arXiv AI

Multimodal Item Parameter Estimation using Simulated Response Probabilitie

arXiv:2608. 10154v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present results from reconstructing multiple-choice model (MCM) and three-parameter logistic (3PL) model curves using a fine-tuned multimodal large language model (LLM) based on Qwen3.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Response-free item difficulty modelling for multiple-choice items with fine-tuned transformers: Component-wise representation and multi-task learning

The paper proposes a response‑free method for estimating difficulty of reading‑comprehension multiple‑choice items by fine‑tuning a transformer on item wording. It introduces two extensions to a baseline joint‑encoding model: a component‑wise variant that encodes passage, question, and options separately, and a multi‑task variant that adds a question‑answering auxiliary task. Experiments on a corpus of nearly 30,000 items show that both extensions outperform the baseline, especially the multi‑task variant across all metrics and the component‑wise variant in rank ordering, even with limited training data.

By Jan Net\'ik, Patr\'icia Martinkov\'a
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Unexplored flaws in multiple-choice VQA make benchmarking unreliable

The paper demonstrates that multiple‑choice visual question answering (MC‑VQA) benchmarks are unreliable because model performance is highly sensitive to semantically neutral prompt formatting choices—such as option ID sets, delimiters, and separators—despite protocols that mitigate option‑order effects. Across seven multimodal large language models and five datasets, the authors observed frequent rank reversals when systematically varying 48 equivalent prompt formats, attributing the instability to tokenizer‑induced token fusion or removal and to how option ID sets influence attention patterns. Consequently, MC‑VQA rankings correlate weakly with open‑ended evaluation, revealing that MC‑VQA reflects option‑selection dynamics as well as multimodal reasoning.

By Fabio Rosenthal, Sebastian Schmidt, Thorsten Graf, Thorsten Bagdonat, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Check The Scoreboard: An Analysis of Scoring Schemes on Multiple-Choice Evaluation

The paper investigates how different scoring schemes affect the evaluation of multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) models. It introduces six education-inspired scoring methods that assess abilities such as distractor elimination, abstention, confidence calibration, and self-correction. Experiments on large language models show that these alternative schemes can change model rankings, better predict user preferences, and reveal distinct capabilities compared to traditional accuracy scoring.

By Nishant Balepur, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Eunsol Choi, Rachel Rudinger, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Unified Multimodal Uncertain Inference

Unified Multimodal Uncertain Inference (UMUI) is a new task that requires models to generate calibrated probability estimates for hypotheses conditioned on premises across text, audio, and video modalities. The authors create a human‑annotated evaluation set with scalar probability judgments for audio, visual, and audiovisual settings, and benchmark their approach on existing text and audio datasets. Their CLUE framework, which blends self‑consistent teacher calibration with distribution‑based confidence probing, enables a 3B‑parameter model to match or surpass zero‑shot baselines up to 32B parameters across all modalities.

By Dengjia Zhang, Alexander Martin, William Jurayj, Kenton Murray, Benjamin Van Durme, Reno Kriz
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Hyper-ICL: Attention Calibration with Hyperbolic Anchor Distillation for Multimodal In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.

By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah