Benchmarks and evaluation

Leaderboards, eval harnesses and ablations — the contested business of deciding which model is actually better.

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arXiv AI
Sep 30

Can AI Scientists Change Their Minds? Prior-Evidence Conflict in Synthetic Universes

The paper introduces Synthetic Universes, a benchmark that pairs well-known theoretical worlds with closely related twisted variants governed by noncanonical mechanisms. It evaluates scientific agents on each law twice: by testing predictive performance on unseen data and by checking if the law recovers the underlying generating mechanism. Results from a 60‑cell study show a dissociation between predictive adequacy and mechanism recovery, indicating that these are distinct scientific claims requiring separate tests.

By Kargi Chauhan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Can Agents Design Libraries for Agents?

The paper introduces LibraryDesignBench, a benchmark that tests how well agents can design reusable libraries from specifications without prescribed designs. It evaluates libraries by measuring the correctness and simplicity of programs written by three different user agents across 242 programming problems in four languages. Findings show that while agents often replicate human-designed abstractions, downstream agents still tend to reimplement library features due to rigidity or usability issues, and that providing more prescriptive guidance improves reuse and program simplicity.

By Gabriel Orlanski, Alex L. Zhang, Avi Trost, Vincent Sunn Chen, Frederic Sala, Aws Albarghouthi, Ludwig Schmidt
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Code4Scene: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Constructing and Editing 3D Scenes

Code4Scene is a benchmark that evaluates coding agents on constructing and editing 3D scenes in Unreal Engine. It tests agents on two tasks: construction, where they must build a scene from open‑ended language, and editing, where they must recover a target scene from reference images while preserving everything else. The benchmark measures task fulfillment, artifact integrity, and physical validity, revealing that construction and editing performance are correlated but not interchangeable, with agents struggling most with spatial composition and precise edits.

By Xiaokang Ye, Siddhant Hitesh Mantri, Zimeng Chen, Edward Zhang, Zhaoxu Zheng, Yuanheng Li, Yizhao Chen, Tianyang Huang, Lianhui Qin
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Beyond Sub-Gaussian Detector Scores: Robust Weighted Profile-Loss Change Point Detection for Human-LLM Text Segmentation

The paper introduces Robust Weighted Profile-Loss Change Point Detection (RWCP), a method for locating authorship transitions in mixed human‑LLM documents using detector scores with varying reliability. RWCP combines capped reliability weights, Huber profile gains, and a narrowest‑over‑threshold search to express the population gap as a merge cost, enabling recovery of change points without a closed‑form nonlinear center. Experiments on five benchmark families show that core RWCP reduces WindowDiff by 17.6% compared to weighted change‑point detection, and an extended variant RWCP‑R further improves performance, especially for isolated changes.

By Wan Tian, Zhongyi Li, Yawen Li, Rui Zhang, Yijie Peng, Fuzhen Zhuang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

HorizonFlow: Variable-Length Planning for Offline Goal-Conditioned RL

HorizonFlow is a hierarchical planner for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that treats the planning horizon as an output rather than a fixed input. It uses a subgoal route planner and an action-prefix controller, both employing insertion-based generation and flow matching, to jointly generate continuous plan content and its length. The method leverages the partially generated plan to guide token insertion and to steer generation toward shorter plans, achieving superior performance on Maze2D, Multi2D, and OGBench benchmarks.

By JunHyeok Oh, Zian Jang, Byung-Jun Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Neuro-Symbolic Computer Use: Learning Reusable Policies for Reliable and Efficient Execution

The paper introduces neuro‑symbolic computer use, a method that learns reusable policies to execute recurring computer workflows efficiently. Instead of re‑planning each run, the learned policy encodes stable decisions (ordering, variables, loops, branches) into executable code while delegating observation‑dependent decisions to neural models. Using neuro‑symbolic policy iteration, the approach iteratively refines the policy from a single agent trajectory, diagnoses failures, and revises the code with a coding model, achieving superior Pass^3 scores and significant reductions in per‑run cost and latency on OSWorld‑Verified and ScienceBoard benchmarks.

By Hyewon Suh, Thanh Minh Nguyen, Chih-Lun Lee, Darrow Hartman, Lizhao Liu, Xin Eric Wang, Ang Li, Jiachen Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

REALHOP: Rethinking Multi-Hop Reasoning Evaluation via Behavioral Auditing

REALHOP introduces a behavioral auditing framework to assess multi‑hop reasoning by measuring the Behavioral Necessity Rate (BNR), which quantifies how often removing targeted evidence prevents correct answers. Across five benchmarks, the framework reveals a wide gap between annotated reasoning chains and actual evidence dependence, with panel‑mean BNR ranging from 16.6% to 48.9%. By re‑binding entities, factorizing relations, adding competing paths, and placing evidence at traceable locations, REALHOP raises BNR dramatically—from 27.4% to 94.4% on MuSiQue questions—while maintaining high overall accuracy and improving performance on long‑context tasks.

By Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Yaoming Li, Chenxu Liu, Mengzhou Wu, Tong Yang, Maxm Pan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

ImbalancE: Inference-Time Latent Search Against Degree Imbalance in Link Prediction

The paper introduces ImbalancE, an inference‑time latent search method that mitigates degree imbalance bias in Knowledge Graph Embedding models. It targets the problematic prediction of target entities with much lower degrees than anchor entities, a common issue in recommender systems and other applications. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that ImbalancE improves predictions on the most imbalanced triples compared to conventional methods.

By Alberto Bernardi, Luca Costabello, Christophe Gueret
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Watch-Think-Interact: Bootstrapping Long-Horizon Multi-Turn Streaming Video Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Watch-Think-Interact (WTI), a closed-loop framework for multi-question streaming video reasoning that maintains compact natural-language memory entries linked to video time ranges. WTI decides whether to answer, continue watching, or recall relevant past intervals for each question, avoiding replay of the full history. The authors build a large dataset, WTI-82K, and a training method, Stream-GDPO, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench.

By Ziheng Huang, Yicheng Bao, Xueheng Li, Zhenkun Gao, Bangwei Liu, Kunquan Li, Yuxiang Shen, Bangyan Li, Xuejiao Wang, Changbo Wang, Gaoqi He
arXiv AI
Sep 30

MatToolBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents in Real-World Materials Science Workflows

MatToolBench is a new benchmark that evaluates multimodal GUI agents on professional materials science software. It contains 204 tasks across 10 tools in three modalities—GUI operation, OriginPro scripting, and code-based database queries—executed inside a Windows 11 VM. The benchmark offers fine-grained, expert-decomposed scoring and a high-performing multimodal judge for aesthetic assessment, revealing that strong general benchmark performance does not transfer to scientific workflows.

By Mei Wu, Rui Xie, Runyu Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Tianfan Fu, Bo Chen, Kai Yu, Xin Chen, Lu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 30

SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory

SkillCome introduces a skill-evolution framework that uses group contrast optimization and a dual memory system to refine large language model skills. By generating multiple trajectories per question and contrasting successful versus failed ones, it identifies key behavioral divergences to guide skill edits. The dual memory accumulates historical evidence across groups, enabling more generalized and reliable optimization signals, leading to consistent performance gains on diverse benchmarks.

By Haolin Li, Feng Hong, Ang Li, Chilin Fu, Weichang Wu, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Jiangchao Yao
arXiv AI
Sep 30

OptiCom : A Unified Framework for State-Conditioned Composition in LLM-Driven Optimization

OptiCom introduces a unified framework for state-conditioned composition in large language model (LLM)-driven optimization. It models LLM optimizers within a shared configuration space (artifact, query, operator, evaluation, memory, strategy) and uses an Optimization Controller to dynamically compose mechanisms while a Strategy Adapter refines long-term preferences. Experiments on 32 benchmark groups show OptiCom outperforms 14 configurations, achieving the top score in 23 groups.

By Chenxing Wei, Sichen Liu, Lizhao Liu, Ningyuan Sun, Chen Bingzhou, Ying He, Bo Jiang, Fei Yu, Yao Shu
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning to Prove, Not Just to Answer: Reinforcement Learning from Formal Verification for Natural-Language Logical Reasoning

The paper introduces Proof‑R1, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains large language models to generate verifiable proofs for natural‑language logical reasoning tasks. Proof‑R1 only accepts a generated conclusion into the proof state when it satisfies formal verification constraints, ensuring each reasoning step is machine‑checkable. The method also reconstructs the dependency closure that supports the final answer, aligning credit with valid proof steps, and shows improved answer accuracy and verifiability across multiple benchmarks and models.

By Qili Zhang, Qianren Mao, Hanze Cai, Kaiming Zhao, Yuening He, Xihan Lei, Yashuo Luo, Hanwen Hao, Yutong Gu, Likang Xiao, Zhijun Chen, Weifeng Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Transolver-$\sigma$: Joint Spectral-Physical Subspace Modeling for Neural PDE Solving

Transolver‑σ is a neural PDE solver that jointly models spectral and physical subspaces to improve accuracy in both one‑step and autoregressive rollouts. The method uses adaptive physical-state interactions, Slice‑Residual Physics‑Attention, and an axis‑factorized Fourier operator to enable information exchange between representations. Across five standard PDE benchmarks, Transolver‑σ reduces benchmark‑averaged relative error by 33.4% compared to the strongest baseline and shows strong performance on coupled multiphysics systems and real‑world fluid and combustion data.

By Haonan Shangguan, Hang Zhou, Haixu Wu, Yuezhou Ma, Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng Long
arXiv AI
Sep 30

VISTA: Value-Informed Event Appraisal for Multimodal Emotion Conflict

VISTA (Value-Informed Semantic Trust Arbitration) is a learned seven-field appraisal interface that conditions modality arbitration on concerns, event relations, and expression conditions while retaining a joint-evidence residual. It uses a log-odds decomposition to separate emotion expectation from cue diagnosticity, allowing appraisal to change how evidence is interpreted. With a shared Qwen2.5-Omni-7B backbone, VISTA achieves 64.5% conflict accuracy on CA-MER, improving on modality gating by 2.5 percentage points on conflict and 0.2 on consistency, and a frozen-backbone probe reaches 0.600 macro CCC for appraisal readout versus 0.505 for emotion-only fine-tuning.

By Jiale Dai, Liuxian Ma, Xiaoke Niu, Wenjing Zhang, Huiying Zhao, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian, Guojie Song
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Seek Before You Move: Evidence Seeking for Progress Grounding in Vision-Language Navigation

SeekVLN is a new framework for Vision‑Language Navigation that addresses the problem of agents acting on insufficient evidence, termed Progress Myopia. It combines semantic progress reasoning with active evidence seeking, trained first with Future‑guided Reverse Generation to augment expert trajectories, and then refined via Counterfactual Contrastive Policy Optimization to reward beneficial seeking actions. Experiments on simulated benchmarks show significant gains, improving success rates by 12.7% on R2R‑CE and 7.5% on RxR‑CE, and real‑world tests demonstrate human‑like evidence‑seeking behavior.

By Zhimin Wang, Meiyuan Zhu, Duo Wu, Linjia Kang, Yajun Wang, Yuan Ni, Xiaohang Wang, Tianlu Pan, Jingyan Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Zhi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Routing Should Pay for Itself: Sparse Supervision for Economical LLM Routing

The paper introduces SaveRouter, a sparse‑supervision framework for large language model routing that selectively gathers informative model feedback and shares capability information across related queries. By using only about 33–41% of available training feedback, SaveRouter achieves competitive or superior routing quality while reducing the break‑even deployment volume by 1.9–9.5× compared to conventional routers. The study also shows that the supervision level that minimizes serving cost may differ from the one that yields the earliest payback.

By Guannan Lai, Gelin Bian, Hao-Xuan Ma, Jun-Peng Jiang, Long Chen, Jian-Dong Liu, Zhi-Hao Tan, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv AI
Sep 30

SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation

SkillGym is an automatic pipeline that generates verifiable environments for training skill-use agents. It crawls internet skills, filters for reproducible workflows, and uses a builder‑reviewer process to create difficulty‑controlled tasks with reference solutions and verifiers. The system builds 6.8k environments, collects 19k successful trajectories, and fine‑tunes LLMs from 2B to 122B parameters, improving performance and skill invocation rates.

By Renxi Wang, Mingshan Hee, Fajri Koto, Timothy Baldwin, Haonan Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents

The paper introduces FOCUS, a training‑free framework that compresses the interaction history of large language model agents by preserving only the past interactions that causally influence future decisions. Unlike prior methods that learn compression policies offline, FOCUS operates entirely at test time, requiring no additional data collection or fine‑tuning and can be applied to any closed‑API model. Experiments on a variety of agentic benchmarks show that FOCUS reduces peak context length by up to 48% and dependency by 73%, while improving task success by up to 8.9 percentage points.

By Shantanu Dixit, Anson Bastos, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Context Language Models

The paper introduces Context Language Models (CLMs), which treat context as a mutable file that the model can update freely, enabling the model to learn what information to retain. CLMs built zero‑shot from existing models outperform state‑of‑the‑art context‑management methods on several benchmarks, achieving higher accuracy with fewer FLOPs. The authors also demonstrate that CLMs can be steered via natural‑language instructions and online reinforcement learning, and they propose a suffix‑cache reuse strategy that further reduces server‑side compute.

By Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh