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 17

Version- and Scope-Aware Question Answering over Normative Documents: A Deployed System and an End-to-End Evaluation at Production Scale

The paper presents a deployed system for answering questions over normative documents that is aware of document version and scope. It evaluates a hosted retrieval service against a governed system that applies explicit rules for version and scope resolution, finding the governed system achieves a higher score (97.7 vs 88.1). The study includes a public benchmark, evaluation scripts, and reports commercial deployment metrics, such as 1,126 users and 100,000 calls per day by April 2026.

By Liuyin Wang, Shuaipeng Jin, Jiwei Shi, Jensen Hsu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Reflect, Revise, Reuse: Training-Free Skill Evolution for GUI Agents

The paper introduces EvoSkill-GUI, a training‑free framework that enables GUI agents to evolve their skills during deployment. Each skill is packaged with metadata, executable plans, and recovery rules, and the system follows a reflect‑revise‑reuse loop where the agent instantly revises skills based on execution feedback. Experiments on MobileWorld, AndroidWorld, and OSWorld show consistent performance gains up to +16.2% without any additional training.

By Bofan Chen, Boxuan Zhang, Fei Tang, Zhengxi Lu, Yong Du, Tongbo Chen, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Diff-SPORT: Diffusion-based Sensor Placement Optimization and Reconstruction of Turbulent flows in urban environments

Diff-SPORT is a diffusion-based framework that integrates a generative diffusion prior, maximum a posteriori inference, and Shapley-value attribution to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction of turbulent flows and optimal sensor placement in urban environments. By training the diffusion prior once for a domain, it enables non-linear sensor placement and near-real-time flow reconstruction from sparse measurements, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and running orders of magnitude faster than RANS or LES simulations. The approach also generalizes to experimental passive scalar concentration data, demonstrating up to 57% lower reconstruction error than random sensor placement under extreme sparsity and providing compact, physically interpretable sensor configurations.

By Abhijeet Vishwasrao, Sai Bharath Chandra Gutha, Andres Cremades, Klas Wijk, Aakash Patil, H. D. Lim, Christina Vanderwel, Catherine Gorle, Beverley J McKeon, Hossein Azizpour, Ricardo Vinuesa
arXiv AI
Sep 17

ShotFinder: Imagination-Driven Open-Domain Video Shot Retrieval via Web Search

ShotFinder introduces a new benchmark for open‑domain video shot retrieval, formalizing editing requirements as keyframe‑oriented shot descriptions and adding five controllable constraints—temporal order, color, visual style, audio, and resolution. The benchmark comprises 1,210 high‑quality YouTube samples across 20 themes, generated with large models and verified by humans. A three‑stage retrieval pipeline—query expansion via video imagination, candidate video retrieval, and description‑guided shot localization—shows a notable performance gap to humans, especially for color and visual style constraints.

By Tao Yu, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Shenghua Chai, Yujia Yang, Junhao Gong, Jiaming Guo, Minghui Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Zhenghao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhou, Yufei Xiong, Shanbin Zhang, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinming Wang, Cheng Zhong, Xiao Ma, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

FairLRF: Achieving Fairness through Sparse Low Rank Factorization

FairLRF proposes a fairness-oriented low rank factorization framework that uses singular value decomposition (SVD) to improve deep learning model fairness. By selectively removing bias-inducing elements from the unitary matrices obtained via SVD, the method reduces group disparities while preserving accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that FairLRF outperforms existing low rank factorization and state-of-the-art fairness techniques, and an ablation study explores the impact of key hyper-parameters.

By Yuanbo Guo, Jun Xia, Yiyu Shi
arXiv AI
Sep 17

StableEval Arena: A Cost-Aware Agentic Benchmark for Stablecoin Price Stability Prediction

StableEval Arena is a cost‑aware benchmark framework designed to evaluate agentic AI systems on stablecoin peg‑risk prediction. It tests LLM‑backed agents by diagnosing peg stress and forecasting deviations from the one‑dollar peg over a hidden seven‑day horizon, using leakage‑safe historical replay with exchange price‑volume data and market‑context features. The benchmark includes a 120‑case stress‑enriched validation block and a 507‑case natural‑distribution full‑arena evaluation, measuring prediction quality, calibrated‑label behavior, structured‑output reliability, latency, token consumption, and estimated inference cost across six LLM‑backed agent configurations and baselines.

By Sean Wan, Dongping Liu, Luyao Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

PACT: Can Enterprise AI Assistants Be Trusted Under Pressure?

The paper introduces PACT, a benchmark designed to evaluate how well enterprise AI assistants follow compliance rules when faced with various pressures such as persistent users or hurried managers. PACT covers twelve regulated domains and forty-eight realistic multi‑turn scenarios, pairing each rule with a shortcut that violates it and applying different pressures across wording and system‑prompt modes. Using PACT, the authors profile six metrics of compliance and aggregate them into a PACTScore, revealing significant variability among 22 LLM models and that even top performers misapply rules 6–10% of the time, with user pressure increasing violations by 65% on average.

By Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Echo: Learning-based Matching Decompilation using Trusted Back Translation

Echo is a matching decompilation system that uses trusted back‑translation to guide an iterative search for source code whose recompiled assembly exactly matches a target binary. It generates candidate programs and compilation configurations with a domain‑specific model, compiles them, measures assembly similarity, and refines mismatches through rule‑based, neural, and reasoning‑based techniques. In evaluations on function‑level benchmarks and the Mirai malware binary, Echo achieves 2.43× more exact matches than the strongest baseline and outperforms GPT‑5.6 and Codex by 2.75× and 7.4× on Mirai, respectively.

By Jun Bi, Xiangxin Fang, Aarsh Chaube, Jos\'e Wesley De Souza Magalh\~aes, Rodrigo C. O. Rocha, Michael O'Boyle
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

NObSP: Functional Decomposition of Neural Networks via Oblique Subspace Projections

NObSP (Nonlinear Oblique Subspace Projections) is a framework that decomposes neural network predictions into explicit per‑feature contribution functions and an interaction residual, leveraging the linear final layer and oblique projections to avoid double counting when feature subspaces overlap. It connects to functional ANOVA and the Kolmogorov‑Arnold representation theorem, and introduces an efficient partial regression algorithm for out‑of‑sample evaluation. For convolutional networks, NObSP‑CAM generates class activation maps without backward passes after a single calibration, and experiments on tabular and vision datasets show faithfulness comparable to established attribution methods, with high function reproduction scores and improved class purity on TinyImageNet.

By Alexander Caicedo, V\'ictor De La Hoz, Santiago Alf\'erez
arXiv AI
Sep 17

A Scalable Framework for Automated NER Annotation Correction in Low-Resource Languages

The paper introduces a scalable, multi-step framework designed to improve the quality of Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotations, particularly in low-resource languages. It employs a frequency-based iterative approach that combines self‑training with a dual‑threshold mechanism to increase inference confidence. Experiments on various NER datasets show notable performance gains over the original data, and the study also investigates the use of generative Large Language Models for NER tasks.

By Toqeer Ehsan, Thamar Solorio
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Ask the Tool, Don't Guess: Agent Tool Calls Hold Their Progress, and the Serving System Should Read It

The paper argues that agentic systems waste time and memory by guessing how long tool calls will take, rather than using explicit progress signals from the tools themselves. It demonstrates that tools can report their remaining work or imminent completion, and that incorporating this feedback into serving systems dramatically improves cache decisions and reduces token latency. The authors show that this approach outperforms existing predictors and works robustly across different environments.

By Yipeng Liu, Yingqiang Zhang, Feifei Li, Huanchen Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

BOOM: Benchmarking Out-Of-distribution Molecular Property Predictions of Machine Learning Models

BOOM is a new benchmark for evaluating out‑of‑distribution (OOD) molecular property predictions in machine learning. It provides chemically‑informed tests across common property prediction tasks and assesses over 150 model‑task combinations. The study shows that current models, including chemical foundation models, struggle to generalize OOD, with the best model still exhibiting three times higher error than in‑distribution predictions.

By Evan R. Antoniuk, Shehtab Zaman, Tal Ben-Nun, Peggy Li, James Diffenderfer, Busra Sahin, Obadiah Smolenski, Everett Grethel, Tim Hsu, Anna M. Hiszpanski, Kenneth Chiu, Bhavya Kailkhura, Brian Van Essen
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Abstention vs. Hallucination: Benchmarking LLM Source Attribution for Scientific Citations

The paper introduces REASONS, a benchmark comprising 12,723 sentence-level citation instances across 12 arXiv subject categories, to evaluate scientific citation attribution by large language models. It proposes a dual-metric framework—Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR)—to assess the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on proprietary and open-source LLMs under various prompting and retrieval settings show that advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations but may increase abstention, while retrieval-augmented variants often maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation reveals a high ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases, underscoring the need for systems that can appropriately abstain under uncertainty.

By Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Seyedali Mohammadi, Ankur Padia, Edward Raff, Amit Sheth, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Manas Gaur
arXiv AI
Sep 17

WordPolo: Evaluating Language Models Through Iterative Semantic Feedback

WordPolo is a word‑finding task that evaluates language models by having them guess an unknown target word and receive semantic similarity feedback. Participants start with no knowledge, make iterative guesses, and receive distance scores that guide them through semantic space. The study tests recent LLMs, LRMs, humans, and a heuristic on 1,500 puzzles, revealing that while solve rates vary widely, many models make meaningful progress and exhibit human‑like strategies, highlighting the importance of assessing reasoning processes, not just final accuracy.

By Tyler McDonald, Ali Emami
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Tabular Deep Learning vs Classical Machine Learning for Urban Land Cover Classification

The paper compares classical machine learning algorithms—such as Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, and CatBoost—with Tabular Deep Learning models (TabNet, FT-Transformer, TabTransformer, TabSeq, and 1D CNNs) for urban land cover classification using a UCI dataset derived from high‑resolution aerial imagery. It evaluates performance across nine land cover classes, addressing challenges like high dimensionality, heterogeneous features, and class imbalance by applying weighted cross‑entropy loss for deep models and measuring accuracy, macro‑precision, macro‑recall, macro‑F1, AUC‑ROC, and confusion matrices. Results indicate that while tree ensembles remain strong baselines, Tabular Deep Learning can match or surpass them when non‑linear interactions are prominent and imbalance handling is effective.

By Muntasir Tabasum, Tanpia Tasnim, Md. Ekramul Islam, Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib
arXiv AI
Sep 17

A Survey on Bridging EEG Signals and Generative AI: From Image and Text to Beyond

This survey reviews recent advances in converting non‑invasive EEG signals into images, text, and audio using generative AI techniques such as GANs, VAEs, transformers, and diffusion models. It summarizes datasets, feature‑encoding methods, evaluation metrics, and key challenges, noting that EEG‑to‑image models mainly use encoder‑decoder architectures, EEG‑to‑text leverages transformer language models, and EEG‑to‑audio maps signals to mel‑spectrograms for vocoder synthesis. The paper highlights the limitations of small, heterogeneous datasets, poor cross‑subject generalization, and the lack of standardized benchmarks, while providing open‑source resources to support reproducible research.

By Shreya Shukla, Jose Torres, Akshaj Murhekar, Christina Liu, Abhijit Mishra, Jacek Gwizdka, Shounak Roychowdhury
arXiv AI
Sep 17

LM Fight Arena: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models via Game Competition

The paper introduces LM Fight Arena, a new benchmark that pits large multimodal models against each other in the fighting game Mortal Kombat II to evaluate real‑time visual understanding and sequential decision‑making. Six leading open‑ and closed‑source models were tested in a controlled tournament where each controlled the same character, ensuring a fair comparison. The framework offers a fully automated, reproducible, and objective assessment of an LMM’s strategic reasoning in a dynamic setting.

By Yushuo Zheng, Tongrui Ye, Zicheng Zhang, Xiongkuo Min, Huiyu Duan, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Sep 17

From 'May' to 'Is': Certainty Distortion in Language Model Rewriting

The study examines how language models (LMs) alter the expressed certainty of statements when rewriting text, a process termed certainty distortion. Using an LM‑based metric aligned with human judgments, the authors find that up to 75% of LM outputs exhibit such distortion, with most models more likely to inflate certainty than reduce it. Repeated paraphrasing can amplify this effect, especially in medical contexts, and while prompt interventions help, they do not fully eliminate the bias.

By Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

CARA: Collision-Aware Resolution Adaptation for Multiresolution Hash Encoding Based Image Fitting

CARA (Collision-Aware Resolution Adaptation) is a technique that dynamically assigns resolution levels in multiresolution hash encodings to balance information load across hash tables, thereby reducing hash collisions and improving parameter efficiency. It also introduces an invertible pixel‑shuffle transform to redistribute spatial information and lower hash load factors without enlarging tables. Experiments on Kodak images, gigapixel natural images, and a newly curated uncompressed whole‑slide image dataset show that CARA consistently enhances the fidelity‑parameter trade‑off, matching state‑of‑the‑art performance with only 27.76% of the parameters and achieving up to 6.11 dB PSNR improvement at comparable parameter counts.

By Linfeng Ye, Zhixiang Chi, Shayan Mohajer Hamidi, En-hui Yang, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis