Automated Evaluation

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48 papers in the last four weeks, up 12% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 321

Jun 21, 2026cs.AI

SkillAudit: From Fixed-Suite Benchmarking to Skill-Centered Assessment

Agent skills have become a practical way to extend large language model agents, but the growing skill ecosystem still lacks a reliable way to judge whether a skill is worth deploying. Existing evaluation methods remain largely anchored to fixed task suites, assessing skills through performance on predefined tasks and environments. As skill marketplaces expand, this paradigm becomes inadequate: fixed suites can conflate a skill's marginal contribution with backbone strength and miss its value when tasks fall outside the skill's intended scope. We introduce SkillAudit, an end-to-end framework for skill-centered assessment that takes an arbitrary agent skill as input and automatically generates a comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation report spanning utility, efficiency/cost, and safety. SkillAudit focuses on the skill artifact itself and constructs capability-aligned evaluation tasks directly from the skill package. The generated tasks are conducted in isolated sandbox environments to collect execution evidence, followed by automated checks with LLM-based judging to produce auditable results. To dissect the agent skills, we propose the baseline comparison principle to measure utility and efficiency/cost, and introduce a two-stage detection paradigm combining static semantic analysis with dynamic runtime verification to assess safety risks. After scanning top-ranked real-world skill packages spanning 23 occupational categories, we found that over 7% of skills are at risky status.

Dexu Yu, Youhua Li, Zhaoyang Guan +12

Northeastern University · City University of Hong Kong · DeciLix Lab +8

AI Agent Auditing Automated Evaluation Agent Skill Security Auditing

Jun 21, 2026cs.AI

MacAgentBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Real-World macOS Desktop

Computer use agents (CUAs) have advanced rapidly in desktop automation, and a growing number of users deploy CUAs such as OpenClaw on Mac Mini for always-on automation. However, existing benchmarks, including those for macOS, evaluate agents without framework augmentation and rely on binary evaluation. As a result, they fail to capture both the framework capabilities leveraged by modern CUAs and the partial progress on long-horizon, multi-application tasks. We present MacAgentBench, a comprehensive macOS agent benchmark comprising 676 tasks across 25 applications, with nearly 60% involving both GUI and CLI interaction. The benchmark adopts deterministic rule-based evaluation and introduces fine-grained multi-checkpoint scoring with capability annotations for multi-application tasks. Experiments across three frameworks and 16 models show that the best configuration, Claude Opus 4.6 on OpenClaw, attains 73.7% Pass@1, while this advantage is primarily driven by the skill library rather than by framework design. Fine-grained metrics further reveal that models with similar Pass@1 can differ substantially in sub-goal completion. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JetAstra/MacAgentBench.

Yikun Fu, Bowen Fu, Zhenyu Wu +10

1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Shanghai AI Laboratory · 3Xi’an Jiaotong University +5

Computer-Use Agent Benchmarks Computer-Use Agents Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation

Jun 20, 2026cs.CL

Can LLMs Control Readability? A Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Framework for CEFR-Controlled Arabic Generation

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent Arabic text, their ability to reliably control readability levels remains unclear. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR)-controlled Arabic text generation, assessing whether instruction-following LLMs can serve as reliable generators for adaptive language learning. Our framework integrates controlled prompting, automatic readability prediction using a validated Taha-19 model, lexical constraint validation, and syntactic complexity profiling. Results show that structured prompting substantially improves CEFR alignment. In particular, CEFR-guided prompting with lexical constraints achieves the highest conformity to reference linguistic profiles (0.91 cosine similarity) and near-perfect agreement with predicted readability levels (0.99), while unconstrained prompting exhibits weak control. These findings establish an empirical foundation for integrating readability-aware Arabic text generation into adaptive educational systems.

Nour Rabih, Chatrine Qwaider, Ted Briscoe

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)

LLM Evaluation Controllable Text Generation Automated Evaluation Text Generation

Jun 19, 2026cs.CL

LLM-Based Multi-Reference Evaluation for Efficient and Robust Assessment of Phrase Break Annotations

Reliable evaluation of phrase break annotations is crucial, as subtle variations in prosodic boundaries directly affect the clarity and naturalness of speech. However, existing approaches exhibit major limitations: single-reference evaluation assumes a unique gold phrasing for an utterance despite multiple valid phrasings, while human judgment, though flexible, is labor-intensive and unscalable. To address these, we propose LLM-based Multi-Reference Evaluation (LMRE) for phrase break annotations that models the one-to-many nature of prosodic phrasing and generates multiple valid phrasings from minimal demonstrations. On a Korean testbed of 1,356 annotations covering five strategies, LMRE shows stronger alignment with human judgment than single-reference evaluation in both acceptance behavior and score correlation. Our findings demonstrate that LMRE effectively achieves both scalability and multi-reference support, highlighting the potential of LLMs for evaluation in the speech domain.

Younghan Park, Hoyeon Lee, Hawon Jeong +1

NAVER Cloud, South Korea · Yonsei University, South Korea · KAIST AI, South Korea

Speech Prosody Automated Evaluation

Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

Power Systems Agent Benchmark: Executable Evaluation of AI Agents in Electric Power Engineering

Executable evaluation -- checking the consequences of an agent's actions with a program rather than grading its prose -- has become a prominent way to assess tool-using AI agents in software settings. Electric power engineering has not yet had an analogous benchmark: language-model use is still dominated by retrieval and text question answering, while agents acting on power-system artifacts remain mostly academic prototypes. We introduce the Power Systems Agent Benchmark, an executable benchmark for power-engineering agents. An agent receives a structured task and returns a structured solution; a deterministic evaluator recomputes the engineering quantities, checks operational constraints, and returns a feasibility flag, a normalized score, and explicit violations. The benchmark contains 41 task families across eight areas of power engineering, from power flow and protection to stability, microgrids, reliability, power quality, and forecasting. Each task is grounded in a citable source, standard, or documented engineering formulation. To resist contamination, held-out cases are synthesized on demand by per-family generators from private seeds: the construction is inspectable, but the instances remain private. In a reference evaluation with three command-line agents, the strongest score near the compact tier's ceiling, a smaller open model trails, and public and held-out performance are broadly consistent; a separate public-split grid with OpenCode and Aider probes harness effects. The reference evaluation doubles as quality control: unanimous failures flag candidate task or evaluator defects, and it exposed a latent evaluator bug missed by self-consistency checks. The evaluators are compact deterministic surrogates, but the task contract allows their internals to be upgraded to simulator-backed checks without changing how tasks are posed or solved.

Sergei Trashchenkov

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation Power Systems

Jun 18, 2026cs.MA

Blame is easier than praise: Measuring off-ball defensive performance in football

The defensive performance of football players is commonly measured through a limited number of actions like tackles and interceptions while their continuous impact through positional behaviour has hardly been studied before. We formulate this problem as an attribution over multi-agent spatiotemporal trajectories without player-level ground truth labels, where event-level changes of expected threat are distributed among individuals. We propose a framework that performs this attribution using player involvement scores calculated from defensive pressure areas (DPAs). By computing role-conditioned baselines within automatically detected team structures, we can determine each defender's expected responsibility for threat created through arbitrary passes. The validity and robustness of this approach are evaluated on a uniquely extensive cross-gender and cross-competition data set, including positional and event data from 64 matches of the men's World Cup, 116 matches of the women's German Bundesliga and 336 matches of the men's German 3. Liga. In the absence of a ground truth, we propose an evaluation protocol that combines multiple relatively weak proxies into robust summary scores. We find a validity score that is improved by around 1 standard deviation compared to the best action-based metric and demonstrate that many popular measures show limited validity. The "blame" for conceding high-value actions shows especially strong correlations with external ratings and market values, making it the first published metric in football to reliably measure positioning errors. All code underlying this work is publicly available to support reproducibility and further research.

Jonas Bischofberger, Runqing Ma, Pascal Bauer +2

Centre for Sport Science and University Sports, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · Vienna Doctoral School of Pharmaceutical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences (VDS-PhaNuSpo), University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · VfB Stuttgart 1893 AG, Stuttgart, Germany +2

Automated Evaluation Fine-Grained Credit Assignment

Jun 17, 2026cs.CL

RECOM: A Validity Discrimination Tradeoff in Automatic Metrics for Open Ended Reddit Question Answering

Automatic metrics are the default for evaluating LLM-generated text, yet a metric is quietly asked to do two jobs: tell genuine content alignment from surface coincidence (validity), and tell a better system from a worse one (discriminative power). On open-ended, opinion-driven question answering, the two are in tension. We introduce RECOM (Reddit Evaluation for Correspondence of Models), a contamination-free evaluation dataset of 15,000 r/AskReddit questions (September 2025), each paired with its authentic community replies, which postdate every evaluated model's training cutoff. Scoring five open-source LLMs (7--10B) against every reply each metric paired with a random-derangement noise floor we find that no metric does both jobs well. Cosine similarity separates real from random answers (Cohen's

d \approx 2

) but cannot rank the five models (

|d| < 0.1

); BERTScore precision appears to rank the models (raw

|d|

up to 0.63), but once response length is controlled this collapses to

|d| = 0.09

and its validity is weak (

d \approx 0.8

, versus cosine's

\approx 2

). Because every metric scores the same outputs, this validity--discrimination tradeoff is a property of the metrics, not the models, and we argue it stems from representation design. Three independent LLM judges reproduce the validity gap and likewise separate the five models only weakly. We recommend reporting metrics on both axes, with an explicit random-baseline floor. RECOM is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/recom-D4B0

Pushwitha Krishnappa, Amit Das, Vinija Jain +2

University of Alabama Huntsville · University of North Alabama · Stanford University +2

Open-Ended Generation LLM Evaluation Language Model Generation Evaluation Automated Evaluation

Jun 17, 2026cs.HC

A Clinician-Centered Pipeline for Annotation and Evaluation in Ultrasound AI Studies

Clinician-centered evaluation is critical for validating medical AI systems, especially in ultrasound imaging where quantitative metrics do not always capture clinical usability. Existing medical image platforms primarily focus on dataset labeling. They lack integrated support for blinded model comparison and reproducible evaluation workflows. We present a clinician-centered pipeline for remote annotation and evaluation in ultrasound AI studies. The proposed pipeline uses a centralized server and lightweight browser interfaces to enable clinicians to perform annotation, blinded ranking, and review without local dataset downloads. The pipeline also supports multi-rater participation, centralized result aggregation, and automated statistical analysis. We validate the pipeline in a fetal ultrasound segmentation study with six raters spanning expert, generalist, and non-expert experience levels. The system automatically generated Spearman correlation, Kendall's

τ

, and top-1 selection statistics. Results indicated moderate to strong agreement across experts and other groups. The blinded evaluation results showed a tendency for later active learning models to be preferred. These outcomes suggest that the pipeline can support clinician-centered annotation and reproducible human-\ac{AI} evaluation studies in ultrasound imaging. The proposed pipeline is available on GitHub.

Fangyijie Wang, Jianjun Yu, Wentao Shi +4

Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning · School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland · The Third People’s Hospital of Zhenjiang City, Zhenjiang, China +3

Human-in-the-Loop Annotation Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation Ultrasound Imaging Automated Evaluation

Jun 17, 2026eess.AS

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

Franziska Braun, Christopher Witzl, Andreas Erzigkeit +4

Technische Hochschule Nürnberg · Geromed GmbH · PMU Klinikum Nürnberg

Speech-Based Dementia Detection Automated Evaluation

Jun 16, 2026eess.AS

ELSA: Acoustic Event-Level Semantic Alignment for Fine-Grained Reference-Free Text-to-Audio Evaluation

Text-to-audio (TTA) generation, synthesizing audio from natural language, has been widely studied for its ability to capture precise user intent. To effectively advance TTA models, it is essential to reliably evaluate generated audio without relying on costly human subjective ratings, motivating the development of automatic evaluation metrics that correlate well with human judgments. While recent CLAP-based metrics provide practical reference-free solutions, their coarse-grained text-audio similarity matching often correlates poorly with human ratings. To address this, we propose ELSA, a reference-free evaluation metric for fine-grained text-audio alignment. ELSA decomposes generated audio guided by distinct acoustic events derived from the text query and assesses event-level alignment. Experiments across four TTA benchmarks show that ELSA reveals a higher correlation with human subjective ratings than prior metrics, highlighting its effectiveness for reliable TTA evaluation.

Shuntaro Suzuki, Kento Tokura, Daichi Yashima +3

Keio University, Japan

Text-to-Audio Generation Automated Evaluation

Jun 15, 2026cs.SE

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

Wenjie Wang, Yue Huang, Zipeng Ling +11

University of Notre Dame · University of Pennsylvania · University of Rochester +4

LLM-as-a-Judge LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation

Jun 15, 2026cs.AI

RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation

Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce \emph{RecourseBench}, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers -- Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation -- governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing.

Zahra Khotanlou, Hashir Ahmed, Chenghao Tan +2

University of Waterloo

Benchmark Design Automated Evaluation ML Reproducibility Algorithmic Recourse

Jun 14, 2026cs.AI

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program

P

and an AI-evolved program

P'

, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where

P'

regresses relative to

P

in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

Yajie Zhou, Ao Li, Ashwin Silla +2

University of Maryland, College Park · Carnegie Mellon University

Automated Software Testing Differential Testing Automated Evaluation Automated Test Generation

Jun 13, 2026cs.CL

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

Yiming Shi, Shaoshuai Yang, Xi Chen +10

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University · Beijing Electronic Digital & Intelligence · College of AI, Tsinghua University +1

Radiology Report Generation Medical VLMs Automated Evaluation Radiology Report Evaluation

Jun 11, 2026cs.SE

A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating Next Action Predictions in Spreadsheets

Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work. In spreadsheets, despite being much more common, such auto-completion features are virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark for systems that observe a sequence of user actions in a spreadsheet and predict future actions. Two challenges are (1) the absence of edit histories in public spreadsheet corpora and (2) the complex space of spreadsheet actions (spatial, temporal, composite). To address (1), we manually curate 52 sequences of 12K actions that recreate spreadsheets from public corpora, seeded by parametrized heuristics and LLM refinement. To address (2), we propose an online evaluation that expects a prediction after each user action, accepts or rejects that prediction, updates the future actions upon acceptance, and repeats this until the target spreadsheet is obtained. We use multiple baseline predictors (including zero-shot LLMs, fine-tuned SLMs, and classical models) and analyze different properties that our benchmark teaches us, including but not limited to: properties of saved actions and false positives, efficiency, effect of user profiles, effect of triggers, and effect of context.

Tejas Agrawal, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani +1

1Microsoft, Bangalore, India · 2Microsoft, Redmond, USA · 3Microsoft, Keerbergen, Belgium.

Next-Action Prediction Automated Evaluation Spreadsheet Automation

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

Xiaoyuan Liu, Jianhong Tu, Yuqi Chen +26

UC Berkeley · University of California, Santa Cruz · EPFL +12

Software Engineering Agents AI Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

Jingxuan Han, Wei Liu, Mingyang Zhu +8

University of Science and Technology of China · Meituan

LLM Agent Evaluation Web Search Agents Automated Evaluation

Jun 10, 2026cs.CL

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.

Paul He, Shiva Kasiviswanathan, Dominik Janzing

NTU Singapore · Amazon Research, Tübingen, Germany · Amazon

LLM Evaluation Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Automated Evaluation

Jun 10, 2026cs.CL

Automated Creativity Evaluation of Language Models Across Open-Ended Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, sparking growing interest in their creative potential. Realizing this potential requires systematic and scalable methods for evaluating creativity across diverse tasks. However, most existing creativity metrics are tightly coupled to specific tasks, embedding domain assumptions into the evaluation process, and limiting scalability and generality. To address this gap, we introduce an automated, domain-agnostic framework for quantifying LLM creativity across open-ended tasks. Our approach separates the measurement apparatus from the creative task itself, enabling scalable, task-agnostic assessment. Divergent creativity is measured using semantic entropy, a reference-free and robust metric for novelty and diversity, validated against human annotations, LLM-based novelty judgments and baseline diversity measures. Convergent creativity is assessed via a novel retrieval-based multi-agent judge framework that delivers context-sensitive evaluation of task fulfilment with over 60% improved efficiency. We validate our framework in three qualitatively distinct domains: problem-solving (MacGyver), research ideation (HypoGen), and creative writing (BookMIA), using a broad suite of LLMs. Empirical results show that our framework reliably captures key facets of creativity, including novelty, diversity, and task fulfilment, and reveal how model properties, such as size, temperature, recency, and reasoning, impact creative performance. Our work establishes a reproducible and generalizable standard for automated LLM creativity evaluation, paving the way for scalable benchmarking and accelerating progress in creative AI.

Min Sen Tan, Zachary Kit Chun Choy, Syed Ali Redha Alsagoff +4

1Raffles Institution · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University · 3Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University +1

Creativity Assessment LLM Evaluation Computational Creativity Automated Evaluation

Jun 10, 2026eess.AS

Sensitivity Analysis of Generative Spatial Audio Metrics: A Study on Responsiveness, Smoothness, and Symmetry

Evaluating generative spatial audio for First-Order Ambisonics (FOA) remains challenging due to a limited understanding of how metrics respond to changes in spatial parameters such as azimuth and elevation. We propose a framework to analyze metric sensitivity along continuous spatial trajectories, drawing on principles of sensitivity analysis in parametric sound synthesis. Using controlled FOA scenes with increasing scene complexity, we define three desiderata for metric behavior: Responsiveness, Smoothness, and Symmetry. We assess standard distribution-based and sample-based metrics, including Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), intensity vectors, and acoustic maps. Our findings show that FAD using localization-specific embeddings and acoustic maps yield high Responsiveness and robust Smoothness and Symmetry across conditions, while intensity vectors degrade with increasing scene complexity. This is the first step towards investigating the sensitivity of metrics for generative spatial audio.

Purnima Kamath, Adrian S. Roman, Koichi Saito +2

New York University, New York, USA · Sony AI, New York, USA · Sony Group Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Automated Evaluation Spatial Audio Generative AI Evaluation

Jun 9, 2026cs.CL

Are We Evaluating Knowledge or Phrasing? Mitigating MCQA Sensitivity with ParaEval

Multiple-choice (MCQA) benchmarks are the standard for evaluating pretrained large language models, but their reliance on log-likelihood scoring makes them unreliable. Specifically, standard scores are highly sensitive to the exact phrasing (surface form) of the answers, conflating a model's familiarity with a specific phrase with its actual capability. We demonstrate this flaw using a controlled testbed of 1B-8B models trained on the same knowledge. Despite having identical knowledge, standard metrics falsely report a performance gap of over 2 points. To solve this, we propose ParaEval, an evaluation framework that queries models using multiple paraphrases per answer option. By scoring each model based on its most favorable phrasing, ParaEval successfully reduces the false performance gap to below 1 point. We confirm that these evaluation artifacts, and the improvements from ParaEval, persist in frontier 70B and 120B open-source models. Ultimately, ParaEval provides a robust and efficient way to evaluate true underlying capability rather than surface-form familiarity.

João Maria Janeiro, Mathurin Videau, Andrea Caciolai +3

FAIR at Meta · Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ISIR, F-75005 Paris, France · Criteo AI Lab, Paris, France

LLM Evaluation Multiple-Choice Question Answering Automated Evaluation Language Model Robustness

Jun 8, 2026eess.AS

DeRA-MOS: Optimizing Text-to-Music Evaluation via Decoupled Listwise Ranking and Modality Alignment

Evaluating text-to-music (TTM) systems remains expensive because music impression (MI) and text alignment (TA) scores rely on human mean opinion scores (MOS). Most automatic MOS estimators are trained with point-wise regression or distributional classification. These objectives do not directly optimize rank-based metrics and provide weak geometric constraints for cross-modal coherence. To address these gaps, we propose DeRA-MOS, a decoupled optimization framework for TTM evaluation. For MI, we introduce a batch-aware listwise ranking loss that models relative order within each mini-batch and better aligns with evaluation based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). For TA, we introduce a score-anchored modality alignment loss that maps human scores to target audio-text similarity and regularizes the latent space before fusion. By effectively mitigating the point-wise training mismatch and modality drift, experiments on MusicEval demonstrate that our decoupled framework yields substantial improvements in both MI and TA ranking metrics, establishing a robust paradigm for large-scale TTM evaluation.

Chien-Chun Wang, Hung-Shin Lee, Hsin-Min Wang +1

E.SUN Financial Holding Co., Ltd., Taipei 10546, Taiwan · United Link Co., Ltd., Taipei 11493, Taiwan · Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan +1

Text-to-Music Generation Music Generation Evaluation Learning to Rank Cross-Modal Alignment Automated Evaluation

Jun 8, 2026cs.CL

A Finetuned SpeechLLM for Joint Multi-Granular L2 Assessment and Natural-Language Rationales

Automated L2 speech assessment can assign proficiency labels, but often lacks interpretability. We propose a rubric-guided SpeechLLM for multi-aspect, multi-granular assessment, trained with a hybrid objective combining supervised fine-tuning and Bounded Direct Preference Optimization. The model jointly predicts ordinal labels at the sentence-level (accuracy, fluency, prosody), word/phoneme-level accuracy, and generates a natural-language rationale in the same response. On SpeechOcean762, our approach matches or outperforms single-granularity models while remaining competitive with prior approaches. We analyze rationale reliability along two axes: self-consistency with model predictions and alignment with ground-truth labels, using sentiment consistency (plausibility) and mention-based agreement (faithfulness). Rationales are plausible at the sentence level, but faithfulness degrades at the word/phoneme level: references are sparse and weakly aligned with token-level labels.

Aditya Kamlesh Parikh, Cristian Tejedor-Garcia, Catia Cucchiarini +1

Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Audio-Language Model Evaluation Speech Processing Automated Evaluation Speech Language Models

Jun 8, 2026cs.CL

Reasoning without Gold Standards: A Proxy-Judge Theory of Autoformalization

Complex reasoning tasks increasingly require systems to produce outputs whose correctness cannot be judged by exact match against a single reference. Autoformalization (AF) is a representative example; it asks a model to translate informal mathematical or logical reasoning into a formally checkable object, yet expert-validated formalizations do not scale beyond toy cases and a single informal argument can admit many valid formal renderings. Progress therefore depends on whether partial, structured proxies can substitute for exact references. We introduce a reference-free proxy-judge framework for AF that replaces gold-standard matching with a vector of per-axis property checks. The framework organizes the proxy along three structural scopes that cover global properties of the elicited object, per-module properties internal to its sub-components, and cross-domain properties that re-align it to the informal source, and aggregates each axis into a verdict vector. The vector drives a reflective refinement loop in which a violated coordinate routes the controller to a matching repair target, so each iteration changes only what is judged wrong. Under bounded judge noise, the expected intrinsic gap contracts geometrically to a noise-dependent plateau. Across seven formalization backbones on miniF2F, ProofNet, e-SNLI, and ProntoQA, refinement consistently lifts Pass Rate over the single-shot ICL baseline, and the per-axis proxy outperforms a matched scalar proxy on benchmarks where the baseline has room to improve. Structured proxy judgments therefore provide both a practical refinement signal and a theoretical handle on convergence when exact references are unavailable.

Lei Xu, Xin Quan, André Freitas

1Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland · 2École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom +1

LLM Self-Refinement LLM-as-a-Judge Reference-Free Evaluation Automated Evaluation Autoformalization

Jun 8, 2026cs.AI

Correct Looks Better: Pairwise Comparisons Reveal Accuracy Rankings

Pairwise comparisons combined with aggregation methods like Elo have become central to evaluating generative models, yet concerns remain that they reward superficial stylistic cues or display judge biases. In a more positive turn, we show that model rankings from pairwise comparisons strongly agree with ground-truth-based accuracy rankings when such ground truth is available for comparison. By converting five well-known benchmarks into free-form generative evaluations, we find that Elo rankings achieve a Spearman correlation above 0.9 with accuracy rankings and substantially outperform direct evaluation when the judge is weak. Furthermore, style and judge bias have only minor effects on model rankings, despite most judgments occurring on pairs where both candidate answers are correct (or incorrect). On such pairs, we find that repetition after the final answer (echo) is a causal driver of judge preference.

Mina Remeli, Moritz Hardt

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany, Tübingen AI Center

Pairwise Comparison LLM-as-a-Judge Language Model Generation Evaluation Pairwise Preference Evaluation Pairwise Ranking Automated Evaluation+1

Jun 7, 2026cs.CL

RadOT-Eval: Auditable Structured-Evidence Transport for Radiology Report Evaluation

Automatic evaluation is critical for high-stakes text generation, where errors often involve omitted findings, hallucinated content, polarity reversals, location changes, uncertainty mismatches, and temporal-comparison errors rather than low surface similarity alone. Radiology report generation provides a challenging test case because generated reports must preserve structured clinical evidence across sources. We present RadOT-Eval, an interpretable structured-evidence optimal transport framework for offline auditing of radiology report generation. RadOT-Eval decomposes reference and candidate reports into attribute-structured clinical evidence units, aligns corresponding evidence using entropy-regularized optimal transport, and uses clinically meaningful side-channel discrepancies in a monotone risk model to predict error burden. All transport, feature, and readout choices are selected using the ReXVal dataset, and the frozen system is evaluated on the independent RadEvalX dataset. RadOT-Eval achieves Spearman correlations of 0.715, 0.548, and 0.399 with total, clinically significant, and clinically insignificant annotated error burden, respectively, yielding higher point estimates than standard evaluation metrics and the open-source large language model (LLM)-based evaluator GREEN-radllama2-7B. In a frozen auxiliary corruption-sensitivity stress test on ReXErr-v1, RadOT-Eval achieves 0.768 AUROC and a 0.990 corrupted-greater-than-clean paired win rate. These results show that structured evidence transport provides an auditable, rank-oriented evaluation tool for high-stakes generated clinical text under ReXVal-only model selection and frozen RadEvalX testing.

Weixin Liu, Juming Xiong, Yang Li +5

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA · Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA · Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Radiology Report Generation Automated Evaluation Optimal Transport Radiology Report Evaluation

Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

SLMJury: Can Small Language Models Judge as Well as Large Ones?

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as judges for evaluating model outputs, but their high cost, latency, and opacity limit scalability. We introduce SLMJury, a framework for evaluating small language models (SLMs) as judges across two paradigms: closed-ended binary correctness and open-ended quality scoring. We benchmark 16 SLM judges (0.6B-14B parameters) from four model families across ten benchmarks: eight closed-ended tasks spanning mathematical, scientific, and general reasoning (N=64,824 judgments per configuration), plus SummEval and MT-Bench for summarization and conversational scoring. We formalize judging as a budget-conditioned function and study five dimensions. Four findings emerge. (1) The overthinking effect is domain-dependent: for most judges quick 10-token verdicts match or beat extended reasoning on mathematical judging (by 2-7% where they help), while reasoning wins on general tasks by up to 23%. (2) Domain generalization separates model families, with math-to-general accuracy gaps ranging from under 10% to nearly 40%. (3) Closed-ended and open-ended judging draw on different capabilities: the best binary judge (Phi-4) drops to rank 9 on MT-Bench, while reasoning-trained models invert this ordering. (4) Under the Reflect-Critique-Refine (RCR) debate protocol, multi-agent debate degrades accuracy across all tested configurations, whereas the top judges resist six adversarial personas with <=0.55% variance. Reliable automated evaluation does not require large proprietary models, yet no single SLM dominates. The leaderboard is available at https://anishh15.github.io/SLMJury/, and our framework code and pip package are publicly available at https://github.com/anishh15/SLMJury and https://pypi.org/project/slmjury/.

Anish Laddha, Nitesh Pradhan, Gaurav Srivastava

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, LNMIIT, Jaipur, India · Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

LLM-as-a-Judge Language Model Generation Evaluation Small Language Models Automated Evaluation Language Model Robustness

Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

A Framework for Evaluating and Benchmarking Concept Drift Detection Methods

Data stream mining is fundamentally challenged by concept drift, where distributional changes can degrade model performance. Despite the proliferation of drift detection methods, progress in the field is hindered by inconsistent evaluation practices: studies rely on oversimplified synthetic data generators, adopt incompatible metrics, and lack transparency in hyperparameter selection, making fair comparisons difficult. We address this gap with a novel benchmarking framework comprising three contributions: (1) a drift simulation method that injects controlled distributional changes into real-world datasets via Monte Carlo trials, enabling supervised evaluation while preserving real-world data complexity; (2) an evaluation protocol for drift detection with timing-aware criteria, including the derivation of new metrics (e.g., F1 detection score, normalized detection time) that are comparable across streams; and (3) we advocate for a leave-one-dataset-out hyperparameter optimization protocol for drift detection methods that promotes configuration robustness across heterogeneous stream dynamics. We benchmark 14 widely used drift detection methods on 7 realworld datasets across 4 drift types (class prior, label swap, feature permutation, feature filtering), each under both abrupt and gradual transitions. Our experimental results provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current drift detection approaches while establishing baseline performance metrics for future research in this area. All code and experiments are publicly available.

Vitor Cerqueira, Heitor Murilo Gomes, Marco Heyden +2

University of Coimbra · Victoria University of Wellington · Commerzbank +2

Concept Drift Synthetic Benchmark Generation Automated Evaluation Synthetic Data Evaluation

Jun 5, 2026cs.IR

Meaning in Order, Order in Meaning: Semantic R-precision for Keyphrase Evaluation

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated keyphrases remains a complex challenge. Traditional metrics either rely on exact lexical matching or consider semantic similarity while ignoring prediction ranking, both of which misalign with how humans judge informativeness and relevance. We introduce Semantic R-Precision (SemR-p), a novel evaluation metric that integrates semantic similarity into the rank-aware R-Precision framework. Designed from a human-centric perspective and inspired by Information Retrieval metrics, SemR-p rewards semantically relevant keyphrases that appear early in the output list. We conducted extensive analyses to assess its semantic sensitivity, ranking awareness, and discriminative power across models and datasets. The results suggest that SemR-p offers a complementary lens for evaluating keyphrase predictions, helping to better reflect user-centred notions of relevance alongside traditional lexical and semantic matching metrics.

Shamira Venturini, Steffen Kinkel

ILIN - Institute for Learning and Innovation in Networks, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Moltkestraße 30, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Kaiserstraße 12, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Automated Evaluation IR Evaluation

Jun 3, 2026q-bio.QM

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

Zhenhong Yang, Zhuoyun Liu, Jintao Fei +4

JDH Algo, JD Health International Inc., China · Department of Big Data in Health Science, The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, China · Zhejiang Engineering Research Center for Hospital Emergency and Process Digitization, Wenzhou, China +1

Factual Consistency Evaluation Automated Evaluation Radiology Report Evaluation