Benchmarks and evaluation

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

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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

When Agents Slow Down: Understanding LLM Agents' Test-Time Strategies via Elo-per-token Analysis

arXiv:2609.15309v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents allocate test-time compute adaptively as they revise solutions, use tools, explore alternatives, and decide when to s...

By Kaiyuan Liu, Qiuyang Mang, Bo Peng, Wenhao Chai, Hanchen Li, Shreyas Pimpalgaonkar, Luke Zettlemoyer, Alex Dimakis, Alvin Cheung
arXiv AI
Sep 15

ZGCM-1: A Fully Open and Extremely Efficient Foundation Model for Math and Agentic Search

ZGCM-1 is a 7B dense foundation model trained from scratch with extreme data, system, and algorithmic efficiency. It uses a core premise that compact models can overcome capacity limits by combining deliberate internal thinking with active external tool use, supported by a 256K context and an end‑to‑end high‑efficiency training recipe that includes interleaved gated sliding‑window and full attention, a stable FP8 Muon optimizer, progressive curriculum scaling, and reformulation of interaction traces into Markov Decision Processes. The model is competitive with much larger frontier models on challenging mathematical reasoning and agentic search tasks, offers a ~4.2× efficiency improvement in pre‑training time‑to‑loss, and its weights, checkpoints, training code, data recipes, and logs are fully open‑source to support community research.

By Jiyan He, Guang Liang, Hao Liu, Haoxiang Guan, Jinbo Sun, Junyi Guo, Wenjun Feng, Yantai Xie, Yifei Shen, Bin Shao, Chuyang Wei, Kai Chen, Kexin Zhou, Minghang Zhu, Shuxin Zheng, Tie-Yan Liu, Taine Zhao, Wenhui Zhu, Xueyin Xu, Xiaoqing Zhang, Yatao Li, Yuxuan Ren
arXiv AI
Sep 15

NoteVQA: Benchmarking VLMs on Real-Life Questions from Human Communities

NoteVQA is a new benchmark that collects 252 real‑life visual questions from the Chinese image‑sharing platform Xiaohongshu, covering 12 topics and 7 user intents. Each question is paired with a concise expert reference and a human‑audited interleaved answer that blends text and visual evidence. The study evaluates VLMs on short‑answer correctness and interleaved answer quality using a new AgenticInterleave framework and a 12‑dimensional IVR‑12 rubric, finding that even state‑of‑the‑art models achieve only about 53% accuracy and lag behind human references in content quality.

By Haonan Jiang, Guojian Zhan, Jiancong Xie, Shijun Wan, Dongiia Zhao, Cheng Chen, Yahui Liu, Yao Hu, Chuan Mu
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Beyond Accuracy: Robustness, Cost, and Governance Trade-offs for Vision-Language Models in Templated Document Extraction

The paper evaluates eleven vision‑language models (VLMs) for extracting structured fields from business documents, focusing on robustness, cost, and governance rather than just accuracy. Using a held‑out set of 750 synthetic checks, the study finds that fine‑tuning open‑source VLMs on 3,000 samples yields an F1 score above 0.98, surpassing all zero‑shot commercial systems, while GPT‑5 tops the commercial group and Claude Sonnet 4.5 fails on date extraction. The authors also present a practitioner‑oriented selection framework that maps task profiles—such as quality, latency, governance, and volume—to recommended approaches via filtering and total‑cost minimization, demonstrated on a mid‑volume document‑extraction scenario.

By Kushal Patel, Pushkal Shrivastava, Mackenzie Lees, Qirui Lu, Bhargobjyoti Saikia, Liying Li, Junlin Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Identifying and Transferring Reasoning-Critical Neurons: Improving LLM Inference Reliability via Activation Steering

arXiv:2601.19847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the strong reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), achieving reliable performance on challenging tasks often require...

By Fangan Dong, Zuming Yan, Xuri Ge, Zhiwei Xu, Mengqi Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Xin Xin, Zhumin Chen, Ying Zhou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Beyond Surface Forms: A Comprehensive, Mechanism-Oriented Taxonomy of Indirect Linguistic Encoding for LLM-Based Coded Language Detection

arXiv:2606.27314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To avoid moderation and surveillance on social media, some users routinely invent indirect linguistic expressions (ILE) that camouflage sensitive m...

By Hamid Reza Firoozfar, Mohammadsadegh Abolhasani, Reza Mousavi, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Where to Look and What to Use: Retrieve-Localize-Generate for Long-Term Conversational Memory Question Answering

arXiv:2609.07093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions by accessing external knowledge and has been widely a...

By Yifan Wang, Xinkui Lin, Yongxiu Xu, Shen Gao, Ruochen Yang, Kun Huang, Yubin Wang, Jie Wu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu, Shuo Shang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Toward Secure Code Generation: Bridging Correctness and Security via Task-Adaptive Vulnerability Modeling and Execution-Based Benchmarking

arXiv:2407.02395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program synthesis, yet they often generate code that is functionally plausible but ins...

By Jiexin Wang, Liuwen Cao, Xitong Luo, Yang Cao, Zhenghao Li, Yunyi Xiao, Mengchen Zhao, Adam Jatowt, Yi Cai