Daily Papers

The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm shows promise for evaluating generative content but lacks reliability in reasoning-intensive scenarios, such as programming. Inspired by recent advances in reasoning models and shifts in scaling laws, we pioneer bringing test-time computation into LLM-as-a-Judge, proposing MCTS-Judge, a resource-efficient, System-2 thinking framework for code correctness evaluation. MCTS-Judge leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to decompose problems into simpler, multi-perspective evaluations. Through a node-selection strategy that combines self-assessment based on historical actions in the current trajectory and the Upper Confidence Bound for Trees based on prior rollouts, MCTS-Judge balances global optimization and refinement of the current trajectory. We further designed a high-precision, unit-test-level reward mechanism to encourage the Large Language Model (LLM) to perform line-by-line analysis. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks and five LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of MCTS-Judge, which improves the base model's accuracy from 41% to 80%, surpassing the o1-series models with 3x fewer tokens. Further evaluations validate the superiority of its reasoning trajectory in logic, analytics, thoroughness, and overall quality, while revealing the test-time scaling law of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm.

Through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), large language models have achieved substantial progress in domains with easily verifiable outcomes, such as mathematics and coding. However, when applied to more complex tasks like open-domain question answering, RLVR faces significant challenges due to the difficulty of verifying correctness. The nuanced and ambiguous nature of real-world knowledge makes it difficult to reliably evaluate correctness in these settings, necessitating further abilities that extend beyond mere logical consistency to encompass an understanding and assessment of both external and internal knowledge. Recent work has primarily focused on improving faithfulness, defined as semantic alignment with supporting documents, which can cause models to rely excessively on external sources and diminish their capacity for critical assessment. To address this, we propose the Thinking-supervised Reward Model (TRM), which incorporates sentence-level thinking supervision to endow reward models with critical thinking abilities. Given a query, answer, and supporting documents, TRM first assesses the faithfulness of each answer sentence to the supporting documents, and then applies a reasoning step to evaluate sentence-level correctness. By structuring reward modeling as a sequence of faithfulness, reasoning, and correctness evaluations, TRM encourages models to critically assess and leverage both external and internal knowledge. Experiments on reward signals demonstrate that TRM substantially improves the identification of incorrect sentences, and incorporating TRM into policy optimization leads to significant gains in both answer correctness and usefulness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) especially ChatGPT have produced impressive results in various areas, but their potential human-like psychology is still largely unexplored. Existing works study the virtual personalities of LLMs but rarely explore the possibility of analyzing human personalities via LLMs. This paper presents a generic evaluation framework for LLMs to assess human personalities based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. Specifically, we first devise unbiased prompts by randomly permuting options in MBTI questions and adopt the average testing result to encourage more impartial answer generation. Then, we propose to replace the subject in question statements to enable flexible queries and assessments on different subjects from LLMs. Finally, we re-formulate the question instructions in a manner of correctness evaluation to facilitate LLMs to generate clearer responses. The proposed framework enables LLMs to flexibly assess personalities of different groups of people. We further propose three evaluation metrics to measure the consistency, robustness, and fairness of assessment results from state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT. Our experiments reveal ChatGPT's ability to assess human personalities, and the average results demonstrate that it can achieve more consistent and fairer assessments in spite of lower robustness against prompt biases compared with InstructGPT.

A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system deployed over a multi-author institutional corpus can give a different answer to the same question depending on which source it retrieves -- a failure mode the dominant single-gold-answer paradigm cannot diagnose. We argue that source-dependence is a missing axis of NLP evaluation, and that auditing it means shifting the unit of evaluation from answer correctness to the inter-source relationship. We make this concrete in transplant patient education, where institutional sources demonstrably disagree, releasing three artefacts: TransplantQA, a benchmark of real patient questions, each answered by grounding generation in multiple institutional handbooks as candidate sources; HERO-QA, a hierarchical retrieval strategy that grounds and audits each answer; and a structured-output judge that scores inter-source relationships on a validated 5-label taxonomy. At scale, better retrieval reveals far more disagreement than prior estimates suggested -- understating its prevalence, not its intensity. The framework is domain-agnostic and transfers to legal and educational RAG: measuring source-dependence is a responsibility for deployed multi-source NLP generally.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs automatically and plays a crucial role in software development and maintenance. With the recent advances in deep learning (DL), an increasing number of APR techniques have been proposed to leverage neural networks to learn bug-fixing patterns from massive open-source code repositories. Such learning-based techniques usually treat APR as a neural machine translation (NMT) task, where buggy code snippets (i.e., source language) are translated into fixed code snippets (i.e., target language) automatically. Benefiting from the powerful capability of DL to learn hidden relationships from previous bug-fixing datasets, learning-based APR techniques have achieved remarkable performance. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the learning-based APR community. We illustrate the general workflow of learning-based APR techniques and detail the crucial components, including fault localization, patch generation, patch ranking, patch validation, and patch correctness phases. We then discuss the widely-adopted datasets and evaluation metrics and outline existing empirical studies. We discuss several critical aspects of learning-based APR techniques, such as repair domains, industrial deployment, and the open science issue. We highlight several practical guidelines on applying DL techniques for future APR studies, such as exploring explainable patch generation and utilizing code features. Overall, our paper can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the achievements of the existing learning-based APR techniques and promote the practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/QuanjunZhang/AwesomeLearningAPR.

This paper introduces GLLM, an innovative tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate G-code from natural language instructions for Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining. GLLM addresses the challenges of manual G-code writing by bridging the gap between human-readable task descriptions and machine-executable code. The system incorporates a fine-tuned StarCoder-3B model, enhanced with domain-specific training data and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism. GLLM employs advanced prompting strategies and a novel self-corrective code generation approach to ensure both syntactic and semantic correctness of the generated G-code. The architecture includes robust validation mechanisms, including syntax checks, G-code-specific verifications, and functional correctness evaluations using Hausdorff distance. By combining these techniques, GLLM aims to democratize CNC programming, making it more accessible to users without extensive programming experience while maintaining high accuracy and reliability in G-code generation.

Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently used for multi-faceted language generation and evaluation tasks that involve satisfying intricate user constraints or taking into account multiple aspects and criteria. However, their performance can fall short, due to the model's lack of coherence and inability to plan and decompose the problem. We propose Branch-Solve-Merge (BSM), a Large Language Model program (Schlag et al., 2023) for tackling such challenging natural language tasks. It consists of branch, solve, and merge modules that are parameterized with specific prompts to the base LLM. These three modules plan a decomposition of the task into multiple parallel sub-tasks, independently solve them, and fuse the solutions to the sub-tasks. We apply our method to the tasks of LLM response evaluation and constrained text generation and evaluate its effectiveness with multiple LLMs, including Vicuna, LLaMA-2-chat, and GPT-4. BSM improves the evaluation correctness and consistency for each LLM by enhancing human-LLM agreement by up to 26%, reducing length and pairwise position biases by up to 50%, and allowing LLaMA-2-chat to match or outperform GPT-4 on most domains. On the constraint story generation task, BSM improves the coherence of the stories while also improving constraint satisfaction by 12%.

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

The HLTCOE LiveRAG submission utilized the GPT-researcher framework for researching the context of the question, filtering the returned results, and generating the final answer. The retrieval system was a ColBERT bi-encoder architecture, which represents a passage with many dense tokens. Retrieval used a local, compressed index of the FineWeb10-BT collection created with PLAID-X, using a model fine-tuned for multilingual retrieval. Query generation from context was done with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, while filtering was accomplished with m2-bert-80M-8k-retrieval. Up to nine passages were used as context to generate an answer using Falcon3-10B. This system placed 5th in the LiveRAG automatic evaluation for correctness with a score of 1.07.

LLM-based Triton kernel generation has attracted significant interest, yet a fundamental empirical question remains unanswered: where does this capability break down, and why? We present KernelBench-X, a benchmark designed to answer this question through category-aware evaluation of correctness and hardware efficiency across 176 tasks in 15 categories. Our systematic comparison of five representative methods yields three main findings. First, task structure determines correctness more than method design. Category explains nearly three times more variance in semantic correctness than method (9.4% vs 3.3% explained deviance), and 72% of Fusion tasks fail across all five methods while Math tasks are solved consistently. Second, iterative refinement improves correctness, but not performance. Across GEAK iterations, compile rate rises from 52.3% to 68.8% while average speedup declines from 1.58times to 1.44times; newly rescued kernels consistently underperform persistently correct ones (1.16times vs 1.58times speedup in round~0to1). Third, correctness does not imply efficiency. 46.6% of correct kernels are slower than the PyTorch eager baseline, and cross-hardware speedup variance reaches 21.4times. Besides, quantization remains completely unsolved (0/30 successes) despite non-trivial compilation rates, revealing systematic misunderstanding of numerical computation contracts rather than surface-level syntax errors. These findings suggest that future progress depends on handling global coordination, explicitly modeling numerical precision, and incorporating hardware efficiency into generation. The code is available at https://github.com/BonnieW05/KernelBenchX

Despite growing interest in domain-specific benchmarking of large language models (LLMs) and agents, current evaluations remain limited to static, small-scale datasets, especially in high-stakes tasks like network operations that demand reliability for deployments. We present NetPress, an automated benchmark generation framework for evaluating LLM agents in network applications. NetPress introduces a unified abstraction with state and action, enabling dynamic generation of diverse query sets along with corresponding ground truths. At runtime, users can specify benchmark configurations to generate millions of queries on the fly. In addition to dynamic benchmark construction, NetPress integrates with network emulators to provide realistic environment feedback, supporting comprehensive evaluation across correctness, safety, and latency. We instantiate NetPress on three representative applications, revealing interesting fine-grained differences in agent behavior that static, correctness-only benchmarks often miss. NetPress moves LLM evaluation toward realistic, scalable testing in infrastructure-centric domains, helping close the gap between benchmark performance and real-world deployment readiness. Code is available at https://github.com/Froot-NetSys/NetPress.

As LLMs generate increasingly long outputs, effective uncertainty estimation must identify errors at fine-grained levels rather than discard entire responses. While such methods exist, evaluating uncertainty at any resolution (token to an entire generation) is challenging and highly sensitive to label imperfections, making zero-noise benchmarks essential; yet, long-form generation benchmarks tend to rely on fallible labels rather than deterministic ground truth. We introduce Single-answer Atomic Long-form Target (SALT), a benchmark of six procedurally generated tasks with single deterministic long textual ground truths, enabling unit-level evaluation of correctness, calibration, and ranking without external judges. Equipped with SALT, our analysis of 50+ LLMs reveals key insights: We identify which confidence functions dominate each uncertainty aspect and show that confidence ranking largely breaks at atomic resolution, even when clearer separability emerges at coarser line-level units. SALT further enables controlled atom-level interventions throughout generation, revealing two separable drivers of future errors: propagation from corrupted prefixes, dominated by global context correctness, and bounded degradation from increasing answer-context length. Finally, we demonstrate that reasoning, via Chain-of-Thought prompting or internalized through training, introduces a trade-off, improving accuracy while degrading confidence ranking. These findings directly impact risk-critical applications requiring reliable error identification and mitigation.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing large language models by encouraging step-by-step intermediate reasoning, and recent advances have extended this paradigm to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In the medical domain, where diagnostic decisions depend on nuanced visual cues and sequential reasoning, CoT aligns naturally with clinical thinking processes. However, Current benchmarks for medical image understanding generally focus on the final answer while ignoring the reasoning path. An opaque process lacks reliable bases for judgment, making it difficult to assist doctors in diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce a new M3CoTBench benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency of CoT reasoning in medical image understanding. M3CoTBench features 1) a diverse, multi-level difficulty dataset covering 24 examination types, 2) 13 varying-difficulty tasks, 3) a suite of CoT-specific evaluation metrics (correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency) tailored to clinical reasoning, and 4) a performance analysis of multiple MLLMs. M3CoTBench systematically evaluates CoT reasoning across diverse medical imaging tasks, revealing current limitations of MLLMs in generating reliable and clinically interpretable reasoning, and aims to foster the development of transparent, trustworthy, and diagnostically accurate AI systems for healthcare. Project page at https://juntaojianggavin.github.io/projects/M3CoTBench/.

To evaluate code large language models (LLMs), research has relied on a few small manually curated benchmarks, such as HumanEval and MBPP, which represent a narrow part of the real-world software domains. In this work, we introduce round-trip correctness (RTC) as an alternative evaluation method. RTC allows Code LLM evaluation on a broader spectrum of real-world software domains without the need for costly human curation. RTC rests on the idea that we can ask a model to make a prediction (e.g., describe some code using natural language), feed that prediction back (e.g., synthesize code from the predicted description), and check if this round-trip leads to code that is semantically equivalent to the original input. We show how to employ RTC to evaluate code synthesis and editing. We find that RTC strongly correlates with model performance on existing narrow-domain code synthesis benchmarks while allowing us to expand to a much broader set of domains and tasks which was not previously possible without costly human annotations.

Reasoning prefixes shape the future trajectory of LLM problem solving, yet existing process reward models usually evaluate them through local step correctness. We argue that correctness is a useful but indirect proxy for the effect we ultimately care about: whether a prefix increases the probability of successful completion. We define this effect as prefix gain, the solve-rate improvement induced by conditioning lightweight student model group on a prefix, and use it to train a Prefix Utility Model (PUM) with a simple pairwise ranking objective. PUM learns outcome-grounded prefix utility and can score both complete trajectories and partial reasoning prefixes. Across Best-of-N selection, beam search, and reinforcement learning on mathematical reasoning, PUM provides a strong prefix-level supervision signal, especially when candidate pools are large, search budgets increase, or rule-based rewards are sparse. We release all data, models, and code at https://zhiqix.github.io/pum-project-page.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have rapidly penetrated into people's work and daily lives over the past few years, due to their extraordinary conversational skills and intelligence. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing software in terms of user numbers in human history and become an important foundational model for the next generation of artificial intelligence applications. However, the generations of LLMs are not entirely reliable, often producing content with factual errors, biases, and toxicity. Given their vast number of users and wide range of application scenarios, these unreliable responses can lead to many serious negative impacts. This thesis introduces the exploratory works in the field of language model reliability during the PhD study, focusing on the correctness, non-toxicity, and fairness of LLMs from both software testing and natural language processing perspectives. First, to measure the correctness of LLMs, we introduce two testing frameworks, FactChecker and LogicAsker, to evaluate factual knowledge and logical reasoning accuracy, respectively. Second, for the non-toxicity of LLMs, we introduce two works for red-teaming LLMs. Third, to evaluate the fairness of LLMs, we introduce two evaluation frameworks, BiasAsker and XCulturalBench, to measure the social bias and cultural bias of LLMs, respectively.

Question answering (QA) can only make progress if we know if an answer is correct, but for many of the most challenging and interesting QA examples, current answer correctness (AC) metrics do not align with human judgments, particularly verbose, free form answers from large language models (LLM). There are two challenges: a lack of data and that models are too big. LLM based scorers correlate better with humans, but this expensive task has only been tested on limited QA datasets. We rectify these issues by providing clear guidelines for evaluating machine QA adopted from human QA contests. We also introduce Precise ANswer correctness Determination and Adjudication (PANDA), a small, efficient, deterministic AC classifier (812 KB) that more accurately evaluates answer correctness.

In this work, we explore uncertainty estimation as a proxy for correctness in LLM-generated code. To this end, we adapt two state-of-the-art techniques from natural language generation -- one based on entropy and another on mutual information -- to the domain of code generation. Given the distinct semantic properties of code, we introduce modifications, including a semantic equivalence check based on symbolic execution. Our findings indicate a strong correlation between the uncertainty computed through these techniques and correctness, highlighting the potential of uncertainty estimation for quality assessment. Additionally, we propose a simplified version of the entropy-based method that assumes a uniform distribution over the LLM's responses, demonstrating comparable effectiveness. Using these techniques, we develop an abstention policy that prevents the model from making predictions when uncertainty is high, reducing incorrect outputs to near zero. Our evaluation on the LiveCodeBench shows that our approach significantly outperforms a baseline relying solely on LLM-reported log-probabilities.

Correctness of instance segmentation constitutes counting the number of objects, correctly localizing all predictions and classifying each localized prediction. Average Precision is the de-facto metric used to measure all these constituents of segmentation. However, this metric does not penalize duplicate predictions in the high-recall range, and cannot distinguish instances that are localized correctly but categorized incorrectly. This weakness has inadvertently led to network designs that achieve significant gains in AP but also introduce a large number of false positives. We therefore cannot rely on AP to choose a model that provides an optimal tradeoff between false positives and high recall. To resolve this dilemma, we review alternative metrics in the literature and propose two new measures to explicitly measure the amount of both spatial and categorical duplicate predictions. We also propose a Semantic Sorting and NMS module to remove these duplicates based on a pixel occupancy matching scheme. Experiments show that modern segmentation networks have significant gains in AP, but also contain a considerable amount of duplicates. Our Semantic Sorting and NMS can be added as a plug-and-play module to mitigate hedged predictions and preserve AP.

In this paper, we propose DuaShepherd, a novel reward modeling framework that integrates two complementary reward signals, correctness and potential, to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While correctness-based signals emphasize identification of stepwise errors, potential-based signals focus on the likelihood of reaching the correct final answer. We developed an automated pipeline for constructing large-scale reward modeling dataset with both signals. A unified, multi-head architecture was explored to train the two reward models in a multi-task setup, demonstrating benefits from learning both correctness and potential in parallel. By combining these two signals into a compound probability, our model achieves consistent performance improvements across multiple benchmarks. Empirical evaluations on MATH500 and ProcessBench confirm that this combined reward significantly outperforms models trained on either reward type alone, achieving state-of-the-art performance under comparable resource constraints.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show strong visualization interpretation, yet it is unclear whether their responses reflect genuine reasoning over visual evidence or factual priors learned during training. Current evaluations mix these two sources, obscuring when correct visual interpretation is overridden by memorized facts. We present a framework that isolates visual correctness from factual correctness, revealing validity limitations in existing visualization literacy assessments. Across three experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LVLMs: (1) several models reach human-level performance on standard tests (VLAT), but this may reflect factual recall rather than visual understanding, while randomized-data tests (reVLAT) underestimate literacy when correct visual interpretation is superseded by factual priors. (2) Using our Counterfactual Visualization Literacy Assessment Test (CVLAT) with capability-normalized arbitration metrics, we classify models by the sign of their visual-factual reliance index (VFRI), revealing a visualization-oriented majority and a factual knowledge-oriented minority, though several near-zero cases warrant caution. A human baseline (N=30) on the same counterfactual items confirms that people overwhelmingly follow the chart under conflict, providing a human reference point. (3) Prompt-based intervention can shift prioritization, but its effectiveness is highly model-dependent and direction-asymmetric, and high chart-reading capability does not predict prompt-controllability. Overall, high visualization accuracy is not sufficient evidence of faithful visual reasoning: reliable integration into visual analytics requires evaluating not only visualization literacy but also how models arbitrate between visual evidence and factual priors when the two diverge. Benchmark and code: https://github.com/JaeyoungKim-HCIL/CVLAT

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, leading to their adoption in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific research. However, their reasoning often contains subtle logical errors masked by fluent language, posing significant risks for critical applications. While existing approaches like fact-checking, self-consistency methods, and rule-based validation provide partial solutions, they fail to detect complex logical flaws in multi-step reasoning. To overcome these challenges, we present MATP, an evaluation framework for systematically verifying LLM reasoning via Multi-step Automatic Theorem Proving. MATP translates natural language reasoning into First-Order Logic (FOL) and applies automated theorem provers to assess step-by-step logical validity. This approach identifies hidden logical errors and provides fine-grained classifications of reasoning correctness. Evaluations on a benchmark comprising 10,830 reasoning instances generated by 10 LLMs across tasks from PrOntoQA-OOD, ProofWriter, and FOLIO show that MATP surpasses prompting-based baselines by over 42 percentage points in reasoning step verification. It further reveals model-level disparities, with reasoning models generating more logically coherent outputs than general models. These results demonstrate MATP's potential to enhance the trustworthiness of LLM-generated reasoning.

Evaluating the real-world applicability of large language models (LLMs) provides valuable insights for their development and use in software development tasks. Existing benchmarks often focus on standalone coding problems or specific libraries, overlooking multi-file, project-based scenarios and lacking a rigorous evaluation of consistency. The HackerRank-ASTRA Benchmark introduces project-based coding problems that mirror real-world scenarios. It evaluates model consistency through 32 runs (k = 32) and median standard deviation while incorporating taxonomy-level analysis to assess sub-skill capabilities. Initial evaluations on 65 problems show that the top three models -- o1, o1-preview, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet-1022 -- achieved comparable average scores of 75%, with no statistically significant differences in performance. Notably, Claude-3.5-Sonnet-1022 demonstrated the highest consistency across problems, with low variability (SD = 0.0497), which was statistically significant compared to other models, highlighting its reliability for real-world software development tasks.

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa

Automatic metrics are now central to evaluating text-to-image models, often substituting for human judgment in benchmarking and large-scale filtering. However, it remains unclear whether these metrics truly prioritize semantic correctness or instead favor visually and socially prototypical images learned from biased data distributions. We identify and study prototypicality bias as a systematic failure mode in multimodal evaluation. We introduce a controlled contrastive benchmark ProtoBias (Prototypical Bias), spanning Animals, Objects, and Demography images, where semantically correct but non-prototypical images are paired with subtly incorrect yet prototypical adversarial counterparts. This setup enables a directional evaluation of whether metrics follow textual semantics or default to prototypes. Our results show that widely used metrics, including CLIPScore, PickScore, and VQA-based scores, frequently misrank these pairs, while even LLM-as-Judge systems exhibit uneven robustness in socially grounded cases. Human evaluations consistently favour semantic correctness with larger decision margins. Motivated by these findings, we propose ProtoScore, a robust 7B-parameter metric that substantially reduces failure rates and suppresses misranking, while running at orders of magnitude faster than the inference time of GPT-5, approaching the robustness of much larger closed-source judges.

Common evaluation paradigms for language models focus on scoring single responses through accuracy metrics or proper scoring rules, failing to capture the full richness of a model's belief state. Recent work illustrates that language models hallucinate in-part because they are optimised to be good test-takers under binary scoring schemes that reward any answer over abstention. While this insight naturally leads to penalty-based approaches, they ignore crucial distinctions in how models distribute uncertainty, for example between hedging toward incorrect answers versus hedging toward "I don't know" responses. A novel evaluation metric, the Distributional Correctness Score (DCS), is introduced to solve this problem, i.e., of not considering a model's entire probability distribution over answer choices. DCS naturally distinguishes between harmful overconfidence in wrong answers and uncertainty expressed through abstention, providing scores in an interpretable default range. Through theoretical analysis and illustrative examples, DCS is demonstrated to offer a more nuanced and aligned evaluation paradigm that incentivises models to express genuine uncertainty rather than guessing. Adapting 12 existing evaluation benchmarks to DCS's variants and measuring performance on six language models reveals that for half of the tested benchmarks scores are negative across all tested models, indicating significant tendencies towards hallucination.

Plain language summarization with LLMs can be useful for improving textual accessibility of technical content. But how factual are these summaries in a high-stakes domain like medicine? This paper presents FactPICO, a factuality benchmark for plain language summarization of medical texts describing randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are the basis of evidence-based medicine and can directly inform patient treatment. FactPICO consists of 345 plain language summaries of RCT abstracts generated from three LLMs (i.e., GPT-4, Llama-2, and Alpaca), with fine-grained evaluation and natural language rationales from experts. We assess the factuality of critical elements of RCTs in those summaries: Populations, Interventions, Comparators, Outcomes (PICO), as well as the reported findings concerning these. We also evaluate the correctness of the extra information (e.g., explanations) added by LLMs. Using FactPICO, we benchmark a range of existing factuality metrics, including the newly devised ones based on LLMs. We find that plain language summarization of medical evidence is still challenging, especially when balancing between simplicity and factuality, and that existing metrics correlate poorly with expert judgments on the instance level.

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in Language Models (LMs) is crucial for improving their safety and reliability. Evaluations often use performance metrics like AUROC to assess how well UQ methods (e.g., negative sequence probabilities) correlate with task correctness functions (e.g., ROUGE-L). In this paper, we show that commonly used correctness functions bias UQ evaluations by inflating the performance of certain UQ methods. We evaluate 7 correctness functions -- from lexical-based and embedding-based metrics to LLM-as-a-judge approaches -- across 4 datasets x 4 models x 6 UQ methods. Our analysis reveals that length biases in the errors of these correctness functions distort UQ assessments by interacting with length biases in UQ methods. We identify LLM-as-a-judge approaches as among the least length-biased choices and hence a potential solution to mitigate these biases.

Task planning for robotic cooking involves generating a sequence of actions for a robot to prepare a meal successfully. This paper introduces a novel task tree generation pipeline producing correct planning and efficient execution for cooking tasks. Our method first uses a large language model (LLM) to retrieve recipe instructions and then utilizes a fine-tuned GPT-3 to convert them into a task tree, capturing sequential and parallel dependencies among subtasks. The pipeline then mitigates the uncertainty and unreliable features of LLM outputs using task tree retrieval. We combine multiple LLM task tree outputs into a graph and perform a task tree retrieval to avoid questionable nodes and high-cost nodes to improve planning correctness and improve execution efficiency. Our evaluation results show its superior performance compared to previous works in task planning accuracy and efficiency.

Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of requirements and code semantics. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two code LMs. Our finding is that they generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We will release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at https://aka.ms/NoFunEval.

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new estimator, called OffCEM, that is based on the conjunct effect model (CEM), a novel decomposition of the causal effect into a cluster effect and a residual effect. OffCEM applies importance weighting only to action clusters and addresses the residual causal effect through model-based reward estimation. We show that the proposed estimator is unbiased under a new condition, called local correctness, which only requires that the residual-effect model preserves the relative expected reward differences of the actions within each cluster. To best leverage the CEM and local correctness, we also propose a new two-step procedure for performing model-based estimation that minimizes bias in the first step and variance in the second step. We find that the resulting OffCEM estimator substantially improves bias and variance compared to a range of conventional estimators. Experiments demonstrate that OffCEM provides substantial improvements in OPE especially in the presence of many actions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed vibe coding, where users leverage LLMs to generate and iteratively refine code through natural language interactions until it passes their vibe check. Vibe check is tied to real-world human preference and goes beyond functionality: the solution should feel right, read cleanly, preserve intent, and remain correct. However, current code evaluation remains anchored to pass@k and captures only functional correctness, overlooking the non-functional instructions that users routinely apply. In this paper, we hypothesize that instruction following is the missing piece underlying vibe check that represents human preference in coding besides functional correctness. To quantify models' code instruction following capabilities with measurable signals, we present VeriCode, a taxonomy of 30 verifiable code instructions together with corresponding deterministic verifiers. We use the taxonomy to augment established evaluation suites, resulting in Vibe Checker, a testbed to assess both code instruction following and functional correctness. Upon evaluating 31 leading LLMs, we show that even the strongest models struggle to comply with multiple instructions and exhibit clear functional regression. Most importantly, a composite score of functional correctness and instruction following correlates the best with human preference, with the latter emerging as the primary differentiator on real-world programming tasks. Our work identifies core factors of the vibe check, providing a concrete path for benchmarking and developing models that better align with user preferences in coding.

Humans use introspection to evaluate their understanding through private internal states inaccessible to external observers. We investigate whether large language models possess similar privileged knowledge about answer correctness, information unavailable through external observation. We train correctness classifiers on question representations from both a model's own hidden states and external models, testing whether self-representations provide a performance advantage. On standard evaluation, we find no advantage: self-probes perform comparably to peer-model probes. We hypothesize this is due to high inter-model agreement of answer correctness. To isolate genuine privileged knowledge, we evaluate on disagreement subsets, where models produce conflicting predictions. Here, we discover domain-specific privileged knowledge: self-representations consistently outperform peer representations in factual knowledge tasks, but show no advantage in math reasoning. We further localize this domain asymmetry across model layers, finding that the factual advantage emerges progressively from early-to-mid layers onward, consistent with model-specific memory retrieval, while math reasoning shows no consistent advantage at any depth.

Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple programming problems. Nevertheless, it is expensive to perform the same evaluation on complex real-world projects considering the execution cost. On the contrary, static analysis tools such as linters, which can detect errors without running the program, haven't been well explored for evaluating code generation models. In this work, we propose a static evaluation framework to quantify static errors in Python code completions, by leveraging Abstract Syntax Trees. Compared with execution-based evaluation, our method is not only more efficient, but also applicable to code in the wild. For experiments, we collect code context from open source repos to generate one million function bodies using public models. Our static analysis reveals that Undefined Name and Unused Variable are the most common errors among others made by language models. Through extensive studies, we also show the impact of sampling temperature, model size, and context on static errors in code completions.

Unit tests play a key role in ensuring the correctness of software. However, manually creating unit tests is a laborious task, motivating the need for automation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to this problem, utilizing additional training or few-shot learning on examples of existing tests. This paper presents a large-scale empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of LLMs for automated unit test generation without additional training or manual effort, providing the LLM with the signature and implementation of the function under test, along with usage examples extracted from documentation. We also attempt to repair failed generated tests by re-prompting the model with the failing test and error message. We implement our approach in TestPilot, a test generation tool for JavaScript that automatically generates unit tests for all API functions in an npm package. We evaluate TestPilot using OpenAI's gpt3.5-turbo LLM on 25 npm packages with a total of 1,684 API functions. The generated tests achieve a median statement coverage of 70.2% and branch coverage of 52.8%, significantly improving on Nessie, a recent feedback-directed JavaScript test generation technique, which achieves only 51.3% statement coverage and 25.6% branch coverage. We also find that 92.8% of TestPilot's generated tests have no more than 50% similarity with existing tests (as measured by normalized edit distance), with none of them being exact copies. Finally, we run TestPilot with two additional LLMs, OpenAI's older code-cushman-002 LLM and the open LLM StarCoder. Overall, we observed similar results with the former (68.2% median statement coverage), and somewhat worse results with the latter (54.0% median statement coverage), suggesting that the effectiveness of the approach is influenced by the size and training set of the LLM, but does not fundamentally depend on the specific model.

Automatic evaluation of large language model (LLM) responses requires not only factual correctness but also clarity, particularly in political question-answering. While recent datasets provide human annotations for clarity and evasion, the impact of prompt design on automatic clarity evaluation remains underexplored. In this paper, we study prompt-based clarity evaluation using the CLARITY dataset from the SemEval 2026 shared task. We compare a GPT-3.5 baseline provided with the dataset against GPT-5.2 evaluated under three prompting strategies: simple prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and chain-of-thought with few-shot examples. Model predictions are evaluated against human annotations using accuracy and class-wise metrics for clarity and evasion, along with hierarchical exact match. Results show that GPT-5.2 consistently outperforms the GPT-3.5 baseline on clarity prediction, with accuracy improving from 56 percent to 63 percent under chain-of-thought with few-shot prompting. Chain-of-thought prompting yields the highest evasion accuracy at 34 percent, though improvements are less stable across fine-grained evasion categories. We further evaluate topic identification and find that reasoning-based prompting improves accuracy from 60 percent to 74 percent relative to human annotations. Overall, our findings indicate that prompt design reliably improves high-level clarity evaluation, while fine-grained evasion and topic detection remain challenging despite structured reasoning prompts.

This paper introduces the Opus Workflow Evaluation Framework, a probabilistic-normative formulation for quantifying Workflow quality and efficiency. It integrates notions of correctness, reliability, and cost into a coherent mathematical model that enables direct comparison, scoring, and optimization of Workflows. The framework combines the Opus Workflow Reward, a probabilistic function estimating expected performance through success likelihood, resource usage, and output gain, with the Opus Workflow Normative Penalties, a set of measurable functions capturing structural and informational quality across Cohesion, Coupling, Observability, and Information Hygiene. It supports automated Workflow assessment, ranking, and optimization within modern automation systems such as Opus and can be integrated into Reinforcement Learning loops to guide Workflow discovery and refinement. In this paper, we introduce the Opus Workflow Reward model that formalizes Workflow success as a probabilistic expectation over costs and outcomes. We define measurable Opus Workflow Normative Penalties capturing structural, semantic, and signal-related properties of Workflows. Finally, we propose a unified optimization formulation for identifying and ranking optimal Workflows under joint Reward-Penalty trade-offs.

Evaluating radiology reports is a challenging problem as factual correctness is extremely important due to the need for accurate medical communication about medical images. Existing automatic evaluation metrics either suffer from failing to consider factual correctness (e.g., BLEU and ROUGE) or are limited in their interpretability (e.g., F1CheXpert and F1RadGraph). In this paper, we introduce GREEN (Generative Radiology Report Evaluation and Error Notation), a radiology report generation metric that leverages the natural language understanding of language models to identify and explain clinically significant errors in candidate reports, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Compared to current metrics, GREEN offers: 1) a score aligned with expert preferences, 2) human interpretable explanations of clinically significant errors, enabling feedback loops with end-users, and 3) a lightweight open-source method that reaches the performance of commercial counterparts. We validate our GREEN metric by comparing it to GPT-4, as well as to error counts of 6 experts and preferences of 2 experts. Our method demonstrates not only higher correlation with expert error counts, but simultaneously higher alignment with expert preferences when compared to previous approaches."

This paper investigates the evaluation of learned multiagent strategies in the incomplete information setting, which plays a critical role in ranking and training of agents. Traditionally, researchers have relied on Elo ratings for this purpose, with recent works also using methods based on Nash equilibria. Unfortunately, Elo is unable to handle intransitive agent interactions, and other techniques are restricted to zero-sum, two-player settings or are limited by the fact that the Nash equilibrium is intractable to compute. Recently, a ranking method called α-Rank, relying on a new graph-based game-theoretic solution concept, was shown to tractably apply to general games. However, evaluations based on Elo or α-Rank typically assume noise-free game outcomes, despite the data often being collected from noisy simulations, making this assumption unrealistic in practice. This paper investigates multiagent evaluation in the incomplete information regime, involving general-sum many-player games with noisy outcomes. We derive sample complexity guarantees required to confidently rank agents in this setting. We propose adaptive algorithms for accurate ranking, provide correctness and sample complexity guarantees, then introduce a means of connecting uncertainties in noisy match outcomes to uncertainties in rankings. We evaluate the performance of these approaches in several domains, including Bernoulli games, a soccer meta-game, and Kuhn poker.

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential. However, establishing such a benchmark is not a trivial task due to the challenges associated with evaluation accuracy and privacy protection. In response to these challenges, we introduce a judge large language model, named PandaLM, which is trained to distinguish the superior model given several LLMs. PandaLM's focus extends beyond just the objective correctness of responses, which is the main focus of traditional evaluation datasets. It addresses vital subjective factors such as relative conciseness, clarity, adherence to instructions, comprehensiveness, and formality. To ensure the reliability of PandaLM, we collect a diverse human-annotated test dataset, where all contexts are generated by humans and labels are aligned with human preferences. Our results indicate that PandaLM-7B achieves 93.75% of GPT-3.5's evaluation ability and 88.28% of GPT-4's in terms of F1-score on our test dataset. PandaLM enables the evaluation of LLM to be fairer but with less cost, evidenced by significant improvements achieved by models tuned through PandaLM compared to their counterparts trained with default Alpaca's hyperparameters. In addition, PandaLM does not depend on API-based evaluations, thus avoiding potential data leakage. All resources of PandaLM are released at https://github.com/WeOpenML/PandaLM.

Editing images using natural language instructions has become a natural and expressive way to modify visual content; yet, evaluating the performance of such models remains challenging. Existing evaluation approaches often rely on image-text similarity metrics like CLIP, which lack precision. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark designed to evaluate text-guided image editing models in a more grounded manner, along two critical dimensions: (i) functional correctness, assessed via automatically generated multiple-choice questions that verify whether the intended change was successfully applied; and (ii) image content preservation, which ensures that non-targeted regions of the image remain visually consistent using an object-aware masking technique and preservation scoring. The benchmark includes over 1000 high-quality editing examples across 20 diverse content categories, each annotated with detailed editing instructions, evaluation questions, and spatial object masks. We conduct a large-scale study comparing GPT-Image-1, the latest flagship in the text-guided image editing space, against several state-of-the-art editing models, and validate our automatic metrics against human ratings. Results show that GPT-Image-1 leads in instruction-following accuracy, but often over-modifies irrelevant image regions, highlighting a key trade-off in the current model behavior. GIE-Bench provides a scalable, reproducible framework for advancing more accurate evaluation of text-guided image editing.

Evaluating text revision in scientific writing remains a challenge, as traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore primarily focus on similarity rather than capturing meaningful improvements. In this work, we analyse and identify the limitations of these metrics and explore alternative evaluation methods that better align with human judgments. We first conduct a manual annotation study to assess the quality of different revisions. Then, we investigate reference-free evaluation metrics from related NLP domains. Additionally, we examine LLM-as-a-judge approaches, analysing their ability to assess revisions with and without a gold reference. Our results show that LLMs effectively assess instruction-following but struggle with correctness, while domain-specific metrics provide complementary insights. We find that a hybrid approach combining LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and task-specific metrics offers the most reliable assessment of revision quality.

Code Agents have achieved remarkable advances in recent years, exhibiting strong capabilities across a wide range of software engineering tasks. However, their misuse often produces bloated and disorganized code that impairing readability, extensibility, and robustness. Despite this risk, existing benchmarks largely evaluate functional correctness rather than long-term maintainability of code agents. In this paper, we propose SmellBench, an extensible code refactoring benchmark that proactively injects code smells into clean code snippets from real-world repositories. This design enables the generation of controlled, high-quality, and diverse refactoring cases with human-written ground truth. Specifically, it contains 294 cases spanning 7 popular smell types, 3 difficulty levels, 2 instruction settings across 7 real-world repositories. We further design 3 evaluation aspects covering functional correctness, localization ability, and refactoring quality assessment. Experiments with 2 popular agents and 6 large langauge models (LLMs) show that the best combination - Qwen Code + Claude Sonnet 4.5 - achieved only a 50.34 score of smell elimination. Further analysis reveals that this gap arises from a focus on local code smells and a lack of cross-file understanding, which hinders comprehensive smell elimination.

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

The evaluation of generated reports remains a critical challenge in Computed Tomography (CT) report generation, due to the large volume of text, the diversity and complexity of findings, and the presence of fine-grained, disease-oriented attributes. Conventional evaluation metrics offer only coarse measures of lexical overlap or entity matching and fail to reflect the granular diagnostic accuracy required for clinical use. To address this gap, we propose CT-FineBench, a benchmark built from CT-RATE and Merlin to evaluate the fine-grained factual consistency of CT reports, constructed from CT-RATE and Merlin. Our benchmark is constructed through a meticulous, Question-Answering (QA) based process: first, we identify and structure key, finding-specific clinical attributes (like location, size, margin). Second, we systematically transform these attributes into a QA dataset, where questions probe for specific clinical details grounded in gold-standard reports. The evaluation protocol for CT-FineBench involves using this QA dataset to query a machine-generated report and scoring the correctness of the answers. This allows for a comprehensive, interpretable, and clinically-relevant assessment, moving beyond superficial lexical overlap to pinpoint specific clinical errors. Experiments show that CT-FineBench correlates better with expert clinical assessment and is substantially more sensitive to fine-grained factual errors than prior metrics.

The rapid expansion of context length in large language models (LLMs) has outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks. Current long-context benchmarks often trade off scalability and realism: synthetic tasks underrepresent real-world complexity, while fully manual annotation is costly to scale to extreme lengths and diverse scenarios. We present LongBench Pro, a more realistic and comprehensive bilingual benchmark of 1,500 naturally occurring long-context samples in English and Chinese spanning 11 primary tasks and 25 secondary tasks, with input lengths from 8k to 256k tokens. LongBench Pro supports fine-grained analysis with task-specific metrics and a multi-dimensional taxonomy of context requirement (full vs. partial dependency), length (six levels), and difficulty (four levels calibrated by model performance). To balance quality with scalability, we propose a Human-Model Collaborative Construction pipeline: frontier LLMs draft challenging questions and reference answers, along with design rationales and solution processes, to reduce the cost of expert verification. Experts then rigorously validate correctness and refine problematic cases. Evaluating 46 widely used long-context LLMs on LongBench Pro yields three findings: (1) long-context optimization contributes more to long-context comprehension than parameter scaling; (2) effective context length is typically shorter than the claimed context length, with pronounced cross-lingual misalignment; and (3) the "thinking" paradigm helps primarily models trained with native reasoning, while mixed-thinking designs offer a promising Pareto trade-off. In summary, LongBench Pro provides a robust testbed for advancing long-context understanding.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a critical technique for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in factual evidence, yet evaluating RAG systems in specialized, safety-critical domains remains a significant challenge. Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on heuristic-based metrics that fail to capture domain-specific nuances and other works utilize LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that lack validated alignment with human judgment. This paper introduces RAGalyst, an automated, human-aligned agentic framework designed for the rigorous evaluation of domain-specific RAG systems. RAGalyst features an agentic pipeline that generates high-quality, synthetic question-answering (QA) datasets from source documents, incorporating an agentic filtering step to ensure data fidelity. The framework refines two key LLM-as-a-Judge metrics-Answer Correctness and Answerability-using prompt optimization to achieve a strong correlation with human annotations. Applying this framework to evaluate various RAG components across three distinct domains (military operations, cybersecurity, and bridge engineering), we find that performance is highly context-dependent. No single embedding model, LLM, or hyperparameter configuration proves universally optimal. Additionally, we provide an analysis on the most common low Answer Correctness reasons in RAG. These findings highlight the necessity of a systematic evaluation framework like RAGalyst, which empowers practitioners to uncover domain-specific trade-offs and make informed design choices for building reliable and effective RAG systems. RAGalyst is available on our Github.

Hallucinations are a common issue that undermine the reliability of large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have identified a specific subset of hallucinations, known as confabulations, which arise due to predictive uncertainty of LLMs. To detect confabulations, various methods for estimating predictive uncertainty in natural language generation (NLG) have been developed. These methods are typically evaluated by correlating uncertainty estimates with the correctness of generated text, with question-answering (QA) datasets serving as the standard benchmark. However, commonly used approximate correctness functions have substantial disagreement between each other and, consequently, in the ranking of the uncertainty estimation methods. This allows one to inflate the apparent performance of uncertainty estimation methods. We propose using several alternative risk indicators for risk correlation experiments that improve robustness of empirical assessment of UE algorithms for NLG. For QA tasks, we show that marginalizing over multiple LLM-as-a-judge variants leads to reducing the evaluation biases. Furthermore, we explore structured tasks as well as out of distribution and perturbation detection tasks which provide robust and controllable risk indicators. Finally, we propose to use an Elo rating of uncertainty estimation methods to give an objective summarization over extensive evaluation settings.

LLM self-evaluation relies on the LLM's own ability to estimate response correctness, which can greatly improve its deployment reliability. In this research track, we propose the Chain-of-Embedding (CoE) in the latent space to enable LLMs to perform output-free self-evaluation. CoE consists of all progressive hidden states produced during the inference time, which can be treated as the latent thinking path of LLMs. We find that when LLMs respond correctly and incorrectly, their CoE features differ, these discrepancies assist us in estimating LLM response correctness. Experiments in four diverse domains and seven LLMs fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Meanwhile, its label-free design intent without any training and millisecond-level computational cost ensures real-time feedback in large-scale scenarios. More importantly, we provide interesting insights into LLM response correctness from the perspective of hidden state changes inside LLMs.

Unit testing is an essential activity in software development for verifying the correctness of software components. However, manually writing unit tests is challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new direction for automating unit test generation. Existing research primarily focuses on closed-source LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT and CodeX) with fixed prompting strategies, leaving the capabilities of advanced open-source LLMs with various prompting settings unexplored. Particularly, open-source LLMs offer advantages in data privacy protection and have demonstrated superior performance in some tasks. Moreover, effective prompting is crucial for maximizing LLMs' capabilities. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study to fill this gap, based on 17 Java projects, five widely-used open-source LLMs with different structures and parameter sizes, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our findings highlight the significant influence of various prompt factors, show the performance of open-source LLMs compared to the commercial GPT-4 and the traditional Evosuite, and identify limitations in LLM-based unit test generation. We then derive a series of implications from our study to guide future research and practical use of LLM-based unit test generation.

Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce ROSE, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a largescale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.

While small language models (SLMs) have shown promise on various reasoning tasks, their ability to judge the correctness of answers remains unclear compared to large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLM-as-a-judge frameworks typically relies on comparing candidate answers against ground-truth labels or other candidate answers using predefined metrics like entailment. However, this approach is inherently indirect and difficult to fully automate, offering limited support for fine-grained and scalable evaluation of reasoning outputs. In this work, we propose JudgeBoard, a novel evaluation pipeline that directly queries models to assess the correctness of candidate answers without requiring extra answer comparisons. We focus on two core reasoning domains: mathematical reasoning and science/commonsense reasoning, and construct task-specific evaluation leaderboards using both accuracy-based ranking and an Elo-based rating system across five benchmark datasets, enabling consistent model comparison as judges rather than comparators. To improve judgment performance in lightweight models, we propose MAJ (Multi-Agent Judging), a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that leverages multiple interacting SLMs with distinct reasoning profiles to approximate LLM-level judgment accuracy through collaborative deliberation. Experimental results reveal a significant performance gap between SLMs and LLMs in isolated judging tasks. However, our MAJ framework substantially improves the reliability and consistency of SLMs. On the MATH dataset, MAJ using smaller-sized models as backbones performs comparatively well or even better than their larger-sized counterparts. Our findings highlight that multi-agent SLM systems can potentially match or exceed LLM performance in judgment tasks, with implications for scalable and efficient assessment.

Large language models are increasingly used as chemistry assistants, yet most chemistry benchmarks still score only final answers. This masks a critical failure mode: a model may output the correct molecule, product, or option while its reasoning violates chemical logic. Existing process-level evaluators are hard to scale because LLM judges and human step-level process annotation are costly, inconsistent, and vulnerable to hallucination. We introduce ChemCoTBench-V2, a rule-verifiable diagnostic benchmark for low-cost, auditable evaluation of structured, verifier-addressable chemical reasoning traces. It spans molecular understanding, molecule editing, molecular optimization, and reaction prediction, with 5,620 evaluation samples across 18 reporting tasks. Models must expose key intermediate steps in expert-designed templates, and those steps are checked with deterministic chemistry rules and, for closed-answer tasks, reference traces rather than another LLM judge. Open-ended molecular optimization is evaluated with oracle-verifiable state constraints rather than strict trace matching. The benchmark reports three separate signals: final-answer correctness, template adherence, and step-wise verifier correctness over expert-refined intermediate commitments. Experiments on frontier models reveal a persistent gap between final-answer success and structured-reasoning-state consistency: models often follow the requested format while failing chemical-step checks, or answer correctly with weak supporting reasoning. ChemCoTBench-V2 enables fine-grained model comparison and identifies the concrete step at which the trace first violates the verifier.

Evaluating text-to-SQL systems remains largely fragile: correctness is typically judged by executing predicted and gold SQL queries on a single static database, even though the same queries may behave differently under alternative database instances. This raises a broader language modeling question: Can large language models synthesize semantically meaningful, schema-consistent relational data directly from a natural language question? If so, such generation can serve as a controlled mechanism for stress-testing text-to-SQL systems beyond fixed benchmark databases. We introduce SynSQL, a framework that synthesizes test databases conditioned on question-schema alignment rather than gold SQL queries. SynSQL decomposes the task into three stages: (1) schema selection, (2) question-guided data synthesis, and (3) constraint-aware critique with iterative refinement, framing database construction as structured generation under semantic and relational constraints. Across ten text-to-SQL models on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0, SynSQL-generated databases reveal performance drops of 3-14% compared to static evaluation, exposing errors masked by benchmark artifacts. We further analyze generation quality, constraint adherence, and failure modes, highlighting both the promise and limitations of LLMs in structured data synthesis. Our findings position synthetic database generation as a new lens for studying LLM reasoning, controllability, and robustness in structured environments.

Recent studies demonstrate that tool-calling capability enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external environments for long-horizon financial tasks. While existing benchmarks have begun evaluating financial tool calling, they focus on limited scenarios and rely on call-level metrics that fail to capture trajectory-level reasoning quality. To address this gap, we introduce FinTrace, a benchmark comprising 800 expert-annotated trajectories spanning 34 real-world financial task categories across multiple difficulty levels. FinTrace employs a rubric-based evaluation protocol with nine metrics organized along four axes -- action correctness, execution efficiency, process quality, and output quality -- enabling fine-grained assessment of LLM tool-calling behavior. Our evaluation of 13 LLMs reveals that while frontier models achieve strong tool selection, all models struggle with information utilization and final answer quality, exposing a critical gap between invoking the right tools and reasoning effectively over their outputs. To move beyond diagnosis, we construct FinTrace-Training, the first trajectory-level preference dataset for financial tool-calling, containing 8,196 curated trajectories with tool-augmented contexts and preference pairs. We fine-tune Qwen-3.5-9B using supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization (DPO) and show that training on FinTrace-Training consistently improves intermediate reasoning metrics, with DPO more effectively suppressing failure modes. However, end-to-end answer quality remains a bottleneck, indicating that trajectory-level improvements do not yet fully propagate to final output quality.

While large language models have significantly accelerated scientific code generation, comprehensively evaluating the generated code remains a major challenge. Traditional benchmarks reduce evaluation to test-case matching, an approach insufficient for library code in HPC where solver selection, API conventions, memory management, and performance are just as critical as functional correctness. To address this gap, we introduce petscagent-bench, an agentic framework built on an agents-evaluating-agents paradigm. Instead of relying on static scripts, petscagent-bench deploys a tool-augmented evaluator agent that compiles, executes, and measures code produced by a separate model-under-test agent, orchestrating a 14-evaluator pipeline across five scoring categories: correctness, performance, code quality, algorithmic appropriateness, and library-specific conventions. Because the agents communicate through standardized protocols (A2A and MCP), the framework enables black-box evaluation of any coding agent without requiring access to its source code. We demonstrate the framework on a benchmark suite of realistic problems using the PETSc library for HPC. Our empirical analysis of frontier models reveals that while current models generate readable, well-structured code, they consistently struggle with library-specific conventions that traditional pass/fail metrics completely miss.

We introduce CRYSTAL (Clear Reasoning via Yielded Steps, Traceability, and Logic), a diagnostic benchmark with 6,372 instances that evaluates multimodal reasoning through verifiable intermediate steps. We propose two complementary metrics: Match F1, which scores step-level precision and recall via semantic similarity matching, and Ordered Match F1, which further penalizes disordered reasoning chains. References are constructed through a Delphi-inspired pipeline in which four independent MLLMs generate trajectories, which are then aggregated via semantic clustering and validated through human quality gates. Evaluation of 20 MLLMs, including commercial frontier systems not used during benchmark construction, reveals systematic failures that are invisible to answer accuracy: universal cherry-picking (precision far exceeds recall), non-monotonic scaling trade-offs, and disordered reasoning in which no competitive model preserves more than 60% of matched steps in the correct order. Beyond evaluation, we propose the Causal Process Reward (CPR), a multiplicative reward that couples answer correctness with step-level alignment, and CPR-Curriculum, which progressively increases reasoning difficulty during training. CPR-Curriculum achieves a 32% improvement in Match F1 via GRPO where additive reward strategies fail, improving reasoning without manual step annotation.

Large language models (LLMs) produce outputs with varying levels of uncertainty, and, just as often, varying levels of correctness; making their practical reliability far from guaranteed. To quantify this uncertainty, we systematically evaluate four approaches for confidence estimation in LLM outputs: VCE, MSP, Sample Consistency, and CoCoA (Vashurin et al., 2025). For the evaluation of the approaches, we conduct experiments on four question-answering tasks using a state-of-the-art open-source LLM. Our results show that each uncertainty metric captures a different facet of model confidence and that the hybrid CoCoA approach yields the best reliability overall, improving both calibration and discrimination of correct answers. We discuss the trade-offs of each method and provide recommendations for selecting uncertainty measures in LLM applications.

Formal verification is the next frontier for ensuring the correctness of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). While methods that co-generate code and formal specifications in formal languages, like Dafny, can, in principle, prove alignment with user intent, progress is bottlenecked by specification quality evaluation. Current benchmarks rely on matching against ground-truth specifications, a manual and expertise-intensive process that has limited existing datasets to a few hundred simple problems and also suffers from a reliability issue. To address this, we introduce VeriEquivBench, a new benchmark with 2,389 complex algorithmic problems that probe the limitations of current models in both code generation and formal reasoning. Our evaluation framework replaces ground-truth matching with a formally grounded metric, the equivalence score, and rigorously verifies the quality of generated specifications and code. Our results show that generating formally verifiable code remains a profound challenge for state-of-the-art LLMs. This underscores both the difficulty of the task and the need for benchmarks like VeriEquivBench to drive progress toward scalable and reliable coding agents.

Designing Verilog modules requires meticulous attention to correctness, efficiency, and adherence to design specifications. However, manually writing Verilog code remains a complex and time-consuming task that demands both expert knowledge and iterative refinement. Leveraging recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their structured text generation capabilities, we propose VeriMind, an agentic LLM framework for Verilog code generation that significantly automates and optimizes the synthesis process. Unlike traditional LLM-based code generators, VeriMind employs a structured reasoning approach: given a user-provided prompt describing design requirements, the system first formulates a detailed train of thought before the final Verilog code is generated. This multi-step methodology enhances interpretability, accuracy, and adaptability in hardware design. In addition, we introduce a novel evaluation metric-pass@ARC-which combines the conventional pass@k measure with Average Refinement Cycles (ARC) to capture both success rate and the efficiency of iterative refinement. Experimental results on diverse hardware design tasks demonstrated that our approach achieved up to 8.3% improvement on pass@k metric and 8.1% on pass@ARC metric. These findings underscore the transformative potential of agentic LLMs in automated hardware design, RTL development, and digital system synthesis.

The generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding from static code to dynamic, interactive visual artifacts. This progress is bottlenecked by a critical evaluation gap: established benchmarks focus on algorithmic correctness and are blind to the visual fidelity and interactive integrity that define modern user experiences. To bridge this gap, we introduce ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark and paradigm for the automated, multimodal evaluation of visual code generation. Our framework programmatically renders each generated artifact and captures its dynamic behavior through temporal screenshots. This visual evidence, alongside the source code, is then assessed by a Multimodal LLM (MLLM)-as-Judge, which is rigorously guided by a fine-grained, per-task checklist to ensure holistic and reproducible scoring. We construct a new benchmark of 1,825 diverse tasks and evaluate over 30 leading LLMs. Our automated evaluation achieves a striking 94.4% ranking consistency with WebDev Arena, the gold-standard for human preference in web development, and over 90% pairwise agreement with human experts. This establishes ArtifactsBench as the first framework to reliably automate the assessment of human-perceived quality at scale. Our analysis provides a high-resolution map of the current SOTA, revealing that generalist models often outperform domain-specific ones. We open-source ArtifactsBench, including the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/, to provide the community with a scalable and accurate tool to accelerate the development of user-centric generative models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable achievements, yet the generation of non-factual responses remains prevalent in fact-seeking question answering (QA). Current multimodal fact-seeking benchmarks primarily focus on comparing model outputs to ground truth answers, providing limited insights into the performance of modality-specific modules. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualSimpleQA, a multimodal fact-seeking benchmark with two key features. First, it enables streamlined and decoupled evaluation of LVLMs in visual and linguistic modalities. Second, it incorporates well-defined difficulty criteria to guide human annotation and facilitates the extraction of a challenging subset, VisualSimpleQA-hard. Experiments on 15 LVLMs show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve merely 60%+ correctness in multimodal fact-seeking QA on VisualSimpleQA and 30%+ on VisualSimpleQA-hard. Furthermore, the decoupled evaluation across these models highlights substantial opportunities for improvement in both visual and linguistic modules. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WYLing/VisualSimpleQA.

Function calling is a core capability of large language models, essential for AI agents. Existing benchmarks such as the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL), tau^2-Bench (arXiv:2506.07982), and ACEBench (arXiv:2501.12851) evaluate argument correctness but do not test adherence to format instructions embedded in parameter descriptions, such as enclosing values in double quotes or using ISO date formats. We introduce IFEval-FC, a benchmark inspired by IFEval (arXiv:2311.07911) that assesses precise instruction following in function calling. IFEval-FC encodes verifiable formats directly within JSON schema descriptions, for example specifying that a value must not contain punctuation. It includes 750 test cases, each consisting of a function with an embedded format for one of its input parameters and a corresponding user query. Evaluation is fully algorithmic, ensuring objectivity, reproducibility, and scalability. Our results show that even state-of-the-art proprietary models, including GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 Opus, frequently fail to follow basic formatting rules, highlighting a practical limitation for real-world agent systems. The complete codebase and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Skripkon/IFEval-FC.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for instrument control requires methods that go beyond standard, stateless algorithmic benchmarks, since the behavior of physical systems cannot be fully captured by unit tests alone. Here we introduce EnvTrace, a simulation-based method that evaluates execution traces to assess semantic code equivalence. EnvTrace is demonstrated with a beamline control-logic digital twin to facilitate the evaluation of instrument control code, with the digital twin itself also enabling the pre-execution validation of live experiments. Over 30 LLMs were evaluated using trace alignment to generate a multi-faceted score for functional correctness across key behavioral dimensions, showing that many top-tier models can approach human-level performance in rapid control-code generation. This is a first step toward a broader vision where LLMs and digital twins work symbiotically: LLMs providing intuitive control and agentic orchestration, and digital twins offering safe and high-fidelity environments, paving the way towards autonomous embodied AI.

Automatic singing quality assessment (SQA) requires evaluating lyrical correctness and musical fidelity while handling expressive variations. However, existing systems largely rely on either acoustic cues or lyric transcriptions exclusively, limiting holistic performance evaluation. Furthermore, their integration is non-trivial due to challenges in robust singing transcription amid melisma, vibrato, and tempo elasticity. To this end, we propose MusicJudge, a modality-guided framework for automated SQA that performs block-aligned multimodal analysis by coupling lyric correctness with pitch-rhythm fidelity. It detects semantically meaningful lyric blocks using multi-signal matching that integrates semantic embeddings, lexical similarity, and phonetic alignment. To improve singing audio transcription, we introduce Modality-Guided LoRA for ASR fine-tuning. Experiments across datasets demonstrate strong agreement with human expert judgments and validate the generalizability of MusicJudge.

Large language models excel on objectively verifiable tasks such as math and programming, where evaluation reduces to unit tests or a single correct answer. In contrast, real-world enterprise work is often subjective and context-dependent: success hinges on organizational goals, user intent, and the quality of intermediate artifacts produced across long, multi-tool workflows. We introduce LH-Bench, a three-pillar evaluation design that moves beyond binary correctness to score autonomous, long-horizon execution on subjective enterprise tasks. The pillars are: (i) expert-grounded rubrics that give LLM judges the domain context needed to score subjective work, (ii) curated ground-truth artifacts that enable stepwise reward signals (e.g., chapter-level annotation for content tasks), and (iii) pairwise human preference evaluation for convergent validation. We show that domain-authored rubrics provide substantially more reliable evaluation signals than LLM-authored rubrics (kappa = 0.60 vs. 0.46), and that human preference judgments confirm the same top-tier separation (p < 0.05), evidence that expert-grounded evaluation can scale without sacrificing reliability. We release public datasets and report results on two environments: Figma-to-code (33 real .fig tasks against the Figma API via MCP) and Programmatic content (41 courses comprising 183 individually-evaluated chapters on a course platform serving 30+ daily users).

This paper presents an eight-week observational comparison of 68 single-file HTML generations collected across 17 public experiments in the "HTML AI Battle" project between December 10, 2025 and February 4, 2026. Four reasoning model families, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, were compared under a fixed public-interface protocol with no custom instructions, no personality tuning, and no repair prompts. Each output was evaluated from a rendered browser video using human scores and a Gemini LLM-as-a-judge layer for prompt adherence, functional correctness, and UI quality, then packaged into a standardized social-media protocol spanning X (Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube. The tracker was also used for two supervised predictive analyses: an experiment-level model for 24-hour X impressions and a generation-level model for HTML verbosity. Under this protocol, Claude was the strongest and most consistent family, leading mean performance and winning 9/17 prompts under the primary human weighted score. Longer measured reasoning time was not associated with higher quality overall. Gemini as a judge was significantly more lenient than the human evaluator on functional correctness and overall performance, while stable self-favoring bias remained unresolved. The exploratory X-impressions model remained weak under post-screen cross-validation (MAE = 46,874, R^2 = -0.377), whereas the HTML-lines model performed better, with a model-family-only baseline outperforming prompt-aware alternatives (MAE = 135.2, R^2 = 0.576). Overall, selected pre-publication technical/audio variables were not sufficient to predict 24-hour X reach, while code verbosity was driven much more by model family than by prompt wording. The comparisons remain observational and are limited by public-interface drift, access-path differences, and one primary human scorer.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in generating structured diagrams from natural language descriptions. In particular, they have shown great promise in generating sequence diagrams for software engineering, typically represented in a text-based syntax such as Mermaid. However, systematic evaluations in this space remain underdeveloped as there is a lack of existing benchmarks to assess the LLM's correctness in this task. To address this shortcoming, we introduce MermaidSeqBench, a human-verified and LLM-synthetically-extended benchmark for assessing an LLM's capabilities in generating Mermaid sequence diagrams from textual prompts. The benchmark consists of a core set of 132 samples, starting from a small set of manually crafted and verified flows. These were expanded via a hybrid methodology combining human annotation, in-context LLM prompting, and rule-based variation generation. Our benchmark uses an LLM-as-a-judge model to assess Mermaid sequence diagram generation across fine-grained metrics, including syntax correctness, activation handling, error handling, and practical usability. We perform initial evaluations on numerous state-of-the-art LLMs and utilize multiple LLM judge models to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our benchmark. Our results reveal significant capability gaps across models and evaluation modes. Our proposed benchmark provides a foundation for advancing research in structured diagram generation and for developing more rigorous, fine-grained evaluation methodologies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and other automated techniques have been increasingly used to support software developers by generating software artifacts such as code snippets, patches, and comments. However, accurately assessing the correctness of these generated artifacts remains a significant challenge. On one hand, human evaluation provides high accuracy but is labor-intensive and lacks scalability. On the other hand, many automatic evaluation metrics are scalable and require minimal human effort, but they often fail to accurately reflect the actual correctness of generated software artifacts. In this paper, we present SE-Jury, the first evaluation metric for LLM-as-Ensemble-Judge specifically designed to accurately assess the correctness of generated software artifacts. SE-Jury first defines five distinct evaluation strategies, each implemented by an independent judge. A dynamic team selection mechanism then identifies the most appropriate subset of judges as a team to produce a final correctness score through ensembling. We evaluate SE-Jury across a diverse set of software engineering (SE) benchmarks that span three popular SE tasks: code generation, automated program repair, and code summarization. Results demonstrate that SE-Jury consistently achieves a higher correlation with human judgments, with improvements ranging from 29.6% to 140.8% over existing automatic metrics. SE-Jury reaches agreement levels with human annotators that are close to inter-annotator agreement in code generation and program repair. These findings underscore SE-Jury's potential as a scalable and reliable alternative to human evaluation in these SE tasks.

Recent failures such as Google Gemini generating people of color in Nazi-era uniforms illustrate how AI outputs can be factually plausible yet socially harmful. AI models are increasingly evaluated for "fairness," yet existing benchmarks often conflate two fundamentally different dimensions: factual correctness and normative fairness. A model may generate responses that are factually accurate but socially unfair, or conversely, appear fair while distorting factual reality. We argue that identifying the boundary between fact and fair is essential for meaningful fairness evaluation. We introduce Fact-or-Fair, a benchmark with (i) objective queries aligned with descriptive, fact-based judgments, and (ii) subjective queries aligned with normative, fairness-based judgments. Our queries are constructed from 19 statistics and are grounded in cognitive psychology, drawing on representativeness bias, attribution bias, and ingroup-outgroup bias to explain why models often misalign fact and fairness. Experiments across ten frontier models reveal different levels of fact-fair trade-offs. By reframing fairness evaluation, we provide both a new theoretical lens and a practical benchmark to advance the responsible model assessments. Our test suite is publicly available at https://github.com/uclanlp/Fact-or-Fair.

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated image descriptions is challenging, requiring metrics that capture various aspects such as grammaticality, coverage, correctness, and truthfulness. While human evaluation offers valuable insights, its cost and time-consuming nature pose limitations. Existing automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, and CIDEr aim to bridge this gap but often show weak correlations with human judgment. We address this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation framework rooted in a modern large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4 or Gemini, capable of image generation. In our proposed framework, we begin by feeding an input image into a designated image captioning model, chosen for evaluation, to generate a textual description. Using this description, an LLM then creates a new image. By extracting features from both the original and LLM-created images, we measure their similarity using a designated similarity metric. A high similarity score suggests that the image captioning model has accurately generated textual descriptions, while a low similarity score indicates discrepancies, revealing potential shortcomings in the model's performance. Human-annotated reference captions are not required in our proposed evaluation framework, which serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of image captioning models. Its efficacy is confirmed through human evaluation.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) perform Question Answering (QA) tasks in various domains. However, RAG based on open-source LLM for specialized domains has challenges of evaluating generated responses. A popular framework in the literature is the RAG Assessment (RAGAS), a publicly available library which uses LLMs for evaluation. One disadvantage of RAGAS is the lack of details of derivation of numerical value of the evaluation metrics. One of the outcomes of this work is a modified version of this package for few metrics (faithfulness, context relevance, answer relevance, answer correctness, answer similarity and factual correctness) through which we provide the intermediate outputs of the prompts by using any LLMs. Next, we analyse the expert evaluations of the output of the modified RAGAS package and observe the challenges of using it in the telecom domain. We also study the effect of the metrics under correct vs. wrong retrieval and observe that few of the metrics have higher values for correct retrieval. We also study for differences in metrics between base embeddings and those domain adapted via pre-training and fine-tuning. Finally, we comment on the suitability and challenges of using these metrics for in-the-wild telecom QA task.

Evaluation of QA systems is very challenging and expensive, with the most reliable approach being human annotations of correctness of answers for questions. Recent works (AVA, BEM) have shown that transformer LM encoder based similarity metrics transfer well for QA evaluation, but they are limited by the usage of a single correct reference answer. We propose a new evaluation metric: SQuArE (Sentence-level QUestion AnsweRing Evaluation), using multiple reference answers (combining multiple correct and incorrect references) for sentence-form QA. We evaluate SQuArE on both sentence-level extractive (Answer Selection) and generative (GenQA) QA systems, across multiple academic and industrial datasets, and show that it outperforms previous baselines and obtains the highest correlation with human annotations.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated substantial potential in video understanding. However, existing benchmarks fail to comprehensively evaluate synergistic reasoning capabilities across audio and visual modalities, often neglecting either one of the modalities or integrating them in a logically inconsistent manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniVideoBench, a large-scale and rigorously designed benchmark dedicated to assessing synergistic audio-visual understanding, with a strong emphasis on modality complementarity and logical consistency. Specifically, OmniVideoBench comprises 1000 high-quality question-answer(QA) pairs, each annotated with step-by-step reasoning traces, derived from 628 diverse videos ranging from several seconds to 30 minutes, and manually verified to guarantee complete correctness and uniqueness. Moreover, OmniVideoBench encompasses 13 carefully designed question types, covering temporal reasoning, spatial localization, counting, causal inference, summarization, and beyond, thereby capturing the essential challenges of video understanding. Evaluation of multiple MLLMs on OmniVideoBench reveals a pronounced gap between model performance and human reasoning, with open-source models lagging significantly behind their closed-source counterparts, underscoring the inherent difficulty of genuine audio-visual reasoning. We will release OmniVideoBench to foster the development of MLLMs with stronger and more generalizable reasoning capabilities.

Large language models are rapidly evolving into interactive coding agents capable of end-to-end web coding, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only narrow slices of this capability, typically text-conditioned generation with static-correctness metrics, leaving visual fidelity, interaction quality, and codebase-level reasoning largely unmeasured. We introduce WebCompass, a multimodal benchmark that provides unified lifecycle evaluation of web engineering capability. Recognizing that real-world web coding is an iterative cycle of generation, editing, and repair, WebCompass spans three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair), yielding seven task categories that mirror professional workflows. Through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline, we curate instances covering 15 generation domains, 16 editing operation types, and 11 repair defect types, each annotated at Easy/Medium/Hard levels. For evaluation, we adopt a checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge protocol for editing and repair, and propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm for generation that autonomously executes generated websites in a real browser, explores interactive behaviors via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and iteratively synthesizes targeted test cases, closely approximating human acceptance testing. We evaluate representative closed-source and open-source models and observe that: (1) closed-source models remain substantially stronger and more balanced; (2) editing and repair exhibit distinct difficulty profiles, with repair preserving interactivity better but remaining execution-challenging; (3) aesthetics is the most persistent bottleneck, especially for open-source models; and (4) framework choice materially affects outcomes, with Vue consistently challenging while React and Vanilla/HTML perform more strongly depending on task type.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the ways the general public accesses and consumes information. Their influence is particularly pronounced in pivotal sectors like healthcare, where lay individuals are increasingly appropriating LLMs as conversational agents for everyday queries. While LLMs demonstrate impressive language understanding and generation proficiencies, concerns regarding their safety remain paramount in these high-stake domains. Moreover, the development of LLMs is disproportionately focused on English. It remains unclear how these LLMs perform in the context of non-English languages, a gap that is critical for ensuring equity in the real-world use of these systems.This paper provides a framework to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs as multi-lingual dialogue systems for healthcare queries. Our empirically-derived framework XlingEval focuses on three fundamental criteria for evaluating LLM responses to naturalistic human-authored health-related questions: correctness, consistency, and verifiability. Through extensive experiments on four major global languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi, spanning three expert-annotated large health Q&A datasets, and through an amalgamation of algorithmic and human-evaluation strategies, we found a pronounced disparity in LLM responses across these languages, indicating a need for enhanced cross-lingual capabilities. We further propose XlingHealth, a cross-lingual benchmark for examining the multilingual capabilities of LLMs in the healthcare context. Our findings underscore the pressing need to bolster the cross-lingual capacities of these models, and to provide an equitable information ecosystem accessible to all.

Reward models play an essential role in training vision-language models (VLMs) by assessing output quality to enable aligning with human preferences. Despite their importance, the research community lacks comprehensive open benchmarks for evaluating multimodal reward models in VLMs. To address this gap, we introduce Multimodal RewardBench, an expert-annotated benchmark covering six domains: general correctness, preference, knowledge, reasoning, safety, and visual question-answering. Our dataset comprises 5,211 annotated (prompt, chosen response, rejected response) triplets collected from various VLMs. In evaluating a range of VLM judges, we find that even the top-performing models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, achieve only 72% overall accuracy. Notably, most models struggle in the reasoning and safety domains. These findings suggest that Multimodal RewardBench offers a challenging testbed for advancing reward model development across multiple domains. We release the benchmark at https://github.com/facebookresearch/multimodal_rewardbench.

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation (RLME), which optimizes a generator using reward derived from an evaluator's answers to natural-language meta-questions (e.g., "Is the answer correct?" or "Is the reasoning logically consistent?"). RLME treats the evaluator's probability of a positive judgment as a reward and updates the generator via group-relative policy optimization, enabling learning without labels. Across a suite of experiments, we show that RLME achieves accuracy and sample efficiency comparable to label-based training, enables controllable trade-offs among multiple objectives, steers models toward reliable reasoning patterns rather than post-hoc rationalization, and generalizes to open-domain settings where ground-truth labels are unavailable, broadening the domains in which LLMs may be trained with RL.

Question answering (QA) can only make progress if we know if an answer is correct, but for many of the most challenging and interesting QA examples, current evaluation metrics to determine answer equivalence (AE) often do not align with human judgments, particularly more verbose, free-form answers from large language models (LLM). There are two challenges: a lack of data and that models are too big: LLM-based scorers can correlate better with human judges, but this task has only been tested on limited QA datasets, and even when available, update of the model is limited because LLMs are large and often expensive. We rectify both of these issues by providing clear and consistent guidelines for evaluating AE in machine QA adopted from professional human QA contests. We also introduce a combination of standard evaluation and a more efficient, robust, and lightweight discriminate AE classifier-based matching method (CFMatch, smaller than 1 MB), trained and validated to more accurately evaluate answer correctness in accordance with adopted expert AE rules that are more aligned with human judgments.

The rapid advancements in LLMs have driven the adoption of generative AI in various domains, including Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Unlike traditional software development, EDA presents unique challenges, as generated RTL code must not only be syntactically correct and functionally accurate but also synthesizable by hardware generators while meeting performance, power, and area constraints. These additional requirements introduce complexities that existing code-generation benchmarks often fail to capture, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating LLMs for RTL generation. To address this gap, we propose TuRTLe, a unified evaluation framework designed to systematically assess LLMs across key RTL generation tasks. TuRTLe integrates multiple existing benchmarks and automates the evaluation process, enabling a comprehensive assessment of LLM performance in syntax correctness, functional correctness, synthesis, PPA optimization, and exact line completion. Using this framework, we benchmark a diverse set of open LLMs and analyze their strengths and weaknesses in EDA-specific tasks. Our results show that reasoning-based models, such as DeepSeek R1, consistently outperform others across multiple evaluation criteria, but at the cost of increased computational overhead and inference latency. Additionally, base models are better suited in module completion tasks, while instruct-tuned models perform better in specification-to-RTL tasks.

AI agents are increasingly deployed in production, yet their security evaluations remain bottlenecked by manual red-teaming or static benchmarks that fail to model adaptive, multi-turn adversaries. We propose NAAMSE, an evolutionary framework that reframes agent security evaluation as a feedback-driven optimization problem. Our system employs a single autonomous agent that orchestrates a lifecycle of genetic prompt mutation, hierarchical corpus exploration, and asymmetric behavioral scoring. By using model responses as a fitness signal, the framework iteratively compounds effective attack strategies while simultaneously ensuring "benign-use correctness", preventing the degenerate security of blanket refusal. Our experiments on Gemini 2.5 Flash demonstrate that evolutionary mutation systematically amplifies vulnerabilities missed by one-shot methods, with controlled ablations revealing that the synergy between exploration and targeted mutation uncovers high-severity failure modes. We show that this adaptive approach provides a more realistic and scalable assessment of agent robustness in the face of evolving threats. The code for NAAMSE is open source and available at https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/NAAMSE.

Prompt design is a primary control interface for large language models (LLMs), yet standard evaluations largely reduce performance to answer correctness, obscuring why a prompt succeeds or fails and providing little actionable guidance. We propose PEEM (Prompt Engineering Evaluation Metrics), a unified framework for joint and interpretable evaluation of both prompts and responses. PEEM defines a structured rubric with 9 axes: 3 prompt criteria (clarity/structure, linguistic quality, fairness) and 6 response criteria (accuracy, coherence, relevance, objectivity, clarity, conciseness), and uses an LLM-based evaluator to output (i) scalar scores on a 1-5 Likert scale and (ii) criterion-specific natural-language rationales grounded in the rubric. Across 7 benchmarks and 5 task models, PEEM's accuracy axis strongly aligns with conventional accuracy while preserving model rankings (aggregate Spearman rho about 0.97, Pearson r about 0.94, p < 0.001). A multi-evaluator study with four models shows consistent relative judgments (pairwise rho = 0.68-0.85), supporting evaluator-agnostic deployment. Beyond alignment, PEEM captures complementary linguistic failure modes and remains informative under prompt perturbations: prompt-quality trends track downstream accuracy under iterative rewrites, semantic adversarial manipulations induce clear score degradation, and meaning-preserving paraphrases yield high stability (robustness rate about 76.7-80.6%). Finally, using only PEEM scores and rationales as feedback, a zero-shot prompt rewriting loop improves downstream accuracy by up to 11.7 points, outperforming supervised and RL-based prompt-optimization baselines. Overall, PEEM provides a reproducible, criterion-driven protocol that links prompt formulation to response behavior and enables systematic diagnosis and optimization of LLM interactions.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on explicit reasoning to solve coding tasks, yet evaluating the quality of this reasoning remains challenging. Existing reasoning evaluators are not designed for coding, and current benchmarks focus primarily on code generation, leaving other coding tasks largely unexplored. We introduce CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM reasoning quality across three coding task categories: generation, summarization, and classification. Using this benchmark, we analyze 1,069 mismatch cases from existing evaluators, identify five recurring limitations, and derive four design insights for reasoning evaluation in coding tasks. Guided by these insights, we propose VERA, a two-stage evaluator that combines evidence-grounded verification with ambiguity-aware score correction. Experiments on CodeRQ-Bench show that VERA consistently outperforms strong baselines across four datasets, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21. We release CodeRQ-Bench at https://github.com/MrLYG/CodeRQ-Bench, supporting future investigations.

Obtaining reliable feedback from the environment is a fundamental capability for intelligent agents to evaluate the correctness of their actions and to accumulate reusable knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on predefined measurements or fixed reward signals, which limits their applicability in open-ended and dynamic environments where new actions may require previously unknown forms of feedback. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an Actively Feedback Getting model, in which an AI agent proactively interacts with the environment to discover, screen, and verify feedback without relying on predefined measurements. Rather than assuming explicit feedback definitions, the proposed method exploits action-induced environmental differences to identify target feedback that is not specified in advance, based on the observation that actions inevitably produce measurable changes in the environment. In addition, a self-triggering mechanism, driven by internal objectives such as improved accuracy, precision, and efficiency, is introduced to autonomously plan and adjust actions, thereby enabling faster and more focused feedback acquisition without external commands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed active approach significantly improves the efficiency and robustness of factor identification.

We study professional image generation, where a model must synthesize information-dense, scientifically precise illustrations from technical descriptions rather than merely produce visually plausible pictures. To quantify the progress, we introduce ProImage-Bench, a rubric-based benchmark that targets biology schematics, engineering/patent drawings, and general scientific diagrams. For 654 figures collected from real textbooks and technical reports, we construct detailed image instructions and a hierarchy of rubrics that decompose correctness into 6,076 criteria and 44,131 binary checks. Rubrics are derived from surrounding text and reference figures using large multimodal models, and are evaluated by an automated LMM-based judge with a principled penalty scheme that aggregates sub-question outcomes into interpretable criterion scores. We benchmark several representative text-to-image models on ProImage-Bench and find that, despite strong open-domain performance, the best base model reaches only 0.791 rubric accuracy and 0.553 criterion score overall, revealing substantial gaps in fine-grained scientific fidelity. Finally, we show that the same rubrics provide actionable supervision: feeding failed checks back into an editing model for iterative refinement boosts a strong generator from 0.653 to 0.865 in rubric accuracy and from 0.388 to 0.697 in criterion score. ProImage-Bench thus offers both a rigorous diagnostic for professional image generation and a scalable signal for improving specification-faithful scientific illustrations.

Trustworthy Large Language Models (LLMs) must cite human-verifiable sources in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, academia, and finance, where even small errors can have severe consequences. Practitioners and researchers face a choice: let models generate citations during decoding, or let models draft answers first and then attach appropriate citations. To clarify this choice, we introduce two paradigms: Generation-Time Citation (G-Cite), which produces the answer and citations in one pass, and Post-hoc Citation (P-Cite), which adds or verifies citations after drafting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation from zero-shot to advanced retrieval-augmented methods across four popular attribution datasets and provide evidence-based recommendations that weigh trade-offs across use cases. Our results show a consistent trade-off between coverage and citation correctness, with retrieval as the main driver of attribution quality in both paradigms. P-Cite methods achieve high coverage with competitive correctness and moderate latency, whereas G-Cite methods prioritize precision at the cost of coverage and speed. We recommend a retrieval-centric, P-Cite-first approach for high-stakes applications, reserving G-Cite for precision-critical settings such as strict claim verification. Our codes and human evaluation results are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Citation_Paradigms-BBB5/

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and are a powerful enabler for interactive systems. However, they still face challenges in long-term interactions that require adaptation towards the user as well as contextual knowledge and understanding of the ever-changing environment. To overcome these challenges, holistic memory modeling is required to efficiently retrieve and store relevant information across interaction sessions for suitable responses. Cognitive AI, which aims to simulate the human thought process in a computerized model, highlights interesting aspects, such as thoughts, memory mechanisms, and decision-making, that can contribute towards improved memory modeling for LLMs. Inspired by these cognitive AI principles, we propose our memory framework CAIM. CAIM consists of three modules: 1.) The Memory Controller as the central decision unit; 2.) the Memory Retrieval, which filters relevant data for interaction upon request; and 3.) the Post-Thinking, which maintains the memory storage. We compare CAIM against existing approaches, focusing on metrics such as retrieval accuracy, response correctness, contextual coherence, and memory storage. The results demonstrate that CAIM outperforms baseline frameworks across different metrics, highlighting its context-awareness and potential to improve long-term human-AI interactions.

Large Language Models are prompting us to view more NLP tasks from a generative perspective. At the same time, they offer a new way of accessing information, mainly through the RAG framework. While there have been notable improvements for the autoregressive models, overcoming hallucination in the generated answers remains a continuous problem. A standard solution is to use commercial LLMs, such as GPT4, to evaluate these algorithms. However, such frameworks are expensive and not very transparent. Therefore, we propose a study which demonstrates the interest of open-weight models for evaluating RAG hallucination. We develop a lightweight approach using smaller, quantized LLMs to provide an accessible and interpretable metric that gives continuous scores for the generated answer with respect to their correctness and faithfulness. This score allows us to question decisions' reliability and explore thresholds to develop a new AUC metric as an alternative to correlation with human judgment.

Quantum programs are typically developed using quantum Software Development Kits (SDKs). The rapid advancement of quantum computing necessitates new tools to streamline this development process, and one such tool could be Generative Artificial intelligence (GenAI). In this study, we introduce and use the Qiskit HumanEval dataset, a hand-curated collection of tasks designed to benchmark the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce quantum code using Qiskit - a quantum SDK. This dataset consists of more than 100 quantum computing tasks, each accompanied by a prompt, a canonical solution, a comprehensive test case, and a difficulty scale to evaluate the correctness of the generated solutions. We systematically assess the performance of a set of LLMs against the Qiskit HumanEval dataset's tasks and focus on the models ability in producing executable quantum code. Our findings not only demonstrate the feasibility of using LLMs for generating quantum code but also establish a new benchmark for ongoing advancements in the field and encourage further exploration and development of GenAI-driven tools for quantum code generation.

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. Difficulties lie in assessing the factuality of free-form responses in open domains. Also, different papers use disparate evaluation benchmarks and measurements, which renders them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we propose OpenFactCheck, a unified factuality evaluation framework for LLMs. OpenFactCheck consists of three modules: (i) CUSTCHECKER allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checker and verify the factual correctness of documents and claims, (ii) LLMEVAL, a unified evaluation framework assesses LLM's factuality ability from various perspectives fairly, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL is an extensible solution for gauging the reliability of automatic fact-checkers' verification results using human-annotated datasets. OpenFactCheck is publicly released at https://github.com/yuxiaw/OpenFactCheck.

Accurate evaluation is central to the large language model (LLM) ecosystem, guiding model selection and downstream adoption across diverse use cases. In practice, however, evaluating generative outputs typically relies on rigid lexical methods to extract and assess answers, which can conflate a model's true problem-solving ability with its compliance with predefined formatting guidelines. While recent LLM-as-a-Judge approaches mitigate this issue by assessing semantic correctness rather than strict structural conformity, they also introduce substantial computational overhead, making evaluation costly. In this work, we first systematically investigate the limitations of lexical evaluation through a large-scale empirical study spanning 36 models and 15 downstream tasks, demonstrating that such methods correlate poorly with human judgments. To address this limitation, we introduce BERT-as-a-Judge, an encoder-driven approach for assessing answer correctness in reference-based generative settings, robust to variations in output phrasing, and requiring only lightweight training on synthetically annotated question-candidate-reference triplets. We show that it consistently outperforms the lexical baseline while matching the performance of much larger LLM judges, providing a compelling tradeoff between the two and enabling reliable, scalable evaluation. Finally, through extensive experimentation, we provide detailed insights into BERT-as-a-Judge's performance to offer practical guidance for practitioners, and release all project artifacts to foster downstream adoption.

Deep Research Agents generate analyst-grade reports, yet evaluating them remains challenging due to the absence of a single ground truth and the multidimensional nature of research quality. Recent benchmarks propose distinct methodologies, yet they suffer from the Mirage of Synthesis, where strong surface-level fluency and citation alignment can obscure underlying factual and reasoning defects. We characterize this gap by introducing a taxonomy across four verticals that exposes a critical capability mismatch: static evaluators inherently lack the tool-use capabilities required to assess temporal validity and factual correctness. To address this, we propose DREAM (Deep Research Evaluation with Agentic Metrics), a framework that instantiates the principle of capability parity by making evaluation itself agentic. DREAM structures assessment through an evaluation protocol combining query-agnostic metrics with adaptive metrics generated by a tool-calling agent, enabling temporally aware coverage, grounded verification, and systematic reasoning probes. Controlled evaluations demonstrate DREAM is significantly more sensitive to factual and temporal decay than existing benchmarks, offering a scalable, reference-free evaluation paradigm.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged to tackle the challenges of Visual Question Answering (VQA), sparking a new research focus on conducting objective evaluations of these models. Existing evaluation methods face limitations due to the significant human workload required to design Q&A pairs for visual images, which inherently restricts the scale and scope of evaluations. Although automated MLLM-as-judge approaches attempt to reduce the human workload through automatic evaluations, they often introduce biases. To address these problems, we propose an Unsupervised Peer review MLLM Evaluation framework. It utilizes only image data, allowing models to automatically generate questions and conduct peer review assessments of answers from other models, effectively alleviating the reliance on human workload. Additionally, we introduce the vision-language scoring system to mitigate the bias issues, which focuses on three aspects: (i) response correctness; (ii) visual understanding and reasoning; and (iii) image-text correlation. Experimental results demonstrate that UPME achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.944 with human evaluations on the MMstar dataset and 0.814 on the ScienceQA dataset, indicating that our framework closely aligns with human-designed benchmarks and inherent human preferences.

Automating Text-to-Image (T2I) model evaluation is challenging; a judge model must be used to score correctness, and test prompts must be selected to be challenging for current T2I models but not the judge. We argue that satisfying these constraints can lead to benchmark drift over time, where the static benchmark judges fail to keep up with newer model capabilities. We show that benchmark drift is a significant problem for GenEval, one of the most popular T2I benchmarks. Although GenEval was well-aligned with human judgment at the time of its release, it has drifted far from human judgment over time -- resulting in an absolute error of as much as 17.7% for current models. This level of drift strongly suggests that GenEval has been saturated for some time, as we verify via a large-scale human study. To help fill this benchmarking gap, we introduce a new benchmark, GenEval 2, with improved coverage of primitive visual concepts and higher degrees of compositionality, which we show is more challenging for current models. We also introduce Soft-TIFA, an evaluation method for GenEval 2 that combines judgments for visual primitives, which we show is more well-aligned with human judgment and argue is less likely to drift from human-alignment over time (as compared to more holistic judges such as VQAScore). Although we hope GenEval 2 will provide a strong benchmark for many years, avoiding benchmark drift is far from guaranteed and our work, more generally, highlights the importance of continual audits and improvement for T2I and related automated model evaluation benchmarks.

Under a unified operational definition, we define LLM memory as a persistent state written during pretraining, finetuning, or inference that can later be addressed and that stably influences outputs. We propose a four-part taxonomy (parametric, contextual, external, procedural/episodic) and a memory quadruple (location, persistence, write/access path, controllability). We link mechanism, evaluation, and governance via the chain write -> read -> inhibit/update. To avoid distorted comparisons across heterogeneous setups, we adopt a three-setting protocol (parametric only, offline retrieval, online retrieval) that decouples capability from information availability on the same data and timeline. On this basis we build a layered evaluation: parametric (closed-book recall, edit differential, memorization/privacy), contextual (position curves and the mid-sequence drop), external (answer correctness vs snippet attribution/faithfulness), and procedural/episodic (cross-session consistency and timeline replay, E MARS+). The framework integrates temporal governance and leakage auditing (freshness hits, outdated answers, refusal slices) and uncertainty reporting via inter-rater agreement plus paired tests with multiple-comparison correction. For updating and forgetting, we present DMM Gov: coordinating DAPT/TAPT, PEFT, model editing (ROME, MEND, MEMIT, SERAC), and RAG to form an auditable loop covering admission thresholds, rollout, monitoring, rollback, and change audits, with specs for timeliness, conflict handling, and long-horizon consistency. Finally, we give four testable propositions: minimum identifiability; a minimal evaluation card; causally constrained editing with verifiable forgetting; and when retrieval with small-window replay outperforms ultra-long-context reading. This yields a reproducible, comparable, and governable coordinate system for research and deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly aided developers by generating or assisting in code writing, enhancing productivity across various tasks. While identifying incorrect code is often straightforward, detecting vulnerabilities in functionally correct code is more challenging, especially for developers with limited security knowledge, which poses considerable security risks of using LLM-generated code and underscores the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that assess both functional correctness and security. Current benchmarks like CyberSecEval and SecurityEval attempt to solve it but are hindered by unclear and impractical specifications, failing to assess both functionality and security accurately. To tackle these deficiencies, we introduce CWEval, a novel outcome-driven evaluation framework designed to enhance the evaluation of secure code generation by LLMs. This framework not only assesses code functionality but also its security simultaneously with high-quality task specifications and outcome-driven test oracles which provides high accuracy. Coupled with CWEval-bench, a multilingual, security-critical coding benchmark, CWEval provides a rigorous empirical security evaluation on LLM-generated code, overcoming previous benchmarks' shortcomings. Through our evaluations, CWEval reveals a notable portion of functional but insecure code produced by LLMs, and shows a serious inaccuracy of previous evaluations, ultimately contributing significantly to the field of secure code generation. We open-source our artifact at: https://github.com/Co1lin/CWEval .

Self-training approach for large language models (LLMs) improves reasoning abilities by training the models on their self-generated rationales. Previous approaches have labeled rationales that produce correct answers for a given question as appropriate for training. However, a single measure risks misjudging rationale quality, leading the models to learn flawed reasoning patterns. To address this issue, we propose CREST (Consistency-driven Rationale Evaluation for Self-Training), a self-training framework that further evaluates each rationale through follow-up questions and leverages this evaluation to guide its training. Specifically, we introduce two methods: (1) filtering out rationales that frequently result in incorrect answers on follow-up questions and (2) preference learning based on mixed preferences from rationale evaluation results of both original and follow-up questions. Experiments on three question-answering datasets using open LLMs show that CREST not only improves the logical robustness and correctness of rationales but also improves reasoning abilities compared to previous self-training approaches.

Many benchmarks for automated causal inference evaluate a system's performance based on a single numerical output, such as an Average Treatment Effect (ATE). This approach conflates two distinct steps in causal analysis: identification-formulating a valid research design under stated assumptions-and estimation-implementing that design numerically on finite data. We introduce CausalReasoningBenchmark, a benchmark of 173 queries across 138 real-world datasets, curated from 85 peer-reviewed research papers and four widely-used causal-inference textbooks. For each query a system must produce (i) a structured identification specification that names the strategy, the treatment, outcome, and control variables, and all design-specific elements, and (ii) a point estimate with a standard error. By scoring these two components separately, our benchmark enables granular diagnosis: it distinguishes failures in causal reasoning from errors in numerical execution. Baseline results with a state-of-the-art LLM show that, while the model correctly identifies the high-level strategy in 84 % of cases, full identification-specification correctness drops to only 30 %, revealing that the bottleneck lies in the nuanced details of research design rather than in computation. CausalReasoningBenchmark is publicly available on Hugging Face and is designed to foster the development of more robust automated causal-inference systems.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in multimodal reasoning and have shown impressive performance on various multimodal benchmarks. However, most of these benchmarks evaluate models primarily through multiple-choice or short-answer formats, which do not take the reasoning process into account. Although some benchmarks assess the reasoning process, their methods are often overly simplistic and only examine reasoning when answers are incorrect. This approach overlooks scenarios where flawed reasoning leads to correct answers. In addition, these benchmarks do not consider the impact of intermodal relationships on reasoning. To address this issue, we propose the Reasoning Process Tree Score (RPTS), a tree structure-based metric to assess reasoning processes. Specifically, we organize the reasoning steps into a reasoning tree and leverage its hierarchical information to assign weighted faithfulness scores to each reasoning step. By dynamically adjusting these weights, RPTS not only evaluates the overall correctness of the reasoning, but also pinpoints where the model fails in the reasoning. To validate RPTS in real-world multimodal scenarios, we construct a new benchmark, RPTS-Eval, comprising 374 images and 390 reasoning instances. Each instance includes reliable visual-textual clues that serve as leaf nodes of the reasoning tree. Furthermore, we define three types of intermodal relationships to investigate how intermodal interactions influence the reasoning process. We evaluated representative LVLMs (e.g., GPT4o, Llava-Next), uncovering their limitations in multimodal reasoning and highlighting the differences between open-source and closed-source commercial LVLMs. We believe that this benchmark will contribute to the advancement of research in the field of multimodal reasoning.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on final-answer correctness is the dominant paradigm. This approach, however, provides a coarse signal for model improvement and overlooks the quality of the underlying reasoning process. We argue that a more granular evaluation of reasoning offers a more effective path to building robust models. We decompose reasoning quality into two dimensions: relevance and coherence. Relevance measures if a step is grounded in the problem; coherence measures if it follows logically from prior steps. To measure these aspects reliably, we introduce causal stepwise evaluation (CaSE). This method assesses each reasoning step using only its preceding context, which avoids hindsight bias. We validate CaSE against human judgments on our new expert-annotated benchmarks, MRa-GSM8K and MRa-MATH. More importantly, we show that curating training data with CaSE-evaluated relevance and coherence directly improves final task performance. Our work provides a scalable framework for analyzing, debugging, and improving LLM reasoning, demonstrating the practical value of moving beyond validity checks.

Text summarization aims at compressing long documents into a shorter form that conveys the most important parts of the original document. Despite increased interest in the community and notable research effort, progress on benchmark datasets has stagnated. We critically evaluate key ingredients of the current research setup: datasets, evaluation metrics, and models, and highlight three primary shortcomings: 1) automatically collected datasets leave the task underconstrained and may contain noise detrimental to training and evaluation, 2) current evaluation protocol is weakly correlated with human judgment and does not account for important characteristics such as factual correctness, 3) models overfit to layout biases of current datasets and offer limited diversity in their outputs.

Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) generation is rapidly becoming a core interface for media creation, yet its evaluation remains fragmented. Existing benchmarks largely assess audio and video in isolation or rely on coarse embedding similarity, failing to capture the fine-grained joint correctness required by realistic prompts. We introduce AVGen-Bench, a task-driven benchmark for T2AV generation featuring high-quality prompts across 11 real-world categories. To support comprehensive assessment, we propose a multi-granular evaluation framework that combines lightweight specialist models with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enabling evaluation from perceptual quality to fine-grained semantic controllability. Our evaluation reveals a pronounced gap between strong audio-visual aesthetics and weak semantic reliability, including persistent failures in text rendering, speech coherence, physical reasoning, and a universal breakdown in musical pitch control. Code and benchmark resources are available at http://aka.ms/avgenbench.

Visual captioning benchmarks have become outdated with the emergence of modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as the brief ground-truth sentences and traditional metrics fail to assess detailed captions effectively. While recent benchmarks attempt to address this by focusing on keyword extraction or object-centric evaluation, they remain limited to vague-view or object-view analyses and incomplete visual element coverage. In this paper, we introduce CAPability, a comprehensive multi-view benchmark for evaluating visual captioning across 12 dimensions spanning six critical views. We curate nearly 11K human-annotated images and videos with visual element annotations to evaluate the generated captions. CAPability stably assesses both the correctness and thoroughness of captions using F1-score. By converting annotations to QA pairs, we further introduce a heuristic metric, know but cannot tell (KT), indicating a significant performance gap between QA and caption capabilities. Our work provides the first holistic analysis of MLLMs' captioning abilities, as we identify their strengths and weaknesses across various dimensions, guiding future research to enhance specific aspects of capabilities.

Multiple-choice questions (MCQ) are frequently used to assess large language models (LLMs). Typically, an LLM is given a question and selects the answer deemed most probable after adjustments for factors like length. Unfortunately, LLMs may inherently favor certain answer choice IDs, such as A/B/C/D, due to inherent biases of priori unbalanced probabilities, influencing the prediction of answers based on these IDs. Previous research has introduced methods to reduce this ''selection bias'' by simply permutating options on a few test samples and applying to new ones. Another problem of MCQ is the lottery ticket choice by ''random guessing''. The LLM does not learn particular knowledge, but the option is guessed correctly. This situation is especially serious for those small-scale LLMs. To address them, a more thorough approach involves shifting from MCQ to open-style questions, which can fundamentally eliminate selection bias and random guessing issues. However, transitioning causes its own set of challenges in (1) identifying suitable open-style questions and (2) validating the correctness of LLM open-style responses against human-annotated ground-truths. This work aims to tackle these significant difficulties, and establish a new LLM evaluation benchmark through entirely open-style questions. Consequently, we introduce the Open-LLM-Leaderboard to track various LLMs' performance and reflect true capability of them, such as GPT-4o/4/3.5, Claude 3, Gemini, etc. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Open-LLM-Leaderboard.

Program synthesis has been long studied with recent approaches focused on directly using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. Programming benchmarks, with curated synthesis problems and test-cases, are used to measure the performance of various LLMs on code synthesis. However, these test-cases can be limited in both quantity and quality for fully assessing the functional correctness of the generated code. Such limitation in the existing benchmarks begs the following question: In the era of LLMs, is the code generated really correct? To answer this, we propose EvalPlus -- a code synthesis evaluation framework to rigorously benchmark the functional correctness of LLM-synthesized code. EvalPlus augments a given evaluation dataset with large amounts of test-cases newly produced by an automatic test input generator, powered by both LLM- and mutation-based strategies. While EvalPlus is general, we extend the test-cases of the popular HumanEval benchmark by 80x to build HumanEval+. Our extensive evaluation across 26 popular LLMs (e.g., GPT-4 and ChatGPT) demonstrates that HumanEval+ is able to catch significant amounts of previously undetected wrong code synthesized by LLMs, reducing the pass@k by up-to 19.3-28.9%. We also surprisingly found that test insufficiency can lead to mis-ranking. For example, both WizardCoder-CodeLlama and Phind-CodeLlama now outperform ChatGPT on HumanEval+, while none of them could on HumanEval. Our work not only indicates that prior popular code synthesis evaluation results do not accurately reflect the true performance of LLMs for code synthesis, but also opens up a new direction to improve such programming benchmarks through automated testing. We have open-sourced our tools, enhanced datasets as well as all LLM-generated code at https://github.com/evalplus/evalplus to facilitate and accelerate future LLM-for-code research.

With the growing use of large language models(LLMs) as evaluators, their application has expanded to code evaluation tasks, where they assess the correctness of generated code without relying on reference implementations. While this offers scalability and flexibility, it also raises a critical, unresolved question: Can LLM judges fairly and robustly evaluate semantically equivalent code with superficial variations? Functionally correct code often exhibits variations-such as differences in variable names, comments, or formatting-that should not influence its correctness. Yet, whether LLM judges can reliably handle these variations remains unclear. We present the first comprehensive study of this issue, defining six types of potential bias in code evaluation and revealing their systematic impact on LLM judges. Across five programming languages and multiple LLMs, we empirically demonstrate that all tested LLM judges are susceptible to both positive and negative biases, resulting in inflated or unfairly low scores. Moreover, we observe that LLM judges remain vulnerable to these biases even when prompted to generate test cases before scoring, highlighting the need for more robust code evaluation methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in scientific research, offering new capabilities for knowledge discovery and reasoning. In single-cell biology, however, evaluation practices for both general and specialized LLMs remain inadequate: existing benchmarks are fragmented across tasks, adopt formats such as multiple-choice classification that diverge from real-world usage, and rely on metrics lacking interpretability and biological grounding. We present SC-ARENA, a natural language evaluation framework tailored to single-cell foundation models. SC-ARENA formalizes a virtual cell abstraction that unifies evaluation targets by representing both intrinsic attributes and gene-level interactions. Within this paradigm, we define five natural language tasks (cell type annotation, captioning, generation, perturbation prediction, and scientific QA) that probe core reasoning capabilities in cellular biology. To overcome the limitations of brittle string-matching metrics, we introduce knowledge-augmented evaluation, which incorporates external ontologies, marker databases, and scientific literature to support biologically faithful and interpretable judgments. Experiments and analysis across both general-purpose and domain-specialized LLMs demonstrate that (i) under the Virtual Cell unified evaluation paradigm, current models achieve uneven performance on biologically complex tasks, particularly those demanding mechanistic or causal understanding; and (ii) our knowledge-augmented evaluation framework ensures biological correctness, provides interpretable, evidence-grounded rationales, and achieves high discriminative capacity, overcoming the brittleness and opacity of conventional metrics. SC-Arena thus provides a unified and interpretable framework for assessing LLMs in single-cell biology, pointing toward the development of biology-aligned, generalizable foundation models.

In line with the principle of honesty, there has been a growing effort to train large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs containing epistemic markers. However, evaluation in the presence of epistemic markers has been largely overlooked, raising a critical question: Could the use of epistemic markers in LLM-generated outputs lead to unintended negative consequences? To address this, we present EMBER, a benchmark designed to assess the robustness of LLM-judges to epistemic markers in both single and pairwise evaluation settings. Our findings, based on evaluations using EMBER, reveal that all tested LLM-judges, including GPT-4o, show a notable lack of robustness in the presence of epistemic markers. Specifically, we observe a negative bias toward epistemic markers, with a stronger bias against markers expressing uncertainty. This suggests that LLM-judges are influenced by the presence of these markers and do not focus solely on the correctness of the content.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show promise for scientific applications, yet open-source models still struggle with Scientific Visual Question Answering (SVQA), namely answering questions about figures from scientific papers. A key bottleneck lies in the lack of public, large-scale, high-quality SVQA datasets. Although recent work uses LVLMs to synthesize data at scale, we identify systematic errors in their resulting QA pairs, stemming from LVLMs' inherent limitations and information asymmetry between figures and text. To address these challenges, we propose a verification-centric Generate-then-Verify framework that first generates QA pairs with figure-associated textual context, then applies cross-modal consistency checks against figures along with auxiliary filters to eliminate erroneous pairs. We instantiate this framework to curate VeriSciQA, a dataset of 20,351 QA pairs spanning 20 scientific domains and 12 figure types. VeriSciQA poses a challenging benchmark for open-source models, with a substantial accuracy gap between the leading open-source models (64%) and a proprietary model (82%). Moreover, models fine-tuned on VeriSciQA achieve consistent improvements on SVQA benchmarks, with performance gains that scale with data size and surpass models trained on existing datasets. Human evaluation further validates the superior correctness of VeriSciQA. Together, these evidences demonstrate that continued data expansion by our scalable framework can further advance SVQA capability in the open-source community.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly pushed the frontiers of program synthesis. Advancement of LLM-based program synthesis calls for a thorough evaluation of LLM-generated code. Most evaluation frameworks focus on the (functional) correctness of generated code; efficiency, as an important measure of code quality, has been overlooked in existing evaluations. In this work, we develop ENAMEL (EfficeNcy AutoMatic EvaLuator), a rigorous and high-standard benchmark for evaluating the capability of LLMs in generating efficient code. Firstly, we propose a new efficiency metric called eff@k, which generalizes the pass@k metric from correctness to efficiency and appropriately handles right-censored execution time. Furthermore, we derive an unbiased and variance-reduced estimator of eff@k via Rao--Blackwellization; we also provide a numerically stable implementation for the new estimator. Secondly, to set a high-standard for efficiency evaluation, we employ a human expert to design best algorithms and implementations as our reference solutions of efficiency, many of which are much more efficient than existing canonical solutions in HumanEval and HumanEval+. Moreover, to ensure a rigorous evaluation, we employ a human expert to curate strong test case generators to filter out wrong code and differentiate suboptimal algorithms. An extensive study across 30 popular LLMs using our benchmark ENAMEL shows that LLMs still fall short of generating expert-level efficient code. Using two subsets of our problem set, we demonstrate that such deficiency is because current LLMs struggle in designing advanced algorithms and are barely aware of implementation optimization. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/q-rz/enamel .

Image generation models now produce high-quality static images, yet their ability to represent how a visual world changes over time remains poorly understood. Practical workflows such as storyboarding, step-by-step illustration, reference-guided editing, and video previsualization require models to preserve identities, objects, spatial relations, and causal order across multiple visual states. Existing evaluations largely measure single-image correctness, compositional alignment, or video quality, leaving open whether an image model can coherently imagine a temporally ordered process. We introduce ImageTime, a diagnostic benchmark that uses spatiotemporal consistency as a behavioral probe of visual world modeling in image generation. Given an action instruction, and optionally a reference image specifying the initial state, a model must generate one image containing four ordered key states: initial state, action onset, transition state, and final state. This four-keyframe protocol is more temporally demanding than single-image generation while avoiding the confounds of dense video dynamics. ImageTime organizes tasks with a progressive capability hierarchy and decomposes each scenario into stage-wise state predicates, cross-frame temporal constraints, and forbidden causal violations. GPT-5.5 scores all generated images under a structured VLM-as-judge protocol, producing interpretable capability scores, diagnostic subscores, and failure labels. Through multi-family benchmarking, ImageTime reveals where current image generation systems succeed, fail, and drift when asked to maintain coherent visual world states over time.

Vibe coding produces correct, executable code at speed, but leaves no record of the structural commitments, dependencies, or evidence behind it. Reviewers cannot determine what invariants were assumed, what changed, or why a regression occurred. This is not a generation failure but a control failure: the dominant artifact of AI-assisted development (code plus chat history) performs dimension collapse, flattening complex system topology into low-dimensional text and making systems opaque and fragile under change. We propose Agentic Consensus: a paradigm in which the consensus layer C, an operable world model represented as a typed property graph, replaces code as the primary artifact of engineering. Executable artifacts are derived from C and kept in correspondence via synchronization operators Phi (realize) and Psi (rehydrate). Evidence links directly to structural claims in C, making every commitment auditable and under-specification explicit as measurable consensus entropy rather than a silent guess. Evaluation must move beyond code correctness toward alignment fidelity, consensus entropy, and intervention distance. We propose benchmark task families designed to measure whether consensus-based workflows reduce human intervention compared to chat-driven baselines.

High-quality training triplets (source-target image pairs with precise editing instructions) are a critical bottleneck for scaling instruction-guided image editing models. Vision-language models (VLMs) are widely used for automated instruction synthesis, but we identify three systematic failure modes in image-pair settings: orientation inconsistency (e.g., left/right confusion), viewpoint ambiguity, and insufficient fine-grained attribute description. Human evaluation shows that over 47% of instructions from strong baseline VLMs contain critical errors unusable for downstream training. We propose EditCaption, a scalable two-stage post-training pipeline for VLM-based instruction synthesis. Stage 1 builds a 100K supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset by combining GLM automatic annotation, EditScore-based filtering, and human refinement for spatial, directional, and attribute-level accuracy. Stage 2 collects 10K human preference pairs targeting the three failure modes and applies direct preference optimization (DPO) for alignment beyond SFT alone. On Eval-400, ByteMorph-Bench, and HQ-Edit, fine-tuned Qwen3-VL models outperform open-source baselines; the 235B model reaches 4.712 on Eval-400 (vs. Gemini-3-Pro 4.706, GPT-4.1 4.220, Kimi-K2.5 4.111) and 4.588 on ByteMorph-Bench (vs. Gemini-3-Pro 4.522, GPT-4.1 3.412). Human evaluation shows critical errors falling from 47.75% to 23% and correctness rising from 41.75% to 66%. The work offers a practical path to scalable, human-aligned instruction synthesis for image editing data.

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage step-by-step reasoning to solve complex problems. Standard evaluation practice involves generating a complete reasoning trace and assessing the correctness of the final answer presented at its conclusion. In this paper, we challenge the reliance on the final answer by posing the following two questions: Does the final answer reliably represent the model's optimal conclusion? Can alternative reasoning paths yield different results? To answer these questions, we analyze intermediate reasoning steps, termed subthoughts, and propose a method based on our findings. Our approach involves segmenting a reasoning trace into sequential subthoughts based on linguistic cues. We start by prompting the model to generate continuations from the end-point of each intermediate subthought. We extract a potential answer from every completed continuation originating from different subthoughts. We find that aggregating these answers by selecting the most frequent one (the mode) often yields significantly higher accuracy compared to relying solely on the answer derived from the original complete trace. Analyzing the consistency among the answers derived from different subthoughts reveals characteristics that correlate with the model's confidence and correctness, suggesting potential for identifying less reliable answers. Our experiments across various LLMs and challenging mathematical reasoning datasets (AIME2024 and AIME2025) show consistent accuracy improvements, with gains reaching up to 13\% and 10\% respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/hammoudhasan/SubthoughtReasoner.

Visual reasoning is critical for a wide range of computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite notable advances in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys often address these directions in isolation, lacking a unified analysis and comparison across reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols. This survey aims to address this gap by categorizing visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and systematically examining their implementation through architectures such as graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems. We review evaluation protocols designed to assess functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and critically analyze their limitations in terms of generalizability, reproducibility, and explanatory power. Beyond evaluation, we identify key open challenges in visual reasoning, including scalability to complex scenes, deeper integration of symbolic and neural paradigms, the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we outline a forward-looking research agenda for next-generation vision systems, emphasizing that bridging perception and reasoning is essential for building transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain adaptive AI systems, particularly in critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

Code generation has largely improved development efficiency in the era of large language models (LLMs). With the ability to follow instructions, current LLMs can be prompted to generate code solutions given detailed descriptions in natural language. Many research efforts are being devoted to improving the correctness of LLM-generated code, and many benchmarks are proposed to evaluate the correctness comprehensively. Despite the focus on correctness, the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions is under-explored. Current correctness benchmarks are not suitable for time efficiency evaluation since their test cases cannot well distinguish the time efficiency of different code solutions. Besides, the current execution time measurement is not stable and comprehensive, threatening the validity of the time efficiency evaluation. To address the challenges in the time efficiency evaluation of code generation, we propose COFFE, a code generation benchmark for evaluating the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions. COFFE contains 398 and 358 problems for function-level and file-level code generation, respectively. To improve the distinguishability, we design a novel stressful test case generation approach with contracts and two new formats of test cases to improve the accuracy of generation. For the time evaluation metric, we propose efficienct@k based on CPU instruction count to ensure a stable and solid comparison between different solutions. We evaluate 14 popular LLMs on COFFE and identify four findings. Based on the findings, we draw some implications for LLM researchers and software practitioners to facilitate future research and usage of LLMs in code generation.

Malware authors often employ code obfuscations to make their malware harder to detect. Existing tools for generating obfuscated code often require access to the original source code (e.g., C++ or Java), and adding new obfuscations is a non-trivial, labor-intensive process. In this study, we ask the following question: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) potentially generate a new obfuscated assembly code? If so, this poses a risk to anti-virus engines and potentially increases the flexibility of attackers to create new obfuscation patterns. We answer this in the affirmative by developing the MetamorphASM benchmark comprising MetamorphASM Dataset (MAD) along with three code obfuscation techniques: dead code, register substitution, and control flow change. The MetamorphASM systematically evaluates the ability of LLMs to generate and analyze obfuscated code using MAD, which contains 328,200 obfuscated assembly code samples. We release this dataset and analyze the success rate of various LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5/4, GPT-4o-mini, Starcoder, CodeGemma, CodeLlama, CodeT5, and LLaMA 3.1) in generating obfuscated assembly code. The evaluation was performed using established information-theoretic metrics and manual human review to ensure correctness and provide the foundation for researchers to study and develop remediations to this risk. The source code can be found at the following GitHub link: https://github.com/mohammadi-ali/MetamorphASM.