Benchmark Suite

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Period ending 2026-09-14

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Benchmark Suite.

Period ending 2026-09-07

6 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Benchmark Suite.

163 papers

Latest in Benchmark Suite

Sep 9, 2026cs.AI

The Era by Eon Benchmark: A Generated Enterprise Estate with Exact Ground Truth for Benchmarking LLM Agents

LLM agents for enterprise systems of record cannot be evaluated on customer production data, and no existing substitute provides ground truth. We present the Era by Eon Benchmark for evaluating LLM agents that use enterprise tools. The benchmark is built around a complete fictional company. It includes product simulators, company-specific internal databases, benchmark questions, and computed answer keys. Industry, company size, business model, application portfolio, and a seed define each company. One seeded entity graph supplies shared company data to simulators of Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, Gong, and other products. A questionconditioned generator creates the schemas and records for internal databases. It takes shared entities, keys, and values from the same graph before generating database-specific facts. Both mechanisms therefore describe one consistent enterprise estate. Every expected answer is computed from the final records, so grading is exact. Design and answer-key checks validate the internal databases. A realism scorecard and adversarial detector validate the entity graph. Across 23 generated companies, the mean realism score rose from 61.8 to 97.0, with zero records flagged as synthetic. In the reported simulator-track comparison, nine models answered the same 33 questions three times each. Accuracy estimates ranged from 42.4% to 76.8%, and three of 36 pairwise differences remained supported after correction.
Benjamin Gruenbaum, Doron Porat, Assaf Natanzon +3
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

Quantization Amplifies Determinism, Not Bias: Scale-Dependent Behavioral Effects of Serving-Time Weight Compression

Weight quantization largely determines the economics of serving open-weight LLMs. Its costs are usually assessed with capability benchmarks, on which 4-bit quantization of mid-sized models is often considered "nearly free." We examine a different question: when several answers are valid, does quantization change what a model chooses to say? We serve three checkpoints (Qwen3-8B/14B/32B) at three weight precisions (W4A16 AWQ, W8A16 FP8-Marlin, and bf16), holding the hardware, software, and sampling configuration constant, and collect approximately 71,000 completions paired by prompt and seed across two custom, leak-checked prompt batteries. We pre-specified the analyses in three waves in version control. At 8B, int4 reduces output diversity: the probability that two samples for the same scenario recommend the same brand increases by 5.1 percentage points (prompt-paired sign-flip test, Holm p = .023; reproduced at +4.4pp on a full regeneration of the arm), and lexical diversity falls substantially (TTR -0.011, standardized effect -0.51; robust to a length-controlled measure). At 14B and 32B, no content-concentration measure reaches significance; instead, stylistic drift emerges (em-dash rate +0.46/1k words at 14B and +0.61/1k at 32B, both Holm p <= .0024). Pre-specified tests of stereotype direction are null at every scale: outputs concentrate on the modal answer for each prompt rather than on stereotypical answers. Mechanistically, the token-level distribution becomes flatter (decision-token entropy +0.091 bits, p = .015) while the semantic distribution, measured directly from first-token log probabilities, becomes more concentrated (collision +2.6pp, p = .023): individual tokens become less predictable even as meanings become more repetitive. At 8B, the smallest size tested, AWQ-int4 serving measurably narrows the range of suggestions; audits should assess concentration as well as bias.
Dachi Kurtskhalia
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

The Oversight Gap: What LLM Safety Monitors Miss, and Why It Is Not Capability

Several properties safety monitors are asked to certify, among them cross-tenant noninterference, sandbagging and evaluation awareness, are 2-safety hyperproperties, witnessed only by two executions. The standard consequence is a binary impossibility: one trace cannot decide them. We replace the binary with a measurement. A tight bound puts the balanced accuracy of any single-trace monitor at 12+12TV(P0,P1)\tfrac12+\tfrac12\,TV(P_0,P_1), turning undecidability into a graded detectability frontier and defining an oversight gap: a monitor's shortfall below it. On a leak family with closed-form TVTV, nine LLM monitors are optimal at TV=0TV=0 but capture little signal as TVTV grows; at TV=1TV=1, where a 20-line membership check scores 100%100\%, they average 60.9%60.9\%. That shortfall is mostly not capability: naming what to check closes 61%61\% of it while leaving the TV=0TV=0 control at chance. The same split runs through a 2×22{\times}2 factorial: an imagined second run leaves monitors at chance (50.4%50.4\%) while the same rule on an executed second run reaches 90.0%90.0\%, and a stored oracle without a comparison procedure yields only 68.2%68.2\%. Information and procedure are each necessary and neither is capability. Under nondeterminism, replay tracks a closed-form kk-replay curve only under the right projection, and a projection frontier shows the resulting dilemma is forced: narrow misses 98.6%98.6\% of off-channel leaks, broad flags 75.7%75.7\% of clean traffic, and attainable accuracy decays like 1/(qm)1/(qm) in the benign-variation rate and the channel count. Finally, two frontier LLM judges certified an earlier version of our own benchmark as sound while a sign test found a directional bias (p=2.7×105p=2.7\times10^{-5}) that invalidated three of our findings. Construction validity for hyperproperty benchmarks should be proved mechanically, not audited by models.
Xin Xu
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

ElderBench: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents for Older Adults

While autonomous mobile agents hold great potential for assisting older adults with smartphone usage, existing GUI benchmarks mainly rely on explicit, goal-oriented instructions and rarely capture the naturally occurring language patterns of older users, such as indirect speech, referential ambiguity, and under-specified requests. This mismatch between benchmark instructions and real-world elderly interactions may hinder reliable agent deployment. To address this gap, we present ElderBench, the first benchmark for evaluating mobile GUI agents in authentic elderly-oriented scenarios. ElderBench is constructed from 249 naturally elicited smartphone tasks collected from older adults across 20 applications. We first characterize the linguistic divergence between elderly instructions and existing GUI benchmark instructions from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives. We then evaluate mainstream GUI agents and Vision-Language Models under both online and offline settings, revealing substantial performance degradation when handling elderly-oriented instructions. Through controlled instruction normalization, failure analysis, and fine-grained linguistic feature analysis, we further identify how elderly-specific language patterns contribute to agent failures. Our findings provide actionable design insights toward more adaptive, interpretable, and age-inclusive GUI agents for older adults.
Weide Zhan, Qumu Shaqu, Yuanqing Liu +6
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

LongCounsel-8: A Benchmark Suite for Longitudinal Depression Tracking from Multi-Session Counseling Dialogues

Tracking depression from multi-session counseling dialogues requires estimating both current symptom severity and how it changes across sessions. Yet progress on this task is constrained by the scarcity of longitudinal counseling data with standardized session-level depression labels. Existing resources typically provide either multi-session conversations without depression labels or labeled interviews in a single session. Building such a benchmark poses three challenges: maintaining longitudinal consistency and diversity, grounding symptom progression in empirical patterns, and expressing controlled depression states naturally without exposing target labels. To address these challenges, we introduce LongCounsel-8, a benchmark suite of three independently generated datasets totaling 7,749 five-session counseling trajectories, grounded in real-world client profiles, depression trajectories, symptom compositions, and counseling patterns. We combine profile-grounded simulation, empirically informed state construction, and indirect behavioral realization to address these challenges. Across the benchmark, simulated self-reports closely recover the controlled states, supporting label fidelity. Experiments on existing depression tracking methods reveal three key findings: (1) lower single-session score error does not guarantee accurate identification of trend, i.e., improvement or worsening; (2) existing methods are consistently less reliable on worsening trajectories; and (3) additional session history may reduce the accuracy of trend prediction. Together, these findings establish LongCounsel-8 as a foundation for advancing depression assessment from static, single-session prediction toward reliable longitudinal tracking of mental-health change.
Jiayi Li, Zhaomin Wu, Bingsheng He
Sep 1, 2026cs.RO

Peg-in-Bench: A Modular Benchmark for High-Precision Robotic Insertion

High-precision insertion remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation due to the strict alignment requirements and contact-rich interactions involved. Although peg-in-hole tasks are widely used for evaluation, existing bench- marks often rely on fixed task configurations, limiting their ability to assess robustness and generalization across different insertion scenarios. This paper introduces a reconfigurable peg-in-hole benchmark designed to evaluate task generalization in high-precision insertion. The benchmark consists of a set of fully 3D-printable modular components, including multiple peg geometries, tolerance levels, and configurable base structures that can be combined to generate a large variety of insertion and assembly tasks. By varying object layouts, orientations, and task structures while maintaining controlled physical conditions, the benchmark enables systematic evaluation of adaptation to unseen scenarios. To support reproducibility, we additionally provide a scenario generation tool capable of producing standardized task configurations and machine-readable task descriptions. The scenario generation tool and the STL files of the benchmark pieces are available through the project repository: https://github.com/aistairc/peg-in-bench.
Yosel Delgado, José G. Buenaventura-Carreón, Floris Erich +4
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Do Satellites See Commuters? A Critical Benchmark of Vision Foundation Models

Satellite foundation models offer a globally available alternative to census data for commuting origin-destination (OD) generation, yet no study has systematically compared encoder paradigms within a single downstream pipeline. We ablate four satellite vision encoders: language-supervised (RemoteCLIP), self-supervised (DINOv3), and geographically grounded (SatCLIP, AlphaEarth) within an identical WeDAN graph diffusion framework across 1,925 US counties, 325 UK districts, and 14 global cities under five random seeds. Three main findings emerge. First, language-supervised features achieve the strongest in-distribution performance (RemoteCLIP CPC 0.602), while geographically grounded encoders transfer more reliably zero-shot: AlphaEarth improves CPC by 33% over RemoteCLIP on UK districts. Second, pretraining corpus scale alone is insufficient: DINOv3, trained on a substantially larger satellite corpus, underperforms RemoteCLIP by 0.091 CPC in-distribution and collapses to CPC 0.022 globally. Third, no encoder transfers usefully to global cities (best CPC 0.122 for RemoteCLIP, 0.022 for DINOv3), confirming cross-continental OD generation remains an open problem. We additionally clarify the semantics of the census noise parameter ηη, whose ordering reverses under cross-continental evaluation, a distinction critical to correctly interpreting prior results. Training scripts and evaluation logs will be released.
Ashiq Shukoor Iqbal, Wilson Wongso, Flora D. Salim
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

ScienceArena: Benchmarking LLMs on Latest Scientific Olympiad Competitions

Benchmark saturation and data contamination increasingly obscure genuine scientific reasoning in frontier LLMs. We introduce \textsc{ScienceArena}, an olympiad-style benchmark from thirteen public science competitions in physics, chemistry, and biology, including IPhO and IChO 2025--2026, IBO 2023, USAPhO 2026, and USNCO 2025. Its open-ended, multi-step problems use process-credit rubrics, making faithful scoring difficult. We build ScienceArena through an expert-audited digitization pipeline that converts official exams, figures, solutions, and rubrics into structured items verified by olympiad medalists. To scale evaluation beyond costly human grading, we calibrate LLM-as-judge against medalist ground truth on archived answers from five models across IPhO and IChO; two strong judges stay within one point of expert total scores. Medalist notes show that failures often stem from visual grounding, structure fidelity, and global problem control rather than missing terminology. Evaluating fourteen recent LLMs with interleaved solving, we find that top models obtain medal-equivalent rubric scores on several public international exams, while chemistry and long-horizon consistency remain key bottlenecks. We provide an interactive \href{https://science-arena.onrender.com/}{demo}.
Guangxiang Zhao, Qilong Shi, Xusen Xiao +13
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

Sleight of Word Benchmark: Can Language Models Notice If Their Own Output Was Tampered With?

The output of a Language Model can be tampered with \emph{while} the model is writing it. A simple test can thus be constructed by evaluating the model's perception of this external perturbation. In this spirit, a simple benchmark is built in which a single word is consistently substituted with another in the generation process. We call this method \emph{Sleight of Word}. Two distinct axes are measured: metrics that relate to the model's surprise, as well as an evaluation of the textual reaction for 19 different open-weight language models.
Alberto Cetoli
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

A Contract-Grade Verifier for LLM-Generated GPU Kernels, and a Native Blackwell Backward for the Gated-Linear-Recurrence Family

Systems that generate GPU kernels with language models report high correctness rates. Those rates come from a single loose test: run the kernel on a few random inputs at one fixed shape and accept it if the output is close to a reference. A kernel can pass that test and still be silently wrong. It can return an ordinary number where the true answer is a NaN or an infinity, differ from run to run, break when the shape changes, or accumulate in fp16 where the reference keeps an fp32 total. We build the instrument that checks correctness properly: a contract-grade verifier of twelve adversarial gates, each a property a correct kernel must satisfy, several of them tolerance-free, so no choice of threshold can explain a failure away. Aimed outward, the verifier audits 2,638 machine-generated kernels that a public system's own harness had already accepted as correct. It finds 39.5% broken beyond any tolerance argument and 62.1% carrying at least one violation. The field's standard test accepts 1,487 kernels the verifier rejects, against only 14 the other way. We defend the finding four independent ways: a 7/7 positive control, a threshold-calibration sweep, 98.5% agreement with the reference benchmark's own correctness code, and a stratified hand-audit. Aimed inward, the verifier judges a kernel of our own: the first native Blackwell tcgen05 training backward for the gated-linear-recurrence (GDN) family, including the reverse-state stage the field still runs on a fallback. We establish its correctness independently, against a double-precision oracle, and train five family members through it. The correctness signal behind reported progress in kernel generation is far weaker than the numbers suggest, and a set of tolerance-free contracts would close most of the gap.
Rishi Shah, Rishav Shrestha
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

Localizing to Debias: A Patch-Level Benchmark and Baseline for Weakly Supervised Spatial Anomaly Detection

Despite growing interest in weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD), current methods struggle to bridge the gap between coarse temporal supervision and fine-grained spatial reasoning. A key obstacle is the tendency of temporal detectors to latch onto background and scene-level cues rather than truly discriminative anomaly evidence. This background bias raises ethical concerns: models may inadvertently associate anomalies with societal or environmental context rather than authentic crime-related cues. Without spatial grounding, such biases remain hidden and unauditable. To address this, we propose SST-WSVADL, a sparse spatio-temporal framework that bridges temporal anomaly detection with fine-grained spatial localization. Rather than processing all spatial regions indiscriminately, SST-WSVADL progressively focuses on the most anomaly-relevant spatio-temporal regions through dynamic sparsification, naturally suppressing background dominant content while preserving discriminative evidence. The temporal and spatial branches are coupled end-to-end via motion-aware regularization that guides sparsification toward dynamically informative regions, without relying on external detectors or vision-language prompts. We publicly release frame-level spatial annotations and a method-agnostic evaluation protocol for three public datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and MSAD. These resources enable the community to audit spatial biases in WSVAD predictions, supporting progress toward more ethical and accountable anomaly detection. Experiments demonstrate that SST-WSVADL is competitive with prior methods across benchmarks while enabling localization and patch-level auditability of scene bias, providing a reproducible foundation for interpretability-oriented evaluation of WSVAD models.
Sara Abdulaziz, Abdulrahman Al-Abri, Giacomo D'Amicantonio +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

Self-Correcting Long-Horizon Search Agents via Tree-Structured Memory

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents answer questions through multi-step interactions with external environments. However, providing complete execution trajectories to the LLM causes unbounded context growth and introduces noise. Existing compression methods reduce context at the cost of important details and often replace erroneous facts without repairing downstream reasoning derived from them. To address this problem, we propose ReTree, a self-correcting tree-structured memory mechanism for search agents. ReTree constructs a bounded per-step reasoning context while preserving source-linked evidence. It models search as an evidence tree whose nodes store bounded summaries, evidence, and revision histories. When newly retrieved evidence contradicts an earlier claim, ReTree traces back to the node where the claim was introduced, replaces outdated evidence, regenerates summaries, prunes affected branches, and resumes search. Source-grounded evidence provenance supports reliable conflict localization and keeps final claims traceable to retrieved passages. Experiments on four public question-answering and search benchmarks show that ReTree consistently outperforms Full-Trajectory ReAct, improving answer accuracy by up to 25.6 percentage points (pp); the average maximum per-step reasoning context of Full-Trajectory ReAct is 1.271.27--1.51×1.51\times that of ReTree. These results establish ReTree as an effective self-correcting memory abstraction for long-horizon search.
Aijun Yang, Qianxue Guo, Ziyi Huang +3
Aug 9, 2026cs.LG

Gaming Without an Attacker: Benchmark Fingerprinting in LLM-Driven Search Under Selection Pressure

Benchmarks for systems that are optimized against the evaluation signal measure something different from what they claim. We document this concretely in two GPU-kernel-optimization suites with held-out generalization gates: Metal-Sci (10 scientific-compute tasks) and Metal-ZK (12 zero-knowledge/cryptographic tasks), in which three frontier LLMs (Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5) propose Metal kernels inside a (1+1)(1{+}1) evolutionary loop with rich feedback. Although no model is prompted to act adversarially, the promoted winners repeatedly fingerprint the evaluation configuration: they branch on the identity of runtime parameters, tune the measured branch maximally, and leave the unmeasured branch slow or silently wrong. Across the pooled suites, 16/5316/53 (30%30\%) of in-distribution wins fail to transfer to held-out configurations. We give a four-mode taxonomy of these failures, from configuration fingerprints to gate leakage. We distill design guidance for measurement under strategic optimization: held-out probes retain validity only on non-enumerable axes; gates must measure held-out performance, not just correctness; and a transfer rate is interpretable only with per-failure mechanism grades: ours decomposes into gamed, overfit, and benign. Code and research artifacts: https://github.com/vicgalle/kernel-fingerprinting
Víctor Gallego
Aug 9, 2026cs.CL

LibraSpec: Dynamic Diffusion-Based Speculative Decoding via Marginal-Gain-Driven Optimization

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens for parallel verification, with efficiency critically determined by the speculative length selected at each decoding round. Existing dynamic speculation methods select the speculation length by estimating how many tokens will be accepted, which is reasonable for autoregressive drafters that generates tokens sequentially. The recent wave of diffusion-based drafters, however, generates candidate blocks in parallel at substantially lower drafting cost, shifting the key question from how many tokens to generate to how many generated tokens are worth verifying. We therefore reformulate dynamic speculative-length selection as expected-speedup optimization and derive a marginal criterion that extends the speculative sequence only when its acceptance gain outweighs the additional verification cost. Building on this criterion, we develop \textit{LibraSpec}, a training-free and plug-and-play algorithm that iteratively determines the speculative length using drafter confidence scores. Theoretically, we prove that LibraSpec monotonically converges toward the optimal speculative length. Experiments across six target models, three diffusion-based speculative decoding methods, and math, coding, and chat benchmarks show consistent improvements under both greedy and sampling settings, achieving a further 0.51.5×0.5\sim1.5\times improvement over baselines and up to 8.49×8.49\times speedup over autoregressive decoding.
Zexun Lin, Yuan Feng, Junlin Lv +2
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

A Paragraph is Worth a Thousand Captions: Rethinking Text Supervision for Vision-Language Retrieval

Contrastive vision-language models such as CLIP and BLIP are typically trained on short image captions, limiting their ability to retrieve images from detailed textual descriptions. While methods such as Long-CLIP extend the token limit through positional embedding interpolation, we ask a simpler question: does training text granularity alone determine long-text retrieval performance? We present a systematic study of supervision ranging from single captions to multi-sentence paragraphs for contrastive image-text retrieval. Using a synthetic pipeline based on Qwen2-VL and Llama 3.2 Vision, we generate diverse captions, hard negatives, and quality-scored paragraphs for 500K CC3M images. To isolate the effect of text granularity, we fine-tune only the BLIP text encoder while keeping the vision encoder frozen across 10 training configurations. Our paragraph-supervised models match Long-CLIP-L on ShareGPT4V and outperform it by more than 14 points on DOCCI for image-to-text retrieval, without architectural changes. We further show that paragraph supervision enables effective use of long token sequences, whereas caption-only training degrades beyond 60 tokens. Increasing caption diversity improves short-caption retrieval with diminishing returns, while paragraph supervision consistently benefits long-description benchmarks and hard negatives prove detrimental in text-only fine-tuning. Evaluations on Flickr30k, COCO, ShareGPT4V, and DOCCI provide a comprehensive analysis of the trade-offs between text granularity, retrieval direction, and description length.
Mahyar Ghazanfari, Amin Tabrizian, Arsyi Aziz +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

GDPevo: Evaluating Agent Self-Evolution on Real Business Tasks

Agent self-evolution updates an agent's persistent state from prior experience and reuses it to solve related tasks more effectively. Evaluating self-evolution is difficult: existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of economically valuable task domains, do not always design training and test tasks such that test-time gains can be attributed to training experience, and remain vulnerable to data contamination. We present GDPevo, an evolution-native benchmark grounded in GDP-related enterprise workflows, together with the fully automated data pipeline that generates it. Its core mechanism, rule hybridization, decomposes each enterprise workflow into atomic business rules, distributes subsets of these rules across training tasks, and recombines them in held-out test tasks so that test-time gains are attributable. GDPevo spans CRM, ERP, finance, healthcare, legal, and data-centric workflows. Its V1 release contains 120 tasks in 12 groups, with five training and five held-out test tasks per group. Full automation enables the pipeline to expand the suite to 240 tasks in 24 groups (V2) within two days, providing a practical response to contamination. Using GDPevo, we evaluate four agents, each comprising a harness and a model, under four supervision types. Self-evolution consistently improves held-out accuracy by up to 16.44 percentage points. But the best evolved agents remain far below the fully informed oracle ceiling of 91.6%, indicating that the self-evolution ability of current agents remains far from fully realized. We publicly release the pipeline, benchmark, and full evaluation results at https://github.com/Prism-Shadow/GDPevo.
Leijun Zhou, Zhihao Liu, Xiang Qu +9
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

PACE: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Time-Efficient Embodied Planning

Reasoning-enhanced large language models have achieved remarkable improvements in planning tasks, yet their deployment in embodied systems remains impractical due to prohibitive inference delays-often exceeding minutes per planning instance. The fundamental bottleneck stems from the serial nature of existing paradigms: models must complete all reasoning before any action execution, leaving execution time windows entirely unexploited. We introduce PACE (Planning with Adaptive Cognitive Effort), a framework that enables interleaved reasoning and execution through two key innovations: an Interleaved Think-Act architecture that pipelines cognitive processing with action execution, and a Dynamic Budget Allocator that adapts reasoning token budgets to available execution time windows. On the Robotouille benchmark using Qwen3-8B-AWQ, PACE achieves a 10% success rate-representing a 67% improvement over the ReAct+Think baseline-while delivering 6.9 times acceleration in thinking time compared to unconstrained reasoning. The framework hides 66.8% of thinking time within execution windows, demonstrating that strategic cognitive effort allocation can simultaneously improve both planning quality and time efficiency. These results provide evidence that time-aware architectural innovations enable reasoning models to operate in latency-sensitive embodied domains where they were previously impractical.
Yuchen Huang, Xijiang Ying, Zhenhua Ma +14
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

Can You Trust the Confidence? ConfBench for Vision-Language Models on Document Extraction

Intelligent document processing (IDP) with vision-language models (VLMs) hinges on confidence scores trustworthy enough to route extractions between automation and human review. Existing document benchmarks are dominated by clean, high-quality samples, leaving low accuracy regions too sparse for calibration assessment. We introduce ConfBench, the first calibration-specific benchmark for key information extraction (KIE), built by applying 20 controlled degradation pipelines to a diverse document set, yielding 1,346 variants and 70K+ entity-level evaluations spanning the full accuracy spectrum. We evaluate four proprietary and three open-weight VLMs under verbalized and log-probability confidence estimation methods across three input modalities, and find: (i) OCR+Image modality results in more accurate confidence estimates; (ii) model capability is the dominant factor: within the Claude family confidence quality scales monotonically with capability, while across families parameter count is a poor predictor; (iii) calibration quality varies widely across models, from near-perfect to severely overconfident, and per-model post-hoc correction rescales these absolute confidence values for threshold-based routing without altering ranking-based operational metrics; and (iv) log-probability with first-token aggregation consistently outperforms mean-token and margin aggregations. We also introduce ECARB, a review-budget metric translating discriminative gains into operational savings. We release ConfBench publicly to enable systematic study of confidence estimators and calibration methods for trustworthy IDP application deployment.
Priyashree Roy, Sujitha Martin, Mohammad Rostami +6
Aug 2, 2026cs.CR

Permission Denied: Policy-Graded Evaluation of Coding Agents in Hardened Environments

Coding agents increasingly run inside organizations whose security controls (scoped credentials, restricted egress, read-only filesystems, non-root execution) constrain them like any other software. Existing benchmarks, however, evaluate agents almost exclusively in permissive sandboxes, so it is unknown how performance changes when policy is enforced. In this work, we evaluate 12 coding agents on Terminal-Bench 2.1 across nested security policy levels derived from common real-world enterprise restrictions. Hardening is never free but far from uniform: under the strictest policy, success losses reach 18.3 points and cost inflation 167.3%, and the two axes disagree; the model that best preserves success is also the one that loses the most efficiency, so model choice is policy-dependent. Beyond aggregate scores, we characterize how agents behave when policy blocks their actions and decompose the failures hardening induces: runs grind into timeouts or wrong solutions rather than stopping early, in a mix that differs by model. To ground comparisons, we verify task solvability under the strictest policy, separating model failures from tasks the policy forecloses. We release Boundary-Bench, an open-source hardening plugin enabling policy-constrained evaluation of coding agents on Terminal-Bench and compatible benchmarks.
Dotan Davidovich, Yair Amar, Hai Rozencwajg +1
Aug 1, 2026cs.NE

SDDMO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Streaming Data-Driven Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization

Streaming data-driven dynamic multi-objective optimization requires algorithms to track time-varying Pareto fronts using only sequential observations under concept drift. However, systematic evaluation remains difficult because real-world problems usually lack ground-truth optima, drift annotations, and controllable conditions, while existing benchmarks provide limited support for standardized comparison. This paper proposes SDDMO-Bench, a benchmark suite that transforms classical dynamic multi-objective test problems into streaming environments by combining intrinsic objective-mapping evolution, controllable distributional drift, and sequential data revelation. By combining five representative time-dependent base functions with six distributional drift patterns, SDDMO-Bench constructs 30 scenarios with diverse levels of non-stationarity, problem complexity, sample-distribution variation, and Pareto-front evolution. Experiments with representative evolutionary algorithms demonstrate that SDDMO-Bench provides challenging and discriminative test scenarios, offering a standardized, controllable, and reproducible benchmark for evaluating adaptability, robustness, and Pareto-front tracking in streaming data-driven dynamic multi-objective optimization.
Wenjie Xiao, Hui Bai, Junhao Chen
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

InfraBench: Evaluating Infrastructure Agents Across Layers, Lifecycle, and Risk

Managing modern computing infrastructure has become a steadily harder problem due to the ever-increasing complexity. Recent advances in AI agents create a timely opportunity to automate infrastructure management tasks, but it remains unclear how well such agents can handle real-world infrastructure complexity. We present InfraBench, a benchmark suite for evaluating AI agents on realistic infrastructure tasks across the full system stack and full operational lifecycle with fine-grained risk assessment. Experiments with 15 agent-model configurations show that even the strongest agent cannot secure a full score across all tasks. Mean effective scores range from roughly 40% to 88% (with per-configuration standard errors of 6-12 points), repeating every task three times reveals that top configurations still pass only a fraction of their attempts, and per-check scoring exposes a general failure pattern: agents may routinely satisfy short-term objectives while leaving non-durable changes, broken distributed invariants, unsafe side effects, and uncleaned state behind. INFRABENCH, including its live leaderboard, tasks, and evaluation harness, is publicly available at infraben.ch.
Yuan Gao, Zeren Yang, Junnan Li +6
Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

EMBL AI Librarian: Life-Sciences Knowledge Layer for AI Agents

The web is increasingly accessed by AI agents rather than humans. Every agent needs knowledge, especially in the life-sciences, where agentic pipelines are growing fast. Access to the literature is a crucial part of that need, and resources such as Europe PMC, with over 40M indexed records, are widely used to meet it. Yet these resources were not built for AI agents: they take keywords and complex syntax and return whole papers, so every agent must learn the syntax, issue several searches, and read full papers to find the evidence it needs. We introduce EMBL AI Librarian, a knowledge layer that upgrades the Europe PMC interface for AI agents: an agent asks in natural language and receives evidence that answers it. A single LLM orchestrates the whole knowledge retrieval process: it plans complementary subqueries executed by the live Europe PMC search engine, then reads the selected papers and locates the relevant evidence. We evaluate Librarian across four benchmarks: literature synthesis, claim verification, open-domain question answering, and downstream biology tasks such as protocol questions and sequence manipulation. On ScholarQABench, Librarian improves Citation F1 by more than 1616 points over strong recently published baselines. Used as the retrieval layer of an existing claim-verification pipeline, it increases agreement with expert consensus; and on the open-form LitQA2 benchmark, a GPT-5.4 agent scores about 88 points higher when grounded in Librarian than with web search. Overall, our results show that equipping life-science agents with the Librarian knowledge layer improves performance across a range of tasks. We release our code publicly at https://github.com/petroni-lab/librarian
Luigi Sigillo, Matteo Silvestri, Francesco Tabaro +9
Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

PanDent: Toward Comprehensive Tooth-Level Structure-Language Consistency in Dental Radiology

Accurate evaluation of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in dental panoramic radiography (orthopantomogram, OPG) is limited by the lack of fine-grained, clinically reliable benchmarks that reflect expert interpretation. This work introduces PanDent, a large-scale, clinically grounded OPG benchmark built upon fine-grained, expert-validated tooth-level annotations. The dataset comprises 9,524 high-quality OPGs, each associated with comprehensive structured annotations produced by experienced dentists and further validated by an oral and maxillofacial radiologist, providing clinically reliable supervision for tooth-level diagnosis and reasoning. Clinically consistent radiology reports are constructed from expert-validated findings using clinician-defined reporting logic, establishing explicit correspondence between structured clinical evidence and free-text descriptions. This design enables evaluation of whether MLLMs generate reports that are not only linguistically coherent but also clinically consistent with expert-validated tooth-level findings. Experiments are conducted on diverse MLLMs, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) proprietary models, general-domain open-source models, and medical-specific models. Results show that current MLLMs can generate fluent reports, yet fail to produce clinically consistent descriptions, exhibiting substantial errors in fine-grained localization and tooth-level diagnosis. Fine-tuning on PanDent significantly improves structure-language consistency, substantially enhancing visual localization accuracy and diagnostic correctness, and bringing model outputs closer to expert dental interpretation. These results establish PanDent as a rigorous benchmark for evaluating tooth-level clinical reasoning in MLLMs and a valuable resource for clinically grounded dental AI.
Xiaohan Li, Xinyu Liu, Chang Liu +4
Jul 29, 2026cs.CL

APEX-Accounting

We introduce APEX-Accounting, a benchmark built by Mercor in partnership with Ramp, to assess whether frontier models can do the real work of accountants. Tasks include reconciling accounts, accruing expenses, posting transactions, and producing reports. The private eval set comprises 160 tasks, split across 10 worlds. Each world contains an accounting system, as well as spreadsheets, PDFs, and other files. Every task was authored and solved by experts in accounting and bookkeeping, who also wrote grading rubrics. Across nine frontier models, Claude-Fable-5 (Max) leads with 56.4% Mean Criteria@3, ahead of Muse-Spark-1.1 (xHigh) at 52.6%. No model scores more than 2.6% Pass^8 (GPT-5.6-Sol (Max+Pro)) and the highest Pass@8 is 21.5% (Muse-Spark-1.1 (xHigh)). We experiment with increasing the token budget from 1to1 to 50 and observe an instance of Simpson's paradox: scores increase as the token budget increases but within a given budget-constrained harness, scores are lower on tasks where the model spends more tokens. As APEX-Accounting is a closed benchmark, leaderboard evals can be run for any frontier model on request.
Julien Benchek, Austin Bennett, Jasmin Kern +8
Jul 28, 2026cs.AI

When benchmark inferences do not compose: Projectibility in AI evaluation

An AI benchmark result rarely reaches a consequential claim in one step. Evaluators generalize it to further cases, interpret it as evidence of capability, extrapolate it to new tasks, transport it to another system or site, and combine it with assumptions about human review and downstream consequences. Validity-centred approaches require evidence for each claim. This paper makes explicit and operationalizes a problem those approaches leave to the analyst: warranted links don't automatically make a warranted chain. The target of one study may not be the source of the next; system, population, outcome, or conditions may change at the interface; and shared data or model lineage may make apparently independent support dependent. Projectibility concerns whether a bounded extension from observed to unobserved cases is warranted. Goodman supplies the problem of rival extensions; argument-based validity supplies an architecture for testing them. The contribution is an interface audit for distributed AI evidence: typed source and target descriptions, and a procedure separating endpoints that never meet from endpoints that meet while warrant fails to cross. A legal-research case shows how benchmark evidence and a deployment study can each be sound while remaining parallel. A known-truth demonstration shows why aggregate stability can erase distinctions a later projection requires. The resulting projectibility audit diagnoses unsupported joins in benchmark-to-use arguments.
Brett Reynolds
Jul 28, 2026cs.AI

Instruction-Tuned Language Models Cannot Sample from Distributions They Can Describe

Silicon sampling uses language models as proxies for human survey respondents, treating each model call as an independent draw from the persona's response distribution. We show this draw does not exist: instruction-tuned models do not sample from distributions, they collapse to a single output. The same persona on the same question returns the same answer on more than half of items in a public-opinion benchmark, and the model's internal probabilities concentrate on a single option. The failure is associated with, and amplified by, instruction-targeted post-training: instruction-tuned models are worse than their own bases in every family we can compare, the gap widens at each successive post-training stage and with the size of the tuning update, and continued pretraining on non-instruction tokens leaves it unchanged. Yet the knowledge survives: the same model that cannot sample from a distribution can describe it accurately in a single call. We call this gap the KNOWS/DOES split. Exploiting the split, a single call that asks the model to describe the response distribution more than halves the error against human survey data compared to persona aggregation. When per-persona outputs are required, we propose Prompt-Perturbed Argyle (PPA), which reduces the same error by 21%, spreading each persona's answers to mirror real population differences at no added cost.
Chaemin Jang, Dongman Lee, Jihee Kim
Jul 26, 2026cs.CL

Novel Claim or Déjà Vu? Rethinking "Contamination-Free'' Dynamic Evaluation for Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking

Multimodal automated fact-checking (MAFC) verifies claims by retrieving and reasoning over external evidence. However, most existing static benchmarks risk contamination: they primarily consist of outdated claims verifiable using an LLM's internal knowledge without external evidence. This can inflate performance estimates and fail to reflect true capability on novel claims that require up-to-date information. To address this, emerging dynamic benchmarks collect claims published after LLMs' knowledge cut-off dates, assuming they are uncontaminated. This work revisits this assumption by empirically studying contamination risks in both the state-of-the-art (SOTA) static AVeriTeC benchmark and our newly constructed dynamic ClaimReview2025Q4 benchmark, as well as their impact on MAFC evaluation. Our experiments yield 16 findings, highlighting three key results: (1) Dynamic evaluation reduces but does not eliminate contamination risks, as 17.09%--29.30% of post-cut-off claims remain potentially contaminated; (2) Many newly published claims can be verified either directly or by synthesizing multiple pieces of public knowledge available before the cut-off; and (3) Contamination can induce statistically significant inflation in MAFC performance, increasing Macro-F1 by up to 11.34 points and distorting system rankings. In light of these findings, we re-evaluate SOTA LLMs under a strictly contamination-controlled setting. Our study provides practical guidelines for trustworthy MAFC evaluation.
Haorui He, Xinwen Chen, Dacheng Wen +3
Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

ParasGB: A Graph Benchmark Suite for Parasitic Estimation on AMS Circuits

As chip manufacturing processes advance to deep submicron nodes, parasitic interconnect effects increasingly dominate the performance of analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits and often lead to costly layout iterations. This makes early-stage estimation of parasitic capacitance and resistance important for parasitic-aware design exploration before full physical implementation. However, progress on GNN-based parasitic modeling has been hindered by the lack of public, high-fidelity RC benchmarks that support reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce ParasGB, the first open-source benchmark suite for pre-layout parasitic parameter prediction on circuit graphs. ParasGB provides large-scale, heterogeneous RC networks extracted with commercial EDA tools from tape-out-proven designs, together with a unified evaluation protocol covering node-level ground capacitance, edge-level resistance, and edge-level coupling capacitance. Within this framework, we benchmark diverse GNN architectures using a standardized training pipeline and expose challenges such as extreme label imbalance, long-tailed parasitic distributions, and strong structural heterogeneity. By establishing a physically grounded and standardized benchmark for early-stage parasitic prediction, ParasGB provides an open platform for reproducible research on circuit graph learning and parasitic-aware model development. All datasets, preprocessing scripts, and configurations are publicly available in our code repository https://github.com/ShenShan123/ParasGB.git.
Jiajun Zou, Jiawei Liu, Ao Liu +8
Jul 24, 2026cs.NE

Sensitivity of hMPA to Controlled CEC 2017 Transformations

The standard CEC 2017 benchmark applies bias, shift, and rotation simultaneously, confounding their individual effects on algorithmic behavior. We introduce a parameterized implementation that controls these transformations independently while preserving the original functions and transformation data. The framework diagnoses the hybrid Marine Predators Algorithm (hMPA), whose predicted-candidate mechanism depends on numerical objective values and coordinate-wise reconstruction. DSC and extended DSC (eDSC) are adapted from algorithm-level comparison to configuration-level diagnosis, enabling, to our knowledge, the first exhaustive analysis of all eight bias-shift-rotation configurations of a parameterized CEC 2017 benchmark. We examine all 56 three-configuration subsets and comparisons with the untransformed control. Experiments cover 29 functions, dimensions 10-100, 30 independent runs, and a budget of 10000*dim objective-function evaluations. DSC and eDSC detect statistically significant differences among configurations at every dimension, but rankings vary across functions, preventing a consistent ordering. Shift generally worsens objective values; isolated rotation causes no systematic deterioration, while isolated bias has little effect on final-solution distributions. Shift-rotation combinations differ most consistently from the control. Convergence plots reveal function- and dimension-dependent separation, plateaus, and late improvement. Results are limited to hMPA, the chosen parameters, 30 runs, the fixed budget, and the analyzed CEC 2017 functions. Within this scope, the framework provides a reproducible diagnostic protocol extensible to other continuous optimizers and related CEC benchmarks, including CEC 2024 and CEC 2025.
Grzegorz Sroka, Sławomir T. Wierzchoń
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

NL2SHACL-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Natural Language to SHACL Translation

SHACL is a core technology for validating the conformance of RDF knowledge graphs (KGs). Yet, authoring SHACL shapes requires technical expertise that most domain experts lack. Translating natural language requirements into SHACL (NL2SHACL) would lower this barrier. However, there is no dedicated benchmark for NL2SHACL, and evaluating generated shapes requires methods beyond string comparison, as semantically equivalent shapes can differ in serialisation and structure. To tackle these challenges, we present NL2SHACL-Bench, a benchmark suite for natural language to SHACL translation. Using NL2SHACL-Bench, we evaluate four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) for this task. Our results show that current LLMs are highly capable of generating syntactically valid SHACL, but still struggle to produce semantically equivalent constraints for complex logical and structural patterns. This indicates that NL2SHACL-Bench provides a meaningful basis for measuring advances in the NL2SHACL state of the art.
Yuchen Zhou, Niels Bobet, Maribel Acosta
Jul 24, 2026cs.NE

On the Runtime Analysis of Reinforcement Learning Hyper-Heuristics

Selection Hyper-heuristics (HHs) automate algorithmic design by selecting from a set of low-level heuristics which one to apply at each stage of the optimisation process. Several impressive results have been recently rigorously proven regarding the performance of selection hyper-heuristics (HHs) for standard benchmark functions. However, the learning mechanisms employed by these HHs are considerably simplified compared to the machine learning techniques typically used in real world applications. In this paper we analyse a Reinforcement Learning Hyper-heuristic (RLHH) from the literature. The only previous result available proved that for a wide range of parameter settings, RLHH does not learn to select heuristics appropriately for the standard LeadingOnes benchmark function. In this paper, we rigorously prove that with appropriate parameter values RLHH equipped with two random local search operators, RLS_1 and RLS_2 optimises the LeadingOnes benchmark function in the best possible expected runtime achievable with the two operators up to lower order terms. Experiments show that for realistic problem sizes it is faster than the Generalised Random Gradient HH which was previously proven to also have optimal expected runtime up to lower order terms.
Pietro S. Oliveto, Zhenyu Wang, Peizhou Wu +1
Jul 24, 2026quant-ph

QC-PHAST Search: Classical--Quantum Query Benchmarks for Finite-Pool Rare-Regime Discovery

Rare-regime discovery in parameterized dynamical systems is an active-search problem: find one verified parameter at which a scientifically defined qualitative threshold is crossed, even when acceptable candidates are rare, nonconvex, or fragmented. We introduce Quantum-Classical Phase-space and Stability-Threshold Search (QC-PHAST), an evidence-gated decision protocol and query-accounting framework for finite candidate libraries. A candidate induces a dynamical object, simulator-derived criticality score, and verified first-hit predicate. Scientific metadata and charged pilot evidence are used to assess whether equation-aware search, scalar-score active search, predicate-only search, or only a query-model comparison is admissible. The quantum row is the inherited Grover/Boyer--Brassard--Hoyer--Tapp (BBHT) unknown-MM marked-set query reference; it is not a new quantum-search theorem, materialized circuit, or hardware-speedup claim. The result is a regime map. Direct boundary constructions, geometry controls, online simulator loops, and learned-label accounting further identify when classical structure, false positives, calibration cost, or state preparation erases the query-model margin. QC-PHAST is therefore an auditable protocol for deciding when a finite-pool marked-set reference is informative and when classical or resource-aware search should dominate.
Harsh Milind Tirhekar, Chandrajit Bajaj
Jul 23, 2026stat.ML

TLRNet: Estimating Individual Treatment Effect based on Local Information and Single Learner Structure

Causal inference has become a central issue across various fields, including computer science, statistics, economics, education, healthcare, and medicine. The broad applicability of this discipline has garnered increased research funding and attention. In recent years, the estimation of causal effects from observational data has gained traction due to the vast amounts of collected data and the lower costs compared to randomized controlled trials. Advances in causal effect estimation methods have enhanced service personalization tools. For instance, these tools can help identify the most effective type of treatment (considering both cost and success rate) for each patient among different medical service options. This paper proposes an innovative method for estimating the heterogeneity of treatment effects. The structure of the proposed model is based on a deep neural network and a pseudo-single learner. The proposed method has been compared with other state-of-the-art methods on the IHDP benchmark. Acceptable results have been obtained by using one estimator to estimate the potential outcomes of two treatment groups. Accordingly, this paves the way for further development and improvement of the proposed method.
Ali Haghpanah Jahromi, Mohammad Taheri, Zohreh Azimifar
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

SynGallery: A Synthetic Gallery of Real Paintings for Instance-Level Artwork Recognition

Instance-level artwork recognition requires matching a handheld visitor photograph to a specific work in a large museum collection. This is challenging because painting datasets typically provide clean catalog images for training, while test queries are captured under oblique viewpoints, gallery lighting, reflections, frames, and other scene-level variations. We present SynGallery, a synthetic gallery dataset for artwork retrieval that addresses this gap without collecting additional real photographs. Starting from catalog images of real paintings, we place each artwork into a procedurally generated 3D gallery scene and render it from multiple viewpoints under varied geometric and appearance conditions, while preserving the exact identity of the original work. The resulting dataset contains 24,490 rendered views of 4,898 paintings from the Met benchmark. We show that these synthetic views provide a stronger training signal than the corresponding studio photographs. At the same number of training data points, training only on SynGallery improves art painting recognition from 67.18 to 73.47 GAP^-. When added to the full Met training set, SynGallery improves the published benchmark protocol from 35.97 to 38.48 GAP. Ablation experiments show that the gain comes primarily from geometric viewpoint variation rather than photographic realism: blur, sensor noise, and image compression consistently reduce performance.
Patryk Bartkowiak, Jakub Markil, Bartosz Kotrys +3
Jul 19, 2026cs.AI

An Explicit World Model Based on Data-First Ontology: DaoQL Multimodal Storage Validation and Counterfactual Reasoning Evaluation

Large language models encode world models implicitly in neural weights, which exposes four structural risks in high-precision domains such as medicine and finance: hallucination, frozen knowledge, poor explainability, and poor modifiability. This paper proposes data-first ontology: LLMs are treated as reasoning and language engines, while deterministic knowledge is moved into an explicit multimodal database, DaoQL. We formalize an explicit world model and show that, under rule independence, deterministic evaluation, and fixed conflict resolution, explicit models provide a sufficient condition for composable counterfactual decomposability; implicit models lack atomic read/delta semantics and therefore provide no comparable architectural guarantee. The implemented system focuses on DaoQL's verified storage layer and explicit Eval path, integrating graph, column, vector, and full-text engines within one process. KVCache graph nodes, expert hot updates, and the DaoQL-Agent runtime remain future work. On an embedded same-machine setup, DaoQL reports graph BFS at 1.20 ms, HNSW at 83.1 us, and a Fluent hybrid query at 105.8 us; these results indicate engineering potential but must be interpreted with deployment-shape differences from client-server systems. Exploratory measurements on LDBC SNB SF1 and ANN-Benchmarks further show 34/34 query coverage with interactive-class queries mostly in the sub-millisecond to millisecond range, but only 1.8 QPS overall due to long-tail BI/IC queries; ANN-Benchmarks reaches Recall@10 >= 99% at thousand-level QPS after a bridge-edge protection fix. In a five-domain counterfactual experiment (n = 1250), DaoQL+GPT-4o achieves 94% composable counterfactual decomposability, 49 percentage points above GPT-4o alone. The paper explicitly separates provable structure, preliminary empirical evidence, and architectural roadmap claims.
Zhanbo Li, Shifeng Wu, Xiangjin Meng +1
Jul 18, 2026cs.LG

Half the Experts, All the Code: One-Shot Domain Pruning of Mixture-of-Experts LLMs for Coding

The strongest open-weight coding models are mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks: most of their size comes from large pools of "expert" subnetworks, of which only a few act on any token. That pool is why these models do not fit on the machines most developers own, yet for a user who only wants coding help, most experts encode abilities that will never be invoked. We ask how many experts can be removed, and which, by pruning two recent open-weight MoE models from different families (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Gemma-4-26B-A4B) under five selection strategies, judged the way a user would: by whether the model still writes correct code. Half the experts can be removed from either model with no statistically detectable loss on the primary code benchmark, and the damage lands almost entirely on abilities outside coding, the intended trade. But the winning strategy flips between the two models, so a recipe validated on one family cannot be assumed to work on another. We further show that perplexity, the metric much of the pruning literature leans on, can rate a broken model above an intact one; that a lightweight fine-tune recovers about half of what aggressive pruning loses; and that against quantizing the full model to the same memory, pruning wins only where quantization would have to drop below 3 bits per weight. Five attempts to overturn that crossover, with failure criteria fixed in advance (better calibration, guarded selection, causal expert importance, failure attribution, and an agentic evaluation letting each model repair its failures from execution feedback), all leave it standing; the last shows single-shot benchmarks overstate compression penalties broadly, as one repair turn erases the 2-bit quantization penalty entirely. Expert pruning works, but it demands per-model validation on the task the model will actually serve.
Anik Jha
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Barnamala: Parameter-Efficient Handwritten Devanagari Recognition at Benchmark Saturation

We built a compact convolutional network (1.11 M parameters) for 46-class DHCD Devanagari recognition and reached 99.73%, the highest reported at 15.6x smaller than prior state-of-the-art. We have effectively reached the saturation point: every model tested, large teacher ensembles included, hits the same 11-error intrinsic floor. No configuration achieves a statistically clear win under exact McNemar tests with Wilson confidence intervals. Even without knowledge distillation, our student matches the nearest large-model baseline (17.32 M parameters; McNemar p=0.345p = 0.345). Outside of DHCD, zero-shot on CMATERdb digits gives 76.6% and fine-tuning reaches 97.8%; corruption robustness is also far better than large baselines (mean corruption accuracy 75.7% vs. 38.7%). All artifacts are at https://github.com/Ampixa/barnamala.
Ashish Thapa, Samrat Karki
Jul 14, 2026cs.IR

ViHoRec: A Quality-Controlled Vietnamese Hotel Recommendation Dataset and Cold-Start Benchmark

Recommender-system research for Vietnamese remains limited by the absence of a public, well-documented hotel interaction resource. Building such a resource is challenging for three reasons: cross-platform hotel names must be reconciled before interactions are comparable; quality must be audited with reproducible metrics rather than ad hoc cleaning; and public release must preserve privacy while remaining benchmarkable under realistic cold-start conditions. We introduce ViHoRec, a quality-controlled Vietnamese hotel recommendation dataset of 18{,}267 interactions between 6{,}832 users and 560 hotels, crawled from Booking.com, Traveloka, and Ivivu. Our contributions are: (i) a reproducible construction pipeline with cross-platform entity resolution and quantitative quality control; (ii) a privacy-preserving release with HMAC pseudonyms; and (iii) a public cold-start benchmark with temporal leave-last-one-out split, data-centric ablations, and dependency-free baselines. On the public split, learned models degrade sharply for users with short histories (BPR-MF Recall@10: 0.065 vs. 0.120), while UserKNN remains strongest overall, establishing ViHoRec as a sparse, cold-start-dominated testbed for low-resource recommendation. All data are publicly available at https://github.com/MinhNguyenDS/ViHoRec.
Minh Hoang Nguyen
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

AdvancedMathBench: A Benchmark Suite for Advanced Mathematical Proof Generation and Verification

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on high-school and olympiad-style mathematics, yet their capabilities on advanced mathematics remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks, however, fall short in both scope and evaluation granularity: they provide limited disciplinary coverage and often rely on final-answer correctness or coarse judgments, leaving the validity of the reasoning process inadequately assessed. To bridge this gap, we introduce AdvancedMathBench, a benchmark suite designed to evaluate advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. Its core proof-generation benchmark, ProverBench, contains 296 problems spanning undergraduate and doctoral qualifying-exam levels. To provide reliable evaluation of the proofs, we develop a dedicated automatic verification pipeline trained on large-scale expert annotations to produce both correctness verdicts and fine-grained assessments of proof errors, which exhibits strong agreement with human experts on held-out proof trajectories. We further introduce VerifierBench, consisting of 888 model-generated proof trajectories paired with expert ground truth, to evaluate whether models can correctly judge proof validity and provide sound verification rationales. Experiments show that AdvancedMathBench remains challenging for frontier models. On proof generation, the best-performing model, GPT-5.5-xhigh, achieves only 75.8 and 66.1 on the UGD and QE splits, respectively, indicating substantial room for improvement on advanced mathematical proof construction. On proof verification, the best model attains a Balanced F1 of only 65.1, and models generally exhibit low true negative rates, suggesting that critical error detection remains a major bottleneck.
Lingkai Kong, Zijian Wu, Yuzhe Gu +10
Jul 13, 2026cs.CR

Baselines Before Architecture: Evaluating Coding Agents for Autonomous Penetration Testing

Recent autonomous penetration testing papers report high benchmark scores while adding multi-component security harnesses around frontier LLMs. Because these systems often change both architecture and backbone model, it is difficult to tell how much performance comes from the harness rather than from the underlying model. This paper presents a controlled study on the 104-task XBOW benchmark using default coding CLI agents as plain-agent baselines. We first run Codex, OpenCode, and Pi with the same GPT-5 model, budget, target interface, and scoring rule. This phase identifies the strongest same-model baseline and tests whether security-specific prompt variants improve its observed score. We then compare the default Codex scaffold with published MAPTA and PentestGPT V2 results under the closest available model matches. Finally, we repeat the plain-agent experiment with GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.5 to measure model scaling inside the same scaffold. The results show a mixed but practical picture. Specialised harnesses can add measurable benchmark lift and may improve cost efficiency, but plain coding agents already solve a large share of the benchmark; repeated plain-agent runs can match or exceed some published architecture scores in union coverage, and newer models substantially improve the same scaffold. Future evaluations should report model-matched plain-agent baselines before attributing benchmark gains to architecture design alone.
Ananda Dhakal, Krish Neupane, Aarjan Chaudhary
Jul 13, 2026cs.SE

An Empirical Study for Android-to-OpenHarmony GUI Test Migration

To reduce the substantial engineering effort required to test the corresponding applications from Android to OpenHarmony, migrating existing GUI test cases has become a critical problem. However, current research neither proposes solutions tailored for OpenHarmony nor provides a systematic evaluation of migration approaches on this system, leaving developers with limited empirical guidance in practice. In this paper, we present the first systematic empirical study of test migration from Android to OpenHarmony. Specifically, we first construct a dataset referred to as the ATH Benchmark, comprising 36 commercial applications with an average of over 9 billion downloads, along with 108 manually designed test cases. Second, we select two state-of-the-art test migration approaches (i.e., ReSPlay and ITeM) and adapt these two approaches to enable their execution on OpenHarmony. Third, we use the preceding infrastructure to evaluate these two approaches from three perspectives, including testing performance, root causes of failures, and the impact of OpenHarmony characteristics. Our results reveal that existing test migration approaches are less effective (15% success-rate on ReSPlay and 26% success-rate on ITeM) in Android-to-OpenHarmony scenarios. Through an in-depth analysis of failed cases, we identify that test performance is primarily hindered by OpenHarmony-specific characteristics, including technical architecture differences and unique ecosystem traits. Utilizing these findings, we propose an enhanced approach based on ITeM, referred as ITeM-HM, which incorporates specific OpenHarmony system features. As a result, ITeM-HM successfully achieves a 214% success-rate relative improvement over the original ITeM (from 26% to 81%).
Yakun Zhang, Xinjia Chen, Yiyun Chen +6
Jul 9, 2026cs.RO

DexVerse: A Modular Benchmark for Multi-Task, Multi-Embodiment Dexterous Manipulation

Building general-purpose dexterous manipulation policies requires benchmarks that go beyond isolated tasks to systematically evaluate policies across diverse interaction modes, sensory conditions, and robot embodiments. However, existing benchmarks remain limited in task and data diversity, embodiment coverage, or controllable visual variation, hindering studies of cross-task and cross-embodiment generalization. We present DexVerse, a large-scale and modular benchmark for dexterous manipulation. DexVerse includes 100 tasks spanning a broad range of manipulation skills, including object grasping and relocation, articulated-object interaction, functional tool use, bimanual coordination, non-prehensile control, contact-rich behaviors, multi-goal execution, and long-horizon multi-stage task completion. It supports 3 robot arms and 6 dexterous hands, and is extensible to new tasks, assets, and embodiments. To evaluate visuomotor generalization, DexVerse provides configurable visual variations in textures, background, lighting, and camera viewpoints. We further provide a VR-based teleoperation interface and 3,180 demonstrations with synchronized proprioceptive, RGB, depth, point-cloud, and state observations. We benchmark representative methods, including Diffusion Policy, DP3, OpenVLA, and π0.5π_{0.5}, across 19 tasks. Results reveal substantial challenges in task generalization and visuomotor robustness, establishing DexVerse as a promising testbed for general-purpose dexterous manipulation. Project page: https://ycyao216.github.io/DexVerse.site
Yunchao Yao, Zhuxiu Xu, Tianqi Zhang +12
Jul 9, 2026cs.LG

Stop Guessing When to Stop Testing: Efficient Model Evaluation with Just Enough Data

The inherent rigidity of fixed-size benchmarks makes them an inefficient tool for model evaluation. Diverse evaluation objectives, including model ranking, model selection and testing throughout development, demand varying levels of statistical power. The mismatch between fixed sample sizes and these diverse needs results in either excessive computational cost or compromised reliability - a critical concern for model evaluation. To overcome these limitations, we call for adoption of sequential testing in our field. We provide an adaptive evaluation framework, that provides a principled way to navigate the trade-off between efficiency and reliability in model evaluation. Our framework combines the established statistical paradigm of sequential testing with stopping criteria tailored to common evaluation needs such as diminishing returns detection, and minimum detectable effect size. We demonstrate its ability to adaptively manage the efficiency-reliability trade-off on the Open VLM Leaderboard, including, for example, a 80% reduction in computational cost compared to fixed-size evaluation (with a 2.5-point CI width allowance) while maintaining statistical significance.
Ofir Arviv, Kristjan Greenewald, Yotam Perlitz +3
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

LEMUR 2: Unlocking Neural Network Diversity for AI

Existing NAS benchmarks (e.g., NAS-Bench, NATS-Bench) cover only narrow, task-specific regions of the architectural design space and lack cross-domain or deployment-aware evaluation. LEMUR 2 introduces a large-scale, extensible framework unifying generative, evaluative, and deployment pipelines to unlock neural-network diversity. It comprises over 14,000 distinct architectures and more than 750,000 structured training records documenting model performance, hyperparameters, and task outcomes. These models were produced through AST-based code mutation, genetic and reinforcement-learning evolution, generation of fractal architectures, and synthesis guided by a Large Language Model (LLM). This includes deep models generated with the retrieval-augmented system NN-RAG, which derived and used architectural motifs from over 900 PyTorch modules extracted from public repositories. LEMUR 2 further employs NN-VR and NN-Lite pipelines for automated deployment and latency benchmarking on heterogeneous mobile and Unity-based VR platforms, providing real-device performance metadata. It spans multimodal tasks, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, and language modeling, supporting cross-domain analysis of architectural transferability. By linking diverse architectures, tasks, and deployment data, LEMUR 2 provides the data foundation for LLM fine-tuning and coupling diverse architectural origins with large-scale, cross-platform empirical validation. This dataset defines a new basis for reproducible and data-driven AI design, advancing the emerging paradigm of LLM-driven AutoML and architectural generalization across modalities and hardware.
Tolgay Atinc Uzun, Waleed Khalid, Saif U Din +17
Jul 7, 2026cs.AI

Evaluating SageMath-Augmented LLM Agents for Computational and Experimental Mathematics

Recent advances in AI for Mathematics have focused largely on autoformalization and theorem proving, leaving the role of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in agentic LLM workflows underexplored. We propose a ReAct-style agentic setup that combines LLM reasoning with verifiable feedback from SageMath, together with Context7 for the up-to-date documentation. We evaluate this agentic setup across frontier models for solving research-level mathematical problems from the RealMath benchmark in a setting that emulates a computational-mathematics research loop. We also propose a refinement to the RealMath benchmark by introducing a multi-step post-processing procedure and a multi-stage validation pipeline, both of which improve the quality and reliability of the extracted problem set. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gains from SageMath access across all evaluated models on +9.7pp on average, the gains range from 1.5pp to 27.8pp and narrow the gap between open-weight and closed models. Qwen3.7-Max benefits from SageMath the most, while GPT-5.5 achieves the highest solve rate of 75.2%75.2\% and the lowest token usage among tool-enabled configurations. Our findings suggest that CAS-augmented agents represent a promising direction for assisting mathematicians in computational exploration, and we believe that this work is a step towards automated conjecture discovery. The project repository is available online.
Pavel Snopov, German Magai
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

AbICL: In-Context Learning for Antigen-Specific Antibody Affinity Ranking

Accurate ranking of antibody candidates according to their binding affinity is essential for therapeutic antibody discovery. However, existing methods treat affinity comparisons independently and ignore the contextual information encoded in other labeled comparisons, limiting their ability to capture antigen-specific binding landscapes. For many target antigens, a small number of experimentally characterized affinity comparisons are often available. An important question is whether the model can exploit these existing comparisons to infer antigen-specific ranking patterns that facilitate subsequent affinity ranking. This form of learning from labeled demonstrations closely resembles the paradigm of In-Context Learning, motivating us to revisit antibody affinity ranking from an ICL perspective. To this end, we propose AbICL, an ICL framework for antigen-specific antibody affinity ranking. AbICL combines a pretrained structural encoder with a context ranking head and is trained with an episodic meta-training strategy that enables the model to leverage support demonstrations for test-time adaptation without gradient updates. Experiments on the AbRank benchmark demonstrate that AbICL consistently outperforms existing ranking baselines across almost all data splits and evaluation benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the value of contextual demonstrations depends on how well they match the target inference task, and becomes increasingly pronounced under distribution shift and fine-grained affinity discrimination. These findings highlight the potential of ICL as an effective paradigm for antigen-specific antibody affinity ranking, particularly in challenging settings where a single global ranking function is insufficient.
Zhiyuan Chen, Jing Hu, Junzhe Wang +4
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

FORGE: Towards Functional Tool-Use Generalization via Keypoint Trajectory Reasoning

While humans readily repurpose a book, a stone, or a shoe to drive a nail, robots trained on specific tools fail to transfer the same function to novel ones -- a gap we formalize as functional generalization. Such tools share a common functional intent that is visually recognizable, yet this perceptual similarity does not carry over to action space, where each tool demands an entirely different motor pattern. To bridge this gap, we explore intermediate representations including affordance images, human video prompts, and 2D keypoint trajectories, finding that keypoint trajectories best balance functional expressiveness and action groundability. Building on this, we propose FunctiOnal Reasoning and Grounded Execution (FORGE), a two-stage policy that decouples functional reasoning from action execution: predicting generalizable keypoint trajectories from action-free data, then grounding them into robot actions with limited demonstrations. On a seven-tool hitting-function benchmark, FORGE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on unseen tools in both simulation and the real world, achieving over 2X improvement in average success rate.
Chuhao Zhou, Liquan Wang, Shuxin Cao +5
Jul 4, 2026cs.AI

Robust Feasible Route Construction through Collaborative Partition Optimization

Large-scale Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRPs) are commonly solved by partitioning customers into smaller routing problems that can be optimized independently. While this substantially reduces computational complexity, independently constructed routing solutions may leave some customer demand unserved even when sufficient resources exist elsewhere in the fleet. We present Collaborative Routing Constructors (CoRC), a routing framework that enables independently solved subproblems to exchange customers and vehicles during optimization rather than relying solely on a fixed partition or a subsequent global re-optimization stage. Computational experiments on AGS benchmark instances and synthetic instances containing up to 200,000 customers compare CoRC against independent routing, post-routing global re-optimization, and state-of-the-art, end-to-end routing frameworks. Across all evaluated partitioning strategies, CoRC consistently constructs feasible routing solutions where competing partition-based methods do not. Furthermore, it remains effective on problem instances for which the evaluated end-to-end routing frameworks did not produce solutions under the same computational budget. These results demonstrate that collaboration between routing subproblems provides a robust and scalable approach for feasible large-scale route construction.
Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu, Hyong Kim
Jul 4, 2026cs.DB

A Fair Benchmarking of Deep Relational Database Learning Models

Relational databases (RDBs) are the primary data infrastructure in many enterprises, yet recent deep learning methods designed for RDBs have been evaluated under inconsistent experimental protocols, making fair comparison difficult. We present one of the first systematic benchmarking studies of recently released deep learning methods for RDBs, evaluating them across five relational databases, with one classification and one regression task for each. We refactor all deep RDB models to allow the full range of experimental procedures to be applied consistently across all methods. Our findings indicate that the relational transformer (RT) approach delivers the strongest overall performance on both classification and regression tasks compared to the state-of-the-art graph-based modeling and learning of RDBs. Even for single-table learning tasks, deep learning methods designed for RDBs outperform the leading tabular foundation model, TabPFN 2.5. Extending learning from a single table (hop = 0) to multiple tables (hop = 1, 2) by connecting neighboring tables in relational databases enhances performance, but the additional benefit from higher hops diminishes as computational overhead grows. Deep RDB learning methods have the potential to challenge state-of-the-art tabular foundation models, especially on large-scale enterprise data. The source code for this benchmarking study is publicly available.
Kazi F. Akhter, Bharath Ajendla, Manar D. Samad
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

PACE: A Proxy for Agentic Capability Evaluation

Evaluating LLM agents on benchmarks like SWE-Bench and GAIA can be expensive, time-consuming, and requires complex infrastructure. A single evaluation can cost thousands of dollars and take days to complete. In contrast, non-agentic LLM benchmarks that test individual capabilities (e.g., reasoning, code generation) are fast and cheap to run. In this paper, we investigate whether performance on expensive agentic benchmarks can be accurately predicted by the performance on a small, carefully selected subset of atomic evaluation instances. We introduce PACE, a framework that constructs proxy benchmarks by selecting instances from existing non-agentic evaluations whose aggregate scores most reliably predict model performances on agentic benchmarks. Given a pool of candidate instances spanning atomic capabilities, PACE fits a regression that maps a model's scores on a compact subset of source instances to its score on the target agentic benchmark. The subset itself is curated by combining two complementary instance-selection strategies, target-relevance local selection and globally informative global selection. We apply PACE to the 4 target agentic benchmarks in this paper, which yields PACE-Bench, the concrete proxy benchmark that we evaluate in the paper. Experiments across 14 models, 4 agentic benchmarks, and 19 non-agentic benchmarks show that PACE-Bench predicts agentic scores with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) mean absolute error (MAE) under 4%, Spearman correlation above 0.80, and pairwise model-ranking accuracy around 85%, all at much less than 1% of the full agentic evaluation cost. We further analyze the selected proxy instances, revealing which skills each agentic benchmark uniquely demands. PACE enables practitioners to obtain reliable estimates of agentic performance during model development, selection, and routing, without the overhead of full agent evaluation.
Yueqi Song, Lintang Sutawika, Jiarui Liu +8
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

HealthAgentBench: A Unified Benchmark Suite of Realistic Agentic Healthcare Environments for Challenging Frontier AI Agents

As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex, long-horizon reasoning, rigorous and holistic evaluation is essential for measuring progress toward real-world healthcare applications. We introduce HealthAgentBench, a suite of 54 agentic healthcare tasks across 7 categories each with its unique environment. The benchmark suite spans diverse workflows throughout the patient journey and a broad range of modalities. Each task is designed to replicate an end-to-end clinical workflow: given minimal instructions, an agent must explore raw healthcare data, operate within a complex environment, and execute multi-step solutions that go beyond naive prompting. A final task success rate is reported to provide a single, interpretable metric for HealthAgentBench overall performance for each agent. Evaluating frontier agents on HealthAgentBench, we find that overall task success rate remains low, underscoring the difficulty of the suite. The strongest and the most cost effective agent, Codex GPT-5.5, achieves only approximately 42% success rate. Beyond aggregate performance, HealthAgentBench reveals nuanced strengths and weaknesses across task categories. Frontier agents show promise in automatically developing research modeling pipelines over EHR data, but medical imaging remains especially challenging, particularly for Claude Code models, while Codex GPT-5.5 shows emerging capability. Tasks that combine large search spaces with compositional reasoning requirements remain difficult for all current agents. Together, these results suggest that HealthAgentBench provides a challenging and realistic benchmark with substantial room for future progress. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/microsoft/HealthAgentBench.
Qianchu Liu, Sheng Zhang, Guanghui Qin +16
Jun 26, 2026physics.comp-ph

Mosaic: A Benchmark Suite for Differentiable Physics Solvers

Differentiable partial differential equation (PDE) solvers underpin solver-in-the-loop ML training, gradient-based optimal control, and inverse problems, yet the practical cost of obtaining correct, usable gradients from a given solver on a given problem is largely undocumented. Integration effort, computational cost, gradient accuracy, and numerical conditioning vary widely across solvers and are discoverable only by trial and error. We introduce Mosaic, an extensible benchmarking framework for differentiable PDE solvers that standardizes access to solver gradients. Each solver is packaged as a containerized component (Tesseract) exposing a uniform gradient API regardless of language or automatic differentiation (AD) strategy, enabling researchers to evaluate, compare, and build on non-trivial physical solvers. Our evaluation of 14 solvers across fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and heat transfer demonstrates that the benchmark surfaces practically relevant differences: order-of-magnitude variation in computational cost and Jacobian conditioning, alongside structural incompatibilities that eliminate solvers from realistic tasks entirely. Despite this variation, all solvers that produce gradients converge to similar optima, indicating that the practical barriers are memory limits, numerical stability, and setup compatibility rather than gradient accuracy alone. Mosaic is open-source and available at https://github.com/pasteurlabs/mosaic.
Andrin Rehmann, Heiko Zimmermann, Dion Häfner
Jun 25, 2026cs.CR

Adaptive Evaluation of Out-of-Band Defenses Against Prompt Injection in LLM Agents

Recent work (2024 to 2026) has converged on a strategy for defending tool-using LLM agents against indirect prompt injection: rather than training the model to refuse malicious instructions, enforce security outside the model with a deterministic policy that mediates the agent's actions. Systems such as CaMeL, FIDES, Progent, RTBAS, and FORGE realize this with capabilities, information-flow labels, and reference monitors, and several report near-elimination of attacks on the AgentDojo benchmark. We make two contributions. First, we organize these out-of-band defenses as instances of classical integrity protection (Biba), reference monitoring, and least privilege, yielding a structured comparison of what they do and do not cover. Second, we warn that every one of them is validated only on static benchmarks (a fixed set of injection attempts), the same methodology that made in-band defenses look strong until adaptive, defense-aware attacks broke twelve of them at over 90% success; we specify the threat model and protocol an adaptive evaluation requires. We then run that protocol as an independent reproduction and extension of Progent's own adaptive-attack analysis, on AgentDojo, with an open-weight agent (Qwen2.5-7B) self-hosted on a single H200, a setting its authors did not test. Averaged over three runs, the defense held: Progent cut mean attack success roughly sixfold (25.8% to 4.2%), and a hand-crafted adaptive attack did not raise it (2.6%). This is one small-scale data point on a weak model with a single black-box attack template; a stronger optimized (white-box GCG) attack remains open. The result is consistent with, but does not establish, the hypothesis that deterministic out-of-band enforcement is a harder target for an adaptive attacker than in-band detection.
Praneeth Narisetty, Shiva Nagendra Babu Kore, Uday Kumar Reddy Kattamanchi +1
Jun 24, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Function Calling: Benchmarking Tool-Using Agents under Tool-Environment Unreliability

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that solve tasks by interacting with external tool environments. Although recent tool-use benchmarks increasingly cover complex task settings, they still largely assume clean, stable, and trustworthy tool environments, leaving tool-environment unreliability insufficiently examined. We introduce ToolBench-X, a benchmark for evaluating agents under recoverable reliability hazards. ToolBench-X contains executable multi-step tasks across diverse domains and sequential, parallel, and mixed workflows, each paired with deterministic tools and a canonical final answer for automatic evaluation. Starting from clean tool environments, ToolBench-X injects five structured hazard types: Specification Drift, Invocation Error, Execution Failure, Output Drift, and Cross-source Conflict. Crucially, each injected instance remains solvable through at least one valid recovery path, such as retrying, fallback, verification, or cross-checking. Experiments reveal a substantial reliability gap: agents that perform well with reliable tools often fail under recoverable hazards. Further analysis shows that failures are driven less by tool-use volume or inference budget than by limited hazard diagnosis and ineffective recovery. Targeted recovery hints recover many failed tasks, while test-time scaling yields more limited gains. These results suggest that tool-use evaluation should move beyond function-call accuracy toward task completion under unreliable tool environments. The code and data is available at https://github.com/Foreverskyou/ToolBench-X.
Yang Tian, Zhengpeng Shi, Yu Zhou +1
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

Life After Benchmark Saturation: A Case Study of CORE-Bench

When a benchmark's accuracy saturates, it is often retired and replaced with a more challenging version. We show that this approach privileges accuracy and misses the opportunity to study six other key dimensions of agent performance: construct validity issues such as shortcuts, out-of-distribution generalizability, efficiency, reliability, the relative importance of the model versus the scaffold, and uplift from human-agent collaboration. We use CORE-Bench Hard, a benchmark for computational reproducibility of scientific code, as a case study to demonstrate that measuring agents along these dimensions yields meaningful insights into agent performance even after accuracy saturates. First, we surface threats to construct validity in CORE-Bench Hard that are difficult to anticipate with less capable agents. We introduce an improved benchmark, CORE-Bench v1.1, and an out-of-distribution task suite, CORE-Bench OOD. Second, we find that despite accuracy saturation, CORE-Bench v1.1 remains useful for measuring efficiency, reliability, model performance, and scaffold performance. Finally, we conduct a small-scale randomized experiment to measure uplift from human-agent collaboration on real-world computational reproducibility tasks. We find a statistically significant speedup by about a factor of two -- likely underestimated due to one-fifth of human-only reproductions reaching the time limit before completing -- and describe various other findings. Together, our contributions present a more rigorous alternative to the dominant accuracy-centric evaluation paradigm.
Nitya Nadgir, Sayash Kapoor, Kangheng Liu +11
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

IPO Finance Agent: Benchmark of LLM Financial Analysts Beyond Finance Agent v2, with Automated Rubric Generation, on the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO

Finance Agent v2 (by Vals AI) has emerged as the reference benchmark for evaluating both Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT frontier language models on financial tasks. However, it narrowly deals with periodic reporting from publicly traded companies (SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings), and its agentic harness relies on naive, unenriched chunk retrieval. Neither the task design nor the retrieval approach addresses the distinct challenges of IPO due diligence. SEC S-1 filings combine historical financial statements, governance structures, pro forma and common-control accounting treatments, capital-formation narratives, and underwriting-sensitive risk disclosures within substantially longer documents than typical periodic filings. That is why we introduce IPO Finance Agent, which extends the Finance Agent v2 framework along two directions: task domain and retrieval architecture. During our experiments, the original Finance Agent v2 harness basically failed to deliver any output related to the SpaceX S-1 filing, due to document length. We therefore had to improve the agentic harness with contextual retrieval, a more realistic and industry-standard approach for long documents. We also built a dataset of 1,000 IPO-diligence questions, and publicly release 70 questions on the SpaceX (SPCX) S-1 filing to support reproducibility, while the remainder are held private to guard against benchmark contamination. In addition, we introduce an evaluator-optimizer pipeline to automatically generate evaluation rubrics for the benchmark: candidate facts are extracted from model answers, consolidated into draft criteria, then automatically audited for omissions, hallucinations, mistiered items, and redundancy, with LLM feedback driving iterative repair, targeted enrichment, and deduplication. Human experts only review final rubrics before deployment. Results show that the best-performing evaluated model, Zhipu GLM-5.2, reaches 79.8% accuracy, and the most cost-efficient model on the resulting Pareto frontier, Xiaomi MiMo-2.5 Pro, reaches slightly lower accuracy (77.2%) at 0.05 USD per query, while exceeding the current Finance Agent v2 leaderboard ceiling, Google Gemini 3.5 Flash at 57.9% for 2.51 USD per query, and undercutting even FABv2's cheapest entry (MiniMax M3: 48.3% at 0.32 USD) on cost-efficiency. Code and data are released on GitHub https://github.com/benstaf/ipoagent
Mostapha Benhenda
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

MINCE: Shrinking LLM Evaluation Datasets via Few-Model Monte Carlo Calibration

Evaluating LLMs across many model variants -- quantized, fine-tuned, or deployment-specific -- requires running large benchmarks repeatedly, a process that can take tens of hours per model on edge hardware such as NPUs. Existing subset selection methods reduce this cost but depend on large calibration pools or learned prediction layers. We introduce MINCE (Monte Carlo Informed N-sizing for Compact Evaluation), which uses Monte Carlo simulation over per-item logs from a small set of calibration models to find the minimum subset size that bounds accuracy drift and then fixes a randomly sampled subset at that size, with no prediction layer needed. MINCE reduces IFEVAL by 54%, MMLU by 89%, and GSM8K by 70% with maximum drift \leq2.62,pp on BF16 models and mean drift of 0.77--3.59,pp on held-out NPU models, while delivering median GPU evaluation speedups of 2.7--8.1×\times and NPU evaluation speedups of 1.7--2.0×\times. The method is robust to calibration pool size and achieves lower drift than tinyBenchmarks (12×\times lower on MMLU, 3.3×\times on GSM8K) while using 57×\times fewer calibration models.
Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Vikram Kumar Bukka +3
Jun 20, 2026eess.AS

How Well Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Encode Age and Gender in Children's Speech? A Layer-Wise Analysis Across Multiple Architectures

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have become a central component of modern speech processing systems, as they enable the learning of rich acoustic representations without reliance on labeled data. Despite their success on adult speech, it remains unclear how effectively these models capture speaker-related attributes such as age and gender in children's speech, which differs substantially from adult speech due to ongoing physiological and cognitive development. Higher pitch, increased articulatory variability, and age-dependent acoustic changes make children's speech a particularly challenging domain. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of how age and gender information is encoded across layers of four widely used SSL models: Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, Data2Vec, and WavLM. Layer-wise features are extracted and evaluated using a lightweight CNN on two benchmark children's speech corpora, PFSTAR and CMU Kids. To analyze feature compactness and redundancy, PCA is applied to identify redundancy and highlight the dimensions that contribute most to classification performance. Experimental results show that age- and gender-related information is unevenly distributed across SSL layers, with early to mid-level layers encoding the strongest paralinguistic cues. HuBERT achieves the best overall performance for age classification, while Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT lead gender classification on PFSTAR and CMU Kids, respectively. Beyond single-split evaluation, we further demonstrate that these findings remain stable under speaker-wise cross-validation, layer aggregation, and cross-database evaluation, indicating robustness to data imbalance and domain mismatch. Finally, we show that reliable age and gender classification is achievable even from short speech segments of 1--3 seconds.
Abhijit Sinha, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Mohit Joshi +3
Jun 20, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Value Benchmarks: Measuring Value-Structure Alignment in Large Language Models via Symmetric Q-Sorts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in contexts requiring complex moral reasoning and value trade-offs. However, existing evaluations typically rely on item-level behavioral metrics, which fail to capture how models structurally prioritize competing values as a cohesive system. To address this, we propose a symmetric human-LLM evaluation framework, grounded in Q methodology, to measure value-structure alignment. Under our protocol, humans and models sort an identical 140-item moral statement set into a shared nine-column forced distribution; for LLMs, we elicit strict rankings and deterministically map them to Q-sort buckets. Using a human reference sample (N=35N=35), we establish a stable three-factor reference geometry specific to this instrument and sample. We evaluate 12 LLMs across four model families via 240 replicated Q-sorts at two temperature settings, quantifying structural alignment via Procrustes similarity (φφ) and RSA-based Spearman correlation (ρρ). Our results reveal significant cross-family heterogeneity, model-specific sensitivity to generation stochasticity and localized misalignment, which demonstrate that favorable global scores can obscure underlying regional distortions. While rank- and bucket-based analyses remain highly consistent, prompt phrasing introduces notable variance. Ultimately, assessing value-structure alignment provides a crucial structural complement to traditional itemwise moral benchmarks.
Jingting Zheng, Yuqi Ren, Linhao Yu +2
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Is Our Benchmark Enough? An Analysis of Continual Learning for MLLMs

Continual adaptation is essential for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deployed across evolving domains, but the state-of-the-art MR-LoRA method highly relies on the assumption that a MLLM-based router is necessary to process complex multimodal inputs. This paper revisits this claim on the MLLM-CL benchmark and argues for two claims. \textbf{First}, routing does not require an MLLM: a simple training-free, replay-free ptotypical routing method (\textsc{RePRo}), uses frozen pretrained features and task prototypes to match the MLLM-based router of MR-LoRA at far lower computational cost. \textbf{Second}, shared experts do not improve continual learning for MLLMs, despite their theoretical appeal. We show that these findings arise from two structural limitations of MLLM-CL: (1) its tasks are \textbf{highly separable} in representation space, and (2) its fixed task order makes conclusions \textbf{sensitive to a single curriculum} rather than robust across diverse continual-learning trajectories. As a result, the benchmark primarily rewards learning in isolation rather than genuine continual transfer. This motivates a new design for future benchmarks of continual MLLM learning, with overlapping task manifolds, multiple task orders, fine-grained domain shifts, and evaluation protocols that reward forward transfer as well as retention.
Van-Tuan Tran, Shruthi Gowda, Merim Dzaferagic +1