Benchmarks and evaluation

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

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ChronoSteer: Bridging Large Language Model and Time Series Foundation Model via Synthetic Cross-Modal Alignment Dataset

ChronoSteer is a decoupled agentic framework that bridges large language models and time series foundation models by learning cross‑modal alignment from synthetic paired supervision. It converts textual events into revision instructions that steer a frozen time‑series model, discretizes these instructions into a compact codebook to reduce semantic divergence, and then refines the predictions with a two‑stage training strategy. The authors also release a leakage‑controlled multimodal benchmark and report a 25.8% improvement in zero‑shot prediction accuracy over the unimodal backbone.

By Chengsen Wang, Qi Qi, Zhongwen Rao, Lujia Pan, Jingyu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ASCIIBench: Evaluating Language-Model-Based Understanding of Visually-Oriented Text

ASCIIBench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on generating and classifying ASCII-text images, using a dataset of 5,315 labeled ASCII images. The authors also release a fine‑tuned CLIP model adapted to capture ASCII structure for evaluation. Their analysis shows that cosine similarity on CLIP embeddings fails to separate most categories, indicating a representation bottleneck rather than generational variance.

By Kerry Luo, Michael Fu, Joshua Peguero, Husnain Malik, Anvay Patil, Joyce Lin, Megan Van Overborg, Ryan Sarmiento, Kevin Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

tidyHEBO: Robust General-Purpose Bayesian Optimization with Model-Consistent Warping and Pareto Search

tidyHEBO is a BoTorch-native Bayesian optimization tool that jointly applies Yeo-Johnson output warping to a Gaussian‑process surrogate, evaluates acquisition functions on the original objective scale, and conducts constrained cumulative Pareto search across multiple acquisition criteria. Using only default settings, it outperformed other methods on the Olympus benchmark and performed strongly on synthetic, Needle‑in‑a‑Haystack, and Bayesmark tasks, while adaptive batching offered a trade‑off between parallelization and optimization quality. These results position tidyHEBO as a robust, reproducible optimizer suitable for diverse practical problems, including scientific applications and hyperparameter tuning.

By L. A. Zhukov, E. V. Shaburova, D. V. Antonets
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Faithful, Interpretable Chest X-ray Diagnosis with Artifact-free B-cos Networks

The paper presents artifact‑free B‑cos networks for chest X‑ray diagnosis, enhancing the original B‑cos architecture with anti‑aliasing techniques (ASAP and BlurPool) to eliminate aliasing artifacts in explanation maps. These modified networks, “B-cos_ASAP” and “B-cos_BP”, maintain competitive diagnostic performance while providing faithful, class‑specific contribution maps without post‑hoc explanations. Experiments on chest X‑ray datasets confirm that the new models deliver strong predictive accuracy and clear, artifact‑free explanations suitable for clinical use in multi‑class and multi‑label scenarios.

By Shreyash Arya, Shashank Agnihotri, Marcel Kleinmann, Bernt Schiele, Margret Keuper
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

PRISM-VLM: A Multi-Axis Discriminative Benchmark for Compact Vision-Language Models

PRISM‑VLM is a new benchmark for compact vision‑language models that evaluates each item across seven axes—task quality, behavioral robustness, and capability bottlenecks—rather than collapsing performance into a single accuracy score. It aggregates these axes into a single PScore while also providing per‑axis profiles, revealing differences that single‑axis benchmarks miss, such as sycophancy. The benchmark draws on items from fifteen public datasets and will be released with its full pipeline, prompts, and annotations.

By Sanghee Park, Kee-Eung Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Mizar: A 159M-Parameter Audio-Language Model for Audio Understanding

Mizar is a 159.3‑million‑parameter audio‑language model designed for devices with limited memory and computation. It couples a compact CED‑Small audio encoder with SmolLM2‑135M via a frequency‑merging mapper and is trained in three stages—audio‑language alignment, audio‑dependent fine‑tuning, and post‑training—to improve performance on audio‑question tasks. Across five random seeds, Mizar outperforms all other sub‑200M‑parameter ALMs on MMAU, MMAR, and ADQA‑clean, achieving mean accuracies of 52.92%, 42.42%, and 36.02% respectively, while enabling local inference on a single CPU with an average latency of 1.09 seconds for MMAU questions.

By Kaiyang Li, Shaobo Han, Yue Tian, Shihao Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

HIVE: Hidden-Evidence Verification for Hallucination Detection in Diffusion Large Language Models

The paper introduces HIVE, a method for detecting hallucinations in diffusion large language models by leveraging hidden trajectory evidence. HIVE compresses hidden states, selects informative step-layer evidence, and uses continuous prefix embeddings to condition a verifier that outputs a hallucination score and diagnostics. Experiments on two diffusion LLMs and three QA benchmarks show that HIVE outperforms eight baselines and improves AUROC and AUPRC by several points over text-only verification.

By Guoshenghui Zhao, Tan Yu, Weijie Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

MetaHOPE: A Metaphor-Oriented Evaluation Framework for Analysing MT and LLM Translation Errors

MetaHOPE is an error‑severity‑aware annotation framework designed to evaluate how well machine translation (MT) and large language models (LLMs) translate metaphors. The authors applied MetaHOPE to three state‑of‑the‑art systems—GoogleMT, GPT5.4, and Hunyuan‑7b—using two human‑annotated metaphor corpora (VUAMC and PSUCMC) for English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English translation. They also produced a bilingual post‑edited gold reference, creating a new resource for metaphor translation research.

By Jiahui Liang, Lifeng Han
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

nnFoundation: 3D Foundation Models for Radiology

nnFoundation introduces complementary convolutional and transformer-based 3D foundation models for radiology, trained on 2.1 million CT, MRI, and PET volumes from 125 datasets. The models are evaluated on 108 tasks—including segmentation, detection, classification, report generation, and image retrieval—under domain shift, low-data, and low-compute scenarios, consistently outperforming prior 3D foundation models and training from scratch. Performance varies by task type, with convolutional models excelling at spatially localized tasks and transformer models at global semantic reasoning, and dynamic alignment with dataset characteristics further enhances transferability.

By Constantin Ulrich Harsy, Tassilo Wald, Karol Gotkowski, Yannick Kirchhoff, Marcel Knopp, Maximilian Rokuss, Elisa Stegmeier, Philipp Schader, Dasha Trofimova, Raphael Stock, Kim-Celine Kahl, Stephen Schaumann, Selen Erkan, David Zimmerer, Stefan Denner, Moritz Langenberg, Sebastian Ziegler, Katharina Eckstein, Maximilian Fischer, Jonathan Suprijadi, B\'alint Kov\'acs, Benjamin Hamm, Anand Deshpande, Dimitrios Bounias, Nico Disch, Shuhan Xiao, Jessica K\"achele, Jan Sellner, Rajesh Baidya, Jeremias Traub, Lars Kr\"amer, Maximilian Zenk, Tim R\"adsch, Stefan Dvoretskii, Robin Peretzke, Jonathan Deissler, Alexandra Ertl, Partha Ghosh, Kris Dreher, Stefan Dinkelacker, Annika Reinke, Evangelia Christodoulou, Numan Saeed, Yoland Savriama, Santiago Estrada, David K\"ugler, Laura Alexandra Daza Barragan, Cristina Isabel Gonzalez Osorio, Jan Peeken, Michael Baumgartner, Marvin Teichmann, Guillaume Chabin, Matthias Kirchler, Valentin Koch, for the ALFA study, Markus Hohenhaus, Dimitri Koslov, Nina Decker, Mohammad Yaqub, Arnd Heuser, Martin Reuter, Julia A. Schnabel, Tobias Heimann, Florin Ghesu, Paul Brachmann, Claus P. Heu{\ss}el, Alexander Radbruch, Gianluca Brugnara, Aditya Rastogi, Martha Foltyn-Dumitru, Heinz-Peter Schlemmer, Ignaz Reicht, Julius C. Holzschuh, Michael Bach, Bram Stieltjes, Kai Schlamp, Lena Maier-Hein, Marco Nolden, Ralf Floca, Paul F. J\"ager, Philipp Vollmuth, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

MINER: Multi-crop INference-time Enhancement for Rare-Object Retrieval with Frozen Dual Encoders

MINER is a training‑free inference framework that enhances frozen dual‑encoder models for text‑to‑image retrieval when queries refer to small, visually subordinate objects in cluttered scenes. It augments the global image embedding with a bank of region‑level embeddings and applies hubness‑correcting similarity rescoring, thereby recovering visual evidence that global pooling underweights. The authors introduce ROCS, a benchmark derived from Flickr30K and MS COCO, and demonstrate that MINER improves retrieval performance across CLIP, SigLIP, and SigLIP 2 backbones on both ROCS and standard splits, attributing gains mainly to broader spatial coverage rather than precise crop placement.

By Abdulmalik Alquwayfili, Faisal AlMeshal, Jumanah Almajnouni, Huda Abdulhadi Alamri, Muhammad Kamran J Khan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Invisible in Space, Visible in Time: Motion Vision CAPTCHA against GUI Agents

The paper introduces Motion Vision CAPTCHA (MVCAP), a new CAPTCHA framework that relies on motion-defined foreground structures to create challenges that are only solvable through temporal analysis of a dynamic background. MVCAP is implemented in three progressive levels—coherent motion, structural motion, and biological motion—and evaluated using the MVCAP-Bench, a browser-based benchmark with 600 live CAPTCHA instances. Human participants achieve 99.6% accuracy, whereas the best GUI agent scores only 16.8%, highlighting a significant human–agent perception gap and demonstrating that dynamic background camouflage is the key difficulty.

By Zeyu Zhang, Dingyi Rong, Zijian Chen, Zicheng Zhang, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

CereVLA: Cerebellum-Inspired Consequence-Aware Residual Governance for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Execution

CereVLA is a cerebellum-inspired framework that enhances vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies by adding lightweight residual refinement and predictive consequence evaluation to frozen VLA execution. It generates corrective actions via flow‑based residual refinement, then assesses their short‑ and interval‑horizon impacts using a recurrent state‑space model and a history‑aware classifier, suppressing unfavorable corrections with a lightweight governor. Experiments on LIBERO‑10, LIBERO‑GOAL, and SO‑101 show that CereVLA improves task success rates and reduces control steps compared to state‑of‑the‑art baselines.

By Shuai Zeng, Yuxuan Liang, Hangmiao Hu, Fobao Zhou, Zixiang Wang, Wenxi Hong, Hang Zhao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

ICM: Intra-class Mixing for Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather

The paper introduces ICM, an Intra-Class Mixing Consistency framework for unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation under adverse weather. ICM mixes regions within the same image and semantic class to maintain realistic layouts, contrasting prior methods that combine across images or domains. On the Cityscapes → ACDC benchmark, ICM achieves 75.7% mIoU, surpassing previous state‑of‑the‑art results by 1.9 percentage points.

By Boying Li, Chang Liu, Britta Ayano Wilde, Gy\"orgy Kov\'acs, Tosin Adewumi, Bj\"orn Backe, Hamam Mokayed
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

A generalizable structural brain MRI foundation model built through dual-priority federated pretraining

BrainFedFM is a structural brain MRI foundation model that was federatively pretrained on 164,707 3‑D scans from 42 sites using a dual‑priority approach that emphasizes informative anatomical regions locally and prioritizes site contributions globally. The model outperformed seven baseline models—including four centralized foundation models—across 20 downstream tasks (classification, regression, segmentation), achieving a mean rank of 1.68 and a 50% performance gain, especially in classification and regression and among underrepresented populations. These results demonstrate the model’s generalizability and show that federated pretraining can effectively develop neuroimaging foundation models without pooling raw images.

By Zhen Yu, Yang Liu, Xiahai Zhuang, Qingchao Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

CasCVS-Net: A Staged Multi-Task Cascade for Critical View of Safety Assessment

CasCVS‑Net is a staged multi‑task cascade that jointly performs object detection, semantic segmentation, and Critical View of Safety (CVS) assessment for laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The model couples tasks through predicted anatomy—boxes guide segmentation and masks provide region‑level features for CVS classification—allowing CVS assessment to rely solely on model predictions. Trained on the Endoscapes dataset, CasCVS‑Net outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods, achieving higher mAP and mIoU scores across detection, segmentation, and CVS tasks, especially for rare hepatocystic structures.

By Bock-Zien Toh, Yuanchuan Ren, Tay Aw Yu, Ng Khee Ong, Zhehua Mao, Sophia Bano
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AWM-VLA: AlignedWorld Modeling for Efficient and Explainable Vision-Language-Action Policies

AWM‑VLA introduces a unified framework that embeds aligned world modeling directly into a diffusion‑transformer vision‑language‑action policy. By adding learnable future tokens aligned with vision‑language embeddings of future observations, the policy can anticipate long‑term consequences while generating actions. The method extends this with an object‑centric alignment objective and a principled weighting scheme, achieving up to 21% higher success rates on RoboCasa and humanoid tabletop benchmarks and producing object‑centric rationales preferred by human raters in 83% of cases.

By An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Fusion-Aware Direct 3D Gaussian Generation with Structured Patch Latent Flows

The paper introduces a fusion‑aware hierarchical Gaussian patch representation that enables direct class‑guided generation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) objects. By decomposing irregular Gaussian sets into canonical local patches and encoding them as structured tokens, the method fuses global class semantics with patch‑level geometry, appearance, spatial correspondence, and rendering‑sensitive cues. A structure‑aware rectified flow model, conditioned on patch positions and coupled with global‑local velocity prediction and density‑aware weighting, produces class‑conditioned 3DGS objects within seconds, achieving more coherent geometry, sharper local details, and better multi‑view consistency than baseline models.

By Yizhao Wang, Jingbo Wang, Guantao Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Groundbench: Multi-Resolution Polygon Grounding Exposes the Geometry Gap in Vision-Language Models

Groundbench is a new benchmark that evaluates vision‑language models on multi‑resolution polygon grounding, using the same 1,500 image‑expression‑referent triples but targeting exact‑N polygons with five different vertex budgets. It audits both filled‑region intersection‑over‑union (IoU) and legal‑polygon completion, revealing that the best models achieve 88.2 box IoU and 97.1 accuracy at IoU ≥ 0.5, while direct polygon predictions lag at 57.7 and 69.2. The study shows performance is non‑monotonic across budgets, collapses at the densest budget due to legality failures, and highlights that false spatial cues hurt more than false colour cues, underscoring an operational geometry gap beyond latent boundary perception.

By Zhonghan Bian, Zhenran Wang, Jinsong Li, Zhangyang Qi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

GaussianDS: Depth-supervised Semantic Gaussian Splatting for Scene Understanding

GaussianDS introduces a depth‑supervised framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting that jointly optimizes RGB appearance, depth, and compact semantics from scratch. By arranging multi‑view images into a pose‑aware pseudo‑video and propagating view‑consistent masks via SAM2, the method aligns semantic lifting with geometric cues, using depth supervision and edge‑aware refinement to curb semantic drift and boundary leakage. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LERF and 3D‑OVS benchmarks while preserving high‑fidelity reconstruction and enabling downstream tasks such as 3D object removal.

By Yufei Zhang, Chenlu Zhan, Hongwei Wang