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Jun 9

What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking

In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 8, 2022

It's TIME: Towards the Next Generation of Time Series Forecasting Benchmarks

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are revolutionizing the forecasting landscape from specific dataset modeling to generalizable task evaluation. However, we contend that existing benchmarks exhibit common limitations in four dimensions: constrained data composition dominated by reused legacy sources, compromised data integrity lacking rigorous quality assurance, misaligned task formulations detached from real-world contexts, and rigid analysis perspectives that obscure generalizable insights. To bridge these gaps, we introduce TIME, a next-generation task-centric benchmark comprising 50 fresh datasets and 98 forecasting tasks, tailored for strict zero-shot TSFM evaluation free from data leakage. Integrating large language models and human expertise, we establish a rigorous human-in-the-loop benchmark construction pipeline to ensure high data integrity and redefine task formulation by aligning forecasting configurations with real-world operational requirements and variate predictability. Furthermore, we propose a novel pattern-level evaluation perspective that moves beyond traditional dataset-level evaluations based on static meta labels. By leveraging structural time series features to characterize intrinsic temporal properties, this approach offers generalizable insights into model capabilities across diverse patterns. We evaluate 12 representative TSFMs and establish a multi-granular leaderboard to facilitate in-depth analysis and visualized inspection. The leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Real-TSF/TIME-leaderboard.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 3

On the Workflows and Smells of Leaderboard Operations (LBOps): An Exploratory Study of Foundation Model Leaderboards

Foundation models (FM), such as large language models (LLMs), which are large-scale machine learning (ML) models, have demonstrated remarkable adaptability in various downstream software engineering (SE) tasks, such as code completion, code understanding, and software development. As a result, FM leaderboards, especially those hosted on cloud platforms, have become essential tools for SE teams to compare and select the best third-party FMs for their specific products and purposes. However, the lack of standardized guidelines for FM evaluation and comparison threatens the transparency of FM leaderboards and limits stakeholders' ability to perform effective FM selection. As a first step towards addressing this challenge, our research focuses on understanding how these FM leaderboards operate in real-world scenarios ("leaderboard operations") and identifying potential leaderboard pitfalls and areas for improvement ("leaderboard smells"). In this regard, we perform a multivocal literature review to collect up to 721 FM leaderboards, after which we examine their documentation and engage in direct communication with leaderboard operators to understand their workflow patterns. Using card sorting and negotiated agreement, we identify 5 unique workflow patterns and develop a domain model that outlines the essential components and their interaction within FM leaderboards. We then identify 8 unique types of leaderboard smells in LBOps. By mitigating these smells, SE teams can improve transparency, accountability, and collaboration in current LBOps practices, fostering a more robust and responsible ecosystem for FM comparison and selection.

QueensUniversity Queen's University
·
Jul 4, 2024

Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark

This technical report introduces a Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark for evaluating language models in healthcare, addressing the crucial natural language processing (NLP) task of extracting structured information from clinical narratives to support applications like automated coding, clinical trial cohort identification, and clinical decision support. The leaderboard provides a standardized platform for assessing diverse language models, including encoder and decoder architectures, on their ability to identify and classify clinical entities across multiple medical domains. A curated collection of openly available clinical datasets is utilized, encompassing entities such as diseases, symptoms, medications, procedures, and laboratory measurements. Importantly, these entities are standardized according to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model, ensuring consistency and interoperability across different healthcare systems and datasets, and a comprehensive evaluation of model performance. Performance of models is primarily assessed using the F1-score, and it is complemented by various assessment modes to provide comprehensive insights into model performance. The report also includes a brief analysis of models evaluated to date, highlighting observed trends and limitations. By establishing this benchmarking framework, the leaderboard aims to promote transparency, facilitate comparative analyses, and drive innovation in clinical entity recognition tasks, addressing the need for robust evaluation methods in healthcare NLP.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 3

Make Still Further Progress: Chain of Thoughts for Tabular Data Leaderboard

Tabular data, a fundamental data format in machine learning, is predominantly utilized in competitions and real-world applications. The performance of tabular models--such as gradient boosted decision trees and neural networks--can vary significantly across datasets due to differences in feature distributions and task characteristics. Achieving top performance on each dataset often requires specialized expert knowledge. To address this variability, practitioners often aggregate the predictions of multiple models. However, conventional aggregation strategies typically rely on static combination rules and lack instance-level adaptability. In this work, we propose an in-context ensemble framework for tabular prediction that leverages large language models (LLMs) to perform dynamic, instance-specific integration of external model predictions. Without access to raw tabular features or semantic information, our method constructs a context around each test instance using its nearest neighbors and the predictions from a pool of external models. Within this enriched context, we introduce Chain of Tabular Thoughts (CoT^2), a prompting strategy that guides LLMs through multi-step, interpretable reasoning, making still further progress toward expert-level decision-making. Experimental results show that our method outperforms well-tuned baselines and standard ensemble techniques across a wide range of tabular datasets.

  • 3 authors
·
May 19, 2025

ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended Capabilities

Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024 2

Results and Retrospective Analysis of the CODS 2025 AssetOpsBench Challenge

Competition retrospectives are useful when they explain what a leaderboard measured, how hidden evaluation changed conclusions, and which design patterns were rewarded. We revisit the CODS 2025 challenge, a privacy-aware Codabench competition on industrial multi-agent orchestration built on . We combine final rank sheets, a 300-submission server log, 149-team registrations, best-submission exports, the organizer winners report, the companion system paper, and verified planning-track source trees. Five results stand out. First, the public planning leaderboard saturates at 72.73\%, and richer prompts do not improve that peak. Second, hidden evaluation changes the story: public and private scores correlate moderately in planning (r{=}0.69) but negatively in execution (r{=}{-}0.13), with several 45.45\% public execution systems reaching 63.64\% on the hidden set. Third, the term is numerically almost inert in the official composite -- combined on a 0--1 scale with 0--100 percentage scores, it contributes at most 0.05 points per track, and rescaling would swap the top two teams. Fourth, the competition is operationally account-based but substantively team-based: 149 registered teams reduce to 24 with non-zero public scores and 11 fully ranked, while 52.3\% of deduplicated registrations list multiple usernames. Fifth, successful execution methods mostly improve guardrails -- response selection, contamination cleanup, fallback, and context control -- rather than novel agent architectures. These findings identify which behaviors the evaluation rewarded, and motivate scale-aware composites, skill-level diagnostics, and versioned artifact release.

ibm-research IBM Research
·
May 7 2

PerSEval: Assessing Personalization in Text Summarizers

Personalized summarization models cater to individuals' subjective understanding of saliency, as represented by their reading history and current topics of attention. Existing personalized text summarizers are primarily evaluated based on accuracy measures such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR. However, a recent study argued that accuracy measures are inadequate for evaluating the degree of personalization of these models and proposed EGISES, the first metric to evaluate personalized text summaries. It was suggested that accuracy is a separate aspect and should be evaluated standalone. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of an accuracy leaderboard, suggesting that relying on accuracy-based aggregated results might lead to misleading conclusions. To support this, we delve deeper into EGISES, demonstrating both theoretically and empirically that it measures the degree of responsiveness, a necessary but not sufficient condition for degree-of-personalization. We subsequently propose PerSEval, a novel measure that satisfies the required sufficiency condition. Based on the benchmarking of ten SOTA summarization models on the PENS dataset, we empirically establish that -- (i) PerSEval is reliable w.r.t human-judgment correlation (Pearson's r = 0.73; Spearman's rho = 0.62; Kendall's tau = 0.42), (ii) PerSEval has high rank-stability, (iii) PerSEval as a rank-measure is not entailed by EGISES-based ranking, and (iv) PerSEval can be a standalone rank-measure without the need of any aggregated ranking.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

Flag Aggregator: Scalable Distributed Training under Failures and Augmented Losses using Convex Optimization

Modern ML applications increasingly rely on complex deep learning models and large datasets. There has been an exponential growth in the amount of computation needed to train the largest models. Therefore, to scale computation and data, these models are inevitably trained in a distributed manner in clusters of nodes, and their updates are aggregated before being applied to the model. However, a distributed setup is prone to Byzantine failures of individual nodes, components, and software. With data augmentation added to these settings, there is a critical need for robust and efficient aggregation systems. We define the quality of workers as reconstruction ratios in (0,1], and formulate aggregation as a Maximum Likelihood Estimation procedure using Beta densities. We show that the Regularized form of log-likelihood wrt subspace can be approximately solved using iterative least squares solver, and provide convergence guarantees using recent Convex Optimization landscape results. Our empirical findings demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the robustness of state-of-the-art Byzantine resilient aggregators. We evaluate our method in a distributed setup with a parameter server, and show simultaneous improvements in communication efficiency and accuracy across various tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hamidralmasi/FlagAggregator

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 12, 2023

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

  • 38 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

IndustryBench: Probing the Industrial Knowledge Boundaries of LLMs

In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering.Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at κ_w = 0.798 against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions.Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.

MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target Tracking

Standardized benchmarks have been crucial in pushing the performance of computer vision algorithms, especially since the advent of deep learning. Although leaderboards should not be over-claimed, they often provide the most objective measure of performance and are therefore important guides for research. We present MOTChallenge, a benchmark for single-camera Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) launched in late 2014, to collect existing and new data, and create a framework for the standardized evaluation of multiple object tracking methods. The benchmark is focused on multiple people tracking, since pedestrians are by far the most studied object in the tracking community, with applications ranging from robot navigation to self-driving cars. This paper collects the first three releases of the benchmark: (i) MOT15, along with numerous state-of-the-art results that were submitted in the last years, (ii) MOT16, which contains new challenging videos, and (iii) MOT17, that extends MOT16 sequences with more precise labels and evaluates tracking performance on three different object detectors. The second and third release not only offers a significant increase in the number of labeled boxes but also provide labels for multiple object classes beside pedestrians, as well as the level of visibility for every single object of interest. We finally provide a categorization of state-of-the-art trackers and a broad error analysis. This will help newcomers understand the related work and research trends in the MOT community, and hopefully shed some light on potential future research directions.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 7, 2020

From Rankings to Insights: Evaluation Should Shift Focus from Leaderboard to Feedback

Automatic evaluation benchmarks such as MT-Bench, Arena-Hard, and Auto-Arena are seeing growing adoption for the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing research has primarily focused on approximating human-based model rankings using limited data and LLM-as-a-Judge. However, the fundamental premise of these studies, which attempts to replicate human rankings, is flawed. Specifically, these benchmarks typically offer only overall scores, limiting their utility to leaderboard rankings, rather than providing feedback that can guide model optimization and support model profiling. Therefore, we advocate for an evaluation paradigm shift from approximating human-based model rankings to providing feedback with analytical value. To this end, we introduce Feedbacker, an evaluation framework that provides comprehensive and fine-grained results, thereby enabling thorough identification of a model's specific strengths and weaknesses. Such feedback not only supports the targeted optimization of the model but also enhances the understanding of its behavior. Feedbacker comprises three key components: an extensible tree-based query taxonomy builder, an automated query synthesis scheme, and a suite of visualization and analysis tools. Furthermore, we propose a novel LLM-as-a-Judge method: PC2 (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) pointwise evaluation. This method derives evaluation criteria by pre-comparing the differences between several auxiliary responses, achieving the accuracy of pairwise evaluation while maintaining the time complexity of pointwise evaluation. Finally, leveraging the evaluation results of 17 mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate the usage of Feedbacker and highlight its effectiveness and potential. Our homepage project is available at https://liudan193.github.io/Feedbacker.

  • 6 authors
·
May 10, 2025

Eureka: Evaluating and Understanding Large Foundation Models

Rigorous and reproducible evaluation is critical for assessing the state of the art and for guiding scientific advances in Artificial Intelligence. Evaluation is challenging in practice due to several reasons, including benchmark saturation, lack of transparency in methods used for measurement, development challenges in extracting measurements for generative tasks, and, more generally, the extensive number of capabilities required for a well-rounded comparison across models. We make three contributions to alleviate the above challenges. First, we present Eureka, an open-source framework for standardizing evaluations of large foundation models beyond single-score reporting and rankings. Second, we introduce Eureka-Bench as an extensible collection of benchmarks testing capabilities that (i) are still challenging for state-of-the-art models and (ii) represent fundamental but overlooked language and multimodal capabilities. The inherent space for improvement in non-saturated benchmarks enables us to discover meaningful differences between models at a capability level. Third, using Eureka, we conduct an analysis of 12 state-of-the-art models, providing in-depth insights into failure understanding and model comparison, which can be leveraged to plan targeted improvements. In contrast to recent trends in reports and leaderboards showing absolute rankings and claims for one model or another to be the best, our analysis shows that there is no such best model. Different models have different strengths, but there are models that appear more often than others as best performers for some capabilities. Despite the recent improvements, current models still struggle with several fundamental capabilities including detailed image understanding, benefiting from multimodal input when available rather than fully relying on language, factuality and grounding for information retrieval, and over refusals.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 13, 2024

TS-Arena -- A Live Forecast Pre-Registration Platform

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are transforming the field of forecasting. However, evaluating them on historical data is increasingly difficult due to the risks of train-test sample overlaps and temporal overlaps between correlated train and test time series. To address this, we introduce TS-Arena, a live forecasting platform that shifts evaluation from the known past to the unknown future. Building on the concept of continuous benchmarking, TS-Arena evaluates models on future data. Crucially, we introduce a strict forecasting pre-registration protocol: models must submit predictions before the ground-truth data physically exists. This makes test-set contamination impossible by design. The platform relies on a modular microservice architecture that harmonizes and structures data from different sources and orchestrates containerized model submissions. By enforcing a strict pre-registration protocol on live data streams, TS-Arena prevents information leakage offers a faster alternative to traditional static, infrequently repeated competitions (e.g. the M-Competitions). First empirical results derived from operating TS-Arena over one year of energy time series demonstrate that established TSFMs accumulate robust longitudinal scores over time, while the continuous nature of the benchmark simultaneously allows newcomers to demonstrate immediate competitiveness. TS-Arena provides the necessary infrastructure to assess the true generalization capabilities of modern forecasting models. The platform and corresponding code are available at https://ts-arena.live/.

BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation

A wide variety of NLP applications, such as machine translation, summarization, and dialog, involve text generation. One major challenge for these applications is how to evaluate whether such generated texts are actually fluent, accurate, or effective. In this work, we conceptualize the evaluation of generated text as a text generation problem, modeled using pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models. The general idea is that models trained to convert the generated text to/from a reference output or the source text will achieve higher scores when the generated text is better. We operationalize this idea using BART, an encoder-decoder based pre-trained model, and propose a metric BARTScore with a number of variants that can be flexibly applied in an unsupervised fashion to evaluation of text from different perspectives (e.g. informativeness, fluency, or factuality). BARTScore is conceptually simple and empirically effective. It can outperform existing top-scoring metrics in 16 of 22 test settings, covering evaluation of 16 datasets (e.g., machine translation, text summarization) and 7 different perspectives (e.g., informativeness, factuality). Code to calculate BARTScore is available at https://github.com/neulab/BARTScore, and we have released an interactive leaderboard for meta-evaluation at http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/leaderboard/task-meval/ on the ExplainaBoard platform, which allows us to interactively understand the strengths, weaknesses, and complementarity of each metric.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 21, 2021

LiveOIBench: Can Large Language Models Outperform Human Contestants in Informatics Olympiads?

Competitive programming problems increasingly serve as valuable benchmarks to evaluate the coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) due to their complexity and ease of verification. Yet, current coding benchmarks face limitations such as lack of exceptionally challenging problems, insufficient test case coverage, reliance on online platform APIs that limit accessibility. To address these issues, we introduce LiveOIBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 403 expert-curated Olympiad-level competitive programming problems, each with an average of 60 expert-designed test cases. The problems are sourced directly from 72 official Informatics Olympiads in different regions conducted between 2023 and 2025. LiveOIBench distinguishes itself through four key features: (1) meticulously curated high-quality tasks with detailed subtask rubrics and extensive private test cases; (2) direct integration of elite contestant performance data to enable informative comparison against top-performing humans; (3) planned continuous, contamination-free updates from newly released Olympiad problems; and (4) a self-contained evaluation system facilitating offline and easy-to-reproduce assessments. Benchmarking 32 popular general-purpose and reasoning LLMs, we find that GPT-5 achieves a notable 81.76th percentile, a strong result that nonetheless falls short of top human contestant performance, who usually place above 90th. In contrast, among open-weight reasoning models, GPT-OSS-120B achieves only a 60th percentile, underscoring significant capability disparities from frontier closed models. Detailed analyses indicate that robust reasoning models prioritize precise problem analysis over excessive exploration, suggesting future models should emphasize structured analysis and minimize unnecessary exploration. All data, code, and leaderboard results will be made publicly available on our website.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

IberBench: LLM Evaluation on Iberian Languages

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain difficult to evaluate comprehensively, particularly for languages other than English, where high-quality data is often limited. Existing benchmarks and leaderboards are predominantly English-centric, with only a few addressing other languages. These benchmarks fall short in several key areas: they overlook the diversity of language varieties, prioritize fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities over tasks of industrial relevance, and are static. With these aspects in mind, we present IberBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark designed to assess LLM performance on both fundamental and industry-relevant NLP tasks, in languages spoken across the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America. IberBench integrates 101 datasets from evaluation campaigns and recent benchmarks, covering 22 task categories such as sentiment and emotion analysis, toxicity detection, and summarization. The benchmark addresses key limitations in current evaluation practices, such as the lack of linguistic diversity and static evaluation setups by enabling continual updates and community-driven model and dataset submissions moderated by a committee of experts. We evaluate 23 LLMs ranging from 100 million to 14 billion parameters and provide empirical insights into their strengths and limitations. Our findings indicate that (i) LLMs perform worse on industry-relevant tasks than in fundamental ones, (ii) performance is on average lower for Galician and Basque, (iii) some tasks show results close to random, and (iv) in other tasks LLMs perform above random but below shared task systems. IberBench offers open-source implementations for the entire evaluation pipeline, including dataset normalization and hosting, incremental evaluation of LLMs, and a publicly accessible leaderboard.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025 2

Subset Selection Based On Multiple Rankings in the Presence of Bias: Effectiveness of Fairness Constraints for Multiwinner Voting Score Functions

We consider the problem of subset selection where one is given multiple rankings of items and the goal is to select the highest ``quality'' subset. Score functions from the multiwinner voting literature have been used to aggregate rankings into quality scores for subsets. We study this setting of subset selection problems when, in addition, rankings may contain systemic or unconscious biases toward a group of items. For a general model of input rankings and biases, we show that requiring the selected subset to satisfy group fairness constraints can improve the quality of the selection with respect to unbiased rankings. Importantly, we show that for fairness constraints to be effective, different multiwinner score functions may require a drastically different number of rankings: While for some functions, fairness constraints need an exponential number of rankings to recover a close-to-optimal solution, for others, this dependency is only polynomial. This result relies on a novel notion of ``smoothness'' of submodular functions in this setting that quantifies how well a function can ``correctly'' assess the quality of items in the presence of bias. The results in this paper can be used to guide the choice of multiwinner score functions for the subset selection setting considered here; we additionally provide a tool to empirically enable this.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2023

LLM Swiss Round: Aggregating Multi-Benchmark Performance via Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics

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.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Dec 24, 2025 2

Pervasive Annotation Errors Break Text-to-SQL Benchmarks and Leaderboards

Researchers have proposed numerous text-to-SQL techniques to streamline data analytics and accelerate the development of data-driven applications. To compare these techniques and select the best one for deployment, the community depends on public benchmarks and their leaderboards. Since these benchmarks heavily rely on human annotations during question construction and answer evaluation, the validity of the annotations is crucial. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that (i) benchmarks annotation error rates for two widely used text-to-SQL benchmarks, BIRD and Spider 2.0-Snow, and (ii) corrects a subset of the BIRD development (Dev) set to measure the impact of annotation errors on text-to-SQL agent performance and leaderboard rankings. Through expert analysis, we show that BIRD Mini-Dev and Spider 2.0-Snow have error rates of 52.8% and 62.8%, respectively. We re-evaluate all 16 open-source agents from the BIRD leaderboard on both the original and the corrected BIRD Dev subsets. We show that performance changes range from -7% to 31% (in relative terms) and rank changes range from -9 to +9 positions. We further assess whether these impacts generalize to the full BIRD Dev set. We find that the rankings of agents on the uncorrected subset correlate strongly with those on the full Dev set (Spearman's r_s=0.85, p=3.26e-5), whereas they correlate weakly with those on the corrected subset (Spearman's r_s=0.32, p=0.23). These findings show that annotation errors can significantly distort reported performance and rankings, potentially misguiding research directions or deployment choices. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/text_to_sql_benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13

The Growing Pains of Frontier Models: When Leaderboards Stop Separating and What to Measure Next

Leaderboards rank frontier models on independent axes but do not reveal whether capabilities reinforce or trade off across releases -- and at the frontier, this interaction is the more informative signal. We decompose paired SWE-bench and GPQA Diamond scores into a population coupling trend and per-release residual (h-field) that diagnoses capability emphasis and identifies which measurement or stress test is most informative next. Across 34 models from 10 labs (2024--2026), capabilities cooperate (r = +0.72, p < 10^{-6}), but cooperation varies by lab and over time: DeepSeek reversed from reasoning-rich to coding-first (h: +11.2 to -4.7, 15.9-pp swing); Google maintains consistent reasoning emphasis; Anthropic oscillates between coding excursions and recovery. Cooperation is not static -- it cascades. Six open-weight architectures confirm a second capability transition at 30--72B, and SWE-bench is now saturating while HLE and instruction-following retain discriminatory spread -- signaling the next axis rotation. We provide a three-level playbook (locate, diagnose, rotate), a per-lab measurement-priority table, and seven falsifiable predictions with timestamped criteria for the next 12 months of frontier releases. Per-lab coupling slopes vary 5times (Google 1.15 vs. DeepSeek 0.23), quantifying how efficiently each recipe converts coding gains into reasoning. Five April 2026 releases confirm the diagnostic out of sample (r rises from +0.72 to +0.75). An interactive dashboard provides phase classification with actionable recommendations, h-field diagnostics, per-lab coupling trajectories, ODE-based scaling predictions, benchmark rotation guidance, self-steering demo, and live tracking of all seven predictions: https://zehenlabs.com/cape/.

  • 1 authors
·
May 12

MacrOData: New Benchmarks of Thousands of Datasets for Tabular Outlier Detection

Quality benchmarks are essential for fairly and accurately tracking scientific progress and enabling practitioners to make informed methodological choices. Outlier detection (OD) on tabular data underpins numerous real-world applications, yet existing OD benchmarks remain limited. The prominent OD benchmark AdBench is the de facto standard in the literature, yet comprises only 57 datasets. In addition to other shortcomings discussed in this work, its small scale severely restricts diversity and statistical power. We introduce MacrOData, a large-scale benchmark suite for tabular OD comprising three carefully curated components: OddBench, with 790 datasets containing real-world semantic anomalies; OvrBench, with 856 datasets featuring real-world statistical outliers; and SynBench, with 800 synthetically generated datasets spanning diverse data priors and outlier archetypes. Owing to its scale and diversity, MacrOData enables comprehensive and statistically robust evaluation of tabular OD methods. Our benchmarks further satisfy several key desiderata: We provide standardized train/test splits for all datasets, public/private benchmark partitions with held-out test labels for the latter reserved toward an online leaderboard, and annotate our datasets with semantic metadata. We conduct extensive experiments across all benchmarks, evaluating a broad range of OD methods comprising classical, deep, and foundation models, over diverse hyperparameter configurations. We report detailed empirical findings, practical guidelines, as well as individual performances as references for future research. All benchmarks containing 2,446 datasets combined are open-sourced, along with a publicly accessible leaderboard hosted at https://huggingface.co/MacrOData-CMU.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 9

ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability

Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models, many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during test-time helps improve listwise ranking performance. However, due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data, existing rerankers perform poorly in many complex ranking scenarios and the ranking ability of reasoning-intensive rerankers remains largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we first propose an automated reasoning-intensive training data synthesis framework, which sources training queries and passages from diverse domains and applies DeepSeek-R1 to generate high-quality training labels. A self-consistency data filtering mechanism is designed to ensure the data quality. To empower the listwise reranker with strong reasoning ability, we further propose a two-stage post-training approach, which includes a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage for reasoning pattern learning and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage for further ranking ability enhancement. During the RL stage, based on the nature of listwise ranking, we design a multi-view ranking reward, which is more effective than a ranking metric-based reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained reasoning-intensive reranker ReasonRank outperforms existing baselines significantly and also achieves much lower latency than pointwise reranker Rank1. Through further experiments, our ReasonRank has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 40.6 on the BRIGHT leaderboard\footnote{https://brightbenchmark.github.io/.} Our codes are available at https://github.com/8421BCD/ReasonRank.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025 4

Taming the Fragility of KV Cache Eviction in LLM Inference

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their deployment remains hampered by the substantial memory and runtime overhead of the transformer's Key-Value cache. To mitigate this, recent methods employ a scoring-aggregation framework to evict unimportant cache entries, based on the stability assumption-that a fixed subset of entries remains consistently important during generation. However, prior work has largely focused on refining importance indicators for scoring, while defaulting to mean aggregation due to a faithful trust in the stability assumption. In this work, we argue that this underlying assumption is inherently fragile, making mean aggregation highly vulnerable in extreme cases. To counter this, we propose a simple yet elegant defensive aggregation strategy: a two-step, linear-time approach that controls worst-case risk, thereby defending against extreme cases with negligible computational overhead. Embodying this strategy, we propose a novel cache eviction method, DefensiveKV and its extension, Layer-DefensiveKV, which incorporates layer-wise budget allocation. Across seven task domains (18 datasets), our methods reduce generation quality loss by 2.3x and 4.3x respectively, versus the strongest baseline under a 20% cache size. These results set new performance benchmarks and pioneer a promising direction for optimizing cache eviction against underlying fragility through worst-case risk management. Our code is available at https://github.com/FFY0/DefensiveKV.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 15, 2025

Learnable Commutative Monoids for Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to be highly sensitive to the choice of aggregation function. While summing over a node's neighbours can approximate any permutation-invariant function over discrete inputs, Cohen-Karlik et al. [2020] proved there are set-aggregation problems for which summing cannot generalise to unbounded inputs, proposing recurrent neural networks regularised towards permutation-invariance as a more expressive aggregator. We show that these results carry over to the graph domain: GNNs equipped with recurrent aggregators are competitive with state-of-the-art permutation-invariant aggregators, on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world problems. However, despite the benefits of recurrent aggregators, their O(V) depth makes them both difficult to parallelise and harder to train on large graphs. Inspired by the observation that a well-behaved aggregator for a GNN is a commutative monoid over its latent space, we propose a framework for constructing learnable, commutative, associative binary operators. And with this, we construct an aggregator of O(log V) depth, yielding exponential improvements for both parallelism and dependency length while achieving performance competitive with recurrent aggregators. Based on our empirical observations, our proposed learnable commutative monoid (LCM) aggregator represents a favourable tradeoff between efficient and expressive aggregators.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 16, 2022

Explore to Evolve: Scaling Evolved Aggregation Logic via Proactive Online Exploration for Deep Research Agents

Deep research web agents not only retrieve information from diverse sources such as web environments, files, and multimodal inputs, but more importantly, they need to rigorously analyze and aggregate knowledge for insightful research. However, existing open-source deep research agents predominantly focus on enhancing information-seeking capabilities of web agents to locate specific information, while overlooking the essential need for information aggregation, which would limit their ability to support in-depth research. We propose an Explore to Evolve paradigm to scalably construct verifiable training data for web agents. Begins with proactive online exploration, an agent sources grounded information by exploring the real web. Using the collected evidence, the agent then self-evolves an aggregation program by selecting, composing, and refining operations from 12 high-level logical types to synthesize a verifiable QA pair. This evolution from high-level guidance to concrete operations allowed us to scalably produce WebAggregatorQA, a dataset of 10K samples across 50K websites and 11 domains. Based on an open-source agent framework, SmolAgents, we collect supervised fine-tuning trajectories to develop a series of foundation models, WebAggregator. WebAggregator-8B matches the performance of GPT-4.1, while the 32B variant surpasses GPT-4.1 by more than 10% on GAIA-text and closely approaches Claude-3.7-sonnet. Moreover, given the limited availability of benchmarks that evaluate web agents' information aggregation abilities, we construct a human-annotated evaluation split of WebAggregatorQA as a challenging test set. On this benchmark, Claude-3.7-sonnet only achieves 28%, and GPT-4.1 scores 25.8%. Even when agents manage to retrieve all references, they still struggle on WebAggregatorQA, highlighting the need to strengthen the information aggregation capabilities of web agent foundations.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 2