Human-Annotated Benchmark

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233 papers

Latest in Human-Annotated Benchmark

Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

DocAttriBench: Benchmarking Answer Grounding in Document Visual Question Answering

Answer grounding in document visual question answering remains an open challenge: most benchmarks lack grounding annotations or provide limited-quality labels, while constructing grounded datasets still requires costly manual effort. We introduce DocAttriBench (DAB), a large-scale benchmark for fine-grained, element-level source attribution in Document VQA, grounding answers to specific layout elements such as text blocks, tables, and images. To build DAB, we propose a Mask-based Perplexity-Derived Attribution method (MAPPET) that combines document layout and language modeling to identify the most informative element for each answer. MAPPET measures the increase in perplexity after masking candidate elements and attributes the answer to the element contributing most to model confidence. Applying MAPPET to multiple existing Document VQA datasets yields DAB, with 237k documents and 296k question-answer pairs with element-level grounding. We benchmark grounding-capable multimodal LLMs on DAB, evaluating answer accuracy, attribution accuracy, and overall answer quality. Results show that while larger models generally achieve higher answer accuracy, even the strongest models often fail to localize the supporting elements. DAB provides a scalable benchmark for developing grounded, verifiable, and trustworthy Document VQA models. Dataset and code are available at https://aimagelab.github.io/DocAttriBench/.
Luca De Grandis, Silvia Cappelletti, William Raccagni +3
Sep 17, 2026cs.SE

DeltaSelect: Affordable A/B Testing for Coding Agents

Coding-agent benchmarks are built for broad and comprehensive comparisons, not frequent development decisions. Individual runs vary, full suites are expensive, and the benchmark harness may differ from the harness used in practice. In a resampling analysis of DeepSWE's published trials, only 19.5% of tasks (22 of 113) had a fifth-percentile Pearson correlation of at least 0.50 with full-benchmark performance. The paper presents DeltaSelect, an open-source method that identifies tasks whose one-run results consistently track full-benchmark performance using Pearson correlation, maps fractional verifier results to a common score using linear regression, and selects a fixed task set within a dollar budget. DeltaSelect is intended for repeated baseline-versus-candidate comparisons during development, not model rankings. In a gpt-5.6-luna low-reasoning case study, DeltaSelect was used to revise custom skills and instructions. Across 13 evaluations, the recorded cost was USD 27.86 at rates published August 16, 2026. The adopted version cost 58.1% less than the initial version (USD 1.75 versus USD 4.18; p=0.008), while the calibrated score was higher (42.36% versus 36.46%; published-analog variance p=0.326).
Nicholas J. Conn
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

DynoFluxBench: Benchmarking Kinodynamic Space-Time Planners in Dynamic Environments

Robots that leave structured, static environments must plan motions that are kinodynamically feasible and safe among moving obstacles. However, there are no dedicated benchmark frameworks that combine both aspects. To overcome this, we present DynoFluxBench, a framework to compare kinodynamic planners in known, dynamic environments with unbounded arrival time. To demonstrate its utility and establish strong baselines, we develop three dedicated planners, named ST-Db-RRT, ST-GBRRT, and KIST, that fuse kinodynamic and space-time methods, covering different kinodynamic search paradigms: ST-Db-RRT expands with randomly selected discontinuity-bounded motion primitives using trajectory optimization, whereas KIST and ST-GBRRT maintain a kinodynamically feasible tree with different heuristic guidance. We analyze the probabilistic completeness guarantees of those new planners in dynamic environments. Finally, we evaluate ST-Db-RRT, ST-GBRRT, and KIST using DynoFluxBench, showing that ST-Db-RRT reaches a first solution up to 32 times faster, while KIST and ST-GBRRT remain valuable where trajectory optimization is fragile. Videos and further analysis can be found at https://dynofluxbench.github.io/dynofluxbench/.
Franz Queißner, Andreas Orthey, Wolfgang Hönig
Sep 16, 2026cs.CL

TeochewBench: A Human-Reviewed Benchmark for Teochew Hanzi Translation

Teochew has a substantial speaker community and exhibits distinctive lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic features, yet textual resources for evaluating large language models remain limited. We present TeochewBench, a human-reviewed benchmark comprising 300 Teochew Hanzi expressions for evaluating translation from Teochew Hanzi into Mandarin Chinese and English. The dataset covers five categories: basic vocabulary; everyday sentences; Teochew-specific expressions; tone, politeness, and context; and idiomatic, ambiguous, and culturally specific expressions. A primary Teochew-speaking reviewer examined all entries individually and revised them as needed, while two additional Teochew speakers verified selected items. Our main evaluation covers 11 official general-purpose post-trained models on the reviewed dataset in both translation directions, yielding 6,600 predictions. Two official base checkpoints provide 1,200 predictions for supplementary diagnostics, bringing the total to 13 models and 7,800 predictions. We additionally include a Hanzi-copy control, which returns the source input unchanged, to assess how shared Hanzi affect automatic scores for translation into Mandarin Chinese. Qwen3.5-27B achieved the highest overall chrF-style score among the evaluated checkpoints, at 60.63, followed by Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct at 56.61, Gemma-3-27B-IT at 56.36, and GLM-4-32B-0414 at 55.82. Across the 11 main-evaluation models, the mean chrF-style score decreased from 69.25 for low-specificity items to 27.52 for high-specificity items. High-specificity expressions received lower scores and exhibited smaller cross-model differences, suggesting that they constitute a shared low-scoring region across the model families evaluated here. The Hanzi-copy control further indicates that surface overlap in low-specificity items can substantially affect automatic scores for translation into Mandarin Chinese.
Jianan Wu
Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

AutoTuneBench: Trustworthy Measurement for Agent Auto-Tuning of LLM Serving Engines

Large language model agents tune GPU kernels and serving engines through a closed loop of propose, measure, and keep, but the measurements behind this loop are not trustworthy. We characterize four failure modes from a four-day pilot corpus of 619 model calls: strawman baselines manufacture speedups, absolute times do not transfer across machines, saturated tasks nullify comparisons, and infrastructure defects impersonate science. We present AutoTuneBench, a benchmark and measurement protocol that makes trust architectural. The protocol is frozen as code with test-enforced provenance; a database-level validator rejects out-of-protocol results; anti-cheat checks run outside the agent's modification surface; comparisons follow pre-registered readouts; and measurements anchor to externally published results, grounded in paired-seed statistics with a 5% cross-run coefficient-of-variation cap. Honest measurement rewrites the headlines: our best kernel reads 10.6x against a naive baseline but 2.03x against the honest one; one configuration delivers 1.174x on one machine and 1.0049x on another; a pre-registered on/off comparison nulls at a shared wall (2.4840 vs 2.4957,ms); and the KernelBench Level-1 suite admits 51% of tasks with median speedup 1.0001x over PyTorch eager. The protocol, the two-engine corpus (vLLM and SGLang), and its audit trail are released as open artifacts.
Li Chen
Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Map2Route: Benchmarking Compositional Language-Grounded Route Planning over Semantic Maps

We introduce Map2Route, a human-curated benchmark for compositional language-grounded route planning over pre-built semantic maps. Map2Route contains 1,000 episodes across 40 scenes, where instructions use relational, comparative, and nested descriptions to identify route-relevant objects and regions, while specifying ordered must-pass regions, must-avoid requirements, five categories of soft preferences, and spatial and route-stage scopes, which is partially tested by existing works. Alongside Map2Route, we propose Grounding2Route, which combines executable code-as-grounding with verification-guided repair and scope-aware planning.Across seven representative adapted baselines, Grounding2Route substantially outperforms existing methods in all metrics. Despite these gains, a substantial gap to human demonstrations remains, highlighting the difficulty of Map2Route and the considerable headroom for future progress. Additional qualitative results and resources are available on https://anonymous.4open.science/w/Map2Route-F05F/.
Muyi Bao, Hang Xu, Jingfan Tang +5
Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

The Neverwhere Visual Parkour Benchmark Suite

State-of-the-art visual locomotion controllers are increasingly capable at handling complex visual environments, making evaluating their real-world performance before deployment increasingly difficult. This work intends to narrow this train/evaluation gap by developing a collection of hyper-photo-realistic, closed-loop evaluation environments - The Neverwhere Benchmark Suite - comprised of over sixty 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of urban indoor and outdoor scenes. Our goal is to encourage large-scale and reproducible robot evaluation by making it easier to create and integrate Gaussian splats-based reconstructions into simulated continuous testing setups. We also underscore the potential pitfalls of relying exclusively on 3D Gaussian-generated data for training, by providing policy checkpoints trained over multiple Neverwhere scenes and their performance when evaluated in novel scenes. Our analysis illustrates the necessity of sourcing diverse data to ensure performance. Code and data are available on the project page: https://ziyc.github.io/neverwhere-bench/.
Ziyu Chen, Henghui Bao, Haoran Chang +12
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

KnowBench: Effort Reduction as a Unified, Deployment-Grounded Benchmark for Clinical AI

Clinical AI systems are evaluated with instruments built for research settings (reference-based similarity metrics and expert rubric panels) that measure resemblance to an artifact rather than reduction of a burden. We introduce KnowBench, pioneered by Knowtex, whose unifying metric is Effort Reduction (ER): the proportion of system-generated clinical work product accepted by the responsible clinician under expert and safety review. ER is defined once and instantiated per task across the administrative workload clinical AI automates: visit notes, diagnosis and billing codes, orders, EHR chart summarization, patient after-visit summaries, and clinical decision support. In every instantiation the construction is identical: the clinician's review-and-attestation event is the ground truth, every accepted unit is work the system completed, and every correction is residual effort returned to the clinician. The primary contribution of this paper is the benchmark itself: the metric, its degenerate cases, and a reporting protocol under which ER claims are auditable and cross-system comparable. Alongside it we report an initial headline measurement from the documentation instantiation: over one million signed encounters across a production window exceeding six months and thirteen medical specialties, Knowtex's proprietary fine-tuned clinical foundation models operating inside a closed feedback architecture achieve an aggregate ER of 97.99%, with per-specialty aggregates spanning 96.8-98.9%. This release reports the protocol's checklist partially, and states which companion statistics are withheld; the benchmark is offered so that this figure, and every figure reported after it, can be held to the same standard.
Jocelyn Kang, Caroline Zhang
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

MedSNIP: Building and Benchmarking Snippet-Level Granularity for Medical Fact Verification

A medical claim's correctness often depends not on the claim alone, but on the clinical structure around it. A claim may require a lab reference range, a causal or conditional link, or patient-specific details to be judged correctly, and atom-level decomposition can fragment these dependencies, leaving the verifier with clinically incomplete claims. We reformulate medical fact-checking around snippet-level verification, where clause-grouped units preserve local clinical structure. We introduce MedSNIP-Bench, a human-annotated benchmark for snippet-level medical fact verification, and MedSNIP, an automatic snippet-generation pipeline. MedSNIP-Bench covers 276 consumer-health and clinical-vignette responses, segmented into 2,524 snippets with dual in-general and in-patient-context labels and six structural pattern codes. MedSNIP is evaluated against human snippet boundaries on MedSNIP-Bench and then used to generate snippet-level units for external corpora. Across MedSNIP-Bench, HealthFC, and MedHallu, snippet-level verification preserves or improves false-class F1, with gains concentrated where answers are long enough to fragment and where the verifier is strong enough to exploit the recovered structure. The largest merge-pattern gain is on causal-conditional clinical chains. It also reduces verifier calls by 24-73%, though the saving survives end-to-end only when decomposition is cheap, which an open-weight decomposer makes possible at no loss of chunking fidelity.
Hasan Iqbal, Sarfraz Ahmad, Hyunjae Kim +5
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

How Good Are Frontier Models at Physics? Expert Re-Grading Reveals Broken Evaluations and Near-Saturation of Leading Benchmarks

Low reported scores on leading physics benchmarks, including those featured in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026), suggest that frontier language models still struggle with advanced physics, a demanding test of their scientific reasoning and quantitative problem-solving abilities. Yet this impression does not always align with domain experts' experiences using these models in their work. We revisit these reported findings by evaluating frontier models on six widely used physics benchmarks and auditing them with experts, focusing on text-only problems with verifiable final answers. For each subfield of physics, faculty and graduate researchers with relevant expertise carefully review problem statements, reference solutions, and model responses to distinguish genuine model errors from grader errors, incorrect reference solutions, and ambiguous or underspecified questions. Most audited cases initially evaluated as incorrect reflect these benchmarking issues rather than errors in the models' physics reasoning. We then ask experts to address these benchmarking issues by correcting erroneous reference solutions and repairing or excluding flawed questions. We find that GPT-5.6-Sol's measured mean@4 rises from 47.3% to 78.7% on HLE-Physics and from 61.0% to 87.2% on CMT-Benchmark, while its corrected pass@4 reaches 94.4% on the 54 retained CritPt challenges. Corrected scores are computed on the retained evaluation subsets following expert review. Scores on the audited subsets of UGPhysics, PRISM-Physics, and PHYBench also rise substantially after correction. These findings suggest that current benchmarks substantially understate frontier models' ability to solve well-posed physics problems. Near-saturation on these closed-ended tasks highlights the need for more demanding, expert-validated evaluations.
Ali Ansari, Haoran Sun, Andy Zeyi Liu +48
Sep 14, 2026eess.AS

MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant

Conversational voice agents have advanced significantly, offering increasingly natural human-machine interactions through both cascaded and end-to-end architectures. However, while recent benchmarks extensively evaluate dyadic interactions and passive audio comprehension, they largely overlook a prevalent real-world scenario: multi-party conversations. Evaluating agents in these settings is fundamentally more challenging than in dyadic interactions due to the exponentially greater conversational complexity. For voice agents to integrate seamlessly into human group dynamics, they must not only generate contextually appropriate responses but also demonstrate a nuanced understanding of open turn-taking. To address this gap, we introduce Multiparty Bench (MP-Bench), the first benchmark specifically designed to objectively evaluate conversational speech systems as active participants within multi-party contexts. MP-Bench assesses agent behavior along two primary dimensions: turn-taking awareness and response appropriateness. Additionally, we incorporate comprehension-based question-answering tasks as a complementary evaluation. By benchmarking 12 voice agents, we find that real-time voice agents stay at or below 22% on multiparty comprehension and remain near chance on multiparty turn-taking, exposing an open challenge for real-time voice agents under multiparty scenario.
Yi-Jen Shih, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Guan-Ting Lin +7
Sep 12, 2026cs.RO

ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs

Reacting to sudden physical hazards (catching a slipping plate, dodging a falling knife) is both a meaningful test of embodied intelligence and a hard requirement for deploying multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as the decision coreof household robots. Existing evaluations, however, probe intuitive physics passively through question answering over videos, or target deliberate, long-horizon tasks such as navigation and rearrangement; none measure whether a model can turn physical understanding into immediate, safety-critical action. We introduce ReactHuman, the first physics-grounded benchmark for human-like reactive decision-making, in which the evaluated MLLM acts as the brain of a simulated humanoid facing sudden household hazards; it spans 17 event families and over 1,000 bit-for-bit reproducible scenes with exact, annotation-free ground truth derived from 240 Hz rigid-body simulation, including adversarial objects whose appearance contradicts their physics (a foam anvil, a steel apple). We further design a five-metric suite that scores each reaction along three axes: reasonable, safe, and physically grounded. We physically execute every committed plan so that decisions have observable consequences. With this harness we evaluate seven representative MLLMs. Results show that reactive safety is far from solved: models mishandle roughly one hazard in three, act from fixed dispositions rather than the observed scene, trust appearance over motion, and miss interception points at meter scale even when the chosen action is correct; none of these failures shrink with model scale. ReactHuman thus offers both a fine-grained diagnosis and a scalable training signal toward physically grounded, safety-aware embodied agents. The benchmark can be found here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Alan123/reacthuman-benchmark-scaled
Yizhan Li, Jianxin You, Mengyang Xiong +5
Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

NovGauge: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Diagnosing LLMs' Capability in Paper Novelty Assessment

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in peer review at major AI conferences, yet novelty remains a persistent weak point. Existing benchmarks assess novelty as a single holistic score, making it difficult to diagnose which dimension a model misjudges or whether its evidence is faithful. We present NovGauge, a human-anchored benchmark for fine-grained novelty assessment diagnosis. The benchmark contains 619 paper pairs and 50 multi-paper sets, drawn from two expert sources: ICLR reviewer overlap claims and survey co-citations. Instances are independently labeled along three dimensions: task, problem, and method, capturing application goals, technical challenges, and solution approaches. We propose a cascading diagnostic pipeline that verifies per-dimension correctness, evidence grounding, and logical support. Evaluation of 18 LLMs shows hallucination rates ranging from 0% to 39% across dimensions, and among non-hallucinated correct-positive judgments, over 70% cite evidence fails to logically support the stated reason. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves 43-72% Verified F1 across dimensions, while most models retain less than half of their raw F1 after faithfulness verification. These results suggest that current LLMs remain far from reliable scientific novelty assessment, particularly when correctness is conditioned on faithful evidence grounding.
Guoqiang Zhang, Kexin Tan, Ming Zhang +12
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

Qiushi Engine on AstaBench E2E-Bench-Hard

This report analyzes Qiushi Engine v0.8 across all 40 test tasks in AstaBench E2E-Bench-Hard, a benchmark that requires autonomous agents to carry a research question through experimental design, code implementation, actual execution, result analysis, and report delivery. Qiushi Engine is model-configurable; this evaluation selected DeepSeek deepseek-v4pro-preview as the model backend. The official AstaBench leaderboard records a score of 0.816 and an average benchmark cost of USD 15.209 per task, while the full-precision local recomputation is 81.59±1.8781.59 \pm 1.87. Four tasks satisfied every rubric item, yielding a full-task completion rate of 4/40 = 10% -- 7 percentage points above, and about 3.3 times, the approximately 3% best rate reported for AstaBench's official agents. Across 507 required rubric items, 416 were satisfied (82.1%). Official scoring archives and 40 Meta-Trace records show sustained production and verification of reports, code, and experimental artifacts; the principal gaps lie in repeated runs, external dependencies, specified metrics, and ablation studies. The report explains the benchmark, system workflow, aggregate results, representative cases, and limits of interpretation.
Wenhao Li, Shuxing Yang, Fujia Chen +13
Sep 8, 2026cs.CV

SciFigure2Code: An AI-Reconstructed Benchmark for Scientific Figure-to-Code

Scientific figures are the interface through which research claims are inspected and reused, but final published panels rarely expose the data or plotting code that produced them. Recovering this hidden provenance from pixels is therefore underdetermined. We introduce SciFigure2Code, an AI-reconstructed benchmark that instead evaluates presentation recovery: generating editable Python programs that preserve how a scientific panel is arranged and read. Role-specialized Codex agents generate, execute, visually refine, and audit silver-standard presentation programs that capture geometry, visual hierarchy, encodings, annotations, and typography without claiming to recover original measurements or author source code. This reconstruction-and-audit protocol turns final published panels into auditable reference packages; the resulting resource contains 6,740 reviewed panels and SciFigureBench, a balanced 337-panel test set across 31 chart subtypes, five domains, and three complexity levels. Across 14 zero-shot models in image-only and caption-assisted settings, execution, multi-component layouts, axes, legends, and scientific labels remain weak. Claude Opus 4.7 achieves the highest image-only Overall score, Claude Opus 4.6 leads caption-assisted reconstruction, and two-stage plan-then-code prompting improves Overall for all four tested models. SciFigure2Code provides an auditable testbed for agents that construct editable, visually faithful scientific figure presentations.
Wentao Li, Yibo Wu, Yizhe Chen +5
Sep 7, 2026cs.RO

How Long Until Your Robot Ignores You? A Safety Benchmark for LLM Orchestrators in Human-Humanoid Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed to orchestrate robot behavior through natural-language interfaces, yet no benchmark exists to evaluate their reliability as safety-aware decision makers in human-humanoid collaboration. Unlike deterministic safety systems that enforce binary allow/deny decisions, LLM-based orchestrators exhibit a compliance spectrum ranging from overcompliance (refusing safe actions) to full safety violations. This paper introduces the first safety benchmarking environment for LLM orchestrators in human-humanoid collaboration, built on a Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based architecture with safety invariants grounded in ISO 10218-2:2025 protective measures. The benchmark defines five testable safety invariants, a four-level compliance taxonomy (correct compliance, overcompliance, undercompliance, full violation), and a three-layer evaluation pipeline (text prompting, simulated sensor-actuator loops, and physical validation on a Unitree G1 EDU humanoid). We report Layer-1 results: three cloud backends (Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash) and a local open-weights baseline (qwen3:8b) across 40 100-turn sessions under full-context and sliding-window budget conditions, while the simulation and physical layers remain ongoing. We find that (1) model family determines the safety floor, as Claude and Gemini remain at or near zero violations while GPT-4o-mini commits up to 13 per session, (2) context management dissociates two failure axes, reducing mean behavioral issues by 42-57% for every cloud backend while nearly doubling GPT-4o-mini's violations (3.8 to 7.2 per session), and (3) proportional compliance, clamping movement speed to the rule-specified maximum rather than refusing, emerges consistently only in Gemini; the preliminary simulation layer reproduces the model ranking and the GPT-4o-mini failure-mode inversion.
Aulon Bajrami, Mohamed Elshamouty, Werner Kraus
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Protocol effects on feature-based hardware-Trojan detection across Trust-Hub families

Trust-Hub reuses host circuits: several files differ mainly in the inserted Trojan. When gates from sibling variants enter both training and test folds, a detector can benefit from host logic it has already seen. We measure that effect instead of proposing another classifier. The corpus contains 49,124 gates from 16 netlists grouped into five host families. We left the parser, 36 gate features, class weighting, model settings, threshold, and family-level aggregation unchanged and altered one choice: the test boundary. The three settings draw test gates from the pooled corpus, withhold a complete netlist, or withhold every variant of one host. The choice matters. Random forest records F1/AP of 0.914/0.978 with pooled gates, 0.636/0.851 with one netlist held out, and 0.460/0.577 with a host family held out. XGBoost falls from 0.946/0.976 to 0.464/0.544 across the same comparison. Logistic regression loses AP, although its fixed-threshold F1 is not monotonic. Each family shows the same pooled-to-family direction. Feature removal, repeated model and simulator seeds, score normalization, parser-related exclusions, and a smaller sample change the size of the gap without reversing it. Aggregation also matters: a gate-weighted average is dominated by the larger ISCAS files, so the headline values give each host family one vote. Bootstrap and jackknife summaries keep the gap positive, but their folds reuse training families. We treat the five family rows as descriptive evidence rather than independent trials. Five host families are too few for a population claim, and the experiment says nothing about transfer to a new cell library or an industrial design. It supports a narrower conclusion: sibling benchmark variants can inflate apparent transfer. Benchmarks with several variants of one host circuit should report family-aware holdouts and all five family results beside pooled scores.
Hang Xiao, Chuhong Xu, Kainan Zhou +2
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 4, 2026cs.AI

TruthInsightBench: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended Scientific Discovery Agents

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly proposed as AI-scientist systems that conduct analyses and write research reports, but executing a prescribed analysis is not the same as making a discovery. Existing benchmarks are configured for reproduction: tasks, data, and rubrics are built around a hidden target study, and recovery of its result is rewarded. We present TruthInsightBench, a benchmark configured for discovery. Its 40 blind tasks, drawn from 40 peer-reviewed studies across 10 scientific domains, expose only a neutral scientific objective and frozen data; source conclusions, expected values, and analysis paths are withheld, leaving the agent to determine what claim the data support. A fixed LLM-based judge scores the evidentiary maturity of an agent's own claims along six dimensions, operationalized as 29 artifact-grounded items, with automated, deterministic aggregation and no per-instance human grading, so evaluation can be repeated automatically as agents evolve. On one frozen base model, four coding agents form a narrow plateau (58.4-60.3 of 100) with no statistically reliable pairwise separation: they execute and document analyses competently, with comparatively strong evidence auditability and novelty, but largely lack the discriminating acts that establish a trustworthy claim (controls, robustness, falsifiability, and cross-dataset generalization). The bottleneck is scientific judgment rather than coding, and genuine discovery remains out of reach. TruthInsightBench makes this gap a measurable target; data and scoring code are at https://github.com/TruthInsight-stack/TruthInsightBench.
Zhibo Yang, Chen Zhang, Yuewei Zhang +1
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

GPS-Bench: A Governance Policy Benchmark for Automating Policy Analysis

Policy analysis requires more than predicting whether a proposal will pass: it requires identifying who will be affected, how those actors respond, and what follows. LLM-based policy simulations model these processes at scale, but their validity is hard to establish when plausible behaviour is never compared with observed outcomes. We introduce GPS-Bench, an evidence-grounded benchmark for governance policy simulation that links policies to relevant actors, actor actions and downstream impacts using legislative records, lobbying disclosures, regulatory documents, corporate filings, economic data and other public evidence. Actors are reconstructed from the dated record rather than prompted as archetypes, so a persona is an evidence object with provenance; a human-annotated pool forms the Gold evaluation set, while cases labelled by a separate LLM from retrieved evidence are treated as Silver supervision and never as test labels. Because every inference mode reads the same grounded state and emits the same schema, GPS-Bench turns "does multi-agent simulation help?" into a controlled comparison: we contrast joint reasoning, independent and communicating actor agents, graph-based methods and weight-level fine-tuning over one policy state. Fine-tuning on the grounded record gives the strongest actor-level impact prediction, and decomposition does not beat it; what decomposition adds is mechanism. Agents hold private, non-identical evidence, each seeing its own exposure clause, and address named partners with concrete joint proposals, what they offer, what they need in return, and why acting together beats acting alone, so the coalitions that form can be checked against the commitments the record holds. GPS-Bench therefore gives a common empirical setting for studying when evidence, actor modelling and multi-agent interaction improve the prediction and interpretation of policy outcomes.
Linh Le, Melanie Bui, My Chiffon Nguyen +2
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 3, 2026cs.CL

FrameBench:A Language Understanding Benchmark Based on Frame Semantics

In frame semantics, sentence comprehension is assumed to proceed by relating lexical meaning to background knowledge called semantic frames, thereby enabling readers to implicitly enrich the text with unstated information. Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, it remains unclear whether they can reproduce the kinds of implicit enrichment that humans naturally make during comprehension. To address this question, we introduce FrameBench, a benchmark grounded in frame semantics. FrameBench consists of multiple-choice questions that test whether models distinguish the frames evoked by the same verb across contexts. We construct the benchmark for English and Japanese using FrameNet-style resources and a generation-and-verification pipeline with native-speaker judgments. Our experiments on a diverse set of models reveal challenges for small models, while several large models surpass the human reference scores. We release the constructed FrameBench dataset and the code for dataset construction and evaluation at https://github.com/SasanoLab/FrameBench.
Chihiro Yano, Ryohei Sasano
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

Can LLMs Discover Scientific Laws in Real and Parallel Worlds?

Scientific equation discovery has long been central to scientific progress, proceeding through iterative cycles of hypothesis generation, observational testing, and refinement under scientific constraints. As LLM capabilities advance and their role in AI for Science expands, it remains an open problem whether they can genuinely discover scientific laws and how this ability should be evaluated. Existing evaluations, however, often either simplify discovery through synthetic settings or reuse published targets that may already be familiar to LLMs. We therefore introduce SCILAWS-BENCH, a benchmark for scientific law discovery built from published research and real scientific data. It comprises 118 problems drawn from 381 scientific papers, covering 291 candidate laws and roughly 8M real data points across six scientific disciplines. Each problem is instantiated in two complementary settings: (1) SCILAWS-REAL asks models to propose laws from fixed real observations and evaluates held-out predictive fit and scientific validity derived from the source literature, and (2) SCILAWS-PARALLEL asks models to actively query residual-calibrated worlds and recover synthesized hidden laws derived from published forms. This two-setting task design preserves each problem's scientific context while separately evaluating fixed-record law discovery and active recovery of a newly synthesized hidden law. We find that predictive fit can diverge from scientific validity, memorization shapes whether models reproduce or move beyond published formulas, and our best-of-N study reveals a selection bottleneck. Our work provides a paper-grounded benchmark and new empirical perspectives for evaluating AI for scientific discovery. Project page: https://yiyihum.github.io/SciLaws-Bench
Yiming Huang, Ziche Liu, Zhuohang Wu +11
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

StudyBench: Can Self-Evolution Squeeze Textbooks for Olympiad Capability?

Humans need to study only a handful of well-written textbooks to master a discipline and attempt its hardest problems. We argue that an ideal self-evolution method should share the same property, that is autonomously learning from raw training material for transferable problem-solving capability. However, we still lack a direct measurement for it. We introduce StudyBench, a controlled physics benchmark that directly measures how efficiently a self-evolution method converts training material into capability. We organise the test set into an Application Set, consisting of difficult textbook problems and evaluating absorption ability, and a Transfer Set, consisting of olympiad-level problems and evaluating transfer ability. Benchmarking representative self-evolution methods across three base models, we find that improvements on the Application Set rarely translate to the harder Transfer Set. A guidance ablation exposes a Guidance Gap: even the strongest method closes only a small fraction of what the same material unlocks when supplied as in-context guidance. Besides, every method hits a Compute Plateau, saturating well before exhausting its compute budget. The remaining gap is therefore a method problem rather than a data or compute problem. By offering a clean and controlled benchmark, StudyBench turns self-evolution progress from an open-ended pursuit into a measurable target for future research. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/StudyBench.
Yinghao Chen, Zixi Chen, Bingxiang He +7
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

SocialReasonBench: A Video-QA Benchmark for Social Reasoning with Counterfactual Narrative Videos

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have greatly improved video understanding, yet their ability to reason about human-centered social situations remains limited. Existing benchmarks typically rely on videos with a single observed trajectory, making it difficult to determine whether models truly understand social dynamics or merely exploit recurring narrative patterns. We introduce SocialReasonBench, a video multiple-choice QA benchmark for evaluating socially grounded reasoning in scenarios derived from interactive narratives. Built from gameplay videos of Detroit: Become Human, the benchmark leverages branching storylines where player decisions lead to alternative social outcomes that can be checked against the game's own script, flowchart, and recorded branches. We develop a multi-agent curation pipeline that localizes socially meaningful clips, grounds answer labels in game-state signals, and generates theory-guided questions with diagnostic distractors. SocialReasonBench covers seven reasoning dimensions, including intent recognition, emotional empathy, moral dilemma, counterfactual reasoning, and causal antecedent. Experiments on contemporary LMMs show that models perform reasonably well on basic social understanding but struggle with counterfactual and causal reasoning. Further ablation and diagnostic error analyses reveal that models often depend on incomplete modality cues and fall into reasoning traps such as visual shortcuts, highlighting a gap between observable event recognition and deeper reasoning over latent social states.
Zheyu Huang, Zijing Shi, Haozhe Luo +4
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, 2026econ.GN

The Price of Intelligence: A Quality-Adjusted Price Index for AI Services

Posted prices for AI inference have fallen steadily since 2024, yet the measured speed of that fall depends almost entirely on the method of measurement. This paper constructs quality-adjusted price indices for the AI inference market from public data. The panel assembles 21,024 posted-price observations across 3,208 models and 86 providers and joins them to 4,605 benchmark scores through a latent quality index estimated from benchmark response patterns, so the quality ladder of the hedonic tradition is built here from evaluations in place of product characteristics. Measured by the matched-model methods that statistical agencies apply to software, inference prices fell at 0.10 log points a year. The quality-adjusted index fell at 0.73, so 87% of the decline is invisible to current methods, with direct consequences for measured competition, concentration and productivity in this market. Counted per completed task, moreover, the buyer's price stopped falling. Reasoning models raised token consumption faster than token prices fell, and the seller's and buyer's prices accordingly diverged. A pre-registered validity audit disciplines the quality measure and yields the sharpest result. Excluding contamination-flagged benchmarks leaves model rankings intact at 0.998 yet moves the index by 0.49 log points a year, so the leaderboard-stability arguments standard in AI evaluation offer no defence of economic statistics built on benchmarks. Prices, quality and the audit are fully reproducible from public sources at zero cost.
Louis Yiven Zhu
Aug 13, 2026cs.RO

HumanTracker: Towards Comprehensive and Human-Aligned Motion Tracking Benchmark

Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.
Dairu Liu, Zekun Qi, Jiayu Zeng +11
Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

LigBench: A Unified and Human-Aligned Benchmark for LLM-based Research Idea Generation

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), research idea generation has attracted increasing attention. Existing approaches enable LLMs to retrieve relevant literature and propose novel ideas for research areas. However, current evaluation practices for idea generation remain fragmented and lack objective standards, often relying on direct LLM scoring, which limits their ability to provide unified and reliable assessments across a coherent distribution of generated ideas. To address this challenge, we propose LigBench, an automated evaluation benchmark that enables fine-grained and reliable evaluation of AI research ideas, consistently applicable across different generation distributions. In addition, we introduce PAIR-IQ, a dataset tailored for training pairwise idea judgment models and serving as an auxiliary reference to support more objective comparative evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LigBench achieves stable and interpretable evaluations, significantly improving alignment with expert judgments. Furthermore, models trained on PAIR-IQ exhibit enhanced ranking accuracy and robustness, establishing a principled standard for scalable and objective research idea assessment.
Chenrun Wang, Mingxuan Zhu, Tiancheng Huang +6
Aug 13, 2026cs.RO

H2R-Bench: Benchmarking Human-to-Robot Manipulation Video Generation in World Models

Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, abundant egocentric human manipulation videos provide rich behavioral experiences, but transferring them across embodiments remains challenging due to differences between human hands and robotic end-effectors. Recent advances in video world models offer a promising pathway to synthesize robot-centric manipulation videos from human observations, while their cross-embodiment transfer capability remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we introduce H2R-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-embodiment human-to-robot manipulation video generation, where models transform egocentric human demonstrations into robot manipulation videos under specified embodiments. Each benchmark instance contains a human demonstration video, target embodiment constraints, and source-grounded annotations covering task goals, action events, functional contacts, and object responses. H2R-Bench evaluates generated videos through five dimensions, including goal-state completion, action-event completion, functional contact transfer, embodiment correctness, and general video quality. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art video generation models across six manipulation families and two robot embodiments. Our evaluation reveals that current video world models remain limited in human-to-robot manipulation transfer: even leading models often fail in embodiment consistency, functional interaction, and task execution. H2R-Bench provides a systematic diagnostic framework for evaluating whether video world models can bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap and convert human manipulation observations into robot-centric training resources.
Dingyi Rong, Yue Shi, Chaofan Ma +6
Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

ARAC: Benchmarking Auto-Research's Alignment and Completeness on End-to-End Researchs

The rapid advancement of Auto-Research has surfaced a fundamental evaluation challenge: how can we measure the alignment, logical coherence, and evolutionary completeness of its research trajectory with human research behavior? We propose Auto-Research's Alignment and Completeness, ARAC-Bench: a Researcher-Mimicking Evaluation framework that shifts the objective from matching final answers to reproducing high-quality human research processes. The framework operates through two synergistic components: the Academic Cognition Skills system, which is the first to transforms implicit reviewer expertise into stage-calibrated, quantifiable rubrics; and a three-stage capability diagnostic protocol, which decomposes the research process under strict modular constraints into three traceable, mutually independent dimensions: Proposal, Experiment, and Synthesis. Systematic evaluation of 11 SOTA frameworks yields a best alignment score of only 67.9 of 100, revealing a significant gap in simulating rigorous human methodology. Validation against Ph.D. Candidates rankings shows a strong correlation of 0.8141, confirming that ARAC-Bench reliably reflects the dimensions researchers truly value. ARAC-Bench provides not only a fine-grained diagnostic tool but also a scalable reward signal for training the next generation of autonomous research systems.
Jiale Cui, Yueyao Yuan, Kaixi Zhong +3
Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

CTBench: Evaluating Troubleshooting Capabilities of AI Agents in Realistic Telecom Network Operations

Agents are increasingly considered for automating network operations and maintenance, where engineers must diagnose network faults, optimize configurations to enhance services, and reduce operational costs while acting under strict constraints. However, existing evaluations fail to accurately model real network characteristics or assess agents under partially observable telecom environments with diverse vendors, devices, protocols, and interfaces. In this paper, we introduce CTBench, a public benchmark for assessing whether an agent behaves like a competent telecom troubleshooting engineer. CTBench focuses on root cause analysis and path restoration. Each task is constructed by experts and annotated with rich task metadata, including golden evidence steps. CTBench uses expert-grounded metrics that evaluate both final answers and the diagnostic evidence. Experiments with representative harness-model combinations show that state-of-the-art agents perform very well at identifying endpoints in path-restoration tasks but, more generally, underperform in root cause analysis. In particular, agents struggle with interface state, link-layer, service-management, and other operational faults. Most importantly, even when agents produce plausible or correct final answers, they often fail to provide the evidence-grounded diagnoses required in operational practice. Our results further show that path restoration is generally more resource expensive, yet larger resource usage does not necessarily translate into better diagnosis.
Xingyu Yan, Tingting Dai, Antonio De Domenico +16
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

Compositional Benchmark Synthesis for Hierarchical Human Action Recognition

Recognizing human behavior across levels of abstraction, from atomic actions to long-horizon intentions, requires data annotated along a semantic hierarchy. Large corpora provide isolated, atomically labeled clips without temporal composition, whereas recorded composite-activity corpora offer shallow, domain-narrow, fixedhierarchies. A benchmark-generation and evaluation frameworkis proposed that synthesizes a four-level hierarchical-intention benchmark, spanning actions, activities, low-level intentions (LLIs), and high-level intentions (HLIs), from a flat single-label action corpus while retaining real pre-extracted features at the action level. Episodes are assembled by a transition model under a subject-consistency constraint, and a coverage-aware sampler reduces the subject usage Gini from 0.566 to 0.248. Synthesizing such a benchmark raises a circular-supervision risk that recorded datasets avoid: if the rules generating the episodes also govern the evaluation, models can succeed by recovering the generator rather than through genuine reasoning. Validity is addressed by design, holding sequence-generation rules disjoint from the first-order-logic rules used at evaluation. The instantiation yields 15,002 episodes. Four reference baselines from different model families characterize difficulty, not as recognition methods. A compositional held-out gap of 0.13 to 0.17 macro-F1 appears across all baselines, including a graph-aware model that recognizes best yet does not close the gap, indicating a structural property of the benchmark rather than a model artifact. A logic-free baseline still violates the held-out semantic rules above their intrinsic data rate, and the order-destroying control changes macro-F1 within seed variation, serving as a generator-consistency check. Theontology, transition model, and generator are released so the benchmark can beregenerated and extended.
Farnaz Soleimani, Abdelghani Chibani, Yacine Amirat +1
Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

SPIEval: Evaluating Large Language Models as Mobile Assistants over Scattered Personal Information

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as mobile assistants, where a key challenge is leveraging personal information scattered across multiple applications (apps) to complete user instructions. However, due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks, their capabilities remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we introduce SPIEval, a human-curated benchmark grounded in five cognitive capabilities (i.e., reasoning, disambiguation, integration, preference inference, and multi-intent decomposition). SPIEval comprises 250 tasks spanning 4,335 personal records distributed across 10 apps and supports multi-turn interaction through 21 tools. Analysis shows that the benchmark exhibits diverse scenarios, challenging tasks, scattered information, controllable environments, and verifiable outcomes. We evaluate nine representative LLMs and find substantial room for improvement. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5 (xhigh), achieves only 57.3% accuracy, while the weakest achieves just 16.4%. Further analysis reveals that 79% of failures stem from inaccurate information localization, as LLMs often commit to plausible but incorrect information instead of continuing retrieval for verification. We also find that fewer than 2% of retrieval actions employ advanced search methods and observe substantial variation in search efficiency across models. These findings expose fundamental limitations of current LLM-based mobile assistants and motivate future research in this direction. Data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Junjie-Ye/SPIEval.
Junjie Ye, Zhuohui Sheng, Shaofan Liu +12
Aug 11, 2026cs.IR

ENTLORE: A Graph-Grounded Benchmark for Latent Organizational Reasoning in Enterprise Question Answering

Enterprise question answering is framed as retrieving internal documents and generating grounded answers. Routine enterprise records, however, are work by-products in which required organizational relations remain implicit across heterogeneous sources. Existing benchmarks provide realistic multi-source evidence, but often materialize a predefined answer path and therefore test the composition of stated facts rather than recovery of a target relation absent from the corpus. We call the latter capability latent organizational reasoning. We introduce ENTLORE, a graph-grounded benchmark construction framework that reconstructs an audited enterprise world from routine documents, authoritative organizational tables, and operational records. Versioned organizational conventions certify derived relations in a truth graph, enabling complete golden answers and proof certificates. The aligned anonymized release exposes only the document corpus while withholding private structure and target relations. ENTLORE contains 2,341 documents from three source types and 907 questions spanning explicit lookup, cross-source composition, and latent organizational reasoning, evaluated across 56 model and access configurations. Structuring the released world as an induced entity graph or navigable knowledge base gives the strongest deployable results. Yet supplying gold documents still leaves 30.4% of latent questions unanswered, versus 12.6% and 6.2% for explicit and compositional questions. Enterprise QA therefore depends not only on document recall, but also on whether implicit organizational relations become usable. The benchmark, data, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/scitix/entlore .
Akrin Zheng, Alexander Wu, Alaia Liu
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

DSAgentBench: Can Agents Automate End-to-End Data-Science Workflows in Real Computer Environments?

Real-world data science involves long-horizon workflows that span data wrangling, exploration, modeling, visualization, and validation, and require coordinated use of tools such as notebooks, IDEs, terminals, browsers, and databases within real operating environments. Yet existing benchmarks lack real-computer interaction and do not evaluate whether agents can execute complete end-to-end data-science workflows in realistic computing environments, failing to capture the multi-stage, multi-tool nature of data-science practice. We introduce DSAgentBench, the first benchmark to evaluate whether agents can automate full data-science workflows inside real computer environments. DSAgentBench contains 275 diverse tasks covering the entire data-science life-cycle, reflecting the complexity and tool coordination required in practice. Each task requires grounding decisions in intermediate outputs and coordinated tool use, and includes a deterministic evaluator that verifies analytical correctness, visual outputs, and model performance rather than code-only execution. Our extensive experiments with 15 closed- and open-source models show that even the strongest agent, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, achieves only 56.70% task success, while all open-source agents remain below 1%, frequently failing at tool orchestration, OS grounding, and multi-step reasoning. These results reveal a substantial capability gap between current agentic systems and real data-science workflows, positioning DSAgentBench as a foundation for developing grounded, verifiable, autonomous data-science agents. We release DSAgentBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DSAgentBench.
Mizanur Rahman, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Ridwan Mahbub +3
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

SafeSceneReason: A Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark Connecting Industrial Hazards with Accident Knowledge

Industrial-safety understanding requires more than detecting workers, equipment, and personal protective equipment. Models must also assess compliance, identify hazardous interactions, explain potential accident mechanisms, and recommend preventive actions. Existing safety datasets primarily focus on visual perception or isolated violation recognition and provide limited supervision for evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce SafeSceneReason, a multimodal industrial-safety reasoning benchmark and companion training corpus that connects workplace scenes with knowledge from occupational accident investigations. SafeSceneReason combines two complementary data-construction pipelines. The scene-centric pipeline converts annotated workplace images into executable safety scene graphs and generates deterministic answers through program execution over objects, relations, and safety rules. The report-centric pipeline extracts figures and contextual evidence from accident reports and constructs multimodal questions using evidence graphs, explicit information boundaries, multi-step reasoning paths, and iterative verification. The resulting resource contains 110,581 verified scene-centric question--answer pairs and 13,114 refined report-centric question--answer pairs, covering perception, spatial and quantitative reasoning, compliance assessment, evidence synthesis, causal analysis, and mitigation-oriented decision making. Evaluation of representative proprietary and open-source vision--language models reveals substantial performance differences and persistent weaknesses in comparative, technical, and multi-evidence reasoning, demonstrating that strong general visual understanding does not yet guarantee reliable industrial-safety reasoning.
Yuanchi Zhu, Kang An, Tengyue Wang +11
Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

Evo-Bench: Can Language Models Improve Agent Harness?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in autonomous agents, yet standard evaluations remain confined to static task solving. An emerging frontier is harness evolution---the agent's capacity to autonomously optimize its own operating harness. However, systematically benchmarking this capability remains challenging, as existing evaluations fail to isolate harness improvements from base model strength, prevent task-specific overfitting, or capture long-horizon iterative research. To address these challenges, we introduce Evo-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate models' intrinsic harness-evolving capabilities across Search, Office, and General agent domains. To rigorously isolate this capability, Evo-Bench employs a novel harness-guided construction framework: it leverages auxiliary-task evolution to identify tasks genuinely sensitive to framework improvements, followed by sensitivity-aware stratified splitting to ensure robust cross-suite generalization. Extensive evaluations across nine frontier and open-weight models reveal that top models achieve massive absolute gains reaching 16.6 points, closely approaching state-of-the-art human-engineered baselines. Crucially, while autonomous evolution outpeforms artificial harness in General tasks and excels in Search tasks, it struggles in Office tasks that demand highly specific processing workflows. Furthermore, our analysis exposes critical temporal anomalies like early saturation, while demonstrating that the synthesized harnesses act as highly transferable reasoning structures, consistently boosting diverse policy models.
Lisheng Huang, Chen Yang, Hao Zhou +6
Aug 9, 2026cs.CV

360CityArena: A Realistic Virtual Urban Navigation Benchmark for Embodied Agents

We present 360CityArena, a benchmark for evaluating the urban exploration capabilities of embodied agents within a photorealistic environment constructed from 360-degree videos. Existing outdoor benchmarks either lack sufficient photorealism or complexity, resulting in a considerable gap from real-world urban environments. 360CityArena is built on a realistic reconstruction of the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, using 602 360-degree video segments covering 85 streets, and consists of 175 meticulously human-crafted tasks. It encompasses three task categories: Environment Understanding, Path Reasoning, and Spatial Reasoning, covering fundamental abilities required for urban exploration, such as localization, landmark search, path planning, and relational spatial reasoning, thereby enabling comprehensive evaluation in realistic urban scenes. Our evaluation using state-of-the-art LMM-based agents shows that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, performs far below human level (human: 77.3% vs. Gemini 2.5 Flash: 17.1%), revealing substantial challenges that remain in city-scale embodied navigation and reasoning. 360CityArena provides a necessary and challenging testbed for photorealistic urban-district navigation and spatial reasoning.
Kenta Watanabe, Atsuyuki Miyai, Mizuki Takenawa +2
Aug 8, 2026cs.CV

MRBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Human Motion-Text Retrieval

Human motion-text retrieval provides a rigorous means of assessing cross-modal alignment. Prevailing benchmarks are dominated by homogeneous indoor motions, imbalanced motion distributions, and oversimplified, repetitive texts, which hinder the reliable measurement of cross-domain and cross-granularity alignment. We thus introduce MRBench, a comprehensive motion-text retrieval benchmark featuring heterogeneous motions, broad and balanced category coverage, and reliable, discriminative, multi-granular descriptions. MRBench is constructed through a meticulously designed multi-stage data curation pipeline, which filters and balances candidates, verifies unambiguous semantic alignment, and generates motion-grounded descriptions at multiple granularities. The resulting benchmark contains 3,390 motions drawn from motion capture, in-the-wild videos, synthetic videos, and motion generative models, covering 118 fine-grained categories. Each motion is paired with concise, standard, and fine-grained descriptions, yielding 10,170 captions. Extensive evaluations of representative retrieval baselines on MRBench reveal a substantial cross-dataset generalization gap and pronounced sensitivity to query granularity. We propose a lightweight granularity-aware model anchored at a frozen standard-caption-aligned retrieval model. LLM-based concise and fine-grained captions provide pseudo-supervision for extra-branch granularity-specific motion extractors and text adapters. For inference, granularity-aware score fusion integrates global and adapted similarities while strictly maintaining score comparability across all description levels. The resulting model improves mixed-granularity retrieval without compromising standard-caption performance. We believe that our MRBench provides a comprehensive testbed for advancing motion-language alignment evaluation.
Fulong Liu, Liang Xu, Chengqun Yang +3
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

FinRank: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Financial Question Answering and Retrieval over SEC Filings

Financial question answering is typically evaluated by answer correctness, yet in SEC filings a plausible and even numerically correct answer can be grounded in the wrong evidence. Similar facts and disclosures recur across sections of a filing, across reporting periods of the same firm, and across comparable firms. FinRank targets this provenance-sensitive retrieval problem by requiring systems to identify evidence for the intended entity, reporting period, and disclosure context. The benchmark contains 1185 manually authored question-answer records over the 10-K and 10-Q filings of 22 companies. Each record includes a reference answer, gold supporting passages, and hand-curated hard negatives drawn from confusable passages within filings, across reporting periods, and across comparable firms. FinRank evaluates passage retrieval, reranking, and hard-negative discrimination as separately measured tasks. Baseline results demonstrate the difficulty of this setting: among the evaluated systems, even a 7B instruction-tuned embedder reaches only 44.8% Recall@10 on the pooled evidence corpus; sub-billion-parameter encoders gain at most 3.5 points over BM25, a finance-adapted embedder trails BM25 by 9.7 points, and pairwise accuracy falls by 13.0-20.5 percentage points when random negatives are replaced with the curated hard negatives. FinRank provides an evidence-first benchmark for developing financial question answering systems that are not only accurate but also grounded in the correct disclosure.
Sasan Mansouri, Daniel Saad, Mark Wahrenburg +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Recipes for Creativity: Iterative Generation and Evaluation in Large Language Models

Generative models are often evaluated through singular artifacts, whereas human creativity typically emerges through iterative generation, appraisal, and refinement. This pilot study examines whether iterative search improves LLM creativity by adapting FunSearch to recipe generation for the 2024 Pillsbury Bake-Off and evaluating outputs against human benchmarks using TTCT-based LLM evaluation. Across two experiments, we test iteration count, generator temperature, and in-loop selection-scorer model size. Results show that iterative generation-selection can produce recipes with creativity scores comparable to human benchmarks, but additional iterations alone do not improve creativity. The in-loop evaluator matters most: a smaller selection scorer yields significantly higher scores across most TTCT dimensions, while temperature has limited effects except for originality. These findings suggest that evaluator design is a first-order design variable in subjective creative search.
Rens Anderson, Tessa Verhoef, Amirhossein Zohrehvand
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

TRACE: A Multi-Layer Benchmark for Human AI Controller Coordination Under Drift and Failure

Modern cyber-physical and AI-assisted systems couple human operators, AI decision modules, and automated controllers in a single control loop, so trustworthiness depends on the whole loop, not any one model. Yet no standard benchmark captures time-aligned, multi-layer traces of how drift and failures propagate across these layers, so we cannot diagnose where coordination breaks down, why, or how to recover. This paper targets one facet of that gap: drift, a deviation that can originate in any stack layer and that conventional single-modality monitoring cannot localize to a layer or pin to an onset time. We construct a benchmark by injecting controlled drift into traces derived from ALFRED, a grounded-instruction benchmark for everyday household tasks, yielding 1,918 drifted traces. Each trace is a time-aligned sequence of per-step records across five execution layers (state, observation, decision, rules, control), labeled with the drift type, affected layer, onset time, responsible actor, and causal mechanism, and validated by independent raters with inter-annotator agreement reported. We pair the dataset with a leak-aware protocol that removes a near-perfect onset leak, and a baseline study across classical, recurrent, and attention-based model families. Under this honest protocol, drift is identifiable and attributable well above random and majority baselines across every family (affected layer macro-F1 near 0.70, responsible actor near 0.85, causal mechanism near 0.49), and heavy attention offers no advantage over simpler models on this symbolic benchmark.
Joshua Zuniga, Srinivasan Subramanian, Ramya Madhuri Narapureddy +1
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

GAUGE: A Measurement-Grounded Benchmark for Physical Fidelity in Simulation Engines and Video World Models

Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions. However, existing evaluations of physical fidelity are often conducted in isolation and rely heavily on perceptual similarity or human judgments, providing limited insight into which physical principles or parameters are violated. We introduce GAUGE, a real-world-grounded diagnostic benchmark for jointly evaluating how numerical simulators and generative video world models reproduce or deviate from real-world physics. It comprises 22 controlled task families covering rigid bodies, flexible cables, textiles, and volumetric deformable objects. Grounded in real-world trajectories and paired with calibrated physical metadata, uncertainty annotations, and task-specific observables, these tasks cover fundamental physical processes including collision, friction, momentum transfer, oscillation, self-contact, and deformation across diverse materials and conditions. We benchmark Isaac Sim, Genesis, and Newton on 14 task families using generalized trajectory errors, and evaluate 6 image-to-video models on 5 rigid-body tasks by testing physical-law consistency and the temporal stability of inferred parameters. Our results reveal no uniformly faithful physics engine, with the largest discrepancies arising in impulsive contact, rapid textile motion, and volumetric deformation. We further find that video world models can produce trajectories with the expected equation form while recovering incorrect accelerations, momentum transfer, and oscillation timing. GAUGE lays the groundwork for developing more physically faithful simulators and world models for embodied intelligence.
Shuai Wang, Yaxin Feng, Xuekun Jiang +12
Aug 6, 2026cs.CL

M3^3R-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Metaphor Understanding

Metaphor enables the understanding of abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings while conveying affective attitudes. In multimodal scenarios, visual and textual information jointly construct Target--Source mappings, requiring both conceptual understanding and cross-modal reasoning. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate metaphor understanding through isolated subtasks and lack evidence-grounded explanations, making it difficult to assess whether models establish mappings grounded in visual and textual cues.To address these limitations, we introduce M3^3R-Bench, a unified and evidence-grounded benchmark containing 1,000 image--text instances with human-verified annotations. Guided by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and theories of nonliteral language understanding, M3^3R-Bench provides joint annotations for metaphor occurrence, Target--Source mapping, sentiment, and stage-wise explanations following ``evidence identification--mapping establishment--sentiment inference.''Evaluations on M3^3R-Bench reveal that existing models often overlook visual evidence, rely on superficial textual cues, and produce inaccurate Target--Source mappings, exposing a cross-modal evidence--mapping mismatch. To address this mismatch, we propose M3^3R-Reasoner, which combines curriculum-based reasoning supervision with task-aware reinforcement learning to align model reasoning with metaphor interpretation. Experiments show that, with only an 8B-parameter backbone, M3^3R-Reasoner outperforms larger proprietary MLLMs across four unified-task metrics and improves Visual Evidence and Sentiment Justification scores over GPT-5.5 by 28.45 and 30.11 points, respectively, while surpassing Claude-Sonnet-4.6 by 8.00 points in mean rubric score. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/hongshi4/M3R-Bench.
Hong Jiang, Junnan Zhu, Jingwang Huang +9
Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

IslamicTurathBench: A Multi-Task, Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on the Islamic Scholarly Tradition (turath)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for question answering, education, and research, including in religious and cultural domains where answers depend on specialised source traditions. Yet in Islamic Studies, key concepts, methods, and debates preserved in the authoritative scholarly tradition, known as turath, lack high-quality annotated resources. We introduce IslamicTurathBench (ISTB), a multi-task, multi-discipline dataset for evaluating LLMs on classical Islamic scholarship. Developed and reviewed by domain experts, ISTB contains 3,465 question-answer items drawn from 35 recognised source works spanning more than 12 centuries of scholarship across seven key fields of Islamic Studies. To enable comprehensive profiling of model capabilities, ISTB is structured along two axes: scholarly demand (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced) and task format (multiple-choice questions, passage-based comprehension, and open-ended knowledge questions). ISTB includes aggregated scores from a scholarly human reference panel and zero-shot baselines from ten systems. The dataset supports reproducible evaluation of language-model behaviour across source works, disciplines, scholarly-demand levels, and question formats in a historically layered scholarly domain.
Shahd Gaben, Heba Sbahi, Samer Rashwani +5
Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

EuroExec: Frontier Language Models Fall Short of Expert Judgment on European Executive Decision Tasks

Frontier LLMs are increasingly put to use on open-ended complex questions, different in nature from the ones they are typically evaluated on. We dedicate more than 4,000 human expert hours to evaluate a selection of six frontier LLMs on a member of this class of problems: EuroExec, our introduced human expert-based benchmark composed of 413 open-ended long-form European executive tasks authored by 47 vetted domain experts, each question drawn from experience in a real case. Every response is manually evaluated through a multi-attribute rubric, an item-specific checklist of requirements, and a preference rank ordering, extracting an aggregate metric "Solve Rate". The strongest model solves only 56.9% of tasks, while expert-written reference answers judged blindly are solved at near-ceiling levels and are preferred over every model response in 74% of direct rankings, placing frontier generative systems well below the professional standard of work they are already used for. We see that the best way to extract this kind of conclusion is by employing human evaluators, carefully checking their consistency through rigorous statistical analysis, and observe that automatic measurements also fall short when evaluating on this case of real-world open-ended problems with a subjective ground truth.
Pau Arnal, Khaled Denfir, Danylo Smahliuk +2
Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

FinReportBench: Measuring and Improving Institution-Grade Financial Report Generation

Large language models can produce fluent financial analysis, but fluency alone does not establish whether a report is suitable for institutional delivery. We introduce FinReportBench, an expert-grounded benchmark for measuring and improving institution-grade financial report generation. Expert review reveals recurring gaps in report identity, institutional components, source discipline, and visual delivery. We derive a 35-item rubric through expert partial orders, multimodal evidence, and audits of decision boundaries, covering deliverability, report identity, and institutional completeness. Starting from 10,000 balanced Chinese and English financial-research source records, we curate 244 bilingual tasks across three research objects and two input tiers. Each task separates the public query, reconstructed research trajectory, and hidden source packet. Three independent judge families reproduce the expert partial order at near-ceiling rates, showing that bounded, observable criteria support reliable evaluation. Across nine model families, basic deliverability is nearly saturated, while report identity and institutional completeness remain the primary bottlenecks. The largest cross-model gaps concern generation-trace control, information density, and data discipline rather than basic report framing. We then use benchmark-guided skill distillation to turn recurrent failures into reusable generation and self-review constraints. Across five model families, the evolved skill improves mean G1 by 33.85 points and mean G2 by 13.83 points over paired no-skill runs while preserving G0 for every pair. Code and benchmark artifacts are available at https://github.com/MisterBrookT/finreportbench.
Yinghao Tang, Tan Zhenwei, Yiyao Wang +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

GEB-Bench: Abstract Structures Told in Many Voices

Can a model look at a river delta and a lightning bolt and see that they share a structure? We introduce GEB-Bench, a benchmark whose unit is an abstract structural motif--self-reference, a strange loop, a Mobius twist--in the spirit of Godel, Escher, Bach. Each motif is told in several voices: a natural scene whose composition is the structure, a folk story whose telling enacts it through a mechanically checkable form device, a mathematical theorem, and a programmatic skeleton; surface parameters are declared nuisance variables and never scored. Motifs, voices, and the structural changes between them form a small cross-modal category, and GEB-Bench's tasks are its questions. Evaluating twelve open and proprietary models, we find that abstraction failure is lawful. The central finding is a gap between recognition and cross-voice mapping: models identify a structure within one voice far better than they carry it across voices; every model pays this tax, and mapping strong enough to narrow it appears only at the frontier tier. Two patterns support it. Errors align more strongly with the designed formal geometry than with measured perceptual geometries, and frontier models from different vendors converge on the same wrong answers; and surface complexity taxes every model that reads structure, with capacity buying headroom rather than immunity. GEB-Bench is fully generative and released with its pipeline.
Tong Zhang, Zhiyuan Shi, Yun Peng +1
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

VIBE: A VAD-Informed Benchmark for Entity-Centered Affective Profiling of Large Language Model Outputs

Large language models routinely describe socially salient targets, including political figures, countries, religions, organizations, historical events, and social groups, encoding affective framing alongside factual content: a target may appear favorable or threatening, calm or conflictual, powerful or vulnerable. Existing work captures parts of this space through sentiment, favorability, and emotion benchmarks, but none combines target-directed VAD attribution, an explicit scorer contract, and a passport reporting format. We introduce VIBE, a benchmark for entity-centered affective profiling of LLM outputs in Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) space. Its core contribution is a measurement contract: VIBE separates generation from external scoring, distinguishes scalar favorability, response-level VAD, and target-directed VAD, and reports profiles through an Affective Passport. Three empirical layers support the contract. H1 shows scalar favorability does not subsume arousal and dominance: valence findings are cross-validated (rV = 0.944 judge-human, rV = 0.954 inter-scorer); arousal and dominance are single-scorer directional estimates, not point-precise, consistent with known inter-annotator difficulty on these axes (rA = 0.495, rD = 0.702 among human annotators). H2 shows whole-response and target-directed VAD are different contracts: the same text can carry one affective tone overall while representing the named target differently. H3 is a protocol-drift diagnostic: elicitation conditions shift profiles, motivating context metadata in every affective report. These results motivate entity-centered affective profiling as a documented practice: profiles should be released with scorer identity, coverage, protocol, and interpretation limits.
Andrei Chetvergov, Alexander Evseev, Timofei Sivoraksha +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

COMEX: A Composition-Grounded Benchmark and Learning Framework for Explainable Aesthetic Image Cropping

Explainable aesthetic image cropping requires not only localizing a visually pleasing crop but also explaining why it is preferred. Existing crop-and-explain methods largely treat explanation as post-hoc text generation and overlook composition, a key aesthetic factor that links crop decisions with interpretable reasoning. In this paper, we reformulate explainable aesthetic image cropping as a structured crop-composition-explanation problem. To support this setting, we introduce COMEX, a new benchmark built through image expansion and an IO-reversal pipeline. COMEX contains 33,161 quadruples, each consisting of an expanded image, a crop box, a composition category, and a composition-grounded explanation, enabling joint learning of crop localization, composition understanding, and explanation generation. We further propose a two-stage SFT+GRPO framework, where supervised fine-tuning establishes the structured output protocol and basic cropping ability, and GRPO further improves crop quality, composition prediction, and explanation faithfulness. We benchmark 15 large vision-language models and existing cropping methods on COMEX, establishing a comprehensive testbed for composition-grounded explainable aesthetic cropping. Experiments on both COMEX and prior benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of our framework, with strong performance across evaluation metrics.
Rui Yang, Wei Zhou, Dingyong Gou +5
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.CL

CompanionBench: A Theory-Anchored, Real-World-Grounded Benchmark for AI Emotional Companionship

LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift. We introduce CompanionBench, an interactive bilingual benchmark. To our knowledge, it is the first companion benchmark to ground both its scenarios and a trained user simulator in de-identified real-world data. A hidden disclosure gate branches each persona's trajectory on the agent's own behavior, controlling the interaction state space without scripting dialogue. We operationalize ten capabilities derived from 25 theories across psychology and counseling, four of them not graded explicitly by prior work: holding ambiguity, selfobject responsiveness, positive resonance and calibrated challenge. Agents are assessed on two complementary axes: a subjective ten-capability rubric and a deterministic measure of whether deeper disclosure was earned. A cross-family panel dilutes same-family favoritism; an Item Response Theory model separates agent quality from judge severity. Theory fixes what to measure and how personas are structured; real data supply events, history, and profiles -- coverage from theory, authenticity from data. Rankings are reproducible in both languages (rho = 0.996 ZH / 0.953 EN). Evaluating 28 agents reveals capability-level differences obscured by aggregate scores. Emotion regulation and calibrated challenge remain common weaknesses; holding ambiguity discriminates most. Role-play agents rank near the bottom: immersion does not imply relational competence. Across agents, the dominant failure mode is substituting surface warmth for substantive relational support. We will release 500 Chinese-English parallel pairs and the evaluation code.
Yao Liu, Guangjia Chai, Yuming Huang +3
Aug 3, 2026cs.SE

BulkPR-Bench: Benchmarking Queue-Level Governance of Interacting Pull Requests

Coding-agent benchmarks increasingly cover long-horizon, end-to-end, and interactive development, but typically retain one requested outcome or a fixed change sequence. Sequential policies can process a pull-request (PR) queue one candidate at a time, but when queued PRs interact, maximizing safe delivery can require jointly deciding which changes to merge and in what order. We introduce BulkPR-Bench, an executable benchmark in which an agent must recover consequential PR relations and return a large safe subset in executable order under a rolling-release protocol. The suite contains 581 newly authored candidate PRs on frozen snapshots of 18 real repositories. Registered state-by-state repository execution, including hidden safety checks, validates the gold relation graph; an exact oracle then computes the largest safe subset. Our primary metric, Relational Delivery Score (RDS), scores safe delivery and correct rejection over relation groups from the realized merge trace; Global Safety-Gated Yield (Global-SGY) separately measures strict delivery of the realized whole-queue plan. Under the buffered primary protocol with batch size K=32K=32, the three highest RDS estimates among the six models are 66.6%, 62.0%, and 57.9%, compared with 53.1% for the strongest sequential baseline. Only 8 of 324 model runs complete a queue exactly. Critical-relation recall ranges from 35.2% to 57.7%, and diagnostic runs supplied with the gold relations show substantial remaining headroom. Gains on relation groups therefore do not yet translate into dependable whole-queue governance.
Zetong Xiong, Qiao Zhao, Jun Zhang +20
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 3, 2026cs.AI

GABench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents on Graph Analysis Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of planning, using tools, and interacting with external environments. They are typically supported by harnesses, which manage state and coordinate multi-step execution. Graph analysis provides a promising setting for evaluating their agentic capabilities, because it requires agents to access data and execute operations in a graph environment. However, existing graph benchmarks for LLMs provide limited coverage of graph tasks and graph types, making it difficult to comprehensively evaluate LLM agents. Moreover, they typically formulate graph analysis as text-based question answering, where graph information is directly provided in the prompt, limiting the evaluation of end-to-end agentic capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce GABench, a comprehensive benchmark for agentic graph analysis. GABench spans three graph types and covers four graph analysis task categories: graph retrieval, graph theory, graph machine learning, and graph open-ended question answering. GABench also provides 84 executable tools for accessing graph data and performing diverse graph operations. Building on these tools, we develop an agentic graph analysis task generation pipeline and construct 10,400 tasks with verifiable ground truth.Using GABench, we evaluate a range of frontier LLMs and agent harnesses. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) Existing LLM agents still struggle with complex graph analysis tasks. (2) Harness choice significantly affects performance, yet existing harnesses remain limited on complex graph tasks. (3) Graph analysis depends more on tool-call quality than quantity. Our findings provide practical insights into the development and evaluation of LLM agents for graph analysis.
Jiarui Tan, Zhongjian Zhang, YaBo Guo +5
Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

CrossLex: A Source-Grounded Benchmark for Cross-Jurisdictional Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models

Legal reasoning is inherently jurisdiction-dependent: the same facts can call for different legal rules and yield different conclusions across legal systems. Yet existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) can recognize such jurisdiction-specific variation, especially when identical fact patterns lead to divergent legal outcomes.We introduce CrossLex, a same-fact, legal-source-grounded benchmark for evaluating cross-jurisdictional legal reasoning in LLMs across three jurisdictions: China, California, and Germany. Built from authoritative legal sources, CrossLex aligns 55 legal issues spanning contract, consumer, criminal, family, and labor law, and constructs jurisdiction-aligned questions paired with answers and supporting citations. In total, CrossLex contains 6,149 instances organized into 385 fact groups, with all legal issues, answers, and cited authorities reviewed by legal professionals.To disentangle basic legal knowledge from cross-jurisdictional reasoning, CrossLex defines three complementary tasks: single-jurisdiction reasoning (T1), joint cross-jurisdictional comparison (T2), and fine-grained cross-jurisdictional evaluation (T3). We further propose Grounded Joint, a metric that jointly assesses answer correctness and legal-source grounding, and provide a unified evaluation for streamlined benchmarking. Extensive experiments on representative LLMs show that, although current models can often answer legal questions correctly, they struggle to provide accurate cross-jurisdictional legal citations.We hope that CrossLex will facilitate future research on source-grounded cross-jurisdictional legal reasoning.
Xiaocui Yang, Xican Tan, Shoujie Chen +3
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.CL

FriendBench: Benchmarking Dyadic Familiarity Inference in Humans and Multimodal Large Language Models

Reading a social situation often depends on behavior, not words alone. We introduce FriendBench, a benchmark for inferring whether two people are already familiar or are meeting as strangers, from a 20-second clip of a dyadic ice-breaker conversation. Every pair answers the same type of prompt, so only the manner of interaction can reveal the answer. Across text, audio, and video, we compare 26 models from seven companies against matched human panels over 96 balanced dyads. The best model and the human crowd are statistically indistinguishable on accuracy in every modality, but reach it differently: humans stay balanced across the two answers, while the strongest models favor ``stranger.'' This is a difference in effective prior, not in discrimination. Richer channels help both unequally, and only humans gain from visible behavior on top of speech. We release the stimuli, human ratings, and model predictions.
Jeffrey M. Girard, Jason Z. Zheng, Jacqueline R. Vertino +2
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

MMShopBench: A Real-Log Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Turn Shopping Agents

Online shoppers increasingly turn to AI shopping assistants, using images and multi-turn dialogue to express and refine product needs that are difficult to articulate in text alone. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on text-only or synthetic requests, underrepresenting complex real-world shopping requirements jointly expressed through images and language. We introduce MMShopBench, the first real-log benchmark for multimodal, multi-turn shopping agents. Built from carefully cleaned and manually annotated shopping logs, MMShopBench provides ground-truth annotations of each request's purchase intent and mandatory product requirements. Agents must infer these requirements jointly from user images and multi-turn dialogue, retrieve candidate products through image and text search, and verify that each candidate satisfies all requirements using its product images and structured attributes. We evaluate representative open-source and proprietary models using an evidence-grounded multimodal protocol and construct a companion training set for fine-tuning an open-source model. To ensure reproducible experimentation, we build an offline shopping sandbox, where fine-tuning substantially narrows the performance gap between our open-source model and leading proprietary models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our training data.
Zeying Hao, Hao Guo, Mengtao Xu +5