratings on LMArena with our benchmark, requires no human reference translations, and does not require a more capable multilingual judge than tested models. Lastly, we introduce Lost in Translation (LiT), a challenging round-trip translation benchmark spanning widely spoken languages worldwide, for realistic evaluation of multilingual frontier models.