new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jul 29

MultiLoKo: a multilingual local knowledge benchmark for LLMs spanning 31 languages

We present MultiLoKo, a new benchmark for evaluating multilinguality in LLMs covering 31 languages. MultiLoKo consists of three partitions: a main partition consisting of 500 questions per language, separately sourced to be locally relevant to the specific language, and two translated partitions, containing human-authored translations from 30 non-English languages to English and vice versa. For comparison, we also release corresponding machine-authored translations. The data is equally distributed over two splits: a dev split and a blind, out-of-distribution test split. MultiLoKo can be used to study a variety of questions regarding the multilinguality of LLMs as well as meta-questions about multilingual benchmark creation. We compute MultiLoKo scores for 11 base and chat models marketed to be multilingual and study their average performance, their performance parity across languages, how much their ability to answer questions depends on the question language, and which languages are most difficult. None of the models we studied performs well on MultiLoKo, as indicated by low average scores as well as large differences between the best and worst scoring languages. Furthermore, we find a substantial effect of the question language, indicating sub-optimal knowledge transfer between languages. Lastly, we find that using local vs English-translated data can result in differences more than 20 points for the best performing models, drastically change the estimated difficulty of some languages. For using machines instead of human translations, we find a weaker effect on ordering of language difficulty, a larger difference in model rankings, and a substantial drop in estimated performance for all models.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

GIMMICK -- Globally Inclusive Multimodal Multitask Cultural Knowledge Benchmarking

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently gained attention due to their distinctive performance and broad applicability. While it has been previously shown that their efficacy in usage scenarios involving non-Western contexts falls short, existing studies are limited in scope, covering just a narrow range of cultures, focusing exclusively on a small number of cultural aspects, or evaluating a limited selection of models on a single task only. Towards globally inclusive LVLM research, we introduce GIMMICK, an extensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge across 144 countries representing six global macro-regions. GIMMICK comprises six tasks built upon three new datasets that span 728 unique cultural events or facets on which we evaluated 20 LVLMs and 11 LLMs, including five proprietary and 26 open-weight models of all sizes. We systematically examine (1) regional cultural biases, (2) the influence of model size, (3) input modalities, and (4) external cues. Our analyses reveal strong biases toward Western cultures across models and tasks and highlight strong correlations between model size and performance, as well as the effectiveness of multimodal input and external geographic cues. We further find that models have more knowledge of tangible than intangible aspects (e.g., food vs. rituals) and that they excel in recognizing broad cultural origins but struggle with a more nuanced understanding.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025 2

CulturalBench: a Robust, Diverse and Challenging Benchmark on Measuring the (Lack of) Cultural Knowledge of LLMs

To make large language models (LLMs) more helpful across diverse cultures, it is essential to have effective cultural knowledge benchmarks to measure and track our progress. Effective benchmarks need to be robust, diverse, and challenging. We introduce CulturalBench: a set of 1,227 human-written and human-verified questions for effectively assessing LLMs' cultural knowledge, covering 45 global regions including the underrepresented ones like Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, and Peru. Questions - each verified by five independent annotators - span 17 diverse topics ranging from food preferences to greeting etiquettes. We evaluate models on two setups: CulturalBench-Easy and CulturalBench-Hard which share the same questions but asked differently. We find that LLMs are sensitive to such difference in setups (e.g., GPT-4o with 27.3% difference). Compared to human performance (92.6% accuracy), CulturalBench-Hard is more challenging for frontier LLMs with the best performing model (GPT-4o) at only 61.5% and the worst (Llama3-8b) at 21.4%. Moreover, we find that LLMs often struggle with tricky questions that have multiple correct answers (e.g., What utensils do the Chinese usually use?), revealing a tendency to converge to a single answer. Our results also indicate that OpenAI GPT-4o substantially outperform other proprietary and open source models in questions related to all but one region (Oceania). Nonetheless, all models consistently underperform on questions related to South America and the Middle East.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

Knowledge Index of Noah's Ark

Knowledge benchmarks for LLMs face three issues: scaling-driven designs that do not operationalize disciplinary representativeness; flat-payment annotation that permits lazy consensus; and unaudited ranking instability under bounded test budgets. We introduce KINA, an 899-item benchmark across 261 fine-grained disciplines, with two formal results. First, we cast representativeness as a coverage-style objective over expert-elicited anchors and operationalize disciplinary representativeness through a proxy, yielding a (1-1/e) greedy approximation (Proposition 1); the guarantee applies to the proxy, not to population representativeness. Second, we prove a bonus-on-bar tournament weakly FOSD-dominates flat payment in released-review quality, with incentive-compatibility threshold B > Delta C / Delta p_min (Theorem 1). Evaluating 42 models from 13 labs, the top model, Gemini-3.1-Pro-Preview, reaches 53.17%, followed by Claude-Opus-4.6 at 49.92% and GPT-5.4 at 48.55%, leaving substantial headroom below saturation. The full leaderboard shows a tiered structure rather than a smooth total order: a small frontier tier lies above 48%, a dense strong-model tier spans roughly 38-45%, and low-performing models remain only modestly above the 10% chance baseline. Tool augmentation adds up to 5.17 points across the five tool-use evaluations, with gains varying substantially across models. We report bootstrap ranking-stability statistics to make bounded-budget variance explicit and to discourage over-interpretation of adjacent ranks.

  • 27 authors
·
Jun 3

MoKus: Leveraging Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer for Knowledge-Aware Concept Customization

Concept customization typically binds rare tokens to a target concept. Unfortunately, these approaches often suffer from unstable performance as the pretraining data seldom contains these rare tokens. Meanwhile, these rare tokens fail to convey the inherent knowledge of the target concept. Consequently, we introduce Knowledge-aware Concept Customization, a novel task aiming at binding diverse textual knowledge to target visual concepts. This task requires the model to identify the knowledge within the text prompt to perform high-fidelity customized generation. Meanwhile, the model should efficiently bind all the textual knowledge to the target concept. Therefore, we propose MoKus, a novel framework for knowledge-aware concept customization. Our framework relies on a key observation: cross-modal knowledge transfer, where modifying knowledge within the text modality naturally transfers to the visual modality during generation. Inspired by this observation, MoKus contains two stages: (1) In visual concept learning, we first learn the anchor representation to store the visual information of the target concept. (2) In textual knowledge updating, we update the answer for the knowledge queries to the anchor representation, enabling high-fidelity customized generation. To further comprehensively evaluate our proposed MoKus on the new task, we introduce the first benchmark for knowledge-aware concept customization: KnowCusBench. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that MoKus outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the cross-model knowledge transfer allows MoKus to be easily extended to other knowledge-aware applications like virtual concept creation and concept erasure. We also demonstrate the capability of our method to achieve improvements on world knowledge benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13 3

LMEnt: A Suite for Analyzing Knowledge in Language Models from Pretraining Data to Representations

Language models (LMs) increasingly drive real-world applications that require world knowledge. However, the internal processes through which models turn data into representations of knowledge and beliefs about the world, are poorly understood. Insights into these processes could pave the way for developing LMs with knowledge representations that are more consistent, robust, and complete. To facilitate studying these questions, we present LMEnt, a suite for analyzing knowledge acquisition in LMs during pretraining. LMEnt introduces: (1) a knowledge-rich pretraining corpus, fully annotated with entity mentions, based on Wikipedia, (2) an entity-based retrieval method over pretraining data that outperforms previous approaches by as much as 80.4%, and (3) 12 pretrained models with up to 1B parameters and 4K intermediate checkpoints, with comparable performance to popular open-sourced models on knowledge benchmarks. Together, these resources provide a controlled environment for analyzing connections between entity mentions in pretraining and downstream performance, and the effects of causal interventions in pretraining data. We show the utility of LMEnt by studying knowledge acquisition across checkpoints, finding that fact frequency is key, but does not fully explain learning trends. We release LMEnt to support studies of knowledge in LMs, including knowledge representations, plasticity, editing, attribution, and learning dynamics.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025 2

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 16 2

Are Large Language Models True Healthcare Jacks-of-All-Trades? Benchmarking Across Health Professions Beyond Physician Exams

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in delivering accurate answers to questions about world knowledge. Despite this, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in healthcare predominantly focus on medical doctors, leaving other critical healthcare professions underrepresented. To fill this research gap, we introduce the Examinations for Medical Personnel in Chinese (EMPEC), a pioneering large-scale healthcare knowledge benchmark in traditional Chinese. EMPEC consists of 157,803 exam questions across 124 subjects and 20 healthcare professions, including underrepresented occupations like Optometrists and Audiologists. Each question is tagged with its release time and source, ensuring relevance and authenticity. We conducted extensive experiments on 17 LLMs, including proprietary, open-source models, general domain models and medical specific models, evaluating their performance under various settings. Our findings reveal that while leading models like GPT-4 achieve over 75\% accuracy, they still struggle with specialized fields and alternative medicine. Surprisingly, general-purpose LLMs outperformed medical-specific models, and incorporating EMPEC's training data significantly enhanced performance. Additionally, the results on questions released after the models' training cutoff date were consistent with overall performance trends, suggesting that the models' performance on the test set can predict their effectiveness in addressing unseen healthcare-related queries. The transition from traditional to simplified Chinese characters had a negligible impact on model performance, indicating robust linguistic versatility. Our study underscores the importance of expanding benchmarks to cover a broader range of healthcare professions to better assess the applicability of LLMs in real-world healthcare scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

GUI-CIDER: Mid-training GUI Agents via Causal Internalization and Density-aware Exemplar Reselection

Despite the rapid progress of multimodal large language models in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, their real-world task completion is fundamentally bottlenecked by a lack of world knowledge about GUI operations. Existing solutions typically rely on expensive multi-agent scaffolding or conventional post-training paradigms, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, post-training only allows agents to implicitly absorb world knowledge through action annotations or reward signals, leading to inefficient trajectory memorization rather than genuine comprehension. Therefore, an approach that enables explicit learning of this knowledge is imperative. To this end, we propose GUI-CIDER, a mid-training method that explicitly internalizes GUI world knowledge through Causal Internalization and Density-aware Exemplar Reselection. GUI-CIDER operates in three stages: (1) data synthesis, which distills static planning and dynamic causal knowledge from GUI trajectories into text; (2) exemplar reselection, which filters the corpus by rewarding causal structures and penalizing semantic redundancy; and (3) mid-training, where the refined data is used to embed the acquired knowledge. Extensive experiments on two GUI knowledge benchmarks and three task completion benchmarks demonstrate that GUI-CIDER consistently improves both the agent's understanding of GUI operations and its task success rates.The codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/GUI-CIDER.

meituan-longcat LongCat
·
May 26 2

Autonomous Scientific Discovery via Iterative Meta-Reflection

Autonomous scientific discovery systems offer the potential to accelerate research by automating the process of hypothesis generation and validation. However, current systems operate within constrained search spaces or require predefined research questions, limiting their capacity for true open-ended inquiry. Furthermore, while they generate hypotheses iteratively, they largely lack the ability to explicitly synthesize their own accumulated findings to uncover complex, interconnected phenomena. We introduce DiscoPER, an autonomous large language model-powered framework that conducts open-ended research by dynamically generating and executing code to explore datasets without pre-specified research objectives. To ensure rigorous scientific validity, every proposed discovery must pass statistical testing. To overcome the limitations of isolated search, our framework introduces a second-order reasoning mechanism that periodically analyzes its own accumulated discoveries. By treating prior discoveries as empirical data, DiscoPER identifies structural patterns, confounds, and epistemic gaps, actively redirecting hypothesis exploration toward uncharted regions of the search space. The search space is further expanded by incorporating tool use, enabling the system to explore hypotheses beyond structured metadata by seamlessly processing and extracting useful information from multimodal sources like images. Evaluated on iNatDisco, a new multimodal ecological knowledge benchmark with pattern-level ground truth obtained from peer-reviewed literature, DiscoPER recovers 8 of 9 known patterns with a 72.7% hypothesis support rate, outperforming both classical causal discovery and LLM-guided baselines. Ablations show that DiscoPER scales with more data, and confirms the benefits of second-order meta-reflection.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 30 2

When Perplexity Lies: Generation-Focused Distillation of Hybrid Sequence Models

Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs. However, achieving high-quality generation in distilled models requires careful joint design of both the student architecture and the distillation process. Many prior distillation works evaluate downstream multiple-choice benchmarks by ranking candidate answers with log-likelihood rather than requiring autoregressive generation, which can obscure important differences in model quality. For example, we show that a 7B parameter distilled model that nearly matches its teacher to within 0.2\,pp under log-likelihood scoring actually falls behind by 20.8\,pp when the model must generate answers autoregressively. We propose a Hybrid Kimi Delta Attention (Hybrid-KDA) architecture paired with GenDistill, a multi-stage distillation pipeline, and use generation-based evaluation throughout to guide design decisions. Applying this approach to Qwen3-0.6B, we systematically ablate six design axes: training objective, loss masking, training duration, dataset selection, parameter freezing, and architecture choice. We find that log-likelihood-based evaluation consistently underestimates the gap between teacher and student, and can in some cases reverse the ranking of design choices, meaning that conclusions drawn from perplexity-only evaluation may be misleading. Among the factors we study, dataset selection, completion-only masking, and freezing attention layers during post-training have the largest impact on generation quality. Our best Hybrid-KDA model retains 86--90\% of teacher accuracy on knowledge benchmarks while reducing KV cache memory by up to 75\% and improving time-to-first-token by 2--4times at 128K-token contexts.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 26

Brevity Constraints Reverse Performance Hierarchies in Language Models

Standard evaluation protocols reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: on 7.7% of benchmark problems spanning five datasets, larger language models underperform smaller ones by 28.4 percentage points despite 10-100x more parameters. Through systematic evaluation of 31 models (0.5B-405B parameters) across 1,485 problems, we identify the mechanism as spontaneous scale-dependent verbosity that introduces errors through overelaboration. Causal intervention experiments demonstrate this reflects correctable prompt design rather than fundamental capability limitations. Constraining large models to produce brief responses improves accuracy by 26 percentage points and reduces performance gaps by up to two-thirds. Most critically, brevity constraints completely reverse performance hierarchies on mathematical reasoning and scientific knowledge benchmarks, with large models achieving 7.7-15.9 percentage point advantages over small models -- direct inversions of the original gaps. These reversals prove large models possess superior latent capabilities that universal prompting masks. We validate findings through three independent contamination tests and demonstrate inverse scaling operates continuously across the full parameter spectrum, with dataset-specific optimal scales ranging from 0.5B to 3.0B parameters. Our results establish that maximizing large model performance requires scale-aware prompt engineering rather than universal evaluation protocols, with immediate implications for deployment: prompt adaptation simultaneously improves accuracy and reduces computational costs.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 11 2

LinguDistill: Recovering Linguistic Ability in Vision- Language Models via Selective Cross-Modal Distillation

Adapting pretrained language models (LMs) into vision-language models (VLMs) can degrade their native linguistic capability due to representation shift and cross-modal interference introduced during multimodal adaptation. Such loss is difficult to recover, even with targeted task-specific fine-tuning using standard objectives. Prior recovery approaches typically introduce additional modules that act as intermediate alignment layers to maintain or isolate modality-specific subspaces, which increases architectural complexity, adds parameters at inference time, and limits flexibility across models and settings. We propose LinguDistill, an adapter-free distillation method that restores linguistic capability by utilizing the original frozen LM as a teacher. We overcome the key challenge of enabling vision-conditioned teacher supervision by introducing layer-wise KV-cache sharing, which exposes the teacher to the student's multimodal representations without modifying the architecture of either model. We then selectively distill the teacher's strong linguistic signal on language-intensive data to recover language capability, while preserving the student's visual grounding on multimodal tasks. As a result, LinguDistill recovers sim10% of the performance lost on language and knowledge benchmarks, while maintaining comparable performance on vision-heavy tasks. Our findings demonstrate that linguistic capability can be recovered without additional modules, providing an efficient and practical solution to modality-specific degradation in multimodal models.

Spectra: A Comprehensive Study of Ternary, Quantized, and FP16 Language Models

Post-training quantization is the leading method for addressing memory-related bottlenecks in LLM inference, but unfortunately, it suffers from significant performance degradation below 4-bit precision. An alternative approach involves training compressed models directly at a low bitwidth (e.g., binary or ternary models). However, the performance, training dynamics, and scaling trends of such models are not yet well understood. To address this issue, we train and openly release the Spectra LLM suite consisting of 54 language models ranging from 99M to 3.9B parameters, trained on 300B tokens. Spectra includes FloatLMs, post-training quantized QuantLMs (3, 4, 6, and 8 bits), and ternary LLMs (TriLMs) - our improved architecture for ternary language modeling, which significantly outperforms previously proposed ternary models of a given size (in bits), matching half-precision models at scale. For example, TriLM 3.9B is (bit-wise) smaller than the half-precision FloatLM 830M, but matches half-precision FloatLM 3.9B in commonsense reasoning and knowledge benchmarks. However, TriLM 3.9B is also as toxic and stereotyping as FloatLM 3.9B, a model six times larger in size. Additionally, TriLM 3.9B lags behind FloatLM in perplexity on validation splits and web-based corpora but performs better on less noisy datasets like Lambada and PennTreeBank. To enhance understanding of low-bitwidth models, we are releasing 500+ intermediate checkpoints of the Spectra suite at https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite{https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite}.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024 3

Multi-modal preference alignment remedies regression of visual instruction tuning on language model

In production, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets which the underlying language model had been trained with. To address this challenging degradation, we first collect a lightweight (6k entries) VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for 5 quality metrics in a granular fashion, and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and SteerLM. Our findings indicate that the with DPO we are able to surpass instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99 despite small data scale. This enhancement in textual instruction proficiency correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that reconciles the textual and visual performance of MLLMs, restoring and boosting language capability after visual instruction tuning.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 16, 2024

LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning

Lifelong learning offers a promising paradigm of building a generalist agent that learns and adapts over its lifespan. Unlike traditional lifelong learning problems in image and text domains, which primarily involve the transfer of declarative knowledge of entities and concepts, lifelong learning in decision-making (LLDM) also necessitates the transfer of procedural knowledge, such as actions and behaviors. To advance research in LLDM, we introduce LIBERO, a novel benchmark of lifelong learning for robot manipulation. Specifically, LIBERO highlights five key research topics in LLDM: 1) how to efficiently transfer declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the mixture of both; 2) how to design effective policy architectures and 3) effective algorithms for LLDM; 4) the robustness of a lifelong learner with respect to task ordering; and 5) the effect of model pretraining for LLDM. We develop an extendible procedural generation pipeline that can in principle generate infinitely many tasks. For benchmarking purpose, we create four task suites (130 tasks in total) that we use to investigate the above-mentioned research topics. To support sample-efficient learning, we provide high-quality human-teleoperated demonstration data for all tasks. Our extensive experiments present several insightful or even unexpected discoveries: sequential finetuning outperforms existing lifelong learning methods in forward transfer, no single visual encoder architecture excels at all types of knowledge transfer, and naive supervised pretraining can hinder agents' performance in the subsequent LLDM. Check the website at https://libero-project.github.io for the code and the datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 5, 2023

RWKU: Benchmarking Real-World Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) inevitably memorize sensitive, copyrighted, and harmful knowledge from the training corpus; therefore, it is crucial to erase this knowledge from the models. Machine unlearning is a promising solution for efficiently removing specific knowledge by post hoc modifying models. In this paper, we propose a Real-World Knowledge Unlearning benchmark (RWKU) for LLM unlearning. RWKU is designed based on the following three key factors: (1) For the task setting, we consider a more practical and challenging unlearning setting, where neither the forget corpus nor the retain corpus is accessible. (2) For the knowledge source, we choose 200 real-world famous people as the unlearning targets and show that such popular knowledge is widely present in various LLMs. (3) For the evaluation framework, we design the forget set and the retain set to evaluate the model's capabilities across various real-world applications. Regarding the forget set, we provide four four membership inference attack (MIA) methods and nine kinds of adversarial attack probes to rigorously test unlearning efficacy. Regarding the retain set, we assess locality and utility in terms of neighbor perturbation, general ability, reasoning ability, truthfulness, factuality, and fluency. We conduct extensive experiments across two unlearning scenarios, two models and six baseline methods and obtain some meaningful findings. We release our benchmark and code publicly at http://rwku-bench.github.io for future work.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

SVFSearch: A Multimodal Knowledge-Intensive Benchmark for Short-Video Frame Search in the Gaming Vertical Domain

Multimodal large language models are increasingly used as agent backbones that understand multimodal inputs, plan retrieval actions, invoke external tools, and reason over retrieved information. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate this ability in short-video applications, where a paused frame is often visually ambiguous and answering requires vertical, long-tail, and fast-evolving domain knowledge. We introduce SVFSearch, the first open benchmark for short-video frame search in the Chinese gaming domain. SVFSearch contains 5,000 four-choice test examples and 4,198 auxiliary training examples, each centered on a paused game scene from a real short-video clip. To support fair and reproducible evaluation, SVFSearch provides a frozen offline retrieval environment with a game-domain text corpus, a topic-linked image gallery, and text, image, and multimodal retrieval interfaces, avoiding reliance on uncontrolled web search APIs. We evaluate representative paradigms ranging from direct QA and RAG workflow to Plan-Act-Replan agents and learned search models. Results reveal a large gap between model-only answering, practical agentic search, and oracle knowledge: the best open-source direct-QA model reaches 66.4%, the best practical agent achieves 79.1%, and oracle knowledge reaches 95.4%. Further analysis exposes bottlenecks in visual grounding, retrieval quality, evidence-grounded reasoning, and tool-use behavior, including over-search, answer-only shortcuts, and retrieval-induced misleading.

  • 7 authors
·
May 19

CodeUpdateArena: Benchmarking Knowledge Editing on API Updates

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to synthesize and reason about source code. However, the static nature of these models' knowledge does not reflect the fact that libraries and API functions they invoke are continuously evolving, with functionality being added or changing. While numerous benchmarks evaluate how LLMs can generate code, no prior work has studied how an LLMs' knowledge about code API functions can be updated. To fill this gap, we present CodeUpdateArena, a benchmark for knowledge editing in the code domain. An instance in our benchmark consists of a synthetic API function update paired with a program synthesis example that uses the updated functionality; our goal is to update an LLM to be able to solve this program synthesis example without providing documentation of the update at inference time. Compared to knowledge editing for facts encoded in text, success here is more challenging: a code LLM must correctly reason about the semantics of the modified function rather than just reproduce its syntax. Our dataset is constructed by first prompting GPT-4 to generate atomic and executable function updates. Then, for each update, we generate program synthesis examples whose code solutions are prone to use the update. Our benchmark covers updates of various types to 54 functions from seven diverse Python packages, with a total of 670 program synthesis examples. Our experiments show that prepending documentation of the update to open-source code LLMs (i.e., DeepSeek, CodeLlama) does not allow them to incorporate changes for problem solving, and existing knowledge editing techniques also have substantial room for improvement. We hope our benchmark will inspire new methods for knowledge updating in code LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8, 2024

Benchmarking Knowledge-driven Zero-shot Learning

External knowledge (a.k.a. side information) plays a critical role in zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to predict with unseen classes that have never appeared in training data. Several kinds of external knowledge, such as text and attribute, have been widely investigated, but they alone are limited with incomplete semantics. Some very recent studies thus propose to use Knowledge Graph (KG) due to its high expressivity and compatibility for representing kinds of knowledge. However, the ZSL community is still in short of standard benchmarks for studying and comparing different external knowledge settings and different KG-based ZSL methods. In this paper, we proposed six resources covering three tasks, i.e., zero-shot image classification (ZS-IMGC), zero-shot relation extraction (ZS-RE), and zero-shot KG completion (ZS-KGC). Each resource has a normal ZSL benchmark and a KG containing semantics ranging from text to attribute, from relational knowledge to logical expressions. We have clearly presented these resources including their construction, statistics, data formats and usage cases w.r.t. different ZSL methods. More importantly, we have conducted a comprehensive benchmarking study, with two general and state-of-the-art methods, two setting-specific methods and one interpretable method. We discussed and compared different ZSL paradigms w.r.t. different external knowledge settings, and found that our resources have great potential for developing more advanced ZSL methods and more solutions for applying KGs for augmenting machine learning. All the resources are available at https://github.com/China-UK-ZSL/Resources_for_KZSL.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.

  • 8 authors
·
May 18, 2025 2

UniEdit: A Unified Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Large Language Models

Model editing aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of large language models (LLMs) by efficiently adjusting their internal parameters. Currently, most LLM editing datasets are confined to narrow knowledge domains and cover a limited range of editing evaluation. They often overlook the broad scope of editing demands and the diversity of ripple effects resulting from edits. In this context, we introduce UniEdit, a unified benchmark for LLM editing grounded in open-domain knowledge. First, we construct editing samples by selecting entities from 25 common domains across five major categories, utilizing the extensive triple knowledge available in open-domain knowledge graphs to ensure comprehensive coverage of the knowledge domains. To address the issues of generality and locality in editing, we design an Neighborhood Multi-hop Chain Sampling (NMCS) algorithm to sample subgraphs based on a given knowledge piece to entail comprehensive ripple effects to evaluate. Finally, we employ proprietary LLMs to convert the sampled knowledge subgraphs into natural language text, guaranteeing grammatical accuracy and syntactical diversity. Extensive statistical analysis confirms the scale, comprehensiveness, and diversity of our UniEdit benchmark. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple LLMs and editors, analyzing their performance to highlight strengths and weaknesses in editing across open knowledge domains and various evaluation criteria, thereby offering valuable insights for future research endeavors.

  • 7 authors
·
May 18, 2025

Breaking Down Video LLM Benchmarks: Knowledge, Spatial Perception, or True Temporal Understanding?

Existing video understanding benchmarks often conflate knowledge-based and purely image-based questions, rather than clearly isolating a model's temporal reasoning ability, which is the key aspect that distinguishes video understanding from other modalities. We identify two major limitations that obscure whether higher scores truly indicate stronger understanding of the dynamic content in videos: (1) strong language priors, where models can answer questions without watching the video; and (2) shuffling invariance, where models maintain similar performance on certain questions even when video frames are temporally shuffled. To alleviate these issues, we propose VBenchComp, an automated pipeline that categorizes questions into different domains: LLM-Answerable, Semantic, and Temporal. Specifically, LLM-Answerable questions can be answered without viewing the video; Semantic questions remain answerable even when the video frames are shuffled; and Temporal questions require understanding the correct temporal order of frames. The rest of the questions are labeled as Others. This can enable fine-grained evaluation of different capabilities of a video LLM. Our analysis reveals nuanced model weaknesses that are hidden by traditional overall scores, and we offer insights and recommendations for designing future benchmarks that more accurately assess video LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20, 2025 2

MMKE-Bench: A Multimodal Editing Benchmark for Diverse Visual Knowledge

Knowledge editing techniques have emerged as essential tools for updating the factual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models (LMMs), allowing them to correct outdated or inaccurate information without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal knowledge editing primarily focus on entity-level knowledge represented as simple triplets, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world multimodal information. To address this issue, we introduce MMKE-Bench, a comprehensive MultiModal Knowledge Editing Benchmark, designed to evaluate the ability of LMMs to edit diverse visual knowledge in real-world scenarios. MMKE-Bench addresses these limitations by incorporating three types of editing tasks: visual entity editing, visual semantic editing, and user-specific editing. Besides, MMKE-Bench uses free-form natural language to represent and edit knowledge, offering a more flexible and effective format. The benchmark consists of 2,940 pieces of knowledge and 8,363 images across 33 broad categories, with evaluation questions automatically generated and human-verified. We assess five state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods on three prominent LMMs, revealing that no method excels across all criteria, and that visual and user-specific edits are particularly challenging. MMKE-Bench sets a new standard for evaluating the robustness of multimodal knowledge editing techniques, driving progress in this rapidly evolving field.

SKA-Bench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Structured Knowledge Understanding of LLMs

Although large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in understanding Structured Knowledge (SK) like KG and Table, existing evaluations for SK understanding are non-rigorous (i.e., lacking evaluations of specific capabilities) and focus on a single type of SK. Therefore, we aim to propose a more comprehensive and rigorous structured knowledge understanding benchmark to diagnose the shortcomings of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce SKA-Bench, a Structured Knowledge Augmented QA Benchmark that encompasses four widely used structured knowledge forms: KG, Table, KG+Text, and Table+Text. We utilize a three-stage pipeline to construct SKA-Bench instances, which includes a question, an answer, positive knowledge units, and noisy knowledge units. To evaluate the SK understanding capabilities of LLMs in a fine-grained manner, we expand the instances into four fundamental ability testbeds: Noise Robustness, Order Insensitivity, Information Integration, and Negative Rejection. Empirical evaluations on 8 representative LLMs, including the advanced DeepSeek-R1, indicate that existing LLMs still face significant challenges in understanding structured knowledge, and their performance is influenced by factors such as the amount of noise, the order of knowledge units, and hallucination phenomenon. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Lza12a/SKA-Bench.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

Can Knowledge Editing Really Correct Hallucinations?

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations, referring to the non-factual information in generated content, despite their superior capacities across tasks. Meanwhile, knowledge editing has been developed as a new popular paradigm to correct the erroneous factual knowledge encoded in LLMs with the advantage of avoiding retraining from scratch. However, one common issue of existing evaluation datasets for knowledge editing is that they do not ensure LLMs actually generate hallucinated answers to the evaluation questions before editing. When LLMs are evaluated on such datasets after being edited by different techniques, it is hard to directly adopt the performance to assess the effectiveness of different knowledge editing methods in correcting hallucinations. Thus, the fundamental question remains insufficiently validated: Can knowledge editing really correct hallucinations in LLMs? We proposed HalluEditBench to holistically benchmark knowledge editing methods in correcting real-world hallucinations. First, we rigorously construct a massive hallucination dataset with 9 domains, 26 topics and more than 6,000 hallucinations. Then, we assess the performance of knowledge editing methods in a holistic way on five dimensions including Efficacy, Generalization, Portability, Locality, and Robustness. Through HalluEditBench, we have provided new insights into the potentials and limitations of different knowledge editing methods in correcting hallucinations, which could inspire future improvements and facilitate the progress in the field of knowledge editing.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 2

RPO-RAG: Aligning Small LLMs with Relation-aware Preference Optimization for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, yet hallucinate on knowledge-intensive tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by grounding answers in external sources, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing KG-based RAG approaches rely on semantics-unaware path sampling and are weakly aligned with KG reasoning objectives, which limits further accuracy gains. They also feed retrieved paths directly into the reasoner without organizing them into answer-centered reasoning paths, hindering small LLMs' ability to leverage the retrieved knowledge. Furthermore, prior works predominantly rely on large LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT/GPT-4) or assume backbones above 7B parameters, leaving sub-7B models underexplored. We address this gap with RPO-RAG, the first KG-based RAG framework specifically designed for small LLMs, to the best of our knowledge. RPO-RAG introduces three key innovations: (1) a query-path semantic sampling strategy that provides informative supervisory signals; (2) a relation-aware preference optimization that aligns training with intermediate KG reasoning signals (e.g., relation); and (3) an answer-centered prompt design that organizes entities and reasoning paths in an interpretable format. Extensive experiments on two benchmark Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that RPO-RAG effectively bridges the performance gap between small and large language models. On WebQSP, it improves F1 by up to 8.8%, reflecting enhanced answer precision, while on CWQ it achieves new state-of-the-art results among models under 8B parameters in both Hit and F1. Overall, RPO-RAG substantially improves the reasoning capability of small LLMs, even under 3B parameters-highlighting their potential for resource-efficient and practical on-device KGQA applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 27

Benchmarking AI Models in Software Engineering: A Review, Search Tool, and Enhancement Protocol

Benchmarks are essential for consistent evaluation and reproducibility. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Software Engineering (AI4SE) has given rise to numerous benchmarks for tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, this surge presents challenges: (1) scattered benchmark knowledge across tasks, (2) difficulty in selecting relevant benchmarks, (3) the absence of a uniform standard for benchmark development, and (4) limitations of existing benchmarks. In this paper, we review 173 studies and identify 204 AI4SE benchmarks. We classify these benchmarks, analyze their limitations, and expose gaps in practices. Based on our review, we created BenchScout, a semantic search tool to find relevant benchmarks, using automated clustering of the contexts from associated studies. We conducted a user study with 22 participants to evaluate BenchScout's usability, effectiveness, and intuitiveness which resulted in average scores of 4.5, 4.0, and 4.1 out of 5. To advance benchmarking standards, we propose BenchFrame, a unified method to enhance benchmark quality. As a case study, we applied BenchFrame to the HumanEval benchmark and addressed its main limitations. This led to HumanEvalNext, featuring (1) corrected errors, (2) improved language conversion, (3) expanded test coverage, and (4) increased difficulty. We then evaluated ten state-of-the-art code language models on HumanEval, HumanEvalPlus, and HumanEvalNext. On HumanEvalNext, models showed a pass@1 score reduction of 31.22% and 19.94% compared to HumanEval and HumanEvalPlus, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025 2

LEMON: LanguagE ModeL for Negative Sampling of Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Knowledge Graph Embedding models have become an important area of machine learning.Those models provide a latent representation of entities and relations in a knowledge graph which can then be used in downstream machine learning tasks such as link prediction. The learning process of such models can be performed by contrasting positive and negative triples. While all triples of a KG are considered positive, negative triples are usually not readily available. Therefore, the choice of the sampling method to obtain the negative triples play a crucial role in the performance and effectiveness of Knowledge Graph Embedding models. Most of the current methods fetch negative samples from a random distribution of entities in the underlying Knowledge Graph which also often includes meaningless triples. Other known methods use adversarial techniques or generative neural networks which consequently reduce the efficiency of the process. In this paper, we propose an approach for generating informative negative samples considering available complementary knowledge about entities. Particularly, Pre-trained Language Models are used to form neighborhood clusters by utilizing the distances between entities to obtain representations of symbolic entities via their textual information. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on benchmark Knowledge Graphs with textual information for the link prediction task.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 9, 2022

FineFake: A Knowledge-Enriched Dataset for Fine-Grained Multi-Domain Fake News Detecction

Existing benchmarks for fake news detection have significantly contributed to the advancement of models in assessing the authenticity of news content. However, these benchmarks typically focus solely on news pertaining to a single semantic topic or originating from a single platform, thereby failing to capture the diversity of multi-domain news in real scenarios. In order to understand fake news across various domains, the external knowledge and fine-grained annotations are indispensable to provide precise evidence and uncover the diverse underlying strategies for fabrication, which are also ignored by existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce a novel multi-domain knowledge-enhanced benchmark with fine-grained annotations, named FineFake. FineFake encompasses 16,909 data samples spanning six semantic topics and eight platforms. Each news item is enriched with multi-modal content, potential social context, semi-manually verified common knowledge, and fine-grained annotations that surpass conventional binary labels. Furthermore, we formulate three challenging tasks based on FineFake and propose a knowledge-enhanced domain adaptation network. Extensive experiments are conducted on FineFake under various scenarios, providing accurate and reliable benchmarks for future endeavors. The entire FineFake project is publicly accessible as an open-source repository at https://github.com/Accuser907/FineFake.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024

MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

Interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation, enabling models to produce and interpret both images and text in arbitrary sequences, have become a pivotal area in multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements, the evaluation of this capability remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks suffer from limitations in data scale, scope, and evaluation depth, while current evaluation metrics are often costly or biased, lacking in reliability for practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIE, a large-scale knowledge-intensive benchmark for evaluating interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). MMIE comprises 20K meticulously curated multimodal queries, spanning 3 categories, 12 fields, and 102 subfields, including mathematics, coding, physics, literature, health, and arts. It supports both interleaved inputs and outputs, offering a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended question formats to evaluate diverse competencies. Moreover, we propose a reliable automated evaluation metric, leveraging a scoring model fine-tuned with human-annotated data and systematic evaluation criteria, aimed at reducing bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and metrics in providing a comprehensive evaluation of interleaved LVLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight LVLMs, revealing that even the best models show significant room for improvement, with most achieving only moderate results. We believe MMIE will drive further advancements in the development of interleaved LVLMs. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://mmie-bench.github.io/.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 4

KGQuiz: Evaluating the Generalization of Encoded Knowledge in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, suggesting that real-world knowledge is encoded in their model parameters. However, besides explorations on a few probing tasks in limited knowledge domains, it is not well understood how to evaluate LLMs' knowledge systematically and how well their knowledge abilities generalize, across a spectrum of knowledge domains and progressively complex task formats. To this end, we propose KGQuiz, a knowledge-intensive benchmark to comprehensively investigate the knowledge generalization abilities of LLMs. KGQuiz is a scalable framework constructed from triplet-based knowledge, which covers three knowledge domains and consists of five tasks with increasing complexity: true-or-false, multiple-choice QA, blank filling, factual editing, and open-ended knowledge generation. To gain a better understanding of LLMs' knowledge abilities and their generalization, we evaluate 10 open-source and black-box LLMs on the KGQuiz benchmark across the five knowledge-intensive tasks and knowledge domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve impressive performance in straightforward knowledge QA tasks, while settings and contexts requiring more complex reasoning or employing domain-specific facts still present significant challenges. We envision KGQuiz as a testbed to analyze such nuanced variations in performance across domains and task formats, and ultimately to understand, evaluate, and improve LLMs' knowledge abilities across a wide spectrum of knowledge domains and tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 15, 2023

VisualPuzzles: Decoupling Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation from Domain Knowledge

Current multimodal benchmarks often conflate reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, making it difficult to isolate and evaluate general reasoning abilities in non-expert settings. To address this, we introduce VisualPuzzles, a benchmark that targets visual reasoning while deliberately minimizing reliance on specialized knowledge. VisualPuzzles consists of diverse questions spanning five categories: algorithmic, analogical, deductive, inductive, and spatial reasoning. One major source of our questions is manually translated logical reasoning questions from the Chinese Civil Service Examination. Experiments show that VisualPuzzles requires significantly less intensive domain-specific knowledge and more complex reasoning compared to benchmarks like MMMU, enabling us to better evaluate genuine multimodal reasoning. Evaluations show that state-of-the-art multimodal large language models consistently lag behind human performance on VisualPuzzles, and that strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks does not necessarily translate to success on reasoning-focused, knowledge-light tasks. Additionally, reasoning enhancements such as scaling up inference compute (with "thinking" modes) yield inconsistent gains across models and task types, and we observe no clear correlation between model size and performance. We also found that models exhibit different reasoning and answering patterns on VisualPuzzles compared to benchmarks with heavier emphasis on knowledge. VisualPuzzles offers a clearer lens through which to evaluate reasoning capabilities beyond factual recall and domain knowledge.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025 2

UniHGKR: Unified Instruction-aware Heterogeneous Knowledge Retrievers

Existing information retrieval (IR) models often assume a homogeneous structure for knowledge sources and user queries, limiting their applicability in real-world settings where retrieval is inherently heterogeneous and diverse. In this paper, we introduce UniHGKR, a unified instruction-aware heterogeneous knowledge retriever that (1) builds a unified retrieval space for heterogeneous knowledge and (2) follows diverse user instructions to retrieve knowledge of specified types. UniHGKR consists of three principal stages: heterogeneous self-supervised pretraining, text-anchored embedding alignment, and instruction-aware retriever fine-tuning, enabling it to generalize across varied retrieval contexts. This framework is highly scalable, with a BERT-based version and a UniHGKR-7B version trained on large language models. Also, we introduce CompMix-IR, the first native heterogeneous knowledge retrieval benchmark. It includes two retrieval scenarios with various instructions, over 9,400 question-answer (QA) pairs, and a corpus of 10 million entries, covering four different types of data. Extensive experiments show that UniHGKR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CompMix-IR, achieving up to 6.36% and 54.23% relative improvements in two scenarios, respectively. Finally, by equipping our retriever for open-domain heterogeneous QA systems, we achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the popular ConvMix task, with an absolute improvement of up to 4.80 points.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 26, 2024

DyMRL: Dynamic Multispace Representation Learning for Multimodal Event Forecasting in Knowledge Graph

Accurate representation of multimodal knowledge is crucial for event forecasting in real-world scenarios. However, existing studies have largely focused on static settings, overlooking the dynamic acquisition and fusion of multimodal knowledge. 1) At the knowledge acquisition level, how to learn time-sensitive information of different modalities, especially the dynamic structural modality. Existing dynamic learning methods are often limited to shallow structures across heterogeneous spaces or simple unispaces, making it difficult to capture deep relation-aware geometric features. 2) At the knowledge fusion level, how to learn evolving multimodal fusion features. Existing knowledge fusion methods based on static coattention struggle to capture the varying historical contributions of different modalities to future events. To this end, we propose DyMRL, a Dynamic Multispace Representation Learning approach to efficiently acquire and fuse multimodal temporal knowledge. 1) For the former issue, DyMRL integrates time-specific structural features from Euclidean, hyperbolic, and complex spaces into a relational message-passing framework to learn deep representations, reflecting human intelligences in associative thinking, high-order abstracting, and logical reasoning. Pretrained models endow DyMRL with time-sensitive visual and linguistic intelligences. 2) For the latter concern, DyMRL incorporates advanced dual fusion-evolution attention mechanisms that assign dynamic learning emphases equally to different modalities at different timestamps in a symmetric manner. To evaluate DyMRL's event forecasting performance through leveraging its learned multimodal temporal knowledge in history, we construct four multimodal temporal knowledge graph benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyMRL outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic unimodal and static multimodal baseline methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 24

MetaAgent: Toward Self-Evolving Agent via Tool Meta-Learning

In this work, we propose MetaAgent, an agentic paradigm inspired by the principle of learning-by-doing, where expertise is developed through hands-on practice and continual self-improvement. MetaAgent starts with a minimal workflow, equipped only with basic reasoning and adaptive help-seeking abilities. When a knowledge gap is encountered, MetaAgent generates natural language help requests, which are routed to the most suitable external tool by a dedicated tool router. As MetaAgent solves tasks, it continually conducts self-reflection and answer verification, distilling actionable experience into concise texts that are dynamically incorporated into future task contexts. Besides, MetaAgent autonomously builds in-house tools and a persistent knowledge base by organizing its tool-use history, further enhancing its ability to retrieve and integrate relevant information We term this continual, data-driven process as meta tool learning, through which MetaAgent incrementally refines its reasoning and tool-use strategies, without changing model parameters or requiring further post-training. Evaluated on challenging knowledge discovery benchmarks, including GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and BrowseCamp, MetaAgent consistently outperforms workflow-based baselines and matches or exceeds end-to-end trained agents, demonstrating the promise of self-evolving agentic systems for robust, general-purpose knowledge discovery. We provide our source codes in https://github.com/qhjqhj00/MetaAgent.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 31, 2025

TruthRL: Incentivizing Truthful LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on factoid question answering, they are still prone to hallucination and untruthful responses, particularly when tasks demand information outside their parametric knowledge. Indeed, truthfulness requires more than accuracy -- models must also recognize uncertainty and abstain when unsure to avoid hallucinations. This presents a fundamental challenge for existing methods: approaches that optimize for accuracy often amplify hallucinations, while those that encourage abstention can become overly conservative, sacrificing correct answers. Both extremes ultimately compromise truthfulness. In this work, we present TruthRL, a general reinforcement learning (RL) framework that directly optimizes the truthfulness of LLMs. Specifically, we implement TruthRL using GRPO with a simple yet effective ternary reward that distinguishes correct answers, hallucinations, and abstentions. It incentivizes models to reduce hallucinations not only by providing correct responses, but also by enabling abstention when uncertain, thereby improving truthfulness. Extensive experiments across four knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that, compared to vanilla RL, TruthRL significantly reduces hallucinations by 28.9% and improves truthfulness by 21.1%, with consistent gains across various backbone models (e.g., Qwen, Llama) under both retrieval and non-retrieval setups. In-depth ablation study demonstrates that vanilla accuracy-driven methods, such as supervised fine-tuning or RL with a binary reward, struggle to balance factual correctness and uncertainty. In contrast, our proposed truthfulness-driven TruthRL achieves strong performance in both accuracy and truthfulness, underscoring the importance of learning objective design for developing truthful LLMs.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Sep 30, 2025 3

ORCE: Order-Aware Alignment of Verbalized Confidence in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly state their confidence in natural language, provides a flexible and user-facing uncertainty signal that can be applied even when token logits are unavailable. However, existing verbalized-confidence methods often optimize answer generation and confidence generation jointly, which can cause confidence-alignment objectives to interfere with answer accuracy. In this work, we propose a decoupled and order-aware framework for verbalized confidence calibration. Our method first generates an answer and then estimates confidence conditioned on the fixed question--answer pair, allowing confidence optimization without directly perturbing the answer-generation process. To align confidence with correctness likelihood, we construct a sampling-based surrogate from multiple model completions and optimize rank-based reinforcement learning objectives that encourage responses with higher estimated correctness likelihood to receive higher verbalized confidence. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that our method improves calibration and failure prediction performance while largely preserving answer accuracy. These results demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be more reliably aligned by decoupling confidence estimation from answer generation and optimizing the relative ordering of confidence across responses.

  • 5 authors
·
May 11

DeepMMSearch-R1: Empowering Multimodal LLMs in Multimodal Web Search

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in real-world applications require access to external knowledge sources and must remain responsive to the dynamic and ever-changing real-world information in order to address information-seeking and knowledge-intensive user queries. Existing approaches, such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) methods, search agents, and search equipped MLLMs, often suffer from rigid pipelines, excessive search calls, and poorly constructed search queries, which result in inefficiencies and suboptimal outcomes. To address these limitations, we present DeepMMSearch-R1, the first multimodal LLM capable of performing on-demand, multi-turn web searches and dynamically crafting queries for both image and text search tools. Specifically, DeepMMSearch-R1 can initiate web searches based on relevant crops of the input image making the image search more effective, and can iteratively adapt text search queries based on retrieved information, thereby enabling self-reflection and self-correction. Our approach relies on a two-stage training pipeline: a cold start supervised finetuning phase followed by an online reinforcement learning optimization. For training, we introduce DeepMMSearchVQA, a novel multimodal VQA dataset created through an automated pipeline intermixed with real-world information from web search tools. This dataset contains diverse, multi-hop queries that integrate textual and visual information, teaching the model when to search, what to search for, which search tool to use and how to reason over the retrieved information. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of knowledge-intensive benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Finally, we analyze the results and provide insights that are valuable for advancing multimodal web-search.

apple Apple
·
Oct 14, 2025 2

Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost

As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contributes to inference latency and operational cost. Recent studies suggest that many real-world tasks require little to no explicit reasoning, with additional reasoning sometimes even degrading performance. In this work, we propose Post-Reasoning, a simple yet effective approach that improves instruction-tuned models by conditioning them to justify their answers after generating the final response. By design, it enables the final answer to be obtained without additional latency or token cost, while still improving performance through simple instruction augmentation. We evaluate Post-Reasoning across \(117\) model--benchmark settings spanning \(13\) open and proprietary models, \(4\) model families, and \(9\) diverse reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks, including AMC, HMMT, GSM8K, GPQA, MMLU-Pro, and BIG-Bench Hard. Post-Reasoning improves performance in over \(88.19\%\) of evaluated settings, achieving a mean relative improvements of \(17.37\%\). Furthermore, we propose supervised post-reason tuning, which further improves performance in over \(91.11\%\) of evaluated settings, and exceeds the prompt-based post-reasoning baseline by an average of \(8.01\%\), demonstrating that post-reasoning can be effectively internalized through training. Ultimately, Post-Reasoning establishes a new performance ceiling for direct-answer capabilities.

  • 3 authors
·
May 6

FlexMoRE: A Flexible Mixture of Rank-heterogeneous Experts for Efficient Federatedly-trained Large Language Models

Recent advances in mixture-of-experts architectures have shown that individual experts models can be trained federatedly, i.e., in isolation from other experts by using a common base model to facilitate coordination. However, we hypothesize that full-sized experts may not be necessary for all domains and that instead low-rank adapters may be sufficient. Here, we introduce FlexMoRE, a Flexible Mixture of Rank-heterogenous Experts, which may be either full-sized experts or adapters of a suitable rank. We systematically investigate the trade-off between expert rank and downstream task performance by evaluating 6 experts with ranks 2^0 to 2^{14} resulting in experiments covering 150 mixtures (96 with 2 experts, 54 with 7 experts) that are evaluated across 120 tasks. For our experiments, we build on FlexOlmo and turn its pre-trained experts into low-rank versions. Our regression analysis from expert rank to downstream task performance reveals that the best-performing rank is substantially higher for reasoning-heavy benchmarks than for knowledge-heavy benchmarks. These findings on rank sensitivity come with direct implications for memory efficiency: Using optimal ranks, FlexMoRE yields improved downstream task performance (average score 47.18) compared to the baseline FlexOlmo-style mixture of full-sized experts (average score 45.46) at less than one third the parameters (10.75B for FlexMoRE vs. 33.27B for FlexOlmo). All code will be made available.

AnalogSeeker: An Open-source Foundation Language Model for Analog Circuit Design

In this paper, we propose AnalogSeeker, an effort toward an open-source foundation language model for analog circuit design, with the aim of integrating domain knowledge and giving design assistance. To overcome the scarcity of data in this field, we employ a corpus collection strategy based on the domain knowledge framework of analog circuits. High-quality, accessible textbooks across relevant subfields are systematically curated and cleaned into a textual domain corpus. To address the complexity of knowledge of analog circuits, we introduce a granular domain knowledge distillation method. Raw, unlabeled domain corpus is decomposed into typical, granular learning nodes, where a multi-agent framework distills implicit knowledge embedded in unstructured text into question-answer data pairs with detailed reasoning processes, yielding a fine-grained, learnable dataset for fine-tuning. To address the unexplored challenges in training analog circuit foundation models, we explore and share our training methods through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation. We finally establish a fine-tuning-centric training paradigm, customizing and implementing a neighborhood self-constrained supervised fine-tuning algorithm. This approach enhances training outcomes by constraining the perturbation magnitude between the model's output distributions before and after training. In practice, we train the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model to obtain AnalogSeeker, which achieves 85.04% accuracy on AMSBench-TQA, the analog circuit knowledge evaluation benchmark, with a 15.67% point improvement over the original model and is competitive with mainstream commercial models. Furthermore, AnalogSeeker also shows effectiveness in the downstream operational amplifier design task. AnalogSeeker is open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/analogllm/analogseeker for research use.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

ScaleEdit-12M: Scaling Open-Source Image Editing Data Generation via Multi-Agent Framework

Instruction-based image editing has emerged as a key capability for unified multimodal models (UMMs), yet constructing large-scale, diverse, and high-quality editing datasets without costly proprietary APIs remains challenging. Previous image editing datasets either rely on closed-source models for annotation, which prevents cost-effective scaling, or employ fixed synthetic editing pipelines, which suffer from limited quality and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose ScaleEditor, a fully open-source hierarchical multi-agent framework for end-to-end construction of large-scale, high-quality image editing datasets. Our pipeline consists of three key components: source image expansion with world-knowledge infusion, adaptive multi-agent editing instruction-image synthesis, and a task-aware data quality verification mechanism. Using ScaleEditor, we curate ScaleEdit-12M, the largest open-source image editing dataset to date, spanning 23 task families across diverse real and synthetic domains. Fine-tuning UniWorld-V1 and Bagel on ScaleEdit yields consistent gains, improving performance by up to 10.4% on ImgEdit and 35.1% on GEdit for general editing benchmarks and by up to 150.0% on RISE and 26.5% on KRIS-Bench for knowledge-infused benchmarks. These results demonstrate that open-source, agentic pipelines can approach commercial-grade data quality while retaining cost-effectiveness and scalability. Both the framework and dataset will be open-sourced.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 21 1

MEDMKG: Benchmarking Medical Knowledge Exploitation with Multimodal Knowledge Graph

Medical deep learning models depend heavily on domain-specific knowledge to perform well on knowledge-intensive clinical tasks. Prior work has primarily leveraged unimodal knowledge graphs, such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), to enhance model performance. However, integrating multimodal medical knowledge graphs remains largely underexplored, mainly due to the lack of resources linking imaging data with clinical concepts. To address this gap, we propose MEDMKG, a Medical Multimodal Knowledge Graph that unifies visual and textual medical information through a multi-stage construction pipeline. MEDMKG fuses the rich multimodal data from MIMIC-CXR with the structured clinical knowledge from UMLS, utilizing both rule-based tools and large language models for accurate concept extraction and relationship modeling. To ensure graph quality and compactness, we introduce Neighbor-aware Filtering (NaF), a novel filtering algorithm tailored for multimodal knowledge graphs. We evaluate MEDMKG across three tasks under two experimental settings, benchmarking twenty-four baseline methods and four state-of-the-art vision-language backbones on six datasets. Results show that MEDMKG not only improves performance in downstream medical tasks but also offers a strong foundation for developing adaptive and robust strategies for multimodal knowledge integration in medical artificial intelligence.

  • 6 authors
·
May 22, 2025

Benchmarking Multimodal Knowledge Conflict for Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models(LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) frameworks where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model's internal parametric knowledge, leading to unreliable outputs. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect such realistic conflict scenarios. Most focus solely on intra-memory conflicts, while context-memory and inter-context conflicts remain largely investigated. Furthermore, commonly used factual knowledge-based evaluations are often overlooked, and existing datasets lack a thorough investigation into conflict detection capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose MMKC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate factual knowledge conflicts in both context-memory and inter-context scenarios. MMKC-Bench encompasses three types of multimodal knowledge conflicts and includes 1,573 knowledge instances and 3,381 images across 23 broad types, collected through automated pipelines with human verification. We evaluate three representative series of LMMs on both model behavior analysis and conflict detection tasks. Our findings show that while current LMMs are capable of recognizing knowledge conflicts, they tend to favor internal parametric knowledge over external evidence. We hope MMKC-Bench will foster further research in multimodal knowledge conflict and enhance the development of multimodal RAG systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/MLLMKCBENCH/MLLMKC.

  • 14 authors
·
May 26, 2025

FinMR: A Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Benchmark for Advanced Financial Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in recent years. However, their rigorous evaluation within specialized domains like finance is hindered by the absence of datasets characterized by professional-level knowledge intensity, detailed annotations, and advanced reasoning complexity. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinMR, a high-quality, knowledge-intensive multimodal dataset explicitly designed to evaluate expert-level financial reasoning capabilities at a professional analyst's standard. FinMR comprises over 3,200 meticulously curated and expertly annotated question-answer pairs across 15 diverse financial topics, ensuring broad domain diversity and integrating sophisticated mathematical reasoning, advanced financial knowledge, and nuanced visual interpretation tasks across multiple image types. Through comprehensive benchmarking with leading closed-source and open-source MLLMs, we highlight significant performance disparities between these models and professional financial analysts, uncovering key areas for model advancement, such as precise image analysis, accurate application of complex financial formulas, and deeper contextual financial understanding. By providing richly varied visual content and thorough explanatory annotations, FinMR establishes itself as an essential benchmark tool for assessing and advancing multimodal financial reasoning toward professional analyst-level competence.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 21, 2025

AECBench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Knowledge Evaluation of Large Language Models in the AEC Field

Large language models (LLMs), as a novel information technology, are seeing increasing adoption in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) field. They have shown their potential to streamline processes throughout the building lifecycle. However, the robustness and reliability of LLMs in such a specialized and safety-critical domain remain to be evaluated. To address this challenge, this paper establishes AECBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to quantify the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in the AEC domain. The benchmark defines 23 representative tasks within a five-level cognition-oriented evaluation framework encompassing Knowledge Memorization, Understanding, Reasoning, Calculation, and Application. These tasks were derived from authentic AEC practice, with scope ranging from codes retrieval to specialized documents generation. Subsequently, a 4,800-question dataset encompassing diverse formats, including open-ended questions, was crafted primarily by engineers and validated through a two-round expert review. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge approach was introduced to provide a scalable and consistent methodology for evaluating complex, long-form responses leveraging expert-derived rubrics. Through the evaluation of nine LLMs, a clear performance decline across five cognitive levels was revealed. Despite demonstrating proficiency in foundational tasks at the Knowledge Memorization and Understanding levels, the models showed significant performance deficits, particularly in interpreting knowledge from tables in building codes, executing complex reasoning and calculation, and generating domain-specific documents. Consequently, this study lays the groundwork for future research and development aimed at the robust and reliable integration of LLMs into safety-critical engineering practices.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025

Benchmarking Commonsense Knowledge Base Population with an Effective Evaluation Dataset

Reasoning over commonsense knowledge bases (CSKB) whose elements are in the form of free-text is an important yet hard task in NLP. While CSKB completion only fills the missing links within the domain of the CSKB, CSKB population is alternatively proposed with the goal of reasoning unseen assertions from external resources. In this task, CSKBs are grounded to a large-scale eventuality (activity, state, and event) graph to discriminate whether novel triples from the eventuality graph are plausible or not. However, existing evaluations on the population task are either not accurate (automatic evaluation with randomly sampled negative examples) or of small scale (human annotation). In this paper, we benchmark the CSKB population task with a new large-scale dataset by first aligning four popular CSKBs, and then presenting a high-quality human-annotated evaluation set to probe neural models' commonsense reasoning ability. We also propose a novel inductive commonsense reasoning model that reasons over graphs. Experimental results show that generalizing commonsense reasoning on unseen assertions is inherently a hard task. Models achieving high accuracy during training perform poorly on the evaluation set, with a large gap between human performance. We will make the data publicly available for future contributions. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CSKB-Population.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 15, 2021

K12-KGraph: A Curriculum-Aligned Knowledge Graph for Benchmarking and Training Educational LLMs

Large language models are increasingly used in K-12 education, but existing benchmarks mainly test exam question answering rather than understanding how curriculum knowledge is structured and visually presented. We call this capability curriculum cognition. It covers prerequisite chains, concept taxonomies, experiment-concept links, pedagogical sequencing, and visual grounding. We introduce K12-KGraph, a curriculum-aligned knowledge graph extracted from official People's Education Press textbooks in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology across primary, middle, and high school. It contains nine node types and fourteen relation types covering curriculum structure and visual grounding. From this graph, we derive K12-Bench, a 23,640-question multi-select benchmark with five task families: Ground, Prereq, Neighbor, Evidence, and Locate. We also build K12-Train, a graph-guided supervised fine-tuning corpus of 7,335 samples, including 2,267 text-only QA pairs and 5,068 multimodal VQA pairs. On K12-Bench, Gemini-3-Flash achieves only 57 percent exact match and Gemma-4-31B-IT reaches 46 percent, with Prereq and Neighbor being the hardest tasks. Our training experiments show that domain-specific supervision can reduce this gap. Under a matched 2,300-sample budget, K12-Train-Text consistently outperforms equally sized subsets of eight mainstream instruction-tuning corpora on GaokaoBench and EduEval. For vision-language models, K12-Train-Full achieves the best overall results on Gaokao-MM, MDK12-medium, and K12Vista among all compared training configurations, despite using fewer samples than the full DataFlow and WizardLM baselines. It also surpasses both text-only and multimodal-only variants, showing that textual and visual supervision are complementary. We release the graph, benchmark, training data, and complete construction pipeline.

Pharmacology Knowledge Graphs: Do We Need Chemical Structure for Drug Repurposing?

The contributions of model complexity, data volume, and feature modalities to knowledge graph-based drug repurposing remain poorly quantified under rigorous temporal validation. We constructed a pharmacology knowledge graph from ChEMBL 36 comprising 5,348 entities including 3,127 drugs, 1,156 proteins, and 1,065 indications. A strict temporal split was enforced with training data up to 2022 and testing data from 2023 to 2025, together with biologically verified hard negatives mined from failed assays and clinical trials. We benchmarked five knowledge graph embedding models and a standard graph neural network with 3.44 million parameters that incorporates drug chemical structure using a graph attention encoder and ESM-2 protein embeddings. Scaling experiments ranging from 0.78 to 9.75 million parameters and from 25 to 100 percent of the data, together with feature ablation studies, were used to isolate the contributions of model capacity, graph density, and node feature modalities. Removing the graph attention based drug structure encoder and retaining only topological embeddings combined with ESM-2 protein features improved drug protein PR-AUC from 0.5631 to 0.5785 while reducing VRAM usage from 5.30 GB to 353 MB. Replacing the drug encoder with Morgan fingerprints further degraded performance, indicating that explicit chemical structure representations can be detrimental for predicting pharmacological network interactions. Increasing model size beyond 2.44 million parameters yielded diminishing returns, whereas increasing training data consistently improved performance. External validation confirmed 6 of the top 14 novel predictions as established therapeutic indications. These results show that drug pharmacological behavior can be accurately predicted using target-centric information and drug network topology alone, without requiring explicit chemical structure representations.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 1

PathVG: A New Benchmark and Dataset for Pathology Visual Grounding

With the rapid development of computational pathology, many AI-assisted diagnostic tasks have emerged. Cellular nuclei segmentation can segment various types of cells for downstream analysis, but it relies on predefined categories and lacks flexibility. Moreover, pathology visual question answering can perform image-level understanding but lacks region-level detection capability. To address this, we propose a new benchmark called Pathology Visual Grounding (PathVG), which aims to detect regions based on expressions with different attributes. To evaluate PathVG, we create a new dataset named RefPath which contains 27,610 images with 33,500 language-grounded boxes. Compared to visual grounding in other domains, PathVG presents pathological images at multi-scale and contains expressions with pathological knowledge. In the experimental study, we found that the biggest challenge was the implicit information underlying the pathological expressions. Based on this, we proposed Pathology Knowledge-enhanced Network (PKNet) as the baseline model for PathVG. PKNet leverages the knowledge-enhancement capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert pathological terms with implicit information into explicit visual features, and fuses knowledge features with expression features through the designed Knowledge Fusion Module (KFM). The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PathVG benchmark.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025 1