new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Aug 11

All that structure matches does not glitter

Generative models for materials, especially inorganic crystals, hold potential to transform the theoretical prediction of novel compounds and structures. Advancement in this field depends critically on robust benchmarks and minimal, information-rich datasets that enable meaningful model evaluation. This paper critically examines common datasets and reported metrics for a crystal structure prediction taskx2014generating the most likely structures given the chemical composition of a material. We focus on three key issues: First, materials datasets should contain unique crystal structures; for example, we show that the widely-utilized carbon-24 dataset only contains approx40% unique structures. Second, materials datasets should not be split randomly if polymorphs of many different compositions are numerous, which we find to be the case for the perov-5 dataset. Third, benchmarks can mislead if used uncritically, e.g., reporting a match rate metric without considering the structural variety exhibited by identical building blocks. To address these oft-overlooked issues, we introduce several fixes. We provide revised versions of the carbon-24 dataset: one with duplicates removed, one deduplicated and split by number of atoms N, and two containing only identical structures but with different unit cells. We also propose a new split for the perov-5 dataset which ensures polymorphs are grouped within each split subset, setting a more sensible standard for benchmarking model performance. Finally, we present METRe and cRMSE, new model evaluation metrics that can correct existing issues with the match rate metric.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

Crystal: Illuminating LLM Abilities on Language and Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) specializing in code generation (which are also often referred to as code LLMs), e.g., StarCoder and Code Llama, play increasingly critical roles in various software development scenarios. It is also crucial for code LLMs to possess both code generation and natural language abilities for many specific applications, such as code snippet retrieval using natural language or code explanations. The intricate interaction between acquiring language and coding skills complicates the development of strong code LLMs. Furthermore, there is a lack of thorough prior studies on the LLM pretraining strategy that mixes code and natural language. In this work, we propose a pretraining strategy to enhance the integration of natural language and coding capabilities within a single LLM. Specifically, it includes two phases of training with appropriately adjusted code/language ratios. The resulting model, Crystal, demonstrates remarkable capabilities in both domains. Specifically, it has natural language and coding performance comparable to that of Llama 2 and Code Llama, respectively. Crystal exhibits better data efficiency, using 1.4 trillion tokens compared to the more than 2 trillion tokens used by Llama 2 and Code Llama. We verify our pretraining strategy by analyzing the training process and observe consistent improvements in most benchmarks. We also adopted a typical application adaptation phase with a code-centric data mixture, only to find that it did not lead to enhanced performance or training efficiency, underlining the importance of a carefully designed data recipe. To foster research within the community, we commit to open-sourcing every detail of the pretraining, including our training datasets, code, loggings and 136 checkpoints throughout the training.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

HMamba: Hyperbolic Mamba for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation systems have become a cornerstone of personalized services, adept at modeling the temporal evolution of user preferences by capturing dynamic interaction sequences. Existing approaches predominantly rely on traditional models, including RNNs and Transformers. Despite their success in local pattern recognition, Transformer-based methods suffer from quadratic computational complexity and a tendency toward superficial attention patterns, limiting their ability to infer enduring preference hierarchies in sequential recommendation data. Recent advances in Mamba-based sequential models introduce linear-time efficiency but remain constrained by Euclidean geometry, failing to leverage the intrinsic hyperbolic structure of recommendation data. To bridge this gap, we propose Hyperbolic Mamba, a novel architecture that unifies the efficiency of Mamba's selective state space mechanism with hyperbolic geometry's hierarchical representational power. Our framework introduces (1) a hyperbolic selective state space that maintains curvature-aware sequence modeling and (2) stabilized Riemannian operations to enable scalable training. Experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that Hyperbolic Mamba achieves 3-11% improvement while retaining Mamba's linear-time efficiency, enabling real-world deployment. This work establishes a new paradigm for efficient, hierarchy-aware sequential modeling.

  • 7 authors
·
May 14, 2025

Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Models

Today's most advanced multimodal models remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed models into open ones. As a result, the community is still missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key innovation is a novel, highly detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions. To enable a wide array of user interactions, we also introduce a diverse dataset mixture for fine-tuning that includes in-the-wild Q&A and innovative 2D pointing data. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which will be released. The best-in-class 72B model within the Molmo family not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models but also compares favorably against proprietary systems like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 1.5 on both academic benchmarks and human evaluation. We will be releasing all of our model weights, captioning and fine-tuning data, and source code in the near future. Select model weights, inference code, and demo are available at https://molmo.allenai.org.

  • 51 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024 4

2 OLMo 2 Furious

We present OLMo 2, the next generation of our fully open language models. OLMo 2 includes dense autoregressive models with improved architecture and training recipe, pretraining data mixtures, and instruction tuning recipes. Our modified model architecture and training recipe achieve both better training stability and improved per-token efficiency. Our updated pretraining data mixture introduces a new, specialized data mix called Dolmino Mix 1124, which significantly improves model capabilities across many downstream task benchmarks when introduced via late-stage curriculum training (i.e. specialized data during the annealing phase of pretraining). Finally, we incorporate best practices from T\"ulu 3 to develop OLMo 2-Instruct, focusing on permissive data and extending our final-stage reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Our OLMo 2 base models sit at the Pareto frontier of performance to compute, often matching or outperforming open-weight only models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 while using fewer FLOPs and with fully transparent training data, code, and recipe. Our fully open OLMo 2-Instruct models are competitive with or surpassing open-weight only models of comparable size, including Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.1 and Gemma 2. We release all OLMo 2 artifacts openly -- models at 7B and 13B scales, both pretrained and post-trained, including their full training data, training code and recipes, training logs and thousands of intermediate checkpoints. The final instruction model is available on the Ai2 Playground as a free research demo.

  • 40 authors
·
Dec 31, 2024

A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation

Generative modeling of crystal data distribution is an important yet challenging task due to the unique periodic physical symmetry of crystals. Diffusion-based methods have shown early promise in modeling crystal distribution. More recently, Bayesian Flow Networks were introduced to aggregate noisy latent variables, resulting in a variance-reduced parameter space that has been shown to be advantageous for modeling Euclidean data distributions with structural constraints (Song et al., 2023). Inspired by this, we seek to unlock its potential for modeling variables located in non-Euclidean manifolds e.g. those within crystal structures, by overcoming challenging theoretical issues. We introduce CrysBFN, a novel crystal generation method by proposing a periodic Bayesian flow, which essentially differs from the original Gaussian-based BFN by exhibiting non-monotonic entropy dynamics. To successfully realize the concept of periodic Bayesian flow, CrysBFN integrates a new entropy conditioning mechanism and empirically demonstrates its significance compared to time-conditioning. Extensive experiments over both crystal ab initio generation and crystal structure prediction tasks demonstrate the superiority of CrysBFN, which consistently achieves new state-of-the-art on all benchmarks. Surprisingly, we found that CrysBFN enjoys a significant improvement in sampling efficiency, e.g., ~100x speedup 10 v.s. 2000 steps network forwards) compared with previous diffusion-based methods on MP-20 dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/wu-han-lin/CrysBFN.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

SpreadsheetBench 2: Evaluating Agents on End-to-End Business Spreadsheet Workflows

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

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 28

RamanBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Machine Learning on Raman Spectroscopy

Machine Learning (ML) has transformed many scientific fields, yet key applications still lack standardized benchmarks. Raman spectroscopy, a widely used technique for non-invasive molecular analysis, is one such field where progress is limited by fragmented datasets, inconsistent evaluation, and models that fail to capture the structure of spectral data. We introduce RamanBench, the first large-scale, fully reproducible benchmark for ML on Raman spectroscopy, consisting of streamlined data access, evaluation protocols and code, as well as a live leaderboard. It unifies 74 datasets (including 16 first released with this benchmark) across four domains, comprising 325,668 spectra and spanning classification and regression tasks under diverse experimental conditions. We benchmark 28 models under a standardized protocol, including classical methods (e.g., PLS), Raman-specific (e.g., RamanNet), Tabular Foundation Model (TFM) (e.g., TabPFN), and time-series approaches (e.g., ROCKET). TFM consistently outperform domain-specific and gradient boosting baselines, while time-series models remain competitive. However, no method generalizes across datasets, revealing a fundamental gap. Therefore, we invite the community to contribute new approaches to our living benchmark, with the potential to accelerate advances in critical applications such as medical diagnostics, biological research, and materials science.

  • 9 authors
·
May 2 1

Beyond IID: How General Are Tabular Foundation Models, Really?

Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry. Research communities across disciplines are increasingly evaluating tabular foundation models on diverse datasets and tasks. However, these task- and discipline-specific evaluations remain largely inaccessible to model researchers because benchmark software and evaluation protocols are fragmented. As a result, model researchers rely on standard benchmarks, which are mostly defined for tasks where tabular foundation models already excel. The most challenging scenarios are excluded, limiting meaningful progress in the field by focusing on marginal improvements on IID data rather than on broader, more demanding challenges. To overcome this, we introduce BeyondArena, the first unified holistic benchmark for tabular data that supports diverse task types (IID, temporal, grouped), across sample size and feature dimensionality scales, with diverse feature types (with text, with high cardinality) from a broad range of disciplines. To enable unified benchmarking beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce Data Foundry, a Python framework and metadata schema for curating tabular datasets for predictive machine learning. Our results across 11 models and 142 curated datasets show that existing tabular foundation models excel on tiny- to medium-sized IID data, while traditional tree-based and deep learning models still dominate on non-IID, large, and high-dimensional datasets. BeyondArena guides model research for the most demanding challenges in tabular data, enabling progress towards truly foundational tabular models.

TabArena TabArena
·
Jun 28 3

TabReD: A Benchmark of Tabular Machine Learning in-the-Wild

Benchmarks that closely reflect downstream application scenarios are essential for the streamlined adoption of new research in tabular machine learning (ML). In this work, we examine existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of industry-grade tabular data that are underrepresented in the datasets available to the academic community. First, tabular data often changes over time in real-world deployment scenarios. This impacts model performance and requires time-based train and test splits for correct model evaluation. Yet, existing academic tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. For each specific dataset, this can have a different impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features, which in turn can affect model selection. To fill the aforementioned gaps in academic benchmarks, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets covering a wide range of domains from finance to food delivery services. We assess a large number of tabular ML models in the feature-rich, temporally-evolving data setting facilitated by TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits more common in academic benchmarks. Furthermore, on the TabReD datasets, MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results, while more sophisticated DL models are yet to prove their effectiveness.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024 6

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

  • 38 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

MatTools: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Materials Science Tools

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to materials science questions, including literature comprehension, property prediction, materials discovery and alloy design. At the same time, a wide range of physics-based computational approaches have been developed in which materials properties can be calculated. Here, we propose a benchmark application to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs to answer materials science questions through the generation and safe execution of codes based on such physics-based computational materials science packages. MatTools is built on two complementary components: a materials simulation tool question-answer (QA) benchmark and a real-world tool-usage benchmark. We designed an automated methodology to efficiently collect real-world materials science tool-use examples. The QA benchmark, derived from the pymatgen (Python Materials Genomics) codebase and documentation, comprises 69,225 QA pairs that assess the ability of an LLM to understand materials science tools. The real-world benchmark contains 49 tasks (138 subtasks) requiring the generation of functional Python code for materials property calculations. Our evaluation of diverse LLMs yields three key insights: (1)Generalists outshine specialists;(2)AI knows AI; and (3)Simpler is better. MatTools provides a standardized framework for assessing and improving LLM capabilities for materials science tool applications, facilitating the development of more effective AI systems for materials science and general scientific research.

  • 6 authors
·
May 16, 2025 2

BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions

Automated software engineering has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for programming. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can perform various software engineering tasks like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks. Solving challenging and practical programming tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs. To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical programming tasks, we introduce Bench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained programming tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of Bench, Benchi, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.

bigcode BigCode
·
Jun 22, 2024 8

Benchmark Everything Everywhere All at Once

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

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 3 2

PhysUniBench: An Undergraduate-Level Physics Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Models

Physics problem-solving is a challenging domain for large AI models, requiring integration of conceptual understanding, mathematical reasoning, and interpretation of physical diagrams. Current evaluation methodologies show notable limitations in capturing the breadth and complexity of undergraduate-level physics, underscoring the need for more rigorous assessments. To this end, we present PhysUniBench, a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate and improve the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) specifically on undergraduate-level physics problems. PhysUniBench consists of 3,304 physics questions spanning 8 major sub-disciplines of physics, each accompanied by one visual diagrams. The benchmark includes both open-ended and multiple-choice questions, systematically curated and difficulty-rated through an iterative model-in-the-loop process. The benchmark's construction involved a rigorous multi-stage process, including multiple roll-outs, expert-level evaluation, automated filtering of easily solved problems, and a nuanced difficulty grading system with five levels. Through extensive experiments, we observe that current state-of-the-art models encounter substantial challenges in physics reasoning. For example, GPT-4o mini achieves only about 34.2\% accuracy in the proposed PhysUniBench. These results highlight that current MLLMs struggle with advanced physics reasoning, especially on multi-step problems and those requiring precise diagram interpretation. By providing a broad and rigorous assessment tool, PhysUniBench aims to drive progress in AI for Science, encouraging the development of models with stronger physical reasoning, problem-solving skills, and multimodal understanding. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://prismax-team.github.io/PhysUniBenchmark/.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 21, 2025

What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking

In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 8, 2022

DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models

Can the rapid advances in code generation, function calling, and data analysis using large language models (LLMs) help automate the search and verification of hypotheses purely from a set of provided datasets? To evaluate this question, we present DiscoveryBench, the first comprehensive benchmark that formalizes the multi-step process of data-driven discovery. The benchmark is designed to systematically assess current model capabilities in discovery tasks and provide a useful resource for improving them. Our benchmark contains 264 tasks collected across 6 diverse domains, such as sociology and engineering, by manually deriving discovery workflows from published papers to approximate the real-world challenges faced by researchers, where each task is defined by a dataset, its metadata, and a discovery goal in natural language. We additionally provide 903 synthetic tasks to conduct controlled evaluations across task complexity. Furthermore, our structured formalism of data-driven discovery enables a facet-based evaluation that provides useful insights into different failure modes. We evaluate several popular LLM-based reasoning frameworks using both open and closed LLMs as baselines on DiscoveryBench and find that even the best system scores only 25%. Our benchmark, thus, illustrates the challenges in autonomous data-driven discovery and serves as a valuable resource for the community to make progress.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

MacrOData: New Benchmarks of Thousands of Datasets for Tabular Outlier Detection

Quality benchmarks are essential for fairly and accurately tracking scientific progress and enabling practitioners to make informed methodological choices. Outlier detection (OD) on tabular data underpins numerous real-world applications, yet existing OD benchmarks remain limited. The prominent OD benchmark AdBench is the de facto standard in the literature, yet comprises only 57 datasets. In addition to other shortcomings discussed in this work, its small scale severely restricts diversity and statistical power. We introduce MacrOData, a large-scale benchmark suite for tabular OD comprising three carefully curated components: OddBench, with 790 datasets containing real-world semantic anomalies; OvrBench, with 856 datasets featuring real-world statistical outliers; and SynBench, with 800 synthetically generated datasets spanning diverse data priors and outlier archetypes. Owing to its scale and diversity, MacrOData enables comprehensive and statistically robust evaluation of tabular OD methods. Our benchmarks further satisfy several key desiderata: We provide standardized train/test splits for all datasets, public/private benchmark partitions with held-out test labels for the latter reserved toward an online leaderboard, and annotate our datasets with semantic metadata. We conduct extensive experiments across all benchmarks, evaluating a broad range of OD methods comprising classical, deep, and foundation models, over diverse hyperparameter configurations. We report detailed empirical findings, practical guidelines, as well as individual performances as references for future research. All benchmarks containing 2,446 datasets combined are open-sourced, along with a publicly accessible leaderboard hosted at https://huggingface.co/MacrOData-CMU.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 9

ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents

Language-model agents are increasingly used as persistent coworkers that assist users across multiple working days. During such workflows, the surrounding environment may change independently of the agent: new emails arrive, calendar entries shift, knowledge-base records are updated, and evidence appears across images, scanned PDFs, audio, video, and spreadsheets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate this setting because they typically run within a single static episode and remain largely text-centric. We introduce , a benchmark for coworker agents built around multi-turn multi-day tasks, a stateful sandboxed service environment whose state evolves between turns, and rule-based verification. The current release contains 100 tasks across 13 professional scenarios, executed against five stateful sandboxed services (filesystem, email, calendar, knowledge base, spreadsheet) and scored by 1537 deterministic Python checkers over post-execution service state; no LLM-as-judge is invoked during scoring. We benchmark seven frontier agent systems. The strongest model reaches 75.8 weighted score, but the best strict Task Success is only 20.0\%, indicating that partial progress is common while complete end-to-end workflow completion remains rare. Turn-level analysis shows that performance drops after the first exogenous environment update, highlighting adaptation to changing state as a key open challenge. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and construction pipeline to support reproducible coworker-agent evaluation.

  • 47 authors
·
Apr 25 2

HWE-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Real-World Hardware Bug Repair Tasks

Existing benchmarks for hardware design primarily evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on isolated, component-level tasks such as generating HDL modules from specifications, leaving repository-scale evaluation unaddressed. We introduce HWE-Bench, the first large-scale, repository-level benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on real-world hardware bug repair tasks. HWE-Bench comprises 417 task instances derived from real historical bug-fix pull requests across six major open-source projects spanning both Verilog/SystemVerilog and Chisel, covering RISC-V cores, SoCs, and security roots-of-trust. Each task is grounded in a fully containerized environment where the agent must resolve a real bug report, with correctness validated through the project's native simulation and regression flows. The benchmark is built through a largely automated pipeline that enables efficient expansion to new repositories. We evaluate seven LLMs with four agent frameworks and find that the best agent resolves 70.7% of tasks overall, with performance exceeding 90% on smaller cores but dropping below 65% on complex SoC-level projects. We observe larger performance gaps across models than commonly reported on software benchmarks, and difficulty is driven by project scope and bug-type distribution rather than code size alone. Our failure analysis traces agent failures to three stages of the debugging process: fault localization, hardware-semantic reasoning, and cross-artifact coordination across RTL, configuration, and verification components, providing concrete directions for developing more capable hardware-aware agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 15

Qiskit QuantumKatas: Adapting Microsoft's Quantum Computing exercises for LLM evaluation

We adapt Microsoft's QuantumKatas -- a well-established quantum computing curriculum -- from Q# to Qiskit, the most widely-adopted quantum computing framework, and package it with an evaluation framework for systematic LLM assessment. The resulting benchmark comprises 350 tasks across 26 categories, spanning fundamental gates through advanced algorithms (Grover's, Simon's, Deutsch-Jozsa), error correction, key distribution, and quantum games. Each task includes a natural language prompt, canonical solution, and deterministic test verification via classical circuit simulation. By building on the QuantumKatas' proven pedagogical design rather than creating tasks from scratch, we inherit a principled difficulty progression and comprehensive concept coverage while contributing the framework adaptation, evaluation infrastructure, and empirical analysis. We evaluate 16 LLMs across 7 prompting configurations -- a total of 39,200 model runs -- to demonstrate the benchmark's utility. Three key findings emerge: (1) the benchmark effectively differentiates model capabilities, with best-configuration pass rates ranging from 32.3% to 83.1% and a 26.1 pp average gap between frontier and open-source models; (2) models perform well at implementing known algorithms (SimonsAlgorithm 82.1%, BasicGates 81.6%) but struggle with problem encoding (SolveSATWithGrover 34.4%, DistinguishUnitaries 40.0%); and (3) chain-of-thought prompting shows a modestly bimodal effect -- it is the best strategy for three models (two of them explicitly reasoning-tuned per vendor documentation) but degrades performance for the rest, leaving it mid-pack in aggregate (56.3% mean) behind few-shot-5 (57.8%). We release the benchmark, evaluation framework, and baseline results to support research on LLM capabilities in quantum computing.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25

JavaBench: A Benchmark of Object-Oriented Code Generation for Evaluating Large Language Models

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

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

PhononBench:A Large-Scale Phonon-Based Benchmark for Dynamical Stability in Crystal Generation

In this work, we introduce PhononBench, the first large-scale benchmark for dynamical stability in AI-generated crystals. Leveraging the recently developed MatterSim interatomic potential, which achieves DFT-level accuracy in phonon predictions across more than 10,000 materials, PhononBench enables efficient large-scale phonon calculations and dynamical-stability analysis for 108,843 crystal structures generated by six leading crystal generation models. PhononBench reveals a widespread limitation of current generative models in ensuring dynamical stability: the average dynamical-stability rate across all generated structures is only 25.83%, with the top-performing model, MatterGen, reaching just 41.0%. Further case studies show that in property-targeted generation-illustrated here by band-gap conditioning with MatterGen--the dynamical-stability rate remains as low as 23.5% even at the optimal band-gap condition of 0.5 eV. In space-group-controlled generation, higher-symmetry crystals exhibit better stability (e.g., cubic systems achieve rates up to 49.2%), yet the average stability across all controlled generations is still only 34.4%. An important additional outcome of this study is the identification of 28,119 crystal structures that are phonon-stable across the entire Brillouin zone, providing a substantial pool of reliable candidates for future materials exploration. By establishing the first large-scale dynamical-stability benchmark, this work systematically highlights the current limitations of crystal generation models and offers essential evaluation criteria and guidance for their future development toward the design and discovery of physically viable materials. All model-generated crystal structures, phonon calculation results, and the high-throughput evaluation workflows developed in PhononBench will be openly released at https://github.com/xqh19970407/PhononBench

Faithful, Enriched, and Precise: Benchmarking Natural-Science Illustration Generation by T2I models

Scientific illustrations are essential tools for communicating research findings, especially in natural science, where they visualize complex concepts and processes. As Text-to-Image (T2I) models become increasingly capable, researchers have started to use them for scientific illustration generation. However, existing benchmarks often assess outputs at a holistic level, overlooking fine-grained elements, while scientific reasoning ability and output conciseness remain under-quantified. We introduce FEPBench, a benchmark built from carefully selected high-quality scientific illustrations across multiple disciplines and layout types. With the assistance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and human experts, we provide fine-grained atom set annotations and systematically evaluate T2I models along three dimensions: instruction faithfulness, reasoning enrichment, and semantic precision. Our evaluation further decomposes model performance across visual, textual, relation, and layout elements. Results show that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source models, such as GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro, still suffer from text-rendering bottlenecks, limited reasoning enrichment, and difficulty balancing generation richness with precision. These findings provide practical guidance for improving and deploying T2I models in scientific illustration generation. Benchmark data, atom set annotations, and evaluation code will be released by us.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 4

Unsteady Metrics and Benchmarking Cultures of AI Model Builders

The primary way to establish and compare competencies in foundation and generative AI models has shifted from peer-reviewed literature to press releases and company blog posts, where model builders highlight results on selected benchmarks. These artifacts now largely define the state of the art for researchers and the public. Despite their prominence, which benchmarks model builders choose to highlight, and what they communicate through this selection, is underexamined. To investigate, we introduce and open-source Benchmarking-Cultures-25, a dataset of 231 benchmarks highlighted across 139 model releases in 2025 from 11 major AI builders, alongside an interactive tool to explore the data. Our analysis reveals a fragmented evaluation landscape with limited cross-model comparability: 63.2% of highlighted benchmarks are used by a single builder, and 38.5% appear in just one release. Few achieve widespread use (e.g., GPQA Diamond, LiveCodeBench, AIME 2025). Moreover, benchmarks are attributed different competencies by different builders, depending on their narrative. To disentangle these conflicting presentations, we develop a unified taxonomy mapping diverging terminology to a shared framework of measured signals based on what benchmark authors claim to measure. "General knowledge application" is the second most popular, yet vaguely defined, category. Qualitative analysis shows many such benchmarks deemphasize construct validity, instead framing results as indicators of progress toward AGI. Their authors claim to measure knowledge or reasoning broadly, yet mostly evaluate STEM subjects (especially math). We argue that highlighted benchmarks function less as standardized measurement tools and more as flexible narrative devices prioritizing market positioning over scientific evaluation. Data: https://hf.co/datasets/matybohacek/benchmarking-cultures-25; tool: https://bench-cultures.net.

  • 3 authors
·
May 12

QuitoBench: A High-Quality Open Time Series Forecasting Benchmark

Time series forecasting is critical across finance, healthcare, and cloud computing, yet progress is constrained by a fundamental bottleneck: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce QuitoBench, a regime-balanced benchmark for time series forecasting with coverage across eight trendtimesseasonalitytimesforecastability (TSF) regimes, designed to capture forecasting-relevant properties rather than application-defined domain labels. The benchmark is built upon Quito, a billion-scale time series corpus of application traffic from Alipay spanning nine business domains. Benchmarking 10 models from deep learning, foundation models, and statistical baselines across 232,200 evaluation instances, we report four key findings: (i) a context-length crossover where deep learning models lead at short context (L=96) but foundation models dominate at long context (L ge 576); (ii) forecastability is the dominant difficulty driver, producing a 3.64 times MAE gap across regimes; (iii) deep learning models match or surpass foundation models at 59 times fewer parameters; and (iv) scaling the amount of training data provides substantially greater benefit than scaling model size for both model families. These findings are validated by strong cross-benchmark and cross-metric consistency. Our open-source release enables reproducible, regime-aware evaluation for time series forecasting research.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 26 3

TabStruct: Measuring Structural Fidelity of Tabular Data

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

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025 1

ImagenWorld: Stress-Testing Image Generation Models with Explainable Human Evaluation on Open-ended Real-World Tasks

Advances in diffusion, autoregressive, and hybrid models have enabled high-quality image synthesis for tasks such as text-to-image, editing, and reference-guided composition. Yet, existing benchmarks remain limited, either focus on isolated tasks, cover only narrow domains, or provide opaque scores without explaining failure modes. We introduce ImagenWorld, a benchmark of 3.6K condition sets spanning six core tasks (generation and editing, with single or multiple references) and six topical domains (artworks, photorealistic images, information graphics, textual graphics, computer graphics, and screenshots). The benchmark is supported by 20K fine-grained human annotations and an explainable evaluation schema that tags localized object-level and segment-level errors, complementing automated VLM-based metrics. Our large-scale evaluation of 14 models yields several insights: (1) models typically struggle more in editing tasks than in generation tasks, especially in local edits. (2) models excel in artistic and photorealistic settings but struggle with symbolic and text-heavy domains such as screenshots and information graphics. (3) closed-source systems lead overall, while targeted data curation (e.g., Qwen-Image) narrows the gap in text-heavy cases. (4) modern VLM-based metrics achieve Kendall accuracies up to 0.79, approximating human ranking, but fall short of fine-grained, explainable error attribution. ImagenWorld provides both a rigorous benchmark and a diagnostic tool to advance robust image generation.

Comfy-Org Comfy Org
·
Mar 29 2

PyBench: Evaluating LLM Agent on various real-world coding tasks

The LLM Agent, equipped with a code interpreter, is capable of automatically solving real-world coding tasks, such as data analysis and image editing. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on either simplistic tasks, such as completing a few lines of code, or on extremely complex and specific tasks at the repository level, neither of which are representative of various daily coding tasks. To address this gap, we introduce PyBench, a benchmark encompassing five main categories of real-world tasks, covering more than 10 types of files. Given a high-level user query and related files, the LLM Agent needs to reason and execute Python code via a code interpreter for a few turns before making a formal response to fulfill the user's requirements. Successfully addressing tasks in PyBench demands a robust understanding of various Python packages, superior reasoning capabilities, and the ability to incorporate feedback from executed code. Our evaluations indicate that current open-source LLMs are struggling with these tasks. Hence, we conduct analysis and experiments on four kinds of datasets proving that comprehensive abilities are needed for PyBench. Our fine-tuned 8B size model: PyLlama3 achieves an exciting performance on PyBench which surpasses many 33B and 70B size models. Our Benchmark, Training Dataset, and Model are available at: https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench{https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench}

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024

Benchmarking the Benchmarks: A Validity Audit of Tool-Calling Evaluation

Tool-calling benchmarks are increasingly used to rank language-model agents, yet their scores are often treated as ground truth without validating the evaluators themselves. We present a systematic validity and reproducibility audit of four major tool-calling benchmark families: BFCL v4, τ2-Bench, LiveMCPBench, and MCP-Atlas. Across 496 expert-reviewed benchmark tasks, we find 92 evaluator-human disagreements, corresponding to an 18.5% misalignment rate. The failures are not isolated annotation mistakes: deterministic benchmarks exhibit brittle state matching, trajectory lock-in, incorrect ground truths, substring-based communication failures, and reward-basis misalignment, while LLM-judge benchmarks exhibit rubric drift, hallucinated completion, answer-only scoring, and substantial run-to-run variance. In LiveMCPBench, 23 repeated evaluations of the same setup produce scores ranging from 57.9% to 76.8%, a spread of 18.9 percentage points, large enough to change leaderboard conclusions. These results show that current tool-calling scores can reflect evaluator artifacts rather than agent capability. We introduce a unified taxonomy of tool-calling evaluation failures, release trace-level audit artifacts and corrected evaluation components, and argue for decomposed metrics that separately measure tool invocation, task completion, and outcome verification. Our findings suggest that progress in tool-using agents requires benchmarks whose evaluators are themselves reproducible, auditable, and aligned with human judgments of task success. We further introduce Tool-Veritas, a configurable benchmark that combines deterministic state verification with optional qualitative judging, and Harness Lab, an open-source system for benchmark execution, trace inspection, repeated-run comparison, and evaluator debugging.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 29

Benchmarking Neural Network Training Algorithms

Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workloads (e.g., better update rules, tuning protocols, learning rate schedules, or data selection schemes) could save time, save computational resources, and lead to better, more accurate, models. Unfortunately, as a community, we are currently unable to reliably identify training algorithm improvements, or even determine the state-of-the-art training algorithm. In this work, using concrete experiments, we argue that real progress in speeding up training requires new benchmarks that resolve three basic challenges faced by empirical comparisons of training algorithms: (1) how to decide when training is complete and precisely measure training time, (2) how to handle the sensitivity of measurements to exact workload details, and (3) how to fairly compare algorithms that require hyperparameter tuning. In order to address these challenges, we introduce a new, competitive, time-to-result benchmark using multiple workloads running on fixed hardware, the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms benchmark. Our benchmark includes a set of workload variants that make it possible to detect benchmark submissions that are more robust to workload changes than current widely-used methods. Finally, we evaluate baseline submissions constructed using various optimizers that represent current practice, as well as other optimizers that have recently received attention in the literature. These baseline results collectively demonstrate the feasibility of our benchmark, show that non-trivial gaps between methods exist, and set a provisional state-of-the-art for future benchmark submissions to try and surpass.

  • 25 authors
·
Jun 12, 2023 1

Force-Free Molecular Dynamics Through Autoregressive Equivariant Networks

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations play a crucial role in scientific research. Yet their computational cost often limits the timescales and system sizes that can be explored. Most data-driven efforts have been focused on reducing the computational cost of accurate interatomic forces required for solving the equations of motion. Despite their success, however, these machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are still bound to small time-steps. In this work, we introduce TrajCast, a transferable and data-efficient framework based on autoregressive equivariant message passing networks that directly updates atomic positions and velocities lifting the constraints imposed by traditional numerical integration. We benchmark our framework across various systems, including a small molecule, crystalline material, and bulk liquid, demonstrating excellent agreement with reference MD simulations for structural, dynamical, and energetic properties. Depending on the system, TrajCast allows for forecast intervals up to 30times larger than traditional MD time-steps, generating over 15 ns of trajectory data per day for a solid with more than 4,000 atoms. By enabling efficient large-scale simulations over extended timescales, TrajCast can accelerate materials discovery and explore physical phenomena beyond the reach of traditional simulations and experiments. An open-source implementation of TrajCast is accessible under https://github.com/IBM/trajcast.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

HiPhO: How Far Are (M)LLMs from Humans in the Latest High School Physics Olympiad Benchmark?

Recently, the physical capabilities of (M)LLMs have garnered increasing attention. However, existing benchmarks for physics suffer from two major gaps: they neither provide systematic and up-to-date coverage of real-world physics competitions such as physics Olympiads, nor enable direct performance comparison with humans. To bridge these gaps, we present HiPhO, the first benchmark dedicated to high school physics Olympiads with human-aligned evaluation. Specifically, HiPhO highlights three key innovations. (1) Comprehensive Data: It compiles 13 latest Olympiad exams from 2024-2025, spanning both international and regional competitions, and covering mixed modalities that encompass problems spanning text-only to diagram-based. (2) Professional Evaluation: We adopt official marking schemes to perform fine-grained grading at both the answer and step level, fully aligned with human examiners to ensure high-quality and domain-specific evaluation. (3) Comparison with Human Contestants: We assign gold, silver, and bronze medals to models based on official medal thresholds, thereby enabling direct comparison between (M)LLMs and human contestants. Our large-scale evaluation of 30 state-of-the-art (M)LLMs shows that: across 13 exams, open-source MLLMs mostly remain at or below the bronze level; open-source LLMs show promising progress with occasional golds; closed-source reasoning MLLMs can achieve 6 to 12 gold medals; and most models still have a significant gap from full marks. These results highlight a substantial performance gap between open-source models and top students, the strong physical reasoning capabilities of closed-source reasoning models, and the fact that there is still significant room for improvement. HiPhO, as a rigorous, human-aligned, and Olympiad-focused benchmark for advancing multimodal physical reasoning, is open-source and available at https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO.

  • 17 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

Matbench Discovery -- An evaluation framework for machine learning crystal stability prediction

Matbench Discovery simulates the deployment of machine learning (ML) energy models in a high-throughput search for stable inorganic crystals. We address the disconnect between (i) thermodynamic stability and formation energy and (ii) in-domain vs out-of-distribution performance. Alongside this paper, we publish a Python package to aid with future model submissions and a growing online leaderboard with further insights into trade-offs between various performance metrics. To answer the question which ML methodology performs best at materials discovery, our initial release explores a variety of models including random forests, graph neural networks (GNN), one-shot predictors, iterative Bayesian optimizers and universal interatomic potentials (UIP). Ranked best-to-worst by their test set F1 score on thermodynamic stability prediction, we find CHGNet > M3GNet > MACE > ALIGNN > MEGNet > CGCNN > CGCNN+P > Wrenformer > BOWSR > Voronoi tessellation fingerprints with random forest. The top 3 models are UIPs, the winning methodology for ML-guided materials discovery, achieving F1 scores of ~0.6 for crystal stability classification and discovery acceleration factors (DAF) of up to 5x on the first 10k most stable predictions compared to dummy selection from our test set. We also highlight a sharp disconnect between commonly used global regression metrics and more task-relevant classification metrics. Accurate regressors are susceptible to unexpectedly high false-positive rates if those accurate predictions lie close to the decision boundary at 0 eV/atom above the convex hull where most materials are. Our results highlight the need to focus on classification metrics that actually correlate with improved stability hit rate.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

MedRepBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Medical Report Interpretation

Medical report interpretation plays a crucial role in healthcare, enabling both patient-facing explanations and effective information flow across clinical systems. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated general document understanding capabilities, there remains a lack of standardized benchmarks to assess structured interpretation quality in medical reports. We introduce MedRepBench, a comprehensive benchmark built from 1,900 de-identified real-world Chinese medical reports spanning diverse departments, patient demographics, and acquisition formats. The benchmark is designed primarily to evaluate end-to-end VLMs for structured medical report understanding. To enable controlled comparisons, we also include a text-only evaluation setting using high-quality OCR outputs combined with LLMs, allowing us to estimate the upper-bound performance when character recognition errors are minimized. Our evaluation framework supports two complementary protocols: (1) an objective evaluation measuring field-level recall of structured clinical items, and (2) an automated subjective evaluation using a powerful LLM as a scoring agent to assess factuality, interpretability, and reasoning quality. Based on the objective metric, we further design a reward function and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve a mid-scale VLM, achieving up to 6% recall gain. We also observe that the OCR+LLM pipeline, despite strong performance, suffers from layout-blindness and latency issues, motivating further progress toward robust, fully vision-based report understanding.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 20, 2025

TempusBench: An Evaluation Framework for Time-Series Forecasting

Foundation models have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, and a rapidly growing literature on time-series foundation models (TSFMs) seeks to replicate this success in forecasting. While recent open-source models demonstrate the promise of TSFMs, the field lacks a comprehensive and community-accepted model evaluation framework. We see at least four major issues impeding progress on the development of such a framework. First, existing evaluation frameworks comprise benchmark forecasting tasks derived from often outdated datasets (e.g., M3), many of which lack clear metadata and overlap with the corpora used to pre-train TSFMs. Second, these frameworks evaluate models along a narrowly defined set of benchmark forecasting tasks, such as forecast horizon length or domain, but overlook core statistical properties such as non-stationarity and seasonality. Third, domain-specific models (e.g., XGBoost) are often compared unfairly, as existing frameworks do not enforce a systematic and consistent hyperparameter tuning convention for all models. Fourth, visualization tools for interpreting comparative performance are lacking. To address these issues, we introduce TempusBench, an open-source evaluation framework for TSFMs. TempusBench consists of 1) new datasets which are not included in existing TSFM pretraining corpora, 2) a set of novel benchmark tasks that go beyond existing ones, 3) a model evaluation pipeline with a standardized hyperparameter tuning protocol, and 4) a tensorboard-based visualization interface. We provide access to our code on GitHub: https://github.com/Smlcrm/TempusBench and maintain a live leaderboard at https://benchmark.smlcrm.com/.

  • 13 authors
·
Apr 15

Benchmark Agreement Testing Done Right: A Guide for LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Recent advancements in Language Models (LMs) have catalyzed the creation of multiple benchmarks, designed to assess these models' general capabilities. A crucial task, however, is assessing the validity of the benchmarks themselves. This is most commonly done via Benchmark Agreement Testing (BAT), where new benchmarks are validated against established ones using some agreement metric (e.g., rank correlation). Despite the crucial role of BAT for benchmark builders and consumers, there are no standardized procedures for such agreement testing. This deficiency can lead to invalid conclusions, fostering mistrust in benchmarks and upending the ability to properly choose the appropriate benchmark to use. By analyzing over 40 prominent benchmarks, we demonstrate how some overlooked methodological choices can significantly influence BAT results, potentially undermining the validity of conclusions. To address these inconsistencies, we propose a set of best practices for BAT and demonstrate how utilizing these methodologies greatly improves BAT robustness and validity. To foster adoption and facilitate future research,, we introduce BenchBench, a python package for BAT, and release the BenchBench-leaderboard, a meta-benchmark designed to evaluate benchmarks using their peers. Our findings underscore the necessity for standardized BAT, ensuring the robustness and validity of benchmark evaluations in the evolving landscape of language model research. BenchBench Package: https://github.com/IBM/BenchBench Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/per/BenchBench

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024 3

VER-Bench: Evaluating MLLMs on Reasoning with Fine-Grained Visual Evidence

With the rapid development of MLLMs, evaluating their visual capabilities has become increasingly crucial. Current benchmarks primarily fall into two main types: basic perception benchmarks, which focus on local details but lack deep reasoning (e.g., "what is in the image?"), and mainstream reasoning benchmarks, which concentrate on prominent image elements but may fail to assess subtle clues requiring intricate analysis. However, profound visual understanding and complex reasoning depend more on interpreting subtle, inconspicuous local details than on perceiving salient, macro-level objects. These details, though occupying minimal image area, often contain richer, more critical information for robust analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce the VER-Bench, a novel framework to evaluate MLLMs' ability to: 1) identify fine-grained visual clues, often occupying on average just 0.25% of the image area; 2) integrate these clues with world knowledge for complex reasoning. Comprising 374 carefully designed questions across Geospatial, Temporal, Situational, Intent, System State, and Symbolic reasoning, each question in VER-Bench is accompanied by structured evidence: visual clues and question-related reasoning derived from them. VER-Bench reveals current models' limitations in extracting subtle visual evidence and constructing evidence-based arguments, highlighting the need to enhance models's capabilities in fine-grained visual evidence extraction, integration, and reasoning for genuine visual understanding and human-like analysis. Dataset and additional materials are available https://github.com/verbta/ACMMM-25-Materials.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Can AI Agents Synthesize Scientific Conclusions?

Scientific AI agents increasingly retrieve evidence, reason across sources, and synthesize conclusions used in consequential decisions. Yet, their ability to do so in high-stakes domains such as health remains unclear. We introduce SciConBench, a large-scale live benchmark of 9.11K questions and expert-written conclusions from systematic reviews to evaluate open-domain scientific conclusion synthesis. The benchmark draws on an expert-validated automated evaluation pipeline that decomposes conclusions into atomic facts and measures correctness and comprehensiveness via factual precision and recall. To mitigate data leakage, we further introduce SciConHarness, a clean-room evaluation harness that equips agents with controlled web interaction to ensure valid measurement. Evaluating 8 frontier models and deep research agents, we find that factual quality remains low: under clean-room settings, the best agent achieves only a factual F1 of 0.337. Our clean-room setting consistently reduces performance relative to unconstrained evaluation, suggesting that leakage inflates estimates of models' true synthesis capabilities. Finally, we audit consumer-facing agents (e.g., Google AI Overview, OpenEvidence) and find they frequently generate incomplete and sometimes contradictory conclusions, even when the ground-truth answer is available. Overall, our results show that reliable synthesis of scientific conclusions remains an open challenge, and that clean-room evaluation is essential for assessing open-domain AI agents.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 9

ClawsBench: Evaluating Capability and Safety of LLM Productivity Agents in Simulated Workspaces

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate productivity tasks (e.g., email, scheduling, document management), but evaluating them on live services is risky due to potentially irreversible changes. Existing benchmarks rely on simplified environments and fail to capture realistic, stateful, multi-service workflows. We introduce ClawsBench, a benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM agents in realistic productivity settings. It includes five high-fidelity mock services (Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive) with full state management and deterministic snapshot/restore, along with 44 structured tasks covering single-service, cross-service, and safety-critical scenarios. We decompose agent scaffolding into two independent levers (domain skills that inject API knowledge via progressive disclosure, and a meta prompt that coordinates behavior across services) and vary both to measure their separate and combined effects. Experiments across 6 models, 4 agent harnesses, and 33 conditions show that with full scaffolding, agents achieve task success rates of 39-64% but exhibit unsafe action rates of 7-33%. On OpenClaw, the top five models fall within a 10 percentage-point band on task success (53-63%), with unsafe action rates from 7% to 23% and no consistent ordering between the two metrics. We identify eight recurring patterns of unsafe behavior, including multi-step sandbox escalation and silent contract modification.

benchflow BenchFlow
·
Apr 5 2

Varco Arena: A Tournament Approach to Reference-Free Benchmarking Large Language Models

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

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 2, 2024

MindEdit-Bench: Benchmarking Object-Level Counterfactual Spatial Reasoning in VLMs from In-the-Wild Photos

Benchmarks for vision-language models (VLMs) mostly test observational spatial reasoning: models describe relations already visible in the input. Existing what-if tasks typically vary the observer while keeping the scene fixed. Can VLMs instead predict the consequences of hypothetically moving or rotating an object? We introduce MindEdit-Bench, a benchmark of six spatial reasoning tasks built from three-photo smartphone triplets of newly captured indoor scenes via an automatic in-the-wild 3D scene-graph extraction pipeline. Four tasks probe perception and perspective transformation over observed structure; two new tasks, L4 (spatial editing) and L5 (cross-view visibility editing), probe object-level counterfactual reasoning, where correct answers are absent from all input images. Each question provides 8-24 structured answer choices, enabling answer-letter-level diagnosis of spatial and fallback errors. The benchmark covers 120 private indoor scenes not drawn from public datasets, reducing public-data pretraining-overlap risk. Across 15 VLMs on 1,003 human-verified questions, task-wise mean VLM accuracy is only 8%-31%, versus 81%-97% human majority-vote accuracy. The pooled human--best-VLM gap is 53 pp, with at least 39 pp on every task. The structured answer space further reveals non-uniform failures, including weaker camera-depth-axis inference and fallback behavior on difficult visibility-editing cases.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 30

An inorganic ABX3 perovskite materials dataset for target property prediction and classification using machine learning

The reliability with Machine Learning (ML) techniques in novel materials discovery often depend on the quality of the dataset, in addition to the relevant features used in describing the material. In this regard, the current study presents and validates a newly processed materials dataset that can be utilized for benchmark ML analysis, as it relates to the prediction and classification of deterministic target properties. Originally, the dataset was extracted from the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD) and contains a robust 16,323 samples of ABX3 inorganic perovskite structures. The dataset is tabular in form and is preprocessed to include sixty-one generalized input features that broadly describes the physicochemical, stability/geometrical, and Density Functional Theory (DFT) target properties associated with the elemental ionic sites in a three-dimensional ABX3 polyhedral. For validation, four different ML models are employed to predict three distinctive target properties, namely: formation energy, energy band gap, and crystal system. On experimentation, the best accuracy measurements are reported at 0.013 eV/atom MAE, 0.216 eV MAE, and 85% F1, corresponding to the formation energy prediction, band gap prediction and crystal system multi-classification, respectively. Moreover, the realized results are compared with previous literature and as such, affirms the resourcefulness of the current dataset for future benchmark materials analysis via ML techniques. The preprocessed dataset and source codes are openly available to download from github.com/chenebuah/ML_abx3_dataset.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

CrystalReasoner: Reasoning and RL for Property-Conditioned Crystal Structure Generation

Generative modeling has emerged as a promising approach for crystal structure discovery. However, existing LLM-based generative models struggle with low-level atomic precision, while diffusion-based methods fall short in integrating high-level scientific knowledge. As a result, generated structures are often invalid, unstable, or do not possess desirable properties. To address this gap, we propose CrystalReasoner (\method), an end-to-end LLM framework that generates crystal structures from natural language instructions through reasoning and alignment. \method introduces physical priors as thinking tokens, which include crystallographic symmetry, local coordination environments and predicted physical properties before generating atomic coordinates. This bridges the gap between natural language and 3D structures. \method then employs reinforcement learning (RL) with a multi-objective, dense reward function to align generation with physical validity, chemical consistency, and thermodynamic stability. For property-conditioned tasks, we design task-specific reward functions and train specialized models for discrete constraints (e.g., space group) and continuous properties (e.g., elasticity, thermal expansion). Empirical results demonstrate that compared to prior works and baselines without thinking traces or RL, \method obtains better performance on diverse metrics, triples S.U.N. ratio, and achieves better performance for property conditioned generation. \method also exhibits adaptive reasoning, increasing reasoning lengths as the number of atoms increases. Our work demonstrates the potential of leveraging thinking traces and RL for generating valid, stable, and property-conditioned crystal structures. Please see our work at https://crystalreasoner.github.io/ .

  • 4 authors
·
May 13

BizFinBench: A Business-Driven Real-World Financial Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs

Large language models excel in general tasks, yet assessing their reliability in logic-heavy, precision-critical domains like finance, law, and healthcare remains challenging. To address this, we introduce BizFinBench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world financial applications. BizFinBench consists of 6,781 well-annotated queries in Chinese, spanning five dimensions: numerical calculation, reasoning, information extraction, prediction recognition, and knowledge-based question answering, grouped into nine fine-grained categories. The benchmark includes both objective and subjective metrics. We also introduce IteraJudge, a novel LLM evaluation method that reduces bias when LLMs serve as evaluators in objective metrics. We benchmark 25 models, including both proprietary and open-source systems. Extensive experiments show that no model dominates across all tasks. Our evaluation reveals distinct capability patterns: (1) In Numerical Calculation, Claude-3.5-Sonnet (63.18) and DeepSeek-R1 (64.04) lead, while smaller models like Qwen2.5-VL-3B (15.92) lag significantly; (2) In Reasoning, proprietary models dominate (ChatGPT-o3: 83.58, Gemini-2.0-Flash: 81.15), with open-source models trailing by up to 19.49 points; (3) In Information Extraction, the performance spread is the largest, with DeepSeek-R1 scoring 71.46, while Qwen3-1.7B scores 11.23; (4) In Prediction Recognition, performance variance is minimal, with top models scoring between 39.16 and 50.00. We find that while current LLMs handle routine finance queries competently, they struggle with complex scenarios requiring cross-concept reasoning. BizFinBench offers a rigorous, business-aligned benchmark for future research. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/BizFinBench.

  • 5 authors
·
May 25, 2025 4

An MLCommons Scientific Benchmarks Ontology

Scientific machine learning research spans diverse domains and data modalities, yet existing benchmark efforts remain siloed and lack standardization. This makes novel and transformative applications of machine learning to critical scientific use-cases more fragmented and less clear in pathways to impact. This paper introduces an ontology for scientific benchmarking developed through a unified, community-driven effort that extends the MLCommons ecosystem to cover physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, climate science, and more. Building on prior initiatives such as XAI-BENCH, FastML Science Benchmarks, PDEBench, and the SciMLBench framework, our effort consolidates a large set of disparate benchmarks and frameworks into a single taxonomy of scientific, application, and system-level benchmarks. New benchmarks can be added through an open submission workflow coordinated by the MLCommons Science Working Group and evaluated against a six-category rating rubric that promotes and identifies high-quality benchmarks, enabling stakeholders to select benchmarks that meet their specific needs. The architecture is extensible, supporting future scientific and AI/ML motifs, and we discuss methods for identifying emerging computing patterns for unique scientific workloads. The MLCommons Science Benchmarks Ontology provides a standardized, scalable foundation for reproducible, cross-domain benchmarking in scientific machine learning. A companion webpage for this work has also been developed as the effort evolves: https://mlcommons-science.github.io/benchmark/

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025

PhyGround: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in Generative World Models

Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/.

MTabVQA: Evaluating Multi-Tabular Reasoning of Language Models in Visual Space

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in interpreting visual layouts and text. However, a significant challenge remains in their ability to interpret robustly and reason over multi-tabular data presented as images, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios like web pages and digital documents. Existing benchmarks typically address single tables or non-visual data (text/structured). This leaves a critical gap: they don't assess the ability to parse diverse table images, correlate information across them, and perform multi-hop reasoning on the combined visual data. We introduce MTabVQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed for multi-tabular visual question answering to bridge that gap. MTabVQA comprises 3,745 complex question-answer pairs that necessitate multi-hop reasoning across several visually rendered table images. We provide extensive benchmark results for state-of-the-art VLMs on MTabVQA, revealing significant performance limitations. We further investigate post-training techniques to enhance these reasoning abilities and release MTabVQA-Instruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs with MTabVQA-Instruct substantially improves their performance on visual multi-tabular reasoning. Code and dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/mtabvqa/MTabVQA-Eval) are available online (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MTabVQA-EMNLP-B16E).

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

FilmBench: A Film-Grade Benchmark for Cinematic Video Generation

Progress in video generation keeps narrowing the visual gap between AI-generated and professionally produced footage, yet most benchmarks still draw prompts from web sources or LLM templates and score them with untrained, generic multimodal models. More fundamentally, their evaluation taxonomies remain rudimentary (overall visual quality, coarse text alignment and temporal smoothness) rather than the professional Cinematic Language criteria by which films are actually made and judged, so they assess basic video plausibility rather than film-grade craft. We introduce FilmBench, a text-to-video (T2V) and reference-to-video (R2V) benchmark grounded in the professional Cinematic Language of the film- academy tradition and co-developed with directors and faculty from the Beijing Film Academy and the Hujing Digital Media & Entertainment Group film studio. It rests on three choices. First, prompts are reverse-engineered from clips of award-winning films spanning 20 cinematic genres and chosen by professional directors, so every prompt is anchored to a verified live-action reference; the prompts follow real shot lists, and most script multiple shots (1,056 of the 1,169 prompts are multi-shot), unlike prior single-clip benchmarks. Second, evaluation follows a three-level Cinematic taxonomy of 3 axes, 12 components and 35 (T2V) +3 (R2V-only) sub-metrics. Third, we develop an in-house expert-grade automatic evaluation agent and open-source its core suite of Cinematic Language operators (FilmOps). Benchmarking leading video generation models (9 for T2V, 7 for R2V), the evaluator reproduces the human model ranking at model-level Spearman ho = 0.95 (T2V) and 0.96 (R2V). Scores fall well below prior web-style benchmarks, with two consistent gaps in dynamic aesthetics and a marked single- to multi-shot performance drop that widens for weaker models.

  • 30 authors
·
Jul 26 1

Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence. Most existing evaluations focus on piecemeal or disconnected tasks, obscuring critical cognitive weaknesses and providing little insight for targeted improvement. To address this gap, we introduce BloomBench, part of the Almieyar benchmarking series, the first cognitively human-grounded, bilingual (English-Arabic) multimodal benchmark for VLMs. Grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy, BloomBench systematically evaluates six levels of cognition (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) through carefully designed image-question-answer tasks. Built with a semi-automated pipeline and validated through a stratified hybrid quality assurance protocol, it ensures scalability, cultural inclusivity, and linguistic fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs to diagnose their cognitive profiles. Our analysis reveals a sharp cognitive asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models achieve strong performance ceilings in semantic understanding, they struggle substantially with factual recall and creative synthesis. This demonstrates that current general multimodal proficiency masks deeper limitations in specific cognitive layers. Furthermore, our study highlights a critical performance gap between Arabic and English, exposing limitations in current cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. These findings establish a foundation for developing more cognitively aligned and inclusive VLMs. The benchmark framework and dataset is available at: https://github.com/qcri/Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench.

How Far Can You Grow? Characterizing the Extrapolation Frontier of Graph Generative Models for Materials Science

Every generative model for crystalline materials harbors a critical structure size beyond which its outputs quietly become unreliable -- we call this the extrapolation frontier. Despite its direct consequences for nanomaterial design, this frontier has never been systematically measured. We introduce RADII, a radius-resolved benchmark of {sim}75,000 nanoparticle structures (55-11,298 atoms) that treats radius as a continuous scaling knob to trace generation quality from in-distribution to out-of-distribution regimes under leakage-free splits. RADII provides frontier-specific diagnostics: per-radius error profiles pinpoint each architecture's scaling ceiling, surface-interior decomposition tests whether failures originate at boundaries or in bulk, and cross-metric failure sequencing reveals which aspect of structural fidelity breaks first. Benchmarking five state-of-the-art architectures, we find that: (i) all models degrade by {sim}13% in global positional error beyond training radii, yet local bond fidelity diverges wildly across architectures -- from near-zero to over 2times collapse; (ii) no two architectures share the same failure sequence, revealing the frontier as a multi-dimensional surface shaped by model family; and (iii) well-behaved models obey a power-law scaling exponent αapprox 1/3 whose in-distribution fit accurately predicts out-of-distribution error, making their frontiers quantitatively forecastable. These findings establish output scale as a first-class evaluation axis for geometric generative models. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/RADII.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 9

MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?

Large vision-language models have recently achieved remarkable progress, exhibiting great perception and reasoning abilities concerning visual information. However, how to effectively evaluate these large vision-language models remains a major obstacle, hindering future model development. Traditional benchmarks like VQAv2 or COCO Caption provide quantitative performance measurements but suffer from a lack of fine-grained ability assessment and non-robust evaluation metrics. Recent subjective benchmarks, such as OwlEval, offer comprehensive evaluations of a model's abilities by incorporating human labor, but they are not scalable and display significant bias. In response to these challenges, we propose MMBench, a novel multi-modality benchmark. MMBench methodically develops a comprehensive evaluation pipeline, primarily comprised of two elements. The first element is a meticulously curated dataset that surpasses existing similar benchmarks in terms of the number and variety of evaluation questions and abilities. The second element introduces a novel CircularEval strategy and incorporates the use of ChatGPT. This implementation is designed to convert free-form predictions into pre-defined choices, thereby facilitating a more robust evaluation of the model's predictions. MMBench is a systematically-designed objective benchmark for robustly evaluating the various abilities of vision-language models. We hope MMBench will assist the research community in better evaluating their models and encourage future advancements in this domain. Project page: https://opencompass.org.cn/mmbench.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 12, 2023

DARE-bench: Evaluating Modeling and Instruction Fidelity of LLMs in Data Science

The fast-growing demands in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex multi-step data science tasks create an emergent need for accurate benchmarking. There are two major gaps in existing benchmarks: (i) the lack of standardized, process-aware evaluation that captures instruction adherence and process fidelity, and (ii) the scarcity of accurately labeled training data. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DARE-bench, a benchmark designed for machine learning modeling and data science instruction following. Unlike many existing benchmarks that rely on human- or model-based judges, all tasks in DARE-bench have verifiable ground truth, ensuring objective and reproducible evaluation. To cover a broad range of tasks and support agentic tools, DARE-bench consists of 6,300 Kaggle-derived tasks and provides both large-scale training data and evaluation sets. Extensive evaluations show that even highly capable models such as gpt-o4-mini struggle to achieve good performance, especially in machine learning modeling tasks. Using DARE-bench training tasks for fine-tuning can substantially improve model performance. For example, supervised fine-tuning boosts Qwen3-32B's accuracy by 1.83x and reinforcement learning boosts Qwen3-4B's accuracy by more than 8x. These significant improvements verify the importance of DARE-bench both as an accurate evaluation benchmark and critical training data.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27

Crystal Structure Generation with Autoregressive Large Language Modeling

The generation of plausible crystal structures is often the first step in predicting the structure and properties of a material from its chemical composition. Quickly generating and predicting inorganic crystal structures is important for the discovery of new materials, which can target applications such as energy or electronic devices. However, most current methods for crystal structure prediction are computationally expensive, slowing the pace of innovation. Seeding structure prediction algorithms with quality generated candidates can overcome a major bottleneck. Here, we introduce CrystaLLM, a methodology for the versatile generation of crystal structures, based on the autoregressive large language modeling (LLM) of the Crystallographic Information File (CIF) format. Trained on millions of CIF files, CrystaLLM focuses on modeling crystal structures through text. CrystaLLM can produce plausible crystal structures for a wide range of inorganic compounds unseen in training, as demonstrated by ab initio simulations. The integration with predictors of formation energy permits the use of a Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to improve the generation of meaningful structures. Our approach challenges conventional representations of crystals, and demonstrates the potential of LLMs for learning effective 'world models' of crystal chemistry, which will lead to accelerated discovery and innovation in materials science.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023

Quantifying Variance in Evaluation Benchmarks

Evaluation benchmarks are the cornerstone of measuring capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as well as driving progress in said capabilities. Originally designed to make claims about capabilities (or lack thereof) in fully pretrained models, evaluation benchmarks are now also extensively used to decide between various training choices. Despite this widespread usage, we rarely quantify the variance in our evaluation benchmarks, which dictates whether differences in performance are meaningful. Here, we define and measure a range of metrics geared towards measuring variance in evaluation benchmarks, including seed variance across initialisations, and monotonicity during training. By studying a large number of models -- both openly available and pretrained from scratch -- we provide empirical estimates for a variety of variance metrics, with considerations and recommendations for practitioners. We also evaluate the utility and tradeoffs of continuous versus discrete performance measures and explore options for better understanding and reducing this variance. We find that simple changes, such as framing choice tasks (like MMLU) as completion tasks, can often reduce variance for smaller scale (sim7B) models, while more involved methods inspired from human testing literature (such as item analysis and item response theory) struggle to meaningfully reduce variance. Overall, our work provides insights into variance in evaluation benchmarks, suggests LM-specific techniques to reduce variance, and more generally encourages practitioners to carefully factor in variance when comparing models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

DEsignBench: Exploring and Benchmarking DALL-E 3 for Imagining Visual Design

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023 2

The Bitter Lesson Learned from 2,000+ Multilingual Benchmarks

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

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 21, 2025 2

Zero-shot Benchmarking: A Framework for Flexible and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models

As language models improve and become capable of performing more complex tasks across modalities, evaluating them automatically becomes increasingly challenging. Developing strong and robust task-specific automatic metrics gets harder, and human-annotated test sets -- which are expensive to create -- saturate more quickly. A compelling alternative is to design reliable strategies to automate the creation of test data and evaluation, but previous attempts either rely on pre-existing data, or focus solely on individual tasks. We present Zero-shot Benchmarking (ZSB), a framework for creating high-quality benchmarks for any task by leveraging language models for both synthetic test data creation and evaluation. ZSB is simple and flexible: it requires only the creation of a prompt for data generation and one for evaluation; it is scalable to tasks and languages where collecting real-world data is costly or impractical; it is model-agnostic, allowing the creation of increasingly challenging benchmarks as models improve. To assess the effectiveness of our framework, we create benchmarks for five text-only tasks and a multi-modal one: general capabilities in four languages (English, Chinese, French, and Korean), translation, and general vision-language capabilities in English. We then rank a broad range of open and closed systems on our benchmarks. ZSB rankings consistently correlate strongly with human rankings, outperforming widely-adopted standard benchmarks. Through ablations, we find that strong benchmarks can be created with open models, and that judge model size and dataset variety are crucial drivers of performance. We release all our benchmarks, and code to reproduce our experiments and to produce new benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025