Daily Papers

Selecting LLM-generated code candidates using LLM-generated tests is challenging because the tests themselves may be incorrect. Existing methods either treat all tests equally or rely on ad-hoc heuristics to filter unreliable tests. Yet determining test correctness requires knowing which codes are correct, creating a circular dependency. Our key insight is that we need not determine test correctness at all: test votes should rank, not merely count. What matters is not how many codes pass a test, but whether the test can distinguish correct from incorrect code. We break the circular dependency via leave-one-out evaluation: hold out one test, rank codes by their aggregate scores on all remaining tests, and measure whether the held-out test's pass/fail pattern agrees with this ranking. We formalize this agreement as the leave-one-out AUC~(LOO-AUC) and prove that the expected LOO-AUC is proportional to each test's ability to separate correct code from incorrect code. Building on this, we propose ACES~(AUC ConsistEncy Scoring) with two complementary variants: ACES-C provides closed-form weights that provably approximate the oracle in expectation under a mild assumption on average test quality; ACES-O drops this assumption and iteratively optimizes a differentiable LOO-AUC objective. Both operate solely on the binary pass matrix with negligible overhead, and achieve state-of-the-art Pass@k on multiple code generation benchmarks.

Consistency models are a nascent family of generative models that can sample high quality data in one step without the need for adversarial training. Current consistency models achieve optimal sample quality by distilling from pre-trained diffusion models and employing learned metrics such as LPIPS. However, distillation limits the quality of consistency models to that of the pre-trained diffusion model, and LPIPS causes undesirable bias in evaluation. To tackle these challenges, we present improved techniques for consistency training, where consistency models learn directly from data without distillation. We delve into the theory behind consistency training and identify a previously overlooked flaw, which we address by eliminating Exponential Moving Average from the teacher consistency model. To replace learned metrics like LPIPS, we adopt Pseudo-Huber losses from robust statistics. Additionally, we introduce a lognormal noise schedule for the consistency training objective, and propose to double total discretization steps every set number of training iterations. Combined with better hyperparameter tuning, these modifications enable consistency models to achieve FID scores of 2.51 and 3.25 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 64times 64 respectively in a single sampling step. These scores mark a 3.5times and 4times improvement compared to prior consistency training approaches. Through two-step sampling, we further reduce FID scores to 2.24 and 2.77 on these two datasets, surpassing those obtained via distillation in both one-step and two-step settings, while narrowing the gap between consistency models and other state-of-the-art generative models.

Large Language Models are prompting us to view more NLP tasks from a generative perspective. At the same time, they offer a new way of accessing information, mainly through the RAG framework. While there have been notable improvements for the autoregressive models, overcoming hallucination in the generated answers remains a continuous problem. A standard solution is to use commercial LLMs, such as GPT4, to evaluate these algorithms. However, such frameworks are expensive and not very transparent. Therefore, we propose a study which demonstrates the interest of open-weight models for evaluating RAG hallucination. We develop a lightweight approach using smaller, quantized LLMs to provide an accessible and interpretable metric that gives continuous scores for the generated answer with respect to their correctness and faithfulness. This score allows us to question decisions' reliability and explore thresholds to develop a new AUC metric as an alternative to correlation with human judgment.

We introduce CAT, a framework designed to evaluate and visualize the interplay of accuracy and response consistency of Large Language Models (LLMs) under controllable input variations, using multiple-choice (MC) benchmarks as a case study. Current evaluation practices primarily focus on model capabilities such as accuracy or benchmark scores and, more recently, measuring consistency is being considered an essential property for deploying LLMs in high-stake, real-world applications. We argue in this paper that although both dimensions should still be evaluated independently, their inter-dependency also need to be considered for a more nuanced evaluation of LLMs. At the core of CAT are the Consistency-Accuracy Relation (CAR) curves, which visualize how model accuracy varies with increasing consistency requirements, as defined by the Minimum-Consistency Accuracy (MCA) metric. We further propose the Consistency-Oriented Robustness Estimate (CORE) index, a global metric that combines the area and shape of the CAR curve to quantify the trade-off between accuracy and consistency. We present a practical demonstration of our framework across a diverse set of generalist and domain-specific LLMs, evaluated on multiple MC benchmarks. We also outline how CAT can be extended beyond MC tasks to support long-form, open-ended evaluations through adaptable scoring functions.

Probabilistic decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields inconsistent outputs, particularly on complex or long-form questions. Self-Consistency (SC) mitigates this for short-form QA by majority voting over exact strings, whereas Universal Self-Consistency (USC) and Weighted Unigram Consistency Score (WUCS) extend to long-form responses but lose accuracy on short-form benchmarks. We introduce Latent Self-Consistency (LSC), which selects the most semantically consistent response using learnable token embeddings. LSC's lightweight forward processing of summary tokens only introduces negligible runtime overhead (at most 0.9%) on top of standard decoding of the base LLM, and requires no changes to the model architecture. Across 6 short-form and 5 long-form reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH, MMLU, TruthfulQA), LSC surpasses SC, USC, and WUCS on both short-form and long-form on average performance, while adding negligible computational overhead on vanilla inference. These results position LSC as a reliable consistency-selection method that works effectively across various answer formats. Additionally, LSC provides well-calibrated confidence estimates, maintaining low expected calibration error across both answer formats.

As of September 2023, ChatGPT correctly answers "what is 7+8" with 15, but when asked "7+8=15, True or False" it responds with "False". This inconsistency between generating and validating an answer is prevalent in language models (LMs) and erodes trust. In this paper, we propose a framework for measuring the consistency between generation and validation (which we call generator-validator consistency, or GV-consistency), finding that even GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LM, is GV-consistent only 76% of the time. To improve the consistency of LMs, we propose to finetune on the filtered generator and validator responses that are GV-consistent, and call this approach consistency fine-tuning. We find that this approach improves GV-consistency of Alpaca-30B from 60% to 93%, and the improvement extrapolates to unseen tasks and domains (e.g., GV-consistency for positive style transfers extrapolates to unseen styles like humor). In addition to improving consistency, consistency fine-tuning improves both generator quality and validator accuracy without using any labeled data. Evaluated across 6 tasks, including math questions, knowledge-intensive QA, and instruction following, our method improves the generator quality by 16% and the validator accuracy by 6.3% across all tasks.

As LLM-based agents are deployed in production systems, understanding their behavioral consistency (whether they produce similar action sequences when given identical tasks) becomes critical for reliability. We study consistency in the context of SWE-bench, a challenging software engineering benchmark requiring complex, multi-step reasoning. Comparing Claude~4.5~Sonnet, GPT-5, and Llama-3.1-70B across 50 runs each (10 tasks times 5 runs), we find that across models, higher consistency aligns with higher accuracy: Claude achieves the lowest variance (CV: 15.2\%) and highest accuracy (58\%), GPT-5 is intermediate (CV: 32.2\%, accuracy: 32\%), and Llama shows the highest variance (CV: 47.0\%) with lowest accuracy (4\%). However, within a model, consistency can amplify both correct and incorrect interpretations. Our analysis reveals a critical nuance: consistency amplifies outcomes rather than guaranteeing correctness. 71\% of Claude's failures stem from "consistent wrong interpretation": making the same incorrect assumption across all runs. Interestingly, GPT-5 achieves similar early strategic agreement as Claude (diverging at step 3.4 vs.\ 3.2) but exhibits 2.1times higher variance, suggesting that divergence timing alone does not determine consistency. These findings suggest that for production deployment, interpretation accuracy matters more than execution consistency, with implications for agent evaluation and training.

Self-consistency (SC), a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning, shows significant gains across various multi-step reasoning tasks but comes with a high cost due to multiple sampling with the preset size. Its variants, Adaptive self-consistency (ASC) and Early-stopping self-consistency (ESC), dynamically adjust the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples, reducing the cost of SC with minimal impact on performance. Both methods, however, do not exploit the prior information about question difficulty. It often results in unnecessary repeated sampling for easy questions that could be accurately answered with just one attempt, wasting resources. To tackle this problem, we propose Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC), which leverages the difficulty information from both prior and posterior perspectives to adaptively allocate inference resources, further reducing the cost of SC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DSC, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning on six benchmarks. The empirical results show that DSC consistently surpasses the strong baseline ASC and ESC in terms of costs by a significant margin, while attaining comparable performances.

Consistency Models (CM) (Song et al., 2023) accelerate score-based diffusion model sampling at the cost of sample quality but lack a natural way to trade-off quality for speed. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Trajectory Model (CTM), a generalization encompassing CM and score-based models as special cases. CTM trains a single neural network that can -- in a single forward pass -- output scores (i.e., gradients of log-density) and enables unrestricted traversal between any initial and final time along the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) in a diffusion process. CTM enables the efficient combination of adversarial training and denoising score matching loss to enhance performance and achieves new state-of-the-art FIDs for single-step diffusion model sampling on CIFAR-10 (FID 1.73) and ImageNet at 64x64 resolution (FID 1.92). CTM also enables a new family of sampling schemes, both deterministic and stochastic, involving long jumps along the ODE solution trajectories. It consistently improves sample quality as computational budgets increase, avoiding the degradation seen in CM. Furthermore, unlike CM, CTM's access to the score function can streamline the adoption of established controllable/conditional generation methods from the diffusion community. This access also enables the computation of likelihood. The code is available at https://github.com/sony/ctm.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment in high-stake domains requires consistent performance across multiple interaction rounds. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving LLM response consistency, making three key contributions. First, we propose a novel Position-Weighted Consistency (PWC) score that captures both the importance of early-stage stability and recovery patterns in multi-turn interactions. Second, we present a carefully curated benchmark dataset spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels, specifically designed to evaluate LLM consistency under various challenging follow-up scenarios. Third, we introduce Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG), a framework that significantly improves response stability by incorporating model confidence signals into the generation process. Empirical results demonstrate that CARG significantly improves response stability without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring its potential for reliable LLM deployment in critical applications.

Diffusion models achieve superior generation quality but suffer from slow generation speed due to the iterative nature of denoising. In contrast, consistency models, a new generative family, achieve competitive performance with significantly faster sampling. These models are trained either through consistency distillation, which leverages pretrained diffusion models, or consistency training/tuning directly from raw data. In this work, we propose a novel framework for understanding consistency models by modeling the denoising process of the diffusion model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and framing consistency model training as the value estimation through Temporal Difference~(TD) Learning. More importantly, this framework allows us to analyze the limitations of current consistency training/tuning strategies. Built upon Easy Consistency Tuning (ECT), we propose Stable Consistency Tuning (SCT), which incorporates variance-reduced learning using the score identity. SCT leads to significant performance improvements on benchmarks such as CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-64. On ImageNet-64, SCT achieves 1-step FID 2.42 and 2-step FID 1.55, a new SoTA for consistency models.

Language models (LMs) should provide reliable confidence estimates to help users detect mistakes in their outputs and defer to human experts when necessary. Asking a language model to assess its confidence ("Score your confidence from 0-1.") is a natural way of evaluating its uncertainty. However, models struggle to provide absolute assessments of confidence (i.e. judging confidence in answering a question independent of other questions) and the coarse-grained scores they produce are not useful for evaluating the correctness of their answers. We propose relative confidence estimation, where we match up questions against each other and ask the model to make relative judgments of confidence ("Which question are you more confident in answering correctly?"). Treating each question as a "player" in a series of matchups against other questions and the model's preferences as match outcomes, we can use rank aggregation methods like Elo rating and Bradley-Terry to translate the model's confidence preferences into confidence scores. We evaluate relative confidence estimation against absolute confidence estimation and self-consistency confidence methods on five state-of-the-art LMs -- GPT-4, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1 405B -- across 14 challenging STEM, social science, and commonsense reasoning question answering tasks. Our results demonstrate that relative confidence estimation consistently provides more reliable confidence scores than absolute confidence estimation, with average gains of 3.5% in selective classification AUC over direct absolute confidence estimation methods and 1.7% over self-consistency approaches across all models and datasets.

Automated Essay Score (AES) is proven to be one of the cutting-edge technologies. Scoring techniques are used for various purposes. Reliable scores are calculated based on influential variables. Such variables can be computed by different methods based on the domain. The research is concentrated on the user's understanding of a given topic. The analysis is based on a scoring index by using Large Language Models. The user can then compare and contrast the understanding of a topic that they recently learned. The results are then contributed towards learning analytics and progression is made for enhancing the learning ability. In this research, the focus is on summarizing a PDF document and gauging a user's understanding of its content. The process involves utilizing a Langchain tool to summarize the PDF and extract the essential information. By employing this technique, the research aims to determine how well the user comprehends the summarized content.

This study investigates the consistency of feedback ratings generated by OpenAI's GPT-4, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence language model, across multiple iterations, time spans and stylistic variations. The model rated responses to tasks within the Higher Education (HE) subject domain of macroeconomics in terms of their content and style. Statistical analysis was conducted in order to learn more about the interrater reliability, consistency of the ratings across iterations and the correlation between ratings in terms of content and style. The results revealed a high interrater reliability with ICC scores ranging between 0.94 and 0.99 for different timespans, suggesting that GPT-4 is capable of generating consistent ratings across repetitions with a clear prompt. Style and content ratings show a high correlation of 0.87. When applying a non-adequate style the average content ratings remained constant, while style ratings decreased, which indicates that the large language model (LLM) effectively distinguishes between these two criteria during evaluation. The prompt used in this study is furthermore presented and explained. Further research is necessary to assess the robustness and reliability of AI models in various use cases.

Standard practice within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) involves optimizing against a Reward Model (RM), which itself is trained to reflect human preferences for desirable generations. A notable subject that is understudied is the (in-)consistency of RMs -- whether they can recognize the semantic changes to different prompts and appropriately adapt their reward assignments -- and their impact on the downstream RLHF model. In this paper, we visit a series of research questions relevant to RM inconsistency: (1) How can we measure the consistency of reward models? (2) How consistent are the existing RMs and how can we improve them? (3) In what ways does reward inconsistency influence the chatbots resulting from the RLHF model training? We propose Contrast Instructions -- a benchmarking strategy for the consistency of RM. Each example in Contrast Instructions features a pair of lexically similar instructions with different ground truth responses. A consistent RM is expected to rank the corresponding instruction and response higher than other combinations. We observe that current RMs trained with the standard ranking objective fail miserably on Contrast Instructions compared to average humans. To show that RM consistency can be improved efficiently without using extra training budget, we propose two techniques ConvexDA and RewardFusion, which enhance reward consistency through extrapolation during the RM training and inference stage, respectively. We show that RLHF models trained with a more consistent RM yield more useful responses, suggesting that reward inconsistency exhibits a trickle-down effect on the downstream RLHF process.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical decision support, where hallucinations and unsafe suggestions may pose direct risks to patient safety. These risks are particularly challenging as they often manifest as subtle clinical errors that evade detection by generic metrics, while expert-authored fine-grained rubrics remain costly to construct and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework designed to automate the generation of instance-specific evaluation rubrics. Our approach grounds evaluation in authoritative medical evidence by decomposing retrieved content into atomic facts and synthesizing them with user interaction constraints to form verifiable, fine-grained evaluation criteria. Evaluated on HealthBench, our framework achieves a Clinical Intent Alignment (CIA) score of 60.12%, a statistically significant improvement over the GPT-4o baseline (55.16%). In discriminative tests, our rubrics yield a mean score delta (μ_Δ = 8.658) and an AUROC of 0.977, nearly doubling the quality separation achieved by GPT-4o baseline (4.972). Beyond evaluation, our rubrics effectively guide response refinement, improving quality by 9.2% (from 59.0% to 68.2%). This provides a scalable and transparent foundation for both evaluating and improving medical LLMs. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Automated-Rubric-Generation-AF3C/.

Techniques for reliable rubric-based LLM evaluation -- ensemble judging, bias mitigation, few-shot calibration -- are scattered across papers with inconsistent terminology and partial implementations. We introduce Autorubric, an open-source framework that unifies these rubric-based LLM evaluation lessons with opinionated defaults: analytic rubrics with binary, ordinal, and nominal criteria; single-judge and ensemble evaluation; few-shot calibration; bias mitigations; and psychometric reliability metrics. We validate on three benchmarks: RiceChem (college chemistry grading, 80\% accuracy with 5-shot calibration), ResearcherBench (deep research evaluation, 931 criteria, cross-judge agreement analysis), and CHARM-100, a new chatbot evaluation dataset combining all three criterion types with ground truth labels (87\% binary accuracy, moderate-to-substantial κ). Beyond measurement, per-criterion scores and explanations serve as optimization signals. We demonstrate how Autorubric's rubric-evaluation explanations raise a peer review agent's score from 0.47 to 0.85 (above the 0.82 expert-curated baseline), and its scores serve as RL rewards to produce statistically significant improvement on AdvancedIF (+0.039, Wilcoxon p = 0.032) with positive transfer to IFEval. In all of these cases, Autorubric enabled us to rapidly operationalize various rubric design choices and best practices with minimal effort.

While large language models (LLMs) have proven to be effective on a large variety of tasks, they are also known to hallucinate information. To measure whether an LLM prefers factually consistent continuations of its input, we propose a new benchmark called FIB(Factual Inconsistency Benchmark) that focuses on the task of summarization. Specifically, our benchmark involves comparing the scores an LLM assigns to a factually consistent versus a factually inconsistent summary for an input news article. For factually consistent summaries, we use human-written reference summaries that we manually verify as factually consistent. To generate summaries that are factually inconsistent, we generate summaries from a suite of summarization models that we have manually annotated as factually inconsistent. A model's factual consistency is then measured according to its accuracy, i.e.\ the proportion of documents where it assigns a higher score to the factually consistent summary. To validate the usefulness of FIB, we evaluate 23 large language models ranging from 1B to 176B parameters from six different model families including BLOOM and OPT. We find that existing LLMs generally assign a higher score to factually consistent summaries than to factually inconsistent summaries. However, if the factually inconsistent summaries occur verbatim in the document, then LLMs assign a higher score to these factually inconsistent summaries than factually consistent summaries. We validate design choices in our benchmark including the scoring method and source of distractor summaries. Our code and benchmark data can be found at https://github.com/r-three/fib.

Self-consistency decoding enhances LLMs' performance on reasoning tasks by sampling diverse reasoning paths and selecting the most frequent answer. However, it is computationally expensive, as sampling many of these (lengthy) paths is required to increase the chances that the correct answer emerges as the most frequent one. To address this, we introduce Confidence-Informed Self-Consistency (CISC). CISC performs a weighted majority vote based on confidence scores obtained directly from the model. By prioritizing high-confidence paths, it can identify the correct answer with a significantly smaller sample size. When tested on nine models and four datasets, CISC outperforms self-consistency in nearly all configurations, reducing the required number of reasoning paths by over 40% on average. In addition, we introduce the notion of within-question confidence evaluation, after showing that standard evaluation methods are poor predictors of success in distinguishing correct and incorrect answers to the same question. In fact, the most calibrated confidence method proved to be the least effective for CISC. Lastly, beyond these practical implications, our results and analyses show that LLMs can effectively judge the correctness of their own outputs, contributing to the ongoing debate on this topic.

Self-alignment, whereby models learn to improve themselves without human annotation, is a rapidly growing research area. However, existing techniques often fail to improve complex reasoning tasks due to the difficulty of assigning correct rewards. An orthogonal approach that is known to improve correctness is self-consistency, a method applied at inference time based on multiple sampling in order to find the most consistent answer. In this work, we extend the self-consistency concept to help train models. We thus introduce self-consistency preference optimization (ScPO), which iteratively trains consistent answers to be preferred over inconsistent ones on unsupervised new problems. We show ScPO leads to large improvements over conventional reward model training on reasoning tasks such as GSM8K and MATH, closing the gap with supervised training with gold answers or preferences, and that combining ScPO with standard supervised learning improves results even further. On ZebraLogic, ScPO finetunes Llama-3 8B to be superior to Llama-3 70B, Gemma-2 27B, and Claude-3 Haiku.

Self-consistency (SC) is a widely used test-time inference technique for improving performance in chain-of-thought reasoning. It involves generating multiple responses, or samples from a large language model (LLM) and selecting the most frequent answer. This procedure can naturally be viewed as a majority vote or empirical mode estimation. Despite its effectiveness, SC is prohibitively expensive at scale when naively applied to datasets, and it lacks a unified theoretical treatment of sample efficiency and scaling behavior. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of SC's scaling behavior and its variants, drawing on mode estimation and voting theory. We derive and empirically validate power law scaling for self-consistency across datasets, and analyze the sample efficiency for fixed-allocation and dynamic-allocation sampling schemes. From these insights, we introduce Blend-ASC, a novel variant of self-consistency that dynamically allocates samples to questions during inference, achieving state-of-the-art sample efficiency. Our approach uses 6.8x fewer samples than vanilla SC on average, outperforming both fixed- and dynamic-allocation SC baselines, thereby demonstrating the superiority of our approach in terms of efficiency. In contrast to existing variants, Blend-ASC is hyperparameter-free and can fit an arbitrary sample budget, ensuring it can be easily applied to any self-consistency application.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) holds significant promise in the field of education, helping educators to mark larger volumes of essays and provide timely feedback. However, Arabic AES research has been limited by the lack of publicly available essay data. This study introduces AR-AES, an Arabic AES benchmark dataset comprising 2046 undergraduate essays, including gender information, scores, and transparent rubric-based evaluation guidelines, providing comprehensive insights into the scoring process. These essays come from four diverse courses, covering both traditional and online exams. Additionally, we pioneer the use of AraBERT for AES, exploring its performance on different question types. We find encouraging results, particularly for Environmental Chemistry and source-dependent essay questions. For the first time, we examine the scale of errors made by a BERT-based AES system, observing that 96.15 percent of the errors are within one point of the first human marker's prediction, on a scale of one to five, with 79.49 percent of predictions matching exactly. In contrast, additional human markers did not exceed 30 percent exact matches with the first marker, with 62.9 percent within one mark. These findings highlight the subjectivity inherent in essay grading, and underscore the potential for current AES technology to assist human markers to grade consistently across large classes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable fluency and competence across various natural language tasks. However, recent research has highlighted their sensitivity to variations in input prompts. To deploy LLMs in a safe and reliable manner, it is crucial for their outputs to be consistent when prompted with expressions that carry the same meaning or intent. While some existing work has explored how state-of-the-art LLMs address this issue, their evaluations have been confined to assessing lexical equality of single- or multi-word answers, overlooking the consistency of generative text sequences. For a more comprehensive understanding of the consistency of LLMs in open-ended text generation scenarios, we introduce a general measure of semantic consistency, and formulate multiple versions of this metric to evaluate the performance of various LLMs. Our proposal demonstrates significantly higher consistency and stronger correlation with human evaluations of output consistency than traditional metrics based on lexical consistency. Finally, we propose a novel prompting strategy, called Ask-to-Choose (A2C), to enhance semantic consistency. When evaluated for closed-book question answering based on answer variations from the TruthfulQA benchmark, A2C increases accuracy metrics for pretrained and finetuned LLMs by up to 47%, and semantic consistency metrics for instruction-tuned models by up to 7-fold.

We set out to train behavioral dispositions (self-verification, uncertainty acknowledgment, feedback integration) into small language models (0.6B to 2.3B effective parameters) through a four-stage all-MIT distillation pipeline, with follow-on experiments on inference-time attention-head interventions and a frozen-base confidence-gated sidecar. An internal draft reported +33.9-point MCAS and +15.3-point HumanEval gains on a Qwen3-0.6B student; a second-pass sanity check falsified both numbers before publication. The HumanEval delta was a truncation artifact (n_predict=512) that inverted to -8.0 points at n_predict=1024; the MCAS gain disappeared under apples-to-apples scoring. That falsification triggered three subsequent arcs. Across (1) SFT/DPO LoRA on three model families and two domains, (2) inference-time attention-head tempering on o_proj, and (3) a training-free frozen-base sidecar reading the final-token hidden state h_last, we find no operator that moves judge-measured disposition without damaging content or collapsing into stylistic mimicry. The failure is consistent across five models (Qwen3-0.6B, Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3.5-0.8B, Gemma 4 E2B, and SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct). A within-distribution cross-validation pass (AUC=0.683) collapsed to chance on fresh prompts (AUC=0.516). We contribute a three-arc negative result with mechanism, a two-failure-mode taxonomy for linear h_last probes, and an honest falsification pipeline that converts the class of false positives we ourselves produced into publishable negatives. As an independent finding, Gemma 4 E2B exhibits near-complete confidence-correctness decoupling on the Chef domain (assertion asymmetry -0.009; the model asserts at 91% regardless of correctness).

This paper introduces the first publicly available dataset for Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) and feedback generation in Basque, targeting the CEFR C1 proficiency level. The dataset comprises 3,200 essays from HABE, each annotated by expert evaluators with criterion specific scores covering correctness, richness, coherence, cohesion, and task alignment enriched with detailed feedback and error examples. We fine-tune open-source models, including RoBERTa-EusCrawl and Latxa 8B/70B, for both scoring and explanation generation. Our experiments show that encoder models remain highly reliable for AES, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of Latxa significantly enhances performance, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) closed-source systems such as GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in scoring consistency and feedback quality. We also propose a novel evaluation methodology for assessing feedback generation, combining automatic consistency metrics with expert-based validation of extracted learner errors. Results demonstrate that the fine-tuned Latxa model produces criterion-aligned, pedagogically meaningful feedback and identifies a wider range of error types than proprietary models. This resource and benchmark establish a foundation for transparent, reproducible, and educationally grounded NLP research in low-resource languages such as Basque.

While LLM-as-a-Judge is widely used in automated evaluation, existing validation practices primarily operate at the level of observed outputs, offering limited insight into whether LLM judges themselves function as stable and reliable measurement instruments. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-phase diagnostic framework for assessing reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge, grounded in Item Response Theory (IRT). The framework adopts Graded Response Model (GRM) of IRT and formalizes reliability along two complementary dimensions: (1) intrinsic consistency, defined as the stability of measurement behavior under prompt variations, and (2) human alignment, capturing correspondence with human quality assessments. We empirically examine diverse LLM judges with this framework, and show that leveraging IRT-GRM yields interpretable signals for diagnosing judgments systematically. These signals provide practical guidance for verifying reliablity of LLM-as-a-Judge and identifying potential causes of unreliability.

Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) and LLM-as-a-Judge exhibit deceptive alignment by producing correct judgments for incorrect reasons, as they are trained and evaluated to prioritize Outcome Accuracy, which undermines their ability to generalize during RLHF. We introduce Rationale Consistency, a fine-grained metric that quantifies the alignment between the model's reasoning process and human judgment. Our evaluation of frontier models reveals that rationale consistency effectively discriminates among state-of-the-art models and detects deceptive alignment, while outcome accuracy falls short in both respects. To mitigate this gap, we introduce a hybrid signal that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy for GenRM training. Our training method achieves state-of-the-art performance on RM-Bench (87.1%) and JudgeBench (82%), surpassing outcome-only baselines by an average of 5%. Using RM during RLHF, our method effectively improves performance as demonstrated on Arena Hard v2, notably yielding a 7% improvement in creative writing tasks. Further analysis confirms that our method escapes the deceptive alignment trap, effectively reversing the decline in rationale consistency observed in outcome-only training.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge) has revealed critical inconsistencies in current evaluation frameworks. We identify two fundamental types of inconsistencies: (1) Score-Comparison Inconsistency, where lower-rated responses outperform higher-scored ones in pairwise comparisons, and (2) Pairwise Transitivity Inconsistency, manifested through circular preference chains (A>B>C>A) and equivalence contradictions (A=B=C\neq A). We argue that these issues come from information loss in discrete rating systems and ambiguous tie judgments during pairwise evaluation. We propose TrustJudge, a probabilistic framework that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: 1) distribution-sensitive scoring that computes continuous expectations from discrete rating probabilities, preserving information entropy for more precise scoring, and 2) likelihood-aware aggregation that resolves transitivity violations using bidirectional preference probabilities or perplexity. We also formalize the theoretical limitations of current LLM-as-a-judge frameworks and demonstrate how TrustJudge's components overcome them. When evaluated with Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct as judge using our dataset, TrustJudge reduces Score-Comparison inconsistency by 8.43% (from 23.32% to 14.89%) and Pairwise Transitivity inconsistency by 10.82% (from 15.22% to 4.40%), while maintaining higher evaluation accuracy. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of evaluation framework inconsistencies in LLM-as-a-judge paradigms, offering both theoretical insights and practical solutions for reliable automated assessment. The framework demonstrates consistent improvements across various model architectures and scales, enabling more trustworthy LLM evaluation without requiring additional training or human annotations. The codes can be found at https://github.com/TrustJudge/TrustJudge.

Generations from large language models (LLMs) can be improved by sampling and scoring multiple solutions to select a final answer. Current "sample and select" methods such as self-consistency (SC) rely on majority voting to score answers. However, when tasks have many distinct and valid answers, selection by voting requires a large number of samples. This makes SC prohibitively expensive for interactive tasks that involve generating multiple actions (answers) sequentially. After establishing that majority voting fails to provide consistent gains on such tasks, we demonstrate how to increase success rates by softening the scoring criterion. We introduce Soft Self-Consistency (SOFT-SC), which replaces SC's discontinuous scoring with a continuous score computed from model likelihoods, allowing for selection even when actions are sparsely distributed. SOFT-SC improves both performance and efficiency on long-horizon interactive tasks, requiring half as many samples as SC for comparable or better performance. For a fixed number of samples, SOFT-SC leads to a 1.3% increase over SC in absolute success rate on writing bash programs, a 6.6% increase on online shopping (WebShop), and a 4.7% increase for an interactive household game (ALFWorld). Finally, we show that SOFT-SC can be applied to both open-source and black-box models.

Timestep distillation is an effective approach for improving the generation efficiency of diffusion models. The Consistency Model (CM), as a trajectory-based framework, demonstrates significant potential due to its strong theoretical foundation and high-quality few-step generation. Nevertheless, current continuous-time consistency distillation methods still rely heavily on training data and computational resources, hindering their deployment in resource-constrained scenarios and limiting their scalability to diverse domains. To address this issue, we propose Trajectory-Backward Consistency Model (TBCM), which eliminates the dependence on external training data by extracting latent representations directly from the teacher model's generation trajectory. Unlike conventional methods that require VAE encoding and large-scale datasets, our self-contained distillation paradigm significantly improves both efficiency and simplicity. Moreover, the trajectory-extracted samples naturally bridge the distribution gap between training and inference, thereby enabling more effective knowledge transfer. Empirically, TBCM achieves 6.52 FID and 28.08 CLIP scores on MJHQ-30k under one-step generation, while reducing training time by approximately 40% compared to Sana-Sprint and saving a substantial amount of GPU memory, demonstrating superior efficiency without sacrificing quality. We further reveal the diffusion-generation space discrepancy in continuous-time consistency distillation and analyze how sampling strategies affect distillation performance, offering insights for future distillation research. GitHub Link: https://github.com/hustvl/TBCM.

Self-consistency with chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has demonstrated remarkable performance gains on various challenging tasks, by utilizing multiple reasoning paths sampled from large language models (LLMs). However, self-consistency relies on the answer extraction process to aggregate multiple solutions, which is not applicable to free-form answers. In this work, we propose Universal Self-Consistency (USC), which leverages LLMs themselves to select the most consistent answer among multiple candidates. We evaluate USC on a variety of benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, long-context summarization, and open-ended question answering. On open-ended generation tasks where the original self-consistency method is not applicable, USC effectively utilizes multiple samples and improves the performance. For mathematical reasoning, USC matches the standard self-consistency performance without requiring the answer formats to be similar. Finally, without access to execution results, USC also matches the execution-based voting performance on code generation.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for improving the quality and consistency of generated outputs from large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs). Self-consistency has emerged as an effective approach for prompts with fixed answers, selecting the answer with the highest number of votes. In this paper, we introduce a generalized framework for self-consistency that extends its applicability beyond problems that have fixed-answer answers. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our approach consistently recovers the optimal or near-optimal generation from a set of candidates. We also propose lightweight parameter-free similarity functions that show significant and consistent improvements across code generation, autoformalization, and summarization tasks, even without access to token log probabilities. Our method incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring no auxiliary reranker models or modifications to the existing model.

Self-consistency has emerged as a popular technique for improving large language model accuracy on reasoning tasks. The approach is straightforward: generate multiple reasoning paths and select the most common answer through majority voting. While this reliably boosts accuracy, it remains unclear whether these gains reflect genuine improvements in reasoning quality. We investigate a fundamental question that has not been studied before: does inference scaling improve reasoning faithfulness? We conduct a comprehensive empirical study across four frontier models (GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini-3-flash-preview, and DeepSeek-v3.2) on 100 GSM8K mathematical reasoning problems. Our analysis employs bootstrap confidence intervals, McNemar's tests for paired comparisons, and Cohen's d effect sizes to quantify the effects rigorously. The results reveal striking differences across models that challenge common assumptions about self-consistency. GPT-5.2 shows the expected pattern: accuracy improves from 78% to 90% at N=5, with faithfulness remaining relatively stable (0.540 to 0.510). Claude Opus 4.5 tells a completely different story. Its accuracy actually drops from 78% to 74.3% while faithfulness jumps dramatically from 0.270 to 0.891 at N=5. DeepSeek-v3.2, already at 98% accuracy, shows ceiling effects with modest faithfulness gains (0.440 to 0.541). Gemini-3-flash improves from 81% to 86% accuracy with a slight faithfulness decrease (0.260 to 0.212). Problem difficulty analysis reveals that GPT-5.2 solves 82% of hard problems while breaking only 13% of easy ones. Claude, in contrast, breaks 23% of easy problems, explaining its accuracy decrease. These findings matter for practitioners: self-consistency is not universally beneficial, and teams should test their specific models before deployment. We release our code and provide practical recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs.

Self-consistency (SC), leveraging multiple samples from LLMs, shows significant gains on various reasoning tasks but struggles with free-form generation due to the difficulty of aggregating answers. Its variants, UCS and USC, rely on sample selection or voting mechanisms to improve output quality. These methods, however, face limitations due to their inability to fully utilize the nuanced consensus knowledge present within multiple candidate samples, often resulting in suboptimal outputs. We propose Fine-Grained Self-Consistency (FSC) to addresses these limitations by extracting and integrating segment-level commonalities from candidate samples, enhancing the performance of LLMs both in open-ended and reasoning tasks. Based on this, we present two additional strategies: candidate filtering, which enhances overall quality by identifying highly similar candidate sets, and merging, which reduces input token requirements by combining similar samples. The effectiveness of FSC is demonstrated through extensive experiments on various tasks, including summarization, code generation, and mathematical reasoning, using GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4. The results indicate significant improvements over baseline methods, showcasing the potential of FSC to optimize output quality by effectively synthesizing fine-grained consensus knowledge from multiple samples.

We present ACAR (Adaptive Complexity and Attribution Routing), a measurement framework for studying multi-model orchestration under auditable conditions. ACAR uses self-consistency variance (sigma) computed from N=3 probe samples to route tasks across single-model, two-model, and three-model execution modes. The system is implemented on top of TEAMLLM, a deterministic execution substrate with immutable artifacts and complete decision traces. We evaluate ACAR on 1,510 tasks spanning four benchmarks: MathArena, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench, and SuperGPQA, using Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.0 Flash, producing more than 7,550 auditable runs. Results show that sigma-based routing achieves 55.6 percent accuracy, exceeding the two-model baseline of 54.4 percent while avoiding full ensembling on 54.2 percent of tasks. The routing mechanism is model-agnostic and requires no learned components. We also document negative results. First, retrieval augmentation reduced accuracy by 3.4 percentage points, as median retrieval similarity was only 0.167, demonstrating that experience injection without semantic alignment introduces noise rather than grounding. Second, when models agree on incorrect answers (sigma equals zero), no downstream ensemble can recover; this agreement-but-wrong failure mode is intrinsic to self-consistency and bounds achievable accuracy at approximately eight percentage points below full ensembling. Third, attribution estimates based on proxy signals such as response similarity and entropy showed weak correlation with ground-truth leave-one-out values, indicating that practical attribution requires explicit counterfactual computation. This work documents which assumptions fail in practice and provides falsifiable baselines for future research on routing, retrieval, and multi-model attribution.

Reinforcement learning has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex problem-solving tasks. Recently, the introduction of DeepSeek R1 has inspired a surge of interest in leveraging rule-based rewards as a low-cost alternative for computing advantage functions and guiding policy optimization. However, a common challenge observed across many replication and extension efforts is that when multiple sampled responses under a single prompt converge to identical outcomes, whether correct or incorrect, the group-based advantage degenerates to zero. This leads to vanishing gradients and renders the corresponding samples ineffective for learning, ultimately limiting training efficiency and downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose a consistency-aware policy optimization framework that introduces a structured global reward based on outcome consistency, the global loss based on it ensures that, even when model outputs show high intra-group consistency, the training process still receives meaningful learning signals, which encourages the generation of correct and self-consistent reasoning paths from a global perspective. Furthermore, we incorporate an entropy-based soft blending mechanism that adaptively balances local advantage estimation with global optimization, enabling dynamic transitions between exploration and convergence throughout training. Our method introduces several key innovations in both reward design and optimization strategy. We validate its effectiveness through substantial performance gains on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, highlighting the proposed framework's robustness and general applicability. Code of this work has been released at https://github.com/hijih/copo-code.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extensively used today across various sectors, including academia, research, business, and finance, for tasks such as text generation, summarization, and translation. Despite their widespread adoption, these models often produce incorrect and misleading information, exhibiting a tendency to hallucinate. This behavior can be attributed to several factors, with consistency and reasoning capabilities being significant contributors. LLMs frequently lack the ability to generate explanations and engage in coherent reasoning, leading to inaccurate responses. Moreover, they exhibit inconsistencies in their outputs. This paper aims to evaluate and compare the consistency and reasoning capabilities of both public and proprietary LLMs. The experiments utilize the Boolq dataset as the ground truth, comprising questions, answers, and corresponding explanations. Queries from the dataset are presented as prompts to the LLMs, and the generated responses are evaluated against the ground truth answers. Additionally, explanations are generated to assess the models' reasoning abilities. Consistency is evaluated by repeatedly presenting the same query to the models and observing for variations in their responses. For measuring reasoning capabilities, the generated explanations are compared to the ground truth explanations using metrics such as BERT, BLEU, and F-1 scores. The findings reveal that proprietary models generally outperform public models in terms of both consistency and reasoning capabilities. However, even when presented with basic general knowledge questions, none of the models achieved a score of 90\% in both consistency and reasoning. This study underscores the direct correlation between consistency and reasoning abilities in LLMs and highlights the inherent reasoning challenges present in current language models.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications. Recent advancements in Self-Rewarding Language Models suggest that an LLM can use its internal reward models (such as LLM-as-a-Judge) yuanself to generate preference data, improving alignment performance without costly human annotation. However, we find that different internal reward models within the same LLM often generate inconsistent preferences. This inconsistency raises concerns about the reliability of self-generated preference data, hinders overall alignment performance, and highlights the need for further research to ensure reliable and coherent alignment with human preferences. To address this limitation, we propose Self-Consistent Internal Rewards (SCIR), a novel framework designed to enhance consistency among internal reward models during training. In each training step, we collect preference predictions from multiple pre-defined internal reward models and enforce consistency and confidence through an inconsistency penalty mechanism, thereby improving the reliability of these internal reward models. We selectively use data with consistent predictions for preference optimization, ensuring the quality of the preference data. By employing self-consistent internal rewards, our method significantly improves the alignment performance and reward modeling capability of LLMs, outperforming baseline methods by a notable margin.

Test-time scaling can improve model performance by aggregating stochastic reasoning trajectories. However, achieving sample-efficient test-time self-consistency under a limited budget remains an open challenge. We introduce PETS (Principled and Efficient Test-TimeSelf-Consistency), which initiates a principled study of trajectory allocation through an optimization framework. Central to our approach is the self-consistency rate, a new measure defined as agreement with the infinite-budget majority vote. This formulation makes sample-efficient test-time allocation theoretically grounded and amenable to rigorous analysis. We study both offline and online settings. In the offline regime, where all questions are known in advance, we connect trajectory allocation to crowdsourcing, a classic and well-developed area, by modeling reasoning traces as workers. This perspective allows us to leverage rich existing theory, yielding theoretical guarantees and an efficient majority-voting-based allocation algorithm. In the online streaming regime, where questions arrive sequentially and allocations must be made on the fly, we propose a novel method inspired by the offline framework. Our approach adapts budgets to question difficulty while preserving strong theoretical guarantees and computational efficiency. Experiments show that PETS consistently outperforms uniform allocation. On GPQA, PETS achieves perfect self-consistency in both settings while reducing the sampling budget by up to 75% (offline) and 55% (online) relative to uniform allocation. Code is available at https://github.com/ZDCSlab/PETS.

ATANT v1.0 (arXiv:2604.06710) defined continuity as a system property with 7 required properties and introduced a 10-checkpoint, LLM-free evaluation methodology validated on a 250-story corpus. Since publication, a recurring reviewer and practitioner question has concerned not the framework itself but its relationship to a wider set of memory evaluations: LOCOMO, LongMemEval, BEAM, MemoryBench, Zep's evaluation suite, Letta/MemGPT's evaluations, and RULER. This companion paper, v1.1, does not modify the v1.0 standard. It closes a related-work gap that v1.0 left brief under page limits. We show by structural analysis that none of these benchmarks measures continuity as defined in v1.0: of the 7 required properties, the median existing eval covers 1 property, the mean covers 0.43 when partial credit is scored at 0.5, and no eval covers more than 2. We provide a cell-by-cell property-coverage matrix, identify methodological defects specific to each benchmark (including an empty-gold scoring bug in the LOCOMO reference implementation that renders 23% of its corpus unscorable by construction), and publish our reference implementation's LOCOMO score (8.8%) alongside the structural reason that number is uninformative about continuity. We publish our 8.8% LOCOMO score alongside our 96% ATANT cumulative-scale score as a calibration pair: the 87-point divergence is evidence that the two benchmarks measure different properties, not that one system is an order of magnitude better than another. The position v1.1 takes is not adversarial: each benchmark measures a real capability. The claim is that none of them can adjudicate continuity, and conflating them with continuity evaluation has led the field to under-invest in the properties v1.0 names.

We present the design rationale, implementation attempt, and failure analysis of Eyla, a proposed identity-anchored LLM architecture that integrates biologically-inspired subsystems -- including HiPPO-initialized state-space models, zero-initialized adapters, episodic memory retrieval, and calibrated uncertainty training -- into a unified agent operating system running on consumer hardware. Unlike existing approaches that optimize models for generic helpfulness, Eyla targets identity consistency: the ability to maintain a coherent self-model under adversarial pressure, admit uncertainty, and resist manipulation. We propose the Identity Consistency Score (ICS), a novel benchmark for evaluating this property across LLMs. We then present an honest account of attempting to implement this architecture using AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor) as a non-programmer, documenting a $1,000+ failure that produced a 1.27B parameter model with 86 brain subsystems contributing less than 2% to output. Our analysis identifies five systematic failure modes of AI-assisted development for novel architectures and offers concrete recommendations. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to combine an architectural vision with a documented first-person failure analysis of AI-assisted LLM development, providing lessons for both the AI systems and AI-assisted software engineering communities.

Large language models (LLMs) can explain their predictions through post-hoc or Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations. But an LLM could make up reasonably sounding explanations that are unfaithful to its underlying reasoning. Recent work has designed tests that aim to judge the faithfulness of post-hoc or CoT explanations. In this work we argue that these faithfulness tests do not measure faithfulness to the models' inner workings -- but rather their self-consistency at output level. Our contributions are three-fold: i) We clarify the status of faithfulness tests in view of model explainability, characterising them as self-consistency tests instead. This assessment we underline by ii) constructing a Comparative Consistency Bank for self-consistency tests that for the first time compares existing tests on a common suite of 11 open LLMs and 5 tasks -- including iii) our new self-consistency measure CC-SHAP. CC-SHAP is a fine-grained measure (not a test) of LLM self-consistency. It compares how a model's input contributes to the predicted answer and to generating the explanation. Our fine-grained CC-SHAP metric allows us iii) to compare LLM behaviour when making predictions and to analyse the effect of other consistency tests at a deeper level, which takes us one step further towards measuring faithfulness by bringing us closer to the internals of the model than strictly surface output-oriented tests. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heidelberg-NLP/CC-SHAP

Multilingual large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have been shown to store considerable amounts of factual knowledge, but large variations are observed across languages. With the ultimate goal of ensuring that users with different language backgrounds obtain consistent feedback from the same model, we study the cross-lingual consistency (CLC) of factual knowledge in various multilingual PLMs. To this end, we propose a Ranking-based Consistency (RankC) metric to evaluate knowledge consistency across languages independently from accuracy. Using this metric, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the determining factors for CLC, both at model level and at language-pair level. Among other results, we find that increasing model size leads to higher factual probing accuracy in most languages, but does not improve cross-lingual consistency. Finally, we conduct a case study on CLC when new factual associations are inserted in the PLMs via model editing. Results on a small sample of facts inserted in English reveal a clear pattern whereby the new piece of knowledge transfers only to languages with which English has a high RankC score.

Qualitative research faces a critical reliability challenge: traditional inter-rater agreement methods require multiple human coders, are time-intensive, and often yield moderate consistency. We present a multi-perspective validation framework for LLM-based thematic analysis that combines ensemble validation with dual reliability metrics: Cohen's Kappa (κ) for inter-rater agreement and cosine similarity for semantic consistency. Our framework enables configurable analysis parameters (1-6 seeds, temperature 0.0-2.0), supports custom prompt structures with variable substitution, and provides consensus theme extraction across any JSON format. As proof-of-concept, we evaluate three leading LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) on a psychedelic art therapy interview transcript, conducting six independent runs per model. Results demonstrate Gemini achieves highest reliability (κ= 0.907, cosine=95.3%), followed by GPT-4o (κ= 0.853, cosine=92.6%) and Claude (κ= 0.842, cosine=92.1%). All three models achieve a high agreement (κ> 0.80), validating the multi-run ensemble approach. The framework successfully extracts consensus themes across runs, with Gemini identifying 6 consensus themes (50-83% consistency), GPT-4o identifying 5 themes, and Claude 4 themes. Our open-source implementation provides researchers with transparent reliability metrics, flexible configuration, and structure-agnostic consensus extraction, establishing methodological foundations for reliable AI-assisted qualitative research.

Recently, Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has gained increasing attention for improving LLM reasoning performance at test time without retraining the model. A notable TTS technique is Self-Consistency (SC), which generates multiple reasoning chains in parallel and selects the final answer via majority voting. While effective, the order-of-magnitude computational overhead limits its broad deployment. Prior attempts to accelerate SC mainly rely on model-based confidence scores or heuristics with limited empirical support. For the first time, we theoretically and empirically analyze the inefficiencies of SC and reveal actionable opportunities for improvement. Building on these insights, we propose Slim-SC, a step-wise pruning strategy that identifies and removes redundant chains using inter-chain similarity at the thought level. Experiments on three STEM reasoning datasets and two recent LLM architectures show that Slim-SC reduces inference latency and KVC usage by up to 45% and 26%, respectively, with R1-Distill, while maintaining or improving accuracy, thus offering a simple yet efficient TTS alternative for SC.

Background: Agent skills are increasingly deployed as modular, reusable capability units in AI agent systems. Medical research agent skills require safeguards beyond general-purpose evaluation, including scientific integrity, methodological validity, reproducibility, and boundary safety. This study developed and preliminarily evaluated a domain-specific audit framework for medical research agent skills, with a focus on reliability against expert review. Methods: We developed MedSkillAudit (skill-auditor@1.0), a layered framework assessing skill release readiness before deployment. We evaluated 75 skills across five medical research categories (15 per category). Two experts independently assigned a quality score (0-100), an ordinal release disposition (Production Ready / Limited Release / Beta Only / Reject), and a high-risk failure flag. System-expert agreement was quantified using ICC(2,1) and linearly weighted Cohen's kappa, benchmarked against the human inter-rater baseline. Results: The mean consensus quality score was 72.4 (SD = 13.0); 57.3% of skills fell below the Limited Release threshold. MedSkillAudit achieved ICC(2,1) = 0.449 (95% CI: 0.250-0.610), exceeding the human inter-rater ICC of 0.300. System-consensus score divergence (SD = 9.5) was smaller than inter-expert divergence (SD = 12.4), with no directional bias (Wilcoxon p = 0.613). Protocol Design showed the strongest category-level agreement (ICC = 0.551); Academic Writing showed a negative ICC (-0.567), reflecting a structural rubric-expert mismatch. Conclusions: Domain-specific pre-deployment audit may provide a practical foundation for governing medical research agent skills, complementing general-purpose quality checks with structured audit workflows tailored to scientific use cases.

Automated essay scoring (AES) involves predicting a score that reflects the writing quality of an essay. Most existing AES systems produce only a single overall score. However, users and L2 learners expect scores across different dimensions (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, coherence) for English essays in real-world applications. To address this need, we have developed two models that automatically score English essays across multiple dimensions by employing fine-tuning and other strategies on two large datasets. The results demonstrate that our systems achieve impressive performance in evaluation using three criteria: precision, F1 score, and Quadratic Weighted Kappa. Furthermore, our system outperforms existing methods in overall scoring.

Hallucination has emerged as a significant barrier to the effective application of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce a novel Attention-Guided SElf-Reflection (AGSER) approach for zero-shot hallucination detection in LLMs. The AGSER method utilizes attention contributions to categorize the input query into attentive and non-attentive queries. Each query is then processed separately through the LLMs, allowing us to compute consistency scores between the generated responses and the original answer. The difference between the two consistency scores serves as a hallucination estimator. In addition to its efficacy in detecting hallucinations, AGSER notably reduces computational overhead, requiring only three passes through the LLM and utilizing two sets of tokens. We have conducted extensive experiments with four widely-used LLMs across three different hallucination benchmarks, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot hallucination detection.

Continuous-time Consistency Models (CMs) promise efficient few-step generation but face significant challenges with training instability. We argue this instability stems from a fundamental conflict: by training a network to learn only a shortcut across a probability flow, the model loses its grasp on the instantaneous velocity field that defines the flow. Our solution is to explicitly anchor the model in the underlying flow during training. We introduce the Flow-Anchored Consistency Model (FACM), a simple but effective training strategy that uses a Flow Matching (FM) task as an anchor for the primary CM shortcut objective. This Flow-Anchoring approach requires no architectural modifications and is broadly compatible with standard model architectures. By distilling a pre-trained LightningDiT model, our method achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 1.32 with two steps (NFE=2) and 1.76 with just one step (NFE=1) on ImageNet 256x256, significantly outperforming previous methods. This provides a general and effective recipe for building high-performance, few-step generative models. Our code and pretrained models: https://github.com/ali-vilab/FACM.

Next token prediction paradigm has been prevailing for autoregressive models in the era of LLMs. The current default sampling choice for popular LLMs is temperature scaling together with nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. Nevertheless, such approach leads to inferior performance in various NLP tasks when the model is not certain about testing questions. To this end, we propose a brand new training-free decoding strategy, dubbed as Cautious Next Token Prediction (CNTP). In the decoding process, if the model has comparatively high prediction entropy at a certain step, we sample multiple trials starting from the step independently and stop when encountering any punctuation. Then we select the trial with the lowest perplexity score viewed as the most probable and reliable trial path given the model's capacity. The trial number is negatively correlated with the prediction confidence, i.e., the less confident the model is, the more trials it should sample. This is consistent with human beings' behaviour: when feeling uncertain or unconfident, one tends to think more creatively, exploring multiple thinking paths, to cautiously select the path one feels most confident about. Extensive experiments on both LLMs and MLLMs show that our proposed CNTP approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. Moreover, the integration of CNTP with self consistency can further improve over vanilla self consistency. We believe our proposed CNTP has the potential to become one of the default choices for LLM decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/CNTP.

Many text generation applications require the generated text to be factually consistent with input information. Automatic evaluation of factual consistency is challenging. Previous work has developed various metrics that often depend on specific functions, such as natural language inference (NLI) or question answering (QA), trained on limited data. Those metrics thus can hardly assess diverse factual inconsistencies (e.g., contradictions, hallucinations) that occur in varying inputs/outputs (e.g., sentences, documents) from different tasks. In this paper, we propose AlignScore, a new holistic metric that applies to a variety of factual inconsistency scenarios as above. AlignScore is based on a general function of information alignment between two arbitrary text pieces. Crucially, we develop a unified training framework of the alignment function by integrating a large diversity of data sources, resulting in 4.7M training examples from 7 well-established tasks (NLI, QA, paraphrasing, fact verification, information retrieval, semantic similarity, and summarization). We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks including 22 evaluation datasets, where 19 of the datasets were never seen in the alignment training. AlignScore achieves substantial improvement over a wide range of previous metrics. Moreover, AlignScore (355M parameters) matches or even outperforms metrics based on ChatGPT and GPT-4 that are orders of magnitude larger.

Accurate confidence estimation is essential for trustworthy large language models (LLMs) systems, as it empowers the user to determine when to trust outputs and enables reliable deployment in safety-critical applications. Current confidence estimation methods for LLMs neglect the relevance between responses and contextual information, a crucial factor in output quality evaluation, particularly in scenarios where background knowledge is provided. To bridge this gap, we propose CRUX (Context-aware entropy Reduction and Unified consistency eXamination), the first framework that integrates context faithfulness and consistency for confidence estimation via two novel metrics. First, contextual entropy reduction represents data uncertainty with the information gain through contrastive sampling with and without context. Second, unified consistency examination captures potential model uncertainty through the global consistency of the generated answers with and without context. Experiments across three benchmark datasets (CoQA, SQuAD, QuAC) and two domain-specific datasets (BioASQ, EduQG) demonstrate CRUX's effectiveness, achieving the highest AUROC than existing baselines.

Part-prototype networks (e.g., ProtoPNet, ProtoTree and ProtoPool) have attracted broad research interest for their intrinsic interpretability and comparable accuracy to non-interpretable counterparts. However, recent works find that the interpretability from prototypes is fragile, due to the semantic gap between the similarities in the feature space and that in the input space. In this work, we strive to address this challenge by making the first attempt to quantitatively and objectively evaluate the interpretability of the part-prototype networks. Specifically, we propose two evaluation metrics, termed as consistency score and stability score, to evaluate the explanation consistency across images and the explanation robustness against perturbations, respectively, both of which are essential for explanations taken into practice. Furthermore, we propose an elaborated part-prototype network with a shallow-deep feature alignment (SDFA) module and a score aggregation (SA) module to improve the interpretability of prototypes. We conduct systematical evaluation experiments and provide substantial discussions to uncover the interpretability of existing part-prototype networks. Experiments on three benchmarks across nine architectures demonstrate that our model achieves significantly superior performance to the state of the art, in both the accuracy and interpretability. Codes are available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/EvalProtoPNet.

A popular approach for improving the correctness of output from large language models (LLMs) is Self-Consistency - poll the LLM multiple times and output the most frequent solution. Existing Self-Consistency techniques always draw a constant number of samples per question, where a better approach will be to non-uniformly distribute the available budget based on the amount of agreement in the samples drawn so far. In response, we introduce Adaptive-Consistency, a cost-efficient, model-agnostic technique that dynamically adjusts the number of samples per question using a lightweight stopping criterion. Our experiments over 13 datasets and two LLMs demonstrate that Adaptive-Consistency reduces sample budget by up to 6.0 times with an average accuracy drop of less than 0.1%.

Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) aims to develop systems capable of describing an audio recording using a textual sentence. In contrast, Audio-Text Retrieval (ATR) systems seek to find the best matching audio recording(s) for a given textual query (Text-to-Audio) or vice versa (Audio-to-Text). These tasks require different types of systems: AAC employs a sequence-to-sequence model, while ATR utilizes a ranking model that compares audio and text representations within a shared projection subspace. However, this work investigates the relationship between AAC and ATR by exploring the ATR capabilities of an unmodified AAC system, without fine-tuning for the new task. Our AAC system consists of an audio encoder (ConvNeXt-Tiny) trained on AudioSet for audio tagging, and a transformer decoder responsible for generating sentences. For AAC, it achieves a high SPIDEr-FL score of 0.298 on Clotho and 0.472 on AudioCaps on average. For ATR, we propose using the standard Cross-Entropy loss values obtained for any audio/caption pair. Experimental results on the Clotho and AudioCaps datasets demonstrate decent recall values using this simple approach. For instance, we obtained a Text-to-Audio R@1 value of 0.382 for Au-dioCaps, which is above the current state-of-the-art method without external data. Interestingly, we observe that normalizing the loss values was necessary for Audio-to-Text retrieval.

Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) is the computer-assisted evaluation of a candidate's speaking proficiency in a language. ASS systems face many challenges like open grammar, variable pronunciations, and unstructured or semi-structured content. Recent deep learning approaches have shown some promise in this domain. However, most of these approaches focus on extracting features from a single audio, making them suffer from the lack of speaker-specific context required to model such a complex task. We propose a novel deep learning technique for non-native ASS, called speaker-conditioned hierarchical modeling. In our technique, we take advantage of the fact that oral proficiency tests rate multiple responses for a candidate. We extract context vectors from these responses and feed them as additional speaker-specific context to our network to score a particular response. We compare our technique with strong baselines and find that such modeling improves the model's average performance by 6.92% (maximum = 12.86%, minimum = 4.51%). We further show both quantitative and qualitative insights into the importance of this additional context in solving the problem of ASS.

We introduce an approach aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through an iterative preference learning process inspired by the successful strategy employed by AlphaZero. Our work leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to iteratively collect preference data, utilizing its look-ahead ability to break down instance-level rewards into more granular step-level signals. To enhance consistency in intermediate steps, we combine outcome validation and stepwise self-evaluation, continually updating the quality assessment of newly generated data. The proposed algorithm employs Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to update the LLM policy using this newly generated step-level preference data. Theoretical analysis reveals the importance of using on-policy sampled data for successful self-improving. Extensive evaluations on various arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrate remarkable performance improvements over existing models. For instance, our approach outperforms the Mistral-7B Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) baseline on GSM8K, MATH, and ARC-C, with substantial increases in accuracy to 81.8% (+5.9%), 34.7% (+5.8%), and 76.4% (+15.8%), respectively. Additionally, our research delves into the training and inference compute tradeoff, providing insights into how our method effectively maximizes performance gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/MCTS-DPO.

Deep-learning based Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) systems are being actively used by states and language testing agencies alike to evaluate millions of candidates for life-changing decisions ranging from college applications to visa approvals. However, little research has been put to understand and interpret the black-box nature of deep-learning based scoring algorithms. Previous studies indicate that scoring models can be easily fooled. In this paper, we explore the reason behind their surprising adversarial brittleness. We utilize recent advances in interpretability to find the extent to which features such as coherence, content, vocabulary, and relevance are important for automated scoring mechanisms. We use this to investigate the oversensitivity i.e., large change in output score with a little change in input essay content) and overstability i.e., little change in output scores with large changes in input essay content) of AES. Our results indicate that autoscoring models, despite getting trained as "end-to-end" models with rich contextual embeddings such as BERT, behave like bag-of-words models. A few words determine the essay score without the requirement of any context making the model largely overstable. This is in stark contrast to recent probing studies on pre-trained representation learning models, which show that rich linguistic features such as parts-of-speech and morphology are encoded by them. Further, we also find that the models have learnt dataset biases, making them oversensitive. To deal with these issues, we propose detection-based protection models that can detect oversensitivity and overstability causing samples with high accuracies. We find that our proposed models are able to detect unusual attribution patterns and flag adversarial samples successfully.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents executing multi-step workflows in real-world software environments. However, existing agent benchmarks suffer from three critical limitations: (1) trajectory-opaque grading that checks only final outputs, (2) underspecified safety and robustness evaluation, and (3) narrow modality coverage and interaction paradigms. We introduce Claw-Eval, an end-to-end evaluation suite addressing all three gaps. It comprises 300 human-verified tasks spanning 9 categories across three groups (general service orchestration, multimodal perception and generation, and multi-turn professional dialogue). Every agent action is recorded through three independent evidence channels (execution traces, audit logs, and environment snapshots), enabling trajectory-aware grading over 2,159 fine-grained rubric items. The scoring protocol evaluates Completion, Safety, and Robustness, reporting Average Score, Pass@k, and Pass^k across three trials to distinguish genuine capability from lucky outcomes. Experiments on 14 frontier models reveal that: (1) trajectory-opaque evaluation is systematically unreliable, missing 44% of safety violations and 13% of robustness failures that our hybrid pipeline catches; (2) controlled error injection primarily degrades consistency rather than peak capability, with Pass^3 dropping up to 24% while Pass@3 remains stable; (3) multimodal performance varies sharply, with most models performing poorer on video than on document or image, and no single model dominating across all modalities. Beyond benchmarking, Claw-Eval highlights actionable directions for agent development, shedding light on what it takes to build agents that are not only capable but reliably deployable.

Common evaluation paradigms for language models focus on scoring single responses through accuracy metrics or proper scoring rules, failing to capture the full richness of a model's belief state. Recent work illustrates that language models hallucinate in-part because they are optimised to be good test-takers under binary scoring schemes that reward any answer over abstention. While this insight naturally leads to penalty-based approaches, they ignore crucial distinctions in how models distribute uncertainty, for example between hedging toward incorrect answers versus hedging toward "I don't know" responses. A novel evaluation metric, the Distributional Correctness Score (DCS), is introduced to solve this problem, i.e., of not considering a model's entire probability distribution over answer choices. DCS naturally distinguishes between harmful overconfidence in wrong answers and uncertainty expressed through abstention, providing scores in an interpretable default range. Through theoretical analysis and illustrative examples, DCS is demonstrated to offer a more nuanced and aligned evaluation paradigm that incentivises models to express genuine uncertainty rather than guessing. Adapting 12 existing evaluation benchmarks to DCS's variants and measuring performance on six language models reveals that for half of the tested benchmarks scores are negative across all tested models, indicating significant tendencies towards hallucination.

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want to include these models in their software stack, however, face a dreadful challenge: debugging LLMs' inconsistent behavior across minor variations of the prompt. We therefore introduce two metrics for classification tasks, namely sensitivity and consistency, which are complementary to task performance. First, sensitivity measures changes of predictions across rephrasings of the prompt, and does not require access to ground truth labels. Instead, consistency measures how predictions vary across rephrasings for elements of the same class. We perform an empirical comparison of these metrics on text classification tasks, using them as guideline for understanding failure modes of the LLM. Our hope is that sensitivity and consistency will be helpful to guide prompt engineering and obtain LLMs that balance robustness with performance.

We propose a new score-based model with one-step sampling. Previously, score-based models were burdened with heavy computations due to iterative sampling. For substituting the iterative process, we train a standalone generator to compress all the time steps with the gradient backpropagated from the score network. In order to produce meaningful gradients for the generator, the score network is trained to simultaneously match the real data distribution and mismatch the fake data distribution. This model has the following advantages: 1) For sampling, it generates a fake image with only one step forward. 2) For training, it only needs 10 diffusion steps.3) Compared with consistency model, it is free of the ill-posed problem caused by consistency loss. On the popular CIFAR-10 dataset, our model outperforms Consistency Model and Denoising Score Matching, which demonstrates the potential of the framework. We further provide more examples on the MINIST and LSUN datasets. The code is available on GitHub.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in large language models (LLMs) has shown promising performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. Recently, Self-Consistency samples a diverse set of reasoning chains with different answers and chooses the answer by majority voting. Though effective, its performance cannot be further improved by sampling more reasoning chains. To address this problem, we propose to integrate backward reasoning into answer verification. We first mask a number in the question by {bf x}. The LLM is then asked to predict the masked number with a candidate answer A embedded in the template: ``If we know the answer to the above question is {A}, what is the value of unknown variable {bf x}?'' The LLM is expected to predict the masked number successfully if the provided candidate answer is correct. To further improve performance, we propose FOBAR (FOrward-BAckward Reasoning) to combine forward and backward reasoning for verifying candidate answers. Experiments are performed on six standard mathematical data sets and three LLMs (text-davinci-003, GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4). Results show that FOBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, FOBAR outperforms Self-Consistency which uses forward reasoning alone, demonstrating that combining forward and forward reasoning is better. It also outperforms existing verification methods, verifying the effectiveness of using the simple template in backward reasoning and the proposed combination.

Reward models are critical for aligning models to follow instructions, and are typically trained following one of two popular paradigms: Bradley-Terry style or Regression style. However, there is a lack of evidence that either approach is better than the other, when adequately matched for data. This is primarily because these approaches require data collected in different (but incompatible) formats, meaning that adequately matched data is not available in existing public datasets. To tackle this problem, we release preference annotations (designed for Bradley-Terry training) to complement existing ratings (designed for Regression style training) in the HelpSteer2 dataset. To improve data interpretability, preference annotations are accompanied with human-written justifications. Using this data, we conduct the first head-to-head comparison of Bradley-Terry and Regression models when adequately matched for data. Based on insights derived from such a comparison, we propose a novel approach to combine Bradley-Terry and Regression reward modeling. A Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model tuned with this approach scores 94.1 on RewardBench, emerging top of more than 140 reward models as of 1 Oct 2024. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of this reward model at aligning models to follow instructions in RLHF. We open-source this dataset (CC-BY-4.0 license) at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/HelpSteer2 and openly release the trained Reward Model at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward

The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm promises scalable rubric-based evaluation, yet aligning frozen black-box models with human standards remains a challenge due to inherent generation stochasticity. We reframe judge alignment as a criteria transfer problem and isolate three recurrent failure modes: rubric instability caused by prompt sensitivity, unverifiable reasoning that lacks auditable evidence, and scale misalignment with human grading boundaries. To address these issues, we introduce RULERS (Rubric Unification, Locking, and Evidence-anchored Robust Scoring), a compiler-executor framework that transforms natural language rubrics into executable specifications. RULERS operates by compiling criteria into versioned immutable bundles, enforcing structured decoding with deterministic evidence verification, and applying lightweight Wasserstein-based post-hoc calibration, all without updating model parameters. Extensive experiments on essay and summarization benchmarks demonstrate that RULERS significantly outperforms representative baselines in human agreement, maintains strong stability against adversarial rubric perturbations, and enables smaller models to rival larger proprietary judges. Overall, our results suggest that reliable LLM judging requires executable rubrics, verifiable evidence, and calibrated scales rather than prompt phrasing alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/Rulers.git.

Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a diverse set of reasoning paths instead of only taking the greedy one, and then selects the most consistent answer by marginalizing out the sampled reasoning paths. Self-consistency leverages the intuition that a complex reasoning problem typically admits multiple different ways of thinking leading to its unique correct answer. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that self-consistency boosts the performance of chain-of-thought prompting with a striking margin on a range of popular arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K (+17.9%), SVAMP (+11.0%), AQuA (+12.2%), StrategyQA (+6.4%) and ARC-challenge (+3.9%).

Diffusion Models (DM) and Consistency Models (CM) are two types of popular generative models with good generation quality on various tasks. When training DM and CM, intermediate weight checkpoints are not fully utilized and only the last converged checkpoint is used. In this work, we find that high-quality model weights often lie in a basin which cannot be reached by SGD but can be obtained by proper checkpoint averaging. Based on these observations, we propose LCSC, a simple but effective and efficient method to enhance the performance of DM and CM, by combining checkpoints along the training trajectory with coefficients deduced from evolutionary search. We demonstrate the value of LCSC through two use cases: (a) Reducing training cost. With LCSC, we only need to train DM/CM with fewer number of iterations and/or lower batch sizes to obtain comparable sample quality with the fully trained model. For example, LCSC achieves considerable training speedups for CM (23times on CIFAR-10 and 15times on ImageNet-64). (b) Enhancing pre-trained models. Assuming full training is already done, LCSC can further improve the generation quality or speed of the final converged models. For example, LCSC achieves better performance using 1 number of function evaluation (NFE) than the base model with 2 NFE on consistency distillation, and decreases the NFE of DM from 15 to 9 while maintaining the generation quality on CIFAR-10. Our code is available at https://github.com/imagination-research/LCSC.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently reshaped Automated Essay Scoring (AES), yet prior studies typically examine individual techniques in isolation, limiting understanding of their relative merits for English as a Second Language (L2) writing. To bridge this gap, we presents a comprehensive comparison of major LLM-based AES paradigms on IELTS Writing Task~2. On this unified benchmark, we evaluate four approaches: (i) encoder-based classification fine-tuning, (ii) zero- and few-shot prompting, (iii) instruction tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and (iv) Supervised Fine-Tuning combined with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and RAG. Our results reveal clear accuracy-cost-robustness trade-offs across methods, the best configuration, integrating k-SFT and RAG, achieves the strongest overall results with F1-Score 93%. This study offers the first unified empirical comparison of modern LLM-based AES strategies for English L2, promising potential in auto-grading writing tasks. Code is public at https://github.com/MinhNguyenDS/LLM_AES-EnL2

Self-consistency (SC) has been a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning. Despite bringing significant performance improvements across a variety of multi-step reasoning tasks, it is a high-cost method that requires multiple sampling with the preset size. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable sampling process, Early-Stopping Self-Consistency (ESC), to greatly reduce the cost of SC without sacrificing performance. On this basis, one control scheme for ESC is further derivated to dynamically choose the performance-cost balance for different tasks and models. To demonstrate ESC's effectiveness, we conducted extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning over language models with varying scales. The empirical results show that ESC reduces the average number of sampling of chain-of-thought reasoning by a significant margin on six benchmarks, including MATH (-33.8%), GSM8K (-80.1%), StrategyQA (-76.8%), CommonsenseQA (-78.5%), Coin Flip (-84.2%) and Last Letters (-67.4%), while attaining comparable performances.

This work represents the first effort to scale up continuous-time consistency distillation to general application-level image and video diffusion models. Although continuous-time consistency model (sCM) is theoretically principled and empirically powerful for accelerating academic-scale diffusion, its applicability to large-scale text-to-image and video tasks remains unclear due to infrastructure challenges in Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computation and the limitations of standard evaluation benchmarks. We first develop a parallelism-compatible FlashAttention-2 JVP kernel, enabling sCM training on models with over 10 billion parameters and high-dimensional video tasks. Our investigation reveals fundamental quality limitations of sCM in fine-detail generation, which we attribute to error accumulation and the "mode-covering" nature of its forward-divergence objective. To remedy this, we propose the score-regularized continuous-time consistency model (rCM), which incorporates score distillation as a long-skip regularizer. This integration complements sCM with the "mode-seeking" reverse divergence, effectively improving visual quality while maintaining high generation diversity. Validated on large-scale models (Cosmos-Predict2, Wan2.1) up to 14B parameters and 5-second videos, rCM matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art distillation method DMD2 on quality metrics while offering notable advantages in diversity, all without GAN tuning or extensive hyperparameter searches. The distilled models generate high-fidelity samples in only 1sim4 steps, accelerating diffusion sampling by 15timessim50times. These results position rCM as a practical and theoretically grounded framework for advancing large-scale diffusion distillation.

Recent advances such as self-consistency and test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) improve the reliability of large language models (LLMs) without additional supervision, yet their underlying mechanisms and statistical guarantees remain poorly understood. We present a unified framework for certifiable inference in LLMs, showing that majority voting provides a statistical certificate of self-consistency: under mild assumptions, the aggregated answer coincides with the mode of the model's terminal distribution with high probability. We derive finite-sample and anytime-valid concentration bounds that quantify this confidence, and introduce the Martingale Majority Certificate (MMC), a sequential stopping rule that adaptively determines when sufficient samples have been drawn. We further prove that label-free post-training methods such as TTRL implicitly sharpen the answer distribution by exponentially tilting it toward its mode, thereby reducing the number of samples required for certification. Building on this insight, we propose new post-training objectives that explicitly optimise this trade-off between sharpness and bias. Together, these results explain and connect two central test-time scaling strategies, self-consistency and TTRL, within a single statistical framework for label-free, certifiable reliability in reasoning LLMs.

In a legal system, judgment consistency is regarded as one of the most important manifestations of fairness. However, due to the complexity of factual elements that impact sentencing in real-world scenarios, few works have been done on quantitatively measuring judgment consistency towards real-world data. In this paper, we propose an evaluation metric for judgment inconsistency, Legal Inconsistency Coefficient (LInCo), which aims to evaluate inconsistency between data groups divided by specific features (e.g., gender, region, race). We propose to simulate judges from different groups with legal judgment prediction (LJP) models and measure the judicial inconsistency with the disagreement of the judgment results given by LJP models trained on different groups. Experimental results on the synthetic data verify the effectiveness of LInCo. We further employ LInCo to explore the inconsistency in real cases and come to the following observations: (1) Both regional and gender inconsistency exist in the legal system, but gender inconsistency is much less than regional inconsistency; (2) The level of regional inconsistency varies little across different time periods; (3) In general, judicial inconsistency is negatively correlated with the severity of the criminal charges. Besides, we use LInCo to evaluate the performance of several de-bias methods, such as adversarial learning, and find that these mechanisms can effectively help LJP models to avoid suffering from data bias.

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely applied to evaluate and compare different LLM alignmnet approaches (e.g., RLHF and DPO). However, concerns regarding its reliability have emerged, due to LLM judges' biases and inconsistent decision-making. Previous research has developed evaluation frameworks to assess reliability of LLM judges and their alignment with human preferences. However, the employed evaluation metrics often lack adequate explainability and fail to address LLM internal inconsistency. Additionally, existing studies inadequately explore the impact of various prompt templates when applying LLM-as-a-Judge methods, leading to potentially inconsistent comparisons between different alignment algorithms. In this work, we systematically evaluate LLM-as-a-Judge on alignment tasks by defining more theoretically interpretable evaluation metrics and explicitly mitigating LLM internal inconsistency from reliability metrics. We develop an open-source framework to evaluate, compare, and visualize the reliability and alignment of LLM judges, which facilitates practitioners to choose LLM judges for alignment tasks. In the experiments, we examine effects of diverse prompt templates on LLM-judge reliability and also demonstrate our developed framework by comparing various LLM judges on two common alignment datasets (i.e., TL;DR Summarization and HH-RLHF-Helpfulness). Our results indicate a significant impact of prompt templates on LLM judge performance, as well as a mediocre alignment level between the tested LLM judges and human evaluators.

Score-based generative models like the diffusion model have been testified to be effective in modeling multi-modal data from image generation to reinforcement learning (RL). However, the inference process of diffusion model can be slow, which hinders its usage in RL with iterative sampling. We propose to apply the consistency model as an efficient yet expressive policy representation, namely consistency policy, with an actor-critic style algorithm for three typical RL settings: offline, offline-to-online and online. For offline RL, we demonstrate the expressiveness of generative models as policies from multi-modal data. For offline-to-online RL, the consistency policy is shown to be more computational efficient than diffusion policy, with a comparable performance. For online RL, the consistency policy demonstrates significant speedup and even higher average performances than the diffusion policy.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel on standardized medical exams, high scores often fail to translate to high-quality responses for real-world medical queries. Current evaluations rely heavily on multiple-choice questions, failing to capture the unstructured, ambiguous, and long-tail complexities inherent in genuine user inquiries. To bridge this gap, we introduce QuarkMedBench, an ecologically valid benchmark tailored for real-world medical LLM assessment. We compiled a massive dataset spanning Clinical Care, Wellness Health, and Professional Inquiry, comprising 20,821 single-turn queries and 3,853 multi-turn sessions. To objectively evaluate open-ended answers, we propose an automated scoring framework that integrates multi-model consensus with evidence-based retrieval to dynamically generate 220,617 fine-grained scoring rubrics (~9.8 per query). During evaluation, hierarchical weighting and safety constraints structurally quantify medical accuracy, key-point coverage, and risk interception, effectively mitigating the high costs and subjectivity of human grading. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated rubrics achieve a 91.8% concordance rate with clinical expert blind audits, establishing highly dependable medical reliability. Crucially, baseline evaluations on this benchmark reveal significant performance disparities among state-of-the-art models when navigating real-world clinical nuances, highlighting the limitations of conventional exam-based metrics. Ultimately, QuarkMedBench establishes a rigorous, reproducible yardstick for measuring LLM performance on complex health issues, while its framework inherently supports dynamic knowledge updates to prevent benchmark obsolescence.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a critical mechanism for enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), with self-consistency demonstrating notable promise in boosting performance. However, inherent linguistic biases in multilingual training corpora frequently cause semantic drift and logical inconsistencies, especially in sub-10B parameter LLMs handling complex inference tasks. To overcome these constraints, we propose the Cross-Lingual Consistency (CLC) framework, an innovative inference paradigm that integrates multilingual reasoning paths through majority voting to elevate LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Empirical evaluations on the CMATH dataset reveal CLC's superiority over the conventional self-consistency method, delivering 9.5%, 6.5%, and 6.0% absolute accuracy gains for DeepSeek-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, and Gemma2-9B-Instruct respectively. Expanding CLC's linguistic scope to 11 diverse languages implies two synergistic benefits: 1) neutralizing linguistic biases in multilingual training corpora through multilingual ensemble voting, 2) escaping monolingual reasoning traps by exploring the broader multilingual solution space. This dual benefits empirically enables more globally optimal reasoning paths compared to monolingual self-consistency baselines, as evidenced by the 4.1%-18.5% accuracy gains using Gemma2-9B-Instruct on the MGSM dataset.

Existing Score-Based Models (SBMs) can be categorized into constrained SBMs (CSBMs) or unconstrained SBMs (USBMs) according to their parameterization approaches. CSBMs model probability density functions as Boltzmann distributions, and assign their predictions as the negative gradients of some scalar-valued energy functions. On the other hand, USBMs employ flexible architectures capable of directly estimating scores without the need to explicitly model energy functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the architectural constraints of CSBMs may limit their modeling ability. In addition, we show that USBMs' inability to preserve the property of conservativeness may lead to degraded performance in practice. To address the above issues, we propose Quasi-Conservative Score-Based Models (QCSBMs) for keeping the advantages of both CSBMs and USBMs. Our theoretical derivations demonstrate that the training objective of QCSBMs can be efficiently integrated into the training processes by leveraging the Hutchinson's trace estimator. In addition, our experimental results on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and SVHN datasets validate the effectiveness of QCSBMs. Finally, we justify the advantage of QCSBMs using an example of a one-layered autoencoder.

While chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning, it can systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior--for example, rationalizing answers in line with a user's opinion without mentioning this bias. To mitigate this biased reasoning problem, we introduce bias-augmented consistency training (BCT), an unsupervised fine-tuning scheme that trains models to give consistent reasoning across prompts with and without biasing features. We construct a suite testing nine forms of biased reasoning on seven question-answering tasks, and find that applying BCT to GPT-3.5-Turbo with one bias reduces the rate of biased reasoning by 86% on held-out tasks. Moreover, this model generalizes to other forms of bias, reducing biased reasoning on held-out biases by an average of 37%. As BCT generalizes to held-out biases and does not require gold labels, this method may hold promise for reducing biased reasoning from as-of-yet unknown biases and on tasks where supervision for ground truth reasoning is unavailable.

Failure of machine learning models to generalize to new data is a core problem limiting the reliability of AI systems, partly due to the lack of simple and robust methods for comparing new data to the original training dataset. We propose a standardized approach for assessing data similarity in a model-agnostic manner by constructing a supervised autoencoder for generalizability estimation (SAGE). We compare points in a low-dimensional embedded latent space, defining empirical probability measures for k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) distance, reconstruction of inputs and task-based performance. As proof of concept for classification tasks, we use MNIST and CIFAR-10 to demonstrate how an ensemble output probability score can separate deformed images from a mixture of typical test examples, and how this SAGE score is robust to transformations of increasing severity. As further proof of concept, we extend this approach to a regression task using non-imaging data (UCI Abalone). In all cases, we show that out-of-the-box model performance increases after SAGE score filtering, even when applied to data from the model's own training and test datasets. Our out-of-distribution scoring method can be introduced during several steps of model construction and assessment, leading to future improvements in responsible deep learning implementation.

Hallucination detection is a critical step toward understanding the trustworthiness of modern language models (LMs). To achieve this goal, we re-examine existing detection approaches based on the self-consistency of LMs and uncover two types of hallucinations resulting from 1) question-level and 2) model-level, which cannot be effectively identified through self-consistency check alone. Building upon this discovery, we propose a novel sampling-based method, i.e., semantic-aware cross-check consistency (SAC3) that expands on the principle of self-consistency checking. Our SAC3 approach incorporates additional mechanisms to detect both question-level and model-level hallucinations by leveraging advances including semantically equivalent question perturbation and cross-model response consistency checking. Through extensive and systematic empirical analysis, we demonstrate that SAC3 outperforms the state of the art in detecting both non-factual and factual statements across multiple question-answering and open-domain generation benchmarks.

In this paper, we introduce OSUniverse: a benchmark of complex, multimodal desktop-oriented tasks for advanced GUI-navigation AI agents that focuses on ease of use, extensibility, comprehensive coverage of test cases, and automated validation. We divide the tasks in increasing levels of complexity, from basic precision clicking to multistep, multiapplication tests requiring dexterity, precision, and clear thinking from the agent. In version one of the benchmark, presented here, we have calibrated the complexity of the benchmark test cases to ensure that the SOTA (State of the Art) agents (at the time of publication) do not achieve results higher than 50%, while the average white collar worker can perform all these tasks with perfect accuracy. The benchmark can be scored manually, but we also introduce an automated validation mechanism that has an average error rate less than 2%. Therefore, this benchmark presents solid ground for fully automated measuring of progress, capabilities and the effectiveness of GUI-navigation AI agents over the short and medium-term horizon. The source code of the benchmark is available at https://github.com/agentsea/osuniverse.

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) excel at many tasks, and will even provide explanations for their behavior. Since these models are directly accessible to the public, there is a risk that convincing and wrong explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs. Therefore, interpretability-faithfulness of self-explanations is an important consideration for AI Safety. Assessing the interpretability-faithfulness of these explanations, termed self-explanations, is challenging as the models are too complex for humans to annotate what is a correct explanation. To address this, we propose employing self-consistency checks as a measure of faithfulness. For example, if an LLM says a set of words is important for making a prediction, then it should not be able to make the same prediction without these words. While self-consistency checks are a common approach to faithfulness, they have not previously been applied to LLM's self-explanations. We apply self-consistency checks to three types of self-explanations: counterfactuals, importance measures, and redactions. Our work demonstrate that faithfulness is both task and model dependent, e.g., for sentiment classification, counterfactual explanations are more faithful for Llama2, importance measures for Mistral, and redaction for Falcon 40B. Finally, our findings are robust to prompt-variations.

We tasked 16 state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) with estimating the likelihood of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) emerging by 2030. To assess the quality of these forecasts, we implemented an automated peer review process (LLM-PR). The LLMs' estimates varied widely, ranging from 3% (Reka- Core) to 47.6% (GPT-4o), with a median of 12.5%. These estimates closely align with a recent expert survey that projected a 10% likelihood of AGI by 2027, underscoring the relevance of LLMs in forecasting complex, speculative scenarios. The LLM-PR process demonstrated strong reliability, evidenced by a high Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC = 0.79), reflecting notable consistency in scoring across the models. Among the models, Pplx-70b-online emerged as the top performer, while Gemini-1.5-pro-api ranked the lowest. A cross-comparison with external benchmarks, such as LMSYS Chatbot Arena, revealed that LLM rankings remained consistent across different evaluation methods, suggesting that existing benchmarks may not encapsulate some of the skills relevant for AGI prediction. We further explored the use of weighting schemes based on external benchmarks, optimizing the alignment of LLMs' predictions with human expert forecasts. This analysis led to the development of a new, 'AGI benchmark' designed to highlight performance differences in AGI-related tasks. Our findings offer insights into LLMs' capabilities in speculative, interdisciplinary forecasting tasks and emphasize the growing need for innovative evaluation frameworks for assessing AI performance in complex, uncertain real-world scenarios.

Diffusion models are relatively easy to train but require many steps to generate samples. Consistency models are far more difficult to train, but generate samples in a single step. In this paper we propose Multistep Consistency Models: A unification between Consistency Models (Song et al., 2023) and TRACT (Berthelot et al., 2023) that can interpolate between a consistency model and a diffusion model: a trade-off between sampling speed and sampling quality. Specifically, a 1-step consistency model is a conventional consistency model whereas we show that a infty-step consistency model is a diffusion model. Multistep Consistency Models work really well in practice. By increasing the sample budget from a single step to 2-8 steps, we can train models more easily that generate higher quality samples, while retaining much of the sampling speed benefits. Notable results are 1.4 FID on Imagenet 64 in 8 step and 2.1 FID on Imagenet128 in 8 steps with consistency distillation. We also show that our method scales to a text-to-image diffusion model, generating samples that are very close to the quality of the original model.

Recent studies have shown that maintaining a consistent response style by human experts and enhancing data quality in training sets can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) while reducing the number of training examples needed. However, the precise definition of style and the relationship between style, data quality, and LLM performance remains unclear. This research decomposes response style into presentation and composition styles and finds that, among training data of similar quality, those with higher style consistency lead to better LLM performance. Inspired by this, we introduce Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking (SCAR), which automatically prioritizes instruction-response pairs in the training set based on their response stylistic consistency. By selecting the most style-consistent examples, ranging from the top 25% to 0.7% of the full dataset, the fine-tuned LLMs can match or even surpass the performance of models trained on the entire dataset in coding and open-ended question-answering benchmarks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/SCAR .

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven to be exceptional on a variety of tasks after alignment, they may still produce responses that contradict the context or world knowledge confidently, a phenomenon known as ``hallucination''. In this paper, we demonstrate that reducing the inconsistency between the external knowledge encapsulated in the training data and the intrinsic knowledge inherited in the pretraining corpus could mitigate hallucination in alignment. Specifically, we introduce a novel knowledge consistent alignment (KCA) approach, which involves automatically formulating examinations based on external knowledge for accessing the comprehension of LLMs. For data encompassing knowledge inconsistency, KCA implements several simple yet efficient strategies for processing. We illustrate the superior performance of the proposed KCA approach in mitigating hallucinations across six benchmarks using LLMs of different backbones and scales. Furthermore, we confirm the correlation between knowledge inconsistency and hallucination, signifying the effectiveness of reducing knowledge inconsistency in alleviating hallucinations. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/KCA.

Long-form numerical reasoning in financial analysis aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the correct answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numbers. Meanwhile, the program consistency were ignored under supervised training, resulting in lower training accuracy and diversity. To solve these problems, we proposed APOLLO to improve the long-form numerical reasoning framework. For the retriever, we adopt a number-aware negative sampling strategy to enable the retriever to be more discriminative on key numerical facts. For the generator, we design consistency-based reinforcement learning and target program augmentation strategy based on the consistency of program execution results. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboard verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the new state-of-the-art.

Consistency models (CMs) are a powerful class of diffusion-based generative models optimized for fast sampling. Most existing CMs are trained using discretized timesteps, which introduce additional hyperparameters and are prone to discretization errors. While continuous-time formulations can mitigate these issues, their success has been limited by training instability. To address this, we propose a simplified theoretical framework that unifies previous parameterizations of diffusion models and CMs, identifying the root causes of instability. Based on this analysis, we introduce key improvements in diffusion process parameterization, network architecture, and training objectives. These changes enable us to train continuous-time CMs at an unprecedented scale, reaching 1.5B parameters on ImageNet 512x512. Our proposed training algorithm, using only two sampling steps, achieves FID scores of 2.06 on CIFAR-10, 1.48 on ImageNet 64x64, and 1.88 on ImageNet 512x512, narrowing the gap in FID scores with the best existing diffusion models to within 10%.

Autonomous language-model agents increasingly rely on installable skills and tools to complete user tasks. Static skill auditing can expose capability surface before deployment, but it cannot determine whether a particular invocation is unsafe under the current user request and runtime context. We therefore study skill invocation auditing as a continuous-risk estimation problem: given a user request, candidate skill, and runtime context, predict a score that supports ranking and triage before a hard intervention is applied. We introduce STARS, which combines a static capability prior, a request-conditioned invocation risk model, and a calibrated risk-fusion policy. To evaluate this setting, we construct SIA-Bench, a benchmark of 3,000 invocation records with group-safe splits, lineage metadata, runtime context, canonical action labels, and derived continuous-risk targets. On a held-out split of indirect prompt injection attacks, calibrated fusion reaches 0.439 high-risk AUPRC, improving over 0.405 for the contextual scorer and 0.380 for the strongest static baseline, while the contextual scorer remains better calibrated with 0.289 expected calibration error. On the locked in-distribution test split, gains are smaller and static priors remain useful. The resulting claim is therefore narrower: request-conditioned auditing is most valuable as an invocation-time risk-scoring and triage layer rather than as a replacement for static screening. Code is available at https://github.com/123zgj123/STARS.

Self-Consistency mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by sampling multiple reasoning paths,but it lacks a systematic approach to determine the optimal number of samples or select the most faithful rationale. To address this limitation, we introduce Reasoning-Aware Self-Consistency (RASC), a novel framework that enhances sampling efficiency and reasoning faithfulness by dynamically evaluating both outputs and rationales. RASC assesses the quality of reasoning and the consistency of answers for each generated sample, using these assessments to guide early stopping decisions and rationale selection. The framework employs criteria-based stopping and weighted majority voting, enabling more informed choices on when to halt sampling and which rationale to select. Our comprehensive experiments across diverse question-answering datasets demonstrate that RASC outperforms existing methods, reducing sample usage by approximately 70% while maintaining accuracy. Moreover, RASC facilitates the selection of high-fidelity rationales, thereby improving the faithfulness of LLM outputs. Our approach effectively addresses the efficiency-accuracy trade-off in LLM reasoning tasks, offering a new perspective for more nuanced, faithful, and effective utilization of LLMs in resource-constrained environments.

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely adopted as an evaluation method and served as supervised rewards in model training. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-as-a-Judge are mainly relying on human-annotated ground truth, which introduces human bias that undermines the assessment of reliability and imposes scalability constraints. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Sage, a novel evaluation suite that assesses the quality of LLM judges without necessitating any human annotation. Inspired by axioms of rational choice theory, Sage introduces two new lenses for measuring LLM-as-a-Judge: local self-consistency (pair-wise preference stability) and global logical consistency (transitivity across a full set of preferences). We curate a dataset of 650 questions by combining structured benchmark problems with real-world user queries. Our experiments demonstrate both the stability of our metrics and their high correlation with supervised benchmarks like LLMBar and RewardBench2, confirming Sage's reliability as an evaluation suite for the robustness and accuracy of LLM-as-a-Judge. Based on Sage, we reveal that current state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant reliability problems when acting as judges in both scoring and pairwise settings; even the top-performing models, Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5, fail to maintain consistent preferences in nearly a quarter of difficult cases. We attribute this to a new phenomenon called situational preference, which explains why explicit rubrics or criteria can help the model judge consistently across answer pairs. Our further analysis shows that finetuned LLM-as-a-Judge is a feasible method to boost performance, and the panel-based judge as well as deep reasoning can enhance the judging consistency. We also find substantial inconsistency in human judgments, which indicates that human annotation may not be a reliable gold standard.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

Language models contain ranking-based knowledge and are powerful solvers of in-context ranking tasks. For instance, they may have parametric knowledge about the ordering of countries by size or may be able to rank reviews by sentiment. Recent work focuses on pairwise, pointwise, and listwise prompting techniques to elicit a language model's ranking knowledge. However, we find that even with careful calibration and constrained decoding, prompting-based techniques may not always be self-consistent in the rankings they produce. This motivates us to explore an alternative approach that is inspired by an unsupervised probing method called Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS). The idea is to train a probing model guided by a logical constraint: a model's representation of a statement and its negation must be mapped to contrastive true-false poles consistently across multiple statements. We hypothesize that similar constraints apply to ranking tasks where all items are related via consistent pairwise or listwise comparisons. To this end, we extend the binary CCS method to Contrast-Consistent Ranking (CCR) by adapting existing ranking methods such as the Max-Margin Loss, Triplet Loss, and Ordinal Regression objective. Our results confirm that, for the same language model, CCR probing outperforms prompting and even performs on a par with prompting much larger language models.

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) is a common and increasingly significant way to refine the step-by-step reasoning of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In the multiple-choice setting - a dominant format for multimodal reasoning benchmarks - the paradigm faces a significant yet often overlooked obstacle: unfaithful trajectories that guess the correct option after a faulty chain of thought receive the same reward as genuine reasoning, which is a flaw that cannot be ignored. We propose Self-Consistency Sampling (SCS) to correct this issue. For each question, SCS (i) introduces small visual perturbations and (ii) performs repeated truncation and resampling of an initial trajectory; agreement among the resulting trajectories yields a differentiable consistency score that down-weights unreliable traces during policy updates. Based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, plugging SCS into RLOO, GRPO, and REINFORCE++ series improves accuracy by up to 7.7 percentage points on six multimodal benchmarks with negligible extra computation. SCS also yields notable gains on both Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct and InternVL3-8B, offering a simple, general remedy for outcome-reward RL in MLLMs.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have led to strong performance in open-domain question answering (QA). However, existing models still struggle with questions that admit multiple valid answers. Standard QA benchmarks, which typically assume a single gold answer, overlook this reality and thus produce inappropriate training signals. Existing attempts to handle ambiguity often rely on costly manual annotation, which is difficult to scale to multi-hop datasets such as HotpotQA and MuSiQue. In this paper, we present A^2Search, an annotation-free, end-to-end training framework to recognize and handle ambiguity. At its core is an automated pipeline that detects ambiguous questions and gathers alternative answers via trajectory sampling and evidence verification. The model is then optimized with RL using a carefully designed AnsF1 reward, which naturally accommodates multiple answers. Experiments on eight open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that A^2Search achieves new state-of-the-art performance. With only a single rollout, A^2Search-7B yields an average AnsF1@1 score of 48.4% across four multi-hop benchmarks, outperforming all strong baselines, including the substantially larger ReSearch-32B (46.2%). Extensive analyses further show that A^2Search resolves ambiguity and generalizes across benchmarks, highlighting that embracing ambiguity is essential for building more reliable QA systems. Our code, data, and model weights can be found at https://github.com/zfj1998/A2Search

Traditional evaluations of multimodal large language models (LLMs) have been limited by their focus on single-image reasoning, failing to assess crucial aspects like contextual understanding, reasoning stability, and uncertainty calibration. This study addresses these limitations by introducing a novel benchmark that integrates multi-image reasoning tasks with rejection-based evaluation and positional bias detection. To evaluate these dimensions, we further introduce entropy as a novel metric for quantifying reasoning consistency across reordered answer variants. We applied this benchmark to assess Grok 3, ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-o1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental, DeepSeek Janus models, Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct, QVQ-72B-Preview, and Pixtral 12B across eight visual reasoning tasks, including difference spotting and diagram interpretation. Our findings reveal ChatGPT-o1 leading in overall accuracy (82.5\%) and rejection accuracy (70.0\%), closely followed by Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (70.8\%). QVQ-72B-Preview demonstrated superior rejection accuracy (85.5\%). Notably, Pixtral 12B (51.7\%) showed promise in specific domains, while Janus models exhibited challenges in bias and uncertainty calibration, reflected in low rejection accuracies and high entropy scores. High entropy scores in Janus models (Janus 7B: 0.8392, Janus 1B: 0.787) underscore their susceptibility to positional bias and unstable reasoning, contrasting with the low entropy and robust reasoning of ChatGPT models. The study further demonstrates that model size is not the sole determinant of performance, as evidenced by Grok 3 underperformance despite its substantial parameter count. By employing multi-image contexts, rejection mechanisms, and entropy-based consistency metrics, this benchmark sets a new standard for evaluating multimodal LLMs, enabling a more robust and reliable assessment of next-generation AI systems.

Factual consistency is an essential quality of text summarization models in practical settings. Existing work in evaluating this dimension can be broadly categorized into two lines of research, entailment-based and question answering (QA)-based metrics, and different experimental setups often lead to contrasting conclusions as to which paradigm performs the best. In this work, we conduct an extensive comparison of entailment and QA-based metrics, demonstrating that carefully choosing the components of a QA-based metric, especially question generation and answerability classification, is critical to performance. Building on those insights, we propose an optimized metric, which we call QAFactEval, that leads to a 14% average improvement over previous QA-based metrics on the SummaC factual consistency benchmark, and also outperforms the best-performing entailment-based metric. Moreover, we find that QA-based and entailment-based metrics can offer complementary signals and be combined into a single metric for a further performance boost.

The rapid progress of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has boosted the task of image quality assessment (IQA). However, a key challenge arises from the inherent mismatch between the discrete token outputs of MLLMs and the continuous nature of quality scores required by IQA tasks. This discrepancy significantly hinders the performance of MLLM-based IQA methods. Previous approaches that convert discrete token predictions into continuous scores often suffer from conversion errors. Moreover, the semantic confusion introduced by level tokens (e.g., ``good'') further constrains the performance of MLLMs on IQA tasks and degrades their original capabilities for related tasks. To tackle these problems, we provide a theoretical analysis of the errors inherent in previous approaches and, motivated by this analysis, propose a simple yet effective framework, Q-Scorer. This framework incorporates a lightweight regression module and IQA-specific score tokens into the MLLM pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Scorer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple IQA benchmarks, generalizes well to mixed datasets, and further improves when combined with other methods.

Evaluating the quality and variability of text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses a significant, yet unresolved research challenge. Traditional evaluation methods, such as ROUGE and BERTScore, which measure token similarity, often fail to capture the holistic semantic equivalence. This results in a low correlation with human judgments and intuition, which is especially problematic in high-stakes applications like healthcare and finance where reliability, safety, and robust decision-making are highly critical. This work proposes DCR, an automated framework for evaluating and improving the consistency of LLM-generated texts using a divide-conquer-reasoning approach. Unlike existing LLM-based evaluators that operate at the paragraph level, our method employs a divide-and-conquer evaluator (DCE) that breaks down the paragraph-to-paragraph comparison between two generated responses into individual sentence-to-paragraph comparisons, each evaluated based on predefined criteria. To facilitate this approach, we introduce an automatic metric converter (AMC) that translates the output from DCE into an interpretable numeric score. Beyond the consistency evaluation, we further present a reason-assisted improver (RAI) that leverages the analytical reasons with explanations identified by DCE to generate new responses aimed at reducing these inconsistencies. Through comprehensive and systematic empirical analysis, we show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (e.g., +19.3% and +24.3% on the SummEval dataset) in evaluating the consistency of LLM generation across multiple benchmarks in semantic, factual, and summarization consistency tasks. Our approach also substantially reduces nearly 90% of output inconsistencies, showing promise for effective hallucination mitigation.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate convincing, fluent explanations. However, different from humans, they often generate inconsistent explanations on different inputs. For example, an LLM may generate the explanation "all birds can fly" when answering the question "Can sparrows fly?" but meanwhile answer "no" to the related question "Can penguins fly?". Explanations should be consistent across related examples so that they allow a human to simulate the LLM's decision process on multiple examples. We propose explanation-consistency finetuning (EC-finetuning), a method that adapts LLMs to generate more consistent natural-language explanations on related examples. EC-finetuning involves finetuning LLMs on synthetic data that is carefully constructed to contain consistent explanations. Across a variety of question-answering datasets in various domains, EC-finetuning yields a 10.0% relative explanation consistency improvement on four finetuning datasets, and generalizes to seven out-of-distribution datasets not seen during finetuning (+4.5% relative). Code is available at https://github.com/yandachen/explanation-consistency-finetuning .

Comprehensive evaluations of language models (LM) during both development and deployment phases are necessary because these models possess numerous capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning, legal support, or medical diagnostic) as well as safety risks (e.g., racial bias, toxicity, or misinformation). The average score across a wide range of benchmarks provides a signal that helps guide the use of these LMs in practice. Currently, holistic evaluations are costly due to the large volume of benchmark questions, making frequent evaluations impractical. A popular attempt to lower the cost is to compute the average score on a subset of the benchmark. This approach, unfortunately, often renders an unreliable measure of LM performance because the average score is often confounded with the difficulty of the questions in the benchmark subset. Item response theory (IRT) was designed to address this challenge, providing a reliable measurement by careful controlling for question difficulty. Unfortunately, question difficulty is expensive to estimate. Facing this challenge, we train a model that predicts question difficulty from its content, enabling a reliable measurement at a fraction of the cost. In addition, we leverage this difficulty predictor to further improve the evaluation efficiency through training a question generator given a difficulty level. This question generator is essential in adaptive testing, where, instead of using a random subset of the benchmark questions, informative questions are adaptively chosen based on the current estimation of LLM performance. Experiments on 22 common natural language benchmarks and 172 LMs show that this approach is more reliable and efficient compared to current common practice.

Ensembling Vision-Language Models (VLMs) from different providers maximizes benchmark accuracy, yet models from the same architectural family share correlated errors that standard voting ignores. We study this structure across 17 VLMs from 8 families on VQAv2, TextVQA, and GQA. Family-correlated errors reduce effective ensemble dimensionality to 2.5-3.6 independent voters and create a Misleading tier (1.5-6.5% of questions) where correlated majority errors destroy accuracy to 0% despite the best model being correct. We propose three family-aware methods. Hierarchical Family Voting (HFV) aggregates within families before voting across them, recovering +18-26 pp on the Misleading tier. QualRCCV, a training-free method weighting models by calibration, family quality, and inverse family size, is the first to beat calibrated voting on all three benchmarks (p<0.05). Learned Candidate Scoring (LCS) trains a cross-validated classifier to re-rank candidate answers using support breadth, family diversity, and model quality, achieving the largest gains: +0.68% VQAv2, +0.61% TextVQA, +2.45% GQA -- all significant -- and is the only learned method that never degrades any benchmark. On VQAv2 test-standard (EvalAI), LCS reaches 87.83% with 12 models, confirming generalization.

Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose how a rubric itself fails from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode Taxonomy, a taxonomy for systematically characterizing failure modes in rubric composition and design. RIFT consists of eight failure modes organized into three high-level categories: Reliability Failures, Content Validity Failures, and Consequential Validity Failures. RIFT is developed using grounded theory by iteratively annotating rubrics drawn from five diverse data sources spanning general instruction following, code generation, creative writing, and expert-level deep research, until no new failure modes are identified. We evaluate the consistency of the taxonomy by measuring agreement among independent human annotators, observing fair agreement overall (87% pairwise agreement and 0.64 average Cohen's kappa). Finally, to support scalable diagnosis, we propose automated rubric quality metrics and show that they align with human failure-mode annotations, achieving up to 0.925 F1.

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage step-by-step reasoning to solve complex problems. Standard evaluation practice involves generating a complete reasoning trace and assessing the correctness of the final answer presented at its conclusion. In this paper, we challenge the reliance on the final answer by posing the following two questions: Does the final answer reliably represent the model's optimal conclusion? Can alternative reasoning paths yield different results? To answer these questions, we analyze intermediate reasoning steps, termed subthoughts, and propose a method based on our findings. Our approach involves segmenting a reasoning trace into sequential subthoughts based on linguistic cues. We start by prompting the model to generate continuations from the end-point of each intermediate subthought. We extract a potential answer from every completed continuation originating from different subthoughts. We find that aggregating these answers by selecting the most frequent one (the mode) often yields significantly higher accuracy compared to relying solely on the answer derived from the original complete trace. Analyzing the consistency among the answers derived from different subthoughts reveals characteristics that correlate with the model's confidence and correctness, suggesting potential for identifying less reliable answers. Our experiments across various LLMs and challenging mathematical reasoning datasets (AIME2024 and AIME2025) show consistent accuracy improvements, with gains reaching up to 13\% and 10\% respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/hammoudhasan/SubthoughtReasoner.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various quantitative reasoning and knowledge benchmarks. However, many of these benchmarks are losing utility as LLMs get increasingly high scores, despite not yet reaching expert performance in these domains. We introduce ARB, a novel benchmark composed of advanced reasoning problems in multiple fields. ARB presents a more challenging test than prior benchmarks, featuring problems in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and law. As a subset of ARB, we introduce a challenging set of math and physics problems which require advanced symbolic reasoning and domain knowledge. We evaluate recent models such as GPT-4 and Claude on ARB and demonstrate that current models score well below 50% on more demanding tasks. In order to improve both automatic and assisted evaluation capabilities, we introduce a rubric-based evaluation approach, allowing GPT-4 to score its own intermediate reasoning steps. Further, we conduct a human evaluation of the symbolic subset of ARB, finding promising agreement between annotators and GPT-4 rubric evaluation scores.

Contrast consistency, the ability of a model to make consistently correct predictions in the presence of perturbations, is an essential aspect in NLP. While studied in tasks such as sentiment analysis and reading comprehension, it remains unexplored in open-domain question answering (OpenQA) due to the difficulty of collecting perturbed questions that satisfy factuality requirements. In this work, we collect minimally edited questions as challenging contrast sets to evaluate OpenQA models. Our collection approach combines both human annotation and large language model generation. We find that the widely used dense passage retriever (DPR) performs poorly on our contrast sets, despite fitting the training set well and performing competitively on standard test sets. To address this issue, we introduce a simple and effective query-side contrastive loss with the aid of data augmentation to improve DPR training. Our experiments on the contrast sets demonstrate that DPR's contrast consistency is improved without sacrificing its accuracy on the standard test sets.

Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into machine-verifiable formal statements, is critical for using formal mathematical reasoning to solve math problems stated in natural language. While Large Language Models can generate syntactically correct formal statements, they often fail to preserve the original problem's semantic intent. This limitation arises from the LLM approaches' treating autoformalization as a simplistic translation task which lacks mechanisms for self-reflection and iterative refinement that human experts naturally employ. To address these issues, we propose ReForm, a Reflective Autoformalization method that tightly integrates semantic consistency evaluation into the autoformalization process. This enables the model to iteratively generate formal statements, assess its semantic fidelity, and self-correct identified errors through progressive refinement. To effectively train this reflective model, we introduce Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization (PBSO), which employs different rewards at different sequence positions to ensure that the model develops both accurate autoformalization and correct semantic validations, preventing superficial critiques that would undermine the purpose of reflection. Extensive experiments across four autoformalization benchmarks demonstrate that ReForm achieves an average improvement of 17.2 percentage points over the strongest baselines. To further ensure evaluation reliability, we introduce ConsistencyCheck, a benchmark of 859 expert-annotated items that not only validates LLMs as judges but also reveals that autoformalization is inherently difficult: even human experts produce semantic errors in up to 38.5% of cases.

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) are being increasingly employed in real-life applications, so evaluating them is critical. While the conventional accuracy evaluates the performance of Code LLMs on a set of individual tasks, their self-consistency across different tasks is overlooked. Intuitively, a trustworthy model should be self-consistent when generating natural language specifications for its own code and generating code for its own specifications. Failure to preserve self-consistency reveals a lack of understanding of the shared semantics underlying natural language and programming language, and therefore undermines the trustworthiness of a model. In this paper, we first formally define the self-consistency of Code LLMs and then design a framework, IdentityChain, which effectively and efficiently evaluates the self-consistency and conventional accuracy of a model at the same time. We study eleven Code LLMs and show that they fail to preserve self-consistency, which is indeed a distinct aspect from conventional accuracy. Furthermore, we show that IdentityChain can be used as a model debugging tool to expose weaknesses of Code LLMs by demonstrating three major weaknesses that we identify in current models using IdentityChain. Our code is available at https://github.com/marcusm117/IdentityChain.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can significantly enhance reasoning abilities by directly optimizing correctness, rather than relying solely on supervised imitation. This paradigm has been extended to multimodal LLMs for complex video and image understanding tasks. However, while outcome-driven RL improves answer accuracy, it can inadvertently decouple the reasoning chain from the final answer, leading to situations where models produce inconsistency between the reasoning trace and final answer. In our experiments on multiple-choice visual question-answering tasks, the standard GRPO method yields only 79.7\% consistency on MMVU between the reasoning steps and the chosen answers, indicating frequent mismatches between answers and reasoning. To this end, we propose Answer-Consistent Reinforcement Learning (ACRE) that modifies the GRPO algorithm with an auxiliary consistency check. After the model generates a chain of thought and an initial answer for a given question, we shuffle the answer options and prompt the model again with the same reasoning trace to predict a second answer. We design a consistency-verification reward that grants a high reward only if both the original and the post-shuffle answers agree and are correct; otherwise, a lower reward is assigned accordingly. This mechanism penalizes reasoning-answer misalignment and discourages the model from relying on spurious patterns, such as option ordering biases. We evaluate ACRE on challenging Video Reasoning benchmarks and multimodal math reasoning benchmarks, achieving an average 2.2\% and 1.5\% improvement for Video Reasoning and Math Reasoning tasks over the GRPO baseline.

Just like the previous generation of task-tuned models, large language models (LLMs) that are adapted to tasks via prompt-based methods like in-context-learning (ICL) perform well in some setups but not in others. This lack of consistency in prompt-based learning hints at a lack of robust generalisation. We here introduce the ICL consistency test -- a contribution to the GenBench collaborative benchmark task (CBT) -- which evaluates how consistent a model makes predictions across many different setups while using the same data. The test is based on different established natural language inference tasks. We provide preprocessed data constituting 96 different 'setups' and a metric that estimates model consistency across these setups. The metric is provided on a fine-grained level to understand what properties of a setup render predictions unstable and on an aggregated level to compare overall model consistency. We conduct an empirical analysis of eight state-of-the-art models, and our consistency metric reveals how all tested LLMs lack robust generalisation.

Recently, using a powerful proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) (e.g., GPT-4) as an evaluator for long-form responses has become the de facto standard. However, for practitioners with large-scale evaluation tasks and custom criteria in consideration (e.g., child-readability), using proprietary LLMs as an evaluator is unreliable due to the closed-source nature, uncontrolled versioning, and prohibitive costs. In this work, we propose Prometheus, a fully open-source LLM that is on par with GPT-4's evaluation capabilities when the appropriate reference materials (reference answer, score rubric) are accompanied. We first construct the Feedback Collection, a new dataset that consists of 1K fine-grained score rubrics, 20K instructions, and 100K responses and language feedback generated by GPT-4. Using the Feedback Collection, we train Prometheus, a 13B evaluator LLM that can assess any given long-form text based on customized score rubric provided by the user. Experimental results show that Prometheus scores a Pearson correlation of 0.897 with human evaluators when evaluating with 45 customized score rubrics, which is on par with GPT-4 (0.882), and greatly outperforms ChatGPT (0.392). Furthermore, measuring correlation with GPT-4 with 1222 customized score rubrics across four benchmarks (MT Bench, Vicuna Bench, Feedback Bench, Flask Eval) shows similar trends, bolstering Prometheus's capability as an evaluator LLM. Lastly, Prometheus achieves the highest accuracy on two human preference benchmarks (HHH Alignment & MT Bench Human Judgment) compared to open-sourced reward models explicitly trained on human preference datasets, highlighting its potential as an universal reward model. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/kaistAI/Prometheus.

Language-model agents are increasingly used as persistent coworkers that assist users across multiple working days. During such workflows, the surrounding environment may change independently of the agent: new emails arrive, calendar entries shift, knowledge-base records are updated, and evidence appears across images, scanned PDFs, audio, video, and spreadsheets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately evaluate this setting because they typically run within a single static episode and remain largely text-centric. We introduce , a benchmark for coworker agents built around multi-turn multi-day tasks, a stateful sandboxed service environment whose state evolves between turns, and rule-based verification. The current release contains 100 tasks across 13 professional scenarios, executed against five stateful sandboxed services (filesystem, email, calendar, knowledge base, spreadsheet) and scored by 1537 deterministic Python checkers over post-execution service state; no LLM-as-judge is invoked during scoring. We benchmark seven frontier agent systems. The strongest model reaches 75.8 weighted score, but the best strict Task Success is only 20.0\%, indicating that partial progress is common while complete end-to-end workflow completion remains rare. Turn-level analysis shows that performance drops after the first exogenous environment update, highlighting adaptation to changing state as a key open challenge. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and construction pipeline to support reproducible coworker-agent evaluation.

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse specialized benchmarks necessitates a shift from fragmented, task-specific metrics to a holistic, competitive ranking system that effectively aggregates performance across multiple ability dimensions. Primarily using static scoring, current evaluation methods are fundamentally limited. They struggle to determine the proper mix ratio across diverse benchmarks, and critically, they fail to capture a model's dynamic competitive fitness or its vulnerability when confronted with sequential, high-stakes tasks. To address this, we introduce the novel Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics (CSD) framework. CSD simulates a multi-round, sequential contest where models are dynamically paired across a curated sequence of benchmarks based on their accumulated win-loss record. And Monte Carlo Simulation (N=100,000 iterations) is used to approximate the statistically robust Expected Win Score (E[S_m]), which eliminates the noise of random pairing and early-round luck. Furthermore, we implement a Failure Sensitivity Analysis by parameterizing the per-round elimination quantity (T_k), which allows us to profile models based on their risk appetite--distinguishing between robust generalists and aggressive specialists. We demonstrate that CSD provides a more nuanced and context-aware ranking than traditional aggregate scoring and static pairwise models, representing a vital step towards risk-informed, next-generation LLM evaluation.

Multi-modal generative document parsing systems challenge traditional evaluation: unlike deterministic OCR or layout models, they often produce semantically correct yet structurally divergent outputs. Conventional metrics-CER, WER, IoU, or TEDS-misclassify such diversity as error, penalizing valid interpretations and obscuring system behavior. We introduce SCORE (Structural and COntent Robust Evaluation), an interpretation-agnostic framework that integrates (i) adjusted edit distance for robust content fidelity, (ii) token-level diagnostics to distinguish hallucinations from omissions, (iii) table evaluation with spatial tolerance and semantic alignment, and (iv) hierarchy-aware consistency checks. Together, these dimensions enable evaluation that embraces representational diversity while enforcing semantic rigor. Across 1,114 pages spanning a holistic benchmark and a field dataset, SCORE consistently revealed cross-dataset performance patterns missed by standard metrics. In 2-5% of pages with ambiguous table structures, traditional metrics penalized systems by 12-25% on average, leading to distorted rankings. SCORE corrected these cases, recovering equivalence between alternative but valid interpretations. Moreover, by normalizing generative outputs into a format-agnostic representation, SCORE reproduces traditional scores (e.g., table F1 up to 0.93) without requiring object-detection pipelines, demonstrating that generative parsing alone suffices for comprehensive evaluation. By exposing how interpretive diversity impacts evaluation outcomes and providing multi-dimensional, interpretable diagnostics, SCORE establishes foundational principles for semantically grounded, fair, and practical benchmarking of modern document parsing systems.

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements are a major source of monetary-policy information, and even subtle changes in their wording can move global financial markets. A central task is therefore to measure the hawkish--dovish stance conveyed in these texts. Existing approaches typically treat stance detection as a standard classification problem, labeling each statement in isolation. However, the interpretation of monetary-policy communication is inherently relative: market reactions depend not only on the tone of a statement, but also on how that tone shifts across meetings. We introduce Delta-Consistent Scoring (DCS), an annotation-free framework that maps frozen large language model (LLM) representations to continuous stance scores by jointly modeling absolute stance and relative inter-meeting shifts. Rather than relying on manual hawkish--dovish labels, DCS uses consecutive meetings as a source of self-supervision. It learns an absolute stance score for each statement and a relative shift score between consecutive statements. A delta-consistency objective encourages changes in absolute scores to align with the relative shifts. This allows DCS to recover a temporally coherent stance trajectory without manual labels. Across four LLM backbones, DCS consistently outperforms supervised probes and LLM-as-judge baselines, achieving up to 71.1% accuracy on sentence-level hawkish--dovish classification. The resulting meeting-level scores are also economically meaningful: they correlate strongly with inflation indicators and are significantly associated with Treasury yield movements. Overall, the results suggest that LLM representations encode monetary-policy signals that can be recovered through relative temporal structure.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce inconsistent answers when faced with different phrasings of the same prompt. In this paper, we propose Flip-Flop Consistency (F^2C), an unsupervised training method that improves robustness to such perturbations. F^2C is composed of two key components. The first, Consensus Cross-Entropy (CCE), uses a majority vote across prompt variations to create a hard pseudo-label. The second is a representation alignment loss that pulls lower-confidence and non-majority predictors toward the consensus established by high-confidence, majority-voting variations. We evaluate our method on 11 datasets spanning four NLP tasks, with 4-15 prompt variations per dataset. On average, F^2C raises observed agreement by 11.62%, improves mean F_1 by 8.94%, and reduces performance variance across formats by 3.29%. In out-of-domain evaluations, F^2C generalizes effectively, increasing F_1 and agreement while decreasing variance across most source-target pairs. Finally, when trained on only a subset of prompt perturbations and evaluated on held-out formats, F^2C consistently improves both performance and agreement while reducing variance. These findings highlight F^2C as an effective unsupervised method for enhancing LLM consistency, performance, and generalization under prompt perturbations. Code is available at https://github.com/ParsaHejabi/Flip-Flop-Consistency-Unsupervised-Training-for-Robustness-to-Prompt-Perturbations-in-LLMs.

Evaluating the real-world applicability of large language models (LLMs) provides valuable insights for their development and use in software development tasks. Existing benchmarks often focus on standalone coding problems or specific libraries, overlooking multi-file, project-based scenarios and lacking a rigorous evaluation of consistency. The HackerRank-ASTRA Benchmark introduces project-based coding problems that mirror real-world scenarios. It evaluates model consistency through 32 runs (k = 32) and median standard deviation while incorporating taxonomy-level analysis to assess sub-skill capabilities. Initial evaluations on 65 problems show that the top three models -- o1, o1-preview, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet-1022 -- achieved comparable average scores of 75%, with no statistically significant differences in performance. Notably, Claude-3.5-Sonnet-1022 demonstrated the highest consistency across problems, with low variability (SD = 0.0497), which was statistically significant compared to other models, highlighting its reliability for real-world software development tasks.

CLIP is one of the most popular foundation models and is heavily used for many vision-language tasks, yet little is known about its inner workings. As CLIP is increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is becoming even more critical to understand its limitations and embedded social biases to mitigate potentially harmful downstream consequences. However, the question of what internal mechanisms drive both the impressive capabilities as well as problematic shortcomings of CLIP has largely remained unanswered. To bridge this gap, we study the conceptual consistency of text descriptions for attention heads in CLIP-like models. Specifically, we propose Concept Consistency Score (CCS), a novel interpretability metric that measures how consistently individual attention heads in CLIP models align with specific concepts. Our soft-pruning experiments reveal that high CCS heads are critical for preserving model performance, as pruning them leads to a significantly larger performance drop than pruning random or low CCS heads. Notably, we find that high CCS heads capture essential concepts and play a key role in out-of-domain detection, concept-specific reasoning, and video-language understanding. Moreover, we prove that high CCS heads learn spurious correlations which amplify social biases. These results position CCS as a powerful interpretability metric exposing the paradox of performance and social biases in CLIP models.

LLM-judged benchmarks are increasingly used to evaluate complex model behaviors, yet their design introduces failure modes absent in conventional ground-truth based benchmarks. We argue that without tight objectives and verifiable constructions, benchmark rankings can produce high-confidence rankings that are in fact largely noise. We introduce two mechanisms to diagnose these issues. Schematic adherence quantifies how much of a judge's overall verdict is explained by the explicit evaluation schema, revealing unexplained variance when judges deviate from their own rubric. Psychometric validity aggregates internal consistency and discriminant validity signals to quantify irreducible uncertainty in any benchmarking run. Applying these tools to Arena-Hard Auto, we find severe schema incoherence and factor collapse across popular judges: for example, unexplained variance exceeding 90 percent for DeepSeek-R1-32B and factor correlations above 0.93 for most criteria. We also show that the ELO-style aggregation used by Arena-Hard Auto collapses and masks genuine ranking uncertainty. Our results highlight design failures that undermine validity and offer actionable principles for building better-scoped, reliability-aware LLM-judged benchmarks. We release our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/judgment-to-noise-947D/README.md

Consistency models are a new family of generative models capable of producing high-quality samples in either a single step or multiple steps. Recently, consistency models have demonstrated impressive performance, achieving results on par with diffusion models in the pixel space. However, the success of scaling consistency training to large-scale datasets, particularly for text-to-image and video generation tasks, is determined by performance in the latent space. In this work, we analyze the statistical differences between pixel and latent spaces, discovering that latent data often contains highly impulsive outliers, which significantly degrade the performance of iCT in the latent space. To address this, we replace Pseudo-Huber losses with Cauchy losses, effectively mitigating the impact of outliers. Additionally, we introduce a diffusion loss at early timesteps and employ optimal transport (OT) coupling to further enhance performance. Lastly, we introduce the adaptive scaling-c scheduler to manage the robust training process and adopt Non-scaling LayerNorm in the architecture to better capture the statistics of the features and reduce outlier impact. With these strategies, we successfully train latent consistency models capable of high-quality sampling with one or two steps, significantly narrowing the performance gap between latent consistency and diffusion models. The implementation is released here: https://github.com/quandao10/sLCT/