Daily Papers

Multilingual LLM benchmarks omit Slovak, a morphologically rich West Slavic language of five million speakers, or cover it only by machine translation. We present sk-bench, a native-first Slovak benchmark with 30 datasets (33 scored task variants) across ten skill categories. Eleven resources are introduced or first packaged for generative-LLM evaluation, including IFEval-SK with Slovak-adapted instruction checkers and native Chiby/SKJ1 resources for Slovak grammar and morphology. We evaluate 55 open- and closed-weights models under one harness. The best open model trails proprietary APIs by 12.6 points. Model rankings are similar for native and translated closed-form data (ρgeq0.98), though translation separates the strongest models less well. By contrast, human-authored and LLM-generated QA questions rank models differently (ρ=0.72). For Qwen3-14B, continued Slovak pretraining lowers the overall score by 13.9 points. A small instruction set restores three quarters of that loss. Test-time reasoning improves scores by 8.5 to 12.5 points for models of 9B and above. Together, these findings suggest four design lessons for other under-resourced languages: use native data where translation fails, plan instruction repair after language adaptation, enable test-time reasoning before scaling up, and avoid overinvesting in target-language prompts. We release the data and code at https://github.com/slovak-nlp/sk-bench

Geo-Foundation Models (GFMs) have been evaluated across diverse Earth observation task including multiple domains and have demonstrated strong potential of producing reliable maps even with sparse labels. However, benchmarking GFMs for Cryosphere applications has remained limited, primarily due to the lack of suitable evaluation datasets. To address this gap, we introduce Cryo-Bench, a benchmark compiled to evaluate GFM performance across key Cryospheric components. Cryo-Bench includes debris-covered glaciers, glacial lakes, sea ice, and calving fronts, spanning multiple sensors and broad geographic regions. We evaluate 14 GFMs alongside UNet and ViT baselines to assess their advantages, limitations, and optimal usage strategies. With a frozen encoder, UNet achieves the highest average mIoU of 66.38, followed by TerraMind at 64.02 across five evluation dataset included in Cryo-Bench. In the few-shot setting (10\% input data), GFMs such as DOFA and TerraMind outperform UNet, achieving mIoU scores of 59.53, 56.62, and 56.60, respectively, comapred to U-Net's 56.60. When fully finetuning GFMs, we observe inconsistent performance across datasets and models. However, tuning learning rate along with finetuning substantially improves GFM performance. For example, evaluation on two representative datasets (GLID and CaFFe) shows an average relative improvement of 12.77\%. Despite having minimal Cryosphere representation in their pretraining data, GFMs exhibit notable domain adaptation capabilities and produce meaningful results across tasks. Based on our findings, We recommend encoder fine-tuning with hyperparameter optimization optimization to achieve the best possible performance, while using frozen encoders when users need quick results without extensive experimentation.(https://github.com/Sk-2103/Cryo-Bench{GitHub}).

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.

Synthetic data generation has gained significant attention recently for its utility in training large vision and language models. However, the application of synthetic data to the training of multimodal context-augmented generation systems has been relatively unexplored. This gap in existing work is important because existing vision and language models (VLMs) are not trained specifically for context-augmented generation. Resources for adapting such models are therefore crucial for enabling their use in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings, where a retriever is used to gather relevant information that is then subsequently provided to a generative model via context augmentation. To address this challenging problem, we generate SK-VQA: a large synthetic multimodal dataset containing over 2 million question-answer pairs which require external knowledge to determine the final answer. Our dataset is both larger and significantly more diverse than existing resources of its kind, possessing over 11x more unique questions and containing images from a greater variety of sources than previously-proposed datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our synthetic dataset can not only serve as a challenging benchmark, but is also highly effective for adapting existing generative multimodal models for context-augmented generation.

Automatic Short Answer Scoring (ASAS) is central to NLP for Education. However, openly available benchmarks remain scarce, and existing datasets largely address how well students answer a question directly rather than how well they master underlying concepts (knowledge elements) such as thermal energy or epistemic activities (skills) such as reasoning or claim. To address this gap, we introduce Alice, a large-scale, rubric-based German ASAS dataset that is pedagogically aligned and comprises three subtasks: (i) learning performance (Alice-LP), (ii) knowledge elements (Alice-KE), and (iii) skills (Alice-SK). We further formulate rubric-based ASAS as a rubric-retrieval task and benchmark the dataset with a range of language models, from encoder-only models to lightweight LLMs. We also benchmark the dataset with zero-shot prompting via LLMs and a standard classification baseline. The experiments show that LLMs, in particular, struggle to score knowledge elements and skills in the zero-shot setting. They also indicate that rubric text is often useful, especially for Alice-KE and Alice-SK, while on Alice-LP gains over sample-solution-focused inputs are more modest and vary by model and input format.

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types -- nearly 4times the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop e5-sk-small (45M parameters) and e5-sk-large (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Reverse engineering and rapid prototyping of computer-aided design (CAD) models from 3D scans, sketches, or simple text prompts are vital in industrial product design. However, recent advances in geometric deep learning techniques lack a multi-modal understanding of parametric CAD features stored in their boundary representation (BRep). This study presents the largest compilation of 10 million multi-modal annotations and metadata for 1 million ABC CAD models, namely A2Z, to unlock an unprecedented level of BRep learning. A2Z comprises (i) high-resolution meshes with salient 3D scanning features, (ii) 3D hand-drawn sketches equipped with (iii) geometric and topological information about BRep co-edges, corners, and surfaces, and (iv) textual captions and tags describing the product in the mechanical world. Creating such carefully structured, large-scale data, which requires nearly 5 terabytes of storage to leverage unparalleled CAD learning/retrieval tasks, is very challenging. The scale, quality, and diversity of our multi-modal annotations are assessed using novel metrics, GPT-5, Gemini, and extensive human feedback mechanisms. To this end, we also merge an additional 25,000 CAD models of electronic enclosures (e.g., tablets, ports) designed by skilled professionals with our A2Z dataset. Subsequently, we train and benchmark a foundation model on a subset of 150K CAD models to detect BRep co-edges and corner vertices from 3D scans, a key downstream task in CAD reverse engineering. The annotated dataset, metrics, and checkpoints will be publicly released to support numerous research directions.

We present FiMI (Finance Model for India), a domain-specialized financial language model developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for Indian digital payment systems. We develop two model variants: FiMI Base and FiMI Instruct. FiMI adapts the Mistral Small 24B architecture through a multi-stage training pipeline, beginning with continuous pre-training on 68 Billion tokens of curated financial, multilingual (English, Hindi, Hinglish), and synthetic data. This is followed by instruction fine-tuning and domain-specific supervised fine-tuning focused on multi-turn, tool-driven conversations that model real-world workflows, such as transaction disputes and mandate lifecycle management. Evaluations reveal that FiMI Base achieves a 20\% improvement over the Mistral Small 24B Base model on finance reasoning benchmark, while FiMI Instruct outperforms the Mistral Small 24B Instruct model by 87\% on domain-specific tool-calling. Moreover, FiMI achieves these significant domain gains while maintaining comparable performance to models of similar size on general benchmarks.

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.