Daily Papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward systems, such as rule-based and reward-model-based, often exhibit issues such as unstable optimization and reward hacking. In this work, we revisit the general reasoning of LLMs from a geometric perspective, conceptualizing it as a coupled manifold composed of three interdependent sub-manifolds: logical deduction, evaluation, and representation. Based on this perspective, response generation in RL can be interpreted as a decoupling process from the evaluation manifold, while reward estimation corresponds to a decoupling process from the logical deduction manifold. The limitations of rule-based and reward-model RL systems can be geometrically interpreted as the mismatch of policy-reward manifolds during RL process. To address the aforementioned misalignment, we propose Decoupling and Coupling Reinforcement Learning (DCRL) framework, which incorporates two key components: (1) a syllogistic logic-based prompt evolution mechanism that dynamically refines reward rubrics to enhance the expressiveness of the reward manifold; and (2) a policy-reward re-coupling mechanism that jointly updates the reward and policy models, ensuring consistent evaluation and mitigating manifold mismatch during training. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments across multiple reasoning domains demonstrate that DCRL consistently outperforms both rule-based and reward-model baselines. Notably, a Qwen3-4B model trained under DCRL surpasses a Qwen3-32B baseline and approaches the performance of a Qwen3-235B model, highlighting superior effectiveness and generalization in RL.

Concept erasure aims to remove a target concept from a representation while preserving the other information encoded in it. This is difficult because representations encode many concepts that are often correlated with the erasure target, so removing the target risks damaging them. We propose the Manifold Constraint Hypothesis (MCH): if natural representations concentrate on a structured, lower-dimensional manifold, then interventions should be constrained to that manifold and better preserve other information encoded in the representation during interventions. We instantiate MCH in a new concept erasure method: MANifold aware Concept Erasure (MANCE). MANCE performs iterative updates to the representations using signals from a classifier that predicts a target concept. We estimate the manifold using representations obtained from natural inputs, and then we project the concept removal update to the estimated manifold. We perform extensive evaluation on 119 settings spanning text and vision, including 13 language models, three NLP concepts, and 40 CelebA-CLIP attributes. Employing MANCE on top of previous methods shows consistent improved leakage results. We also introduce MANCE+ and MANCE++, which prepend a closed-form erasure algorithm before employing MANCE, achieving better leakage--surgicality tradeoffs relative to matched full-space updates. MANCE++, our best method, achieves state-of-the-art results on nonlinear concept erasure. These results support MCH in the erasure setting: interventions should be constrained to the natural representation manifold.

The recent advances in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have achieved remarkable performance by leveraging human expertise. Yet, fully eliciting LLMs' potential for complex tasks requires navigating the vast search space of natural language prompts. While prompt engineering has shown promise, the requisite human-crafted prompts in trial-and-error attempts and the associated costs pose significant challenges. Crucially, the efficiency of prompt optimization hinges on the costly procedure of prompt evaluation. This work introduces Prompt-OIRL, an approach rooted in offline inverse reinforcement learning that seeks to bridge the gap between effective prompt evaluation and affordability. Our method draws on offline datasets from expert evaluations, employing Inverse-RL to derive a reward model for offline, query-dependent prompt evaluations. The advantages of Prompt-OIRL are manifold: it predicts prompt performance, is cost-efficient, produces human-readable results, and efficiently navigates the prompt space. We validate our method across four LLMs and three arithmetic datasets, highlighting its potential as a robust and effective tool for offline prompt evaluation and optimization. Our code as well as the offline datasets are released, and we highlight the Prompt-OIRL can be reproduced within a few hours using a single laptop using CPU

Video re-shooting re-renders a monocular video of a dynamic scene along a user-specified camera trajectory, and the dominant recipe supplies the target geometry explicitly: per-frame depth lifts the source video into a 4D point cloud, which is rasterized along the trajectory into a point cloud render. Because the render and the source video are both handed to the network as visual conditions, they compete at every denoising step, leaving the model with a trust dilemma --- how much of the render to believe --- which can degrade trajectory control or visual quality on data outside the training distribution. We argue that a render already pixel-aligned with the target view does not need to be supplied as an explicit conditioning stream at all. We propose MANIFOLD4D, which injects the render directly into the initial noise of flow matching, so that generation no longer departs from standard Gaussian noise but from a new noise manifold carrying geometric information, leaving the source video as the only visual condition. The render is thus used exactly once, and the network is never asked to learn how to read it; in subsequent denoising steps the model can focus on the source video. On our DAVIS-Traj benchmark and on the Vista4D evaluation set, MANIFOLD4D attains the best camera-control accuracy on every metric, lowering rotation error by 25% and 27% and translation error by up to 32% over the strongest baseline, while matching it in video fidelity and leading on real-world novel-view photometric quality. In a user study, our method achieves clear advantages in trajectory following and dynamic consistency. The gap widens as the yaw amplitude grows past the training range, and the model still recovers correct dynamic motion from the source video when the render is deliberately corrupted, confirming that the geometric prior guides generation without overriding it.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

In this paper, we propose an improved quantitative evaluation framework for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on generating domain-specific images, where we improve conventional evaluation methods on two levels: the feature representation and the evaluation metric. Unlike most existing evaluation frameworks which transfer the representation of ImageNet inception model to map images onto the feature space, our framework uses a specialized encoder to acquire fine-grained domain-specific representation. Moreover, for datasets with multiple classes, we propose Class-Aware Frechet Distance (CAFD), which employs a Gaussian mixture model on the feature space to better fit the multi-manifold feature distribution. Experiments and analysis on both the feature level and the image level were conducted to demonstrate improvements of our proposed framework over the recently proposed state-of-the-art FID method. To our best knowledge, we are the first to provide counter examples where FID gives inconsistent results with human judgments. It is shown in the experiments that our framework is able to overcome the shortness of FID and improves robustness. Code will be made available.

Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks. However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks. While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness. For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses. In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multidimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator. MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks. Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts. This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark. Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4. Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.

We show how aspects of the R-charge of N=2 CFTs in four dimensions are encoded in the q-deformed Kontsevich-Soibelman monodromy operator, built from their dyon spectra. In particular, the monodromy operator should have finite order if the R-charges are rational. We verify this for a number of examples including those arising from pairs of ADE singularities on a Calabi-Yau threefold (some of which are dual to 6d (2,0) ADE theories suitably fibered over the plane). In these cases we find that our monodromy maps to that of the Y-systems, studied by Zamolodchikov in the context of TBA. Moreover we find that the trace of the (fractional) q-deformed KS monodromy is given by the characters of 2d conformal field theories associated to the corresponding TBA (i.e. integrable deformations of the generalized parafermionic systems). The Verlinde algebra gets realized through evaluation of line operators at the loci of the associated hyperKahler manifold fixed under R-symmetry action. Moreover, we propose how the TBA system arises as part of the N=2 theory in 4 dimensions. Finally, we initiate a classification of N=2 superconformal theories in 4 dimensions based on their quiver data and find that this classification problem is mapped to the classification of N=2 theories in 2 dimensions, and use this to classify all the 4d, N=2 theories with up to 3 generators for BPS states.

The ability to automatically estimate the quality and coverage of the samples produced by a generative model is a vital requirement for driving algorithm research. We present an evaluation metric that can separately and reliably measure both of these aspects in image generation tasks by forming explicit, non-parametric representations of the manifolds of real and generated data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our metric in StyleGAN and BigGAN by providing several illustrative examples where existing metrics yield uninformative or contradictory results. Furthermore, we analyze multiple design variants of StyleGAN to better understand the relationships between the model architecture, training methods, and the properties of the resulting sample distribution. In the process, we identify new variants that improve the state-of-the-art. We also perform the first principled analysis of truncation methods and identify an improved method. Finally, we extend our metric to estimate the perceptual quality of individual samples, and use this to study latent space interpolations.

Riemannian geometry has been applied to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) for brain signals classification yielding promising results. Studying electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from their associated covariance matrices allows a mitigation of common sources of variability (electronic, electrical, biological) by constructing a representation which is invariant to these perturbations. While working in Euclidean space with covariance matrices is known to be error-prone, one might take advantage of algorithmic advances in information geometry and matrix manifold to implement methods for Symmetric Positive-Definite (SPD) matrices. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of the actual tools of information geometry and how they could be applied on covariance matrices of EEG. In practice, covariance matrices should be estimated, thus a thorough study of all estimators is conducted on real EEG dataset. As a main contribution, this paper proposes an online implementation of a classifier in the Riemannian space and its subsequent assessment in Steady-State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) experimentations.

The era of foundation models has revolutionized AI research, yet Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale graph corpora. Traditional graph data synthesis techniques primarily focus on simplistic structural operations, lacking the capacity to generate semantically rich nodes with meaningful textual attributes: a critical limitation for real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional text generation capabilities, their direct application to graph synthesis is impeded by context window limitations, hallucination phenomena, and structural consistency challenges. To address these issues, we introduce GraphMaster, the first multi-agent framework specifically designed for graph data synthesis in data-limited environments. GraphMaster orchestrates four specialized LLM agents (Manager, Perception, Enhancement, and Evaluation) that collaboratively optimize the synthesis process through iterative refinement, ensuring both semantic coherence and structural integrity. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we create new data-limited "Sub" variants of six standard graph benchmarks, specifically designed to test synthesis capabilities under realistic constraints. Additionally, we develop a novel interpretability assessment framework that combines human evaluation with a principled Grassmannian manifold-based analysis, providing both qualitative and quantitative measures of semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphMaster significantly outperforms traditional synthesis methods across multiple datasets, establishing a strong foundation for advancing GFMs in data-scarce environments.

Evaluation is a key part of machine learning (ML), yet there is a lack of support and tooling to enable its informed and systematic practice. We introduce Evaluate and Evaluation on the Hub --a set of tools to facilitate the evaluation of models and datasets in ML. Evaluate is a library to support best practices for measurements, metrics, and comparisons of data and models. Its goal is to support reproducibility of evaluation, centralize and document the evaluation process, and broaden evaluation to cover more facets of model performance. It includes over 50 efficient canonical implementations for a variety of domains and scenarios, interactive documentation, and the ability to easily share implementations and outcomes. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/evaluate. In addition, we introduce Evaluation on the Hub, a platform that enables the large-scale evaluation of over 75,000 models and 11,000 datasets on the Hugging Face Hub, for free, at the click of a button. Evaluation on the Hub is available at https://huggingface.co/autoevaluate.

As the use of text-to-image generative models increases, so does the adoption of automatic benchmarking methods used in their evaluation. However, while metrics and datasets abound, there are few unified benchmarking libraries that provide a framework for performing evaluations across many datasets and metrics. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of increasingly robust benchmarking methods requires that evaluation libraries remain flexible to new datasets and metrics. Finally, there remains a gap in synthesizing evaluations in order to deliver actionable takeaways about model performance. To enable unified, flexible, and actionable evaluations, we introduce EvalGIM (pronounced ''EvalGym''), a library for evaluating generative image models. EvalGIM contains broad support for datasets and metrics used to measure quality, diversity, and consistency of text-to-image generative models. In addition, EvalGIM is designed with flexibility for user customization as a top priority and contains a structure that allows plug-and-play additions of new datasets and metrics. To enable actionable evaluation insights, we introduce ''Evaluation Exercises'' that highlight takeaways for specific evaluation questions. The Evaluation Exercises contain easy-to-use and reproducible implementations of two state-of-the-art evaluation methods of text-to-image generative models: consistency-diversity-realism Pareto Fronts and disaggregated measurements of performance disparities across groups. EvalGIM also contains Evaluation Exercises that introduce two new analysis methods for text-to-image generative models: robustness analyses of model rankings and balanced evaluations across different prompt styles. We encourage text-to-image model exploration with EvalGIM and invite contributions at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EvalGIM/.

Recent progress in deep research systems has been impressive, but evaluation still lags behind real user needs. Existing benchmarks predominantly assess final reports using fixed rubrics, failing to evaluate the underlying research process. Most also offer limited multimodal coverage, rely on synthetic tasks that do not reflect real-world query complexity, and cannot be refreshed as knowledge evolves. To address these gaps, we introduce MiroEval, a benchmark and evaluation framework for deep research systems. The benchmark comprises 100 tasks (70 text-only, 30 multimodal), all grounded in real user needs and constructed via a dual-path pipeline that supports periodic updates, enabling a live and evolving setting. The proposed evaluation suite assesses deep research systems along three complementary dimensions: adaptive synthesis quality evaluation with task-specific rubrics, agentic factuality verification via active retrieval and reasoning over both web sources and multimodal attachments, and process-centric evaluation audits how the system searches, reasons, and refines throughout its investigation. Evaluation across 13 systems yields three principal findings: the three evaluation dimensions capture complementary aspects of system capability, with each revealing distinct strengths and weaknesses across systems; process quality serves as a reliable predictor of overall outcome while revealing weaknesses invisible to output-level metrics; and multimodal tasks pose substantially greater challenges, with most systems declining by 3 to 10 points. The MiroThinker series achieves the most balanced performance, with MiroThinker-H1 ranking the highest overall in both settings. Human verification and robustness results confirm the reliability of the benchmark and evaluation framework. MiroEval provides a holistic diagnostic tool for the next generation of deep research agents.

We propose a new approach for generative modeling based on training a neural network to be idempotent. An idempotent operator is one that can be applied sequentially without changing the result beyond the initial application, namely f(f(z))=f(z). The proposed model f is trained to map a source distribution (e.g, Gaussian noise) to a target distribution (e.g. realistic images) using the following objectives: (1) Instances from the target distribution should map to themselves, namely f(x)=x. We define the target manifold as the set of all instances that f maps to themselves. (2) Instances that form the source distribution should map onto the defined target manifold. This is achieved by optimizing the idempotence term, f(f(z))=f(z) which encourages the range of f(z) to be on the target manifold. Under ideal assumptions such a process provably converges to the target distribution. This strategy results in a model capable of generating an output in one step, maintaining a consistent latent space, while also allowing sequential applications for refinement. Additionally, we find that by processing inputs from both target and source distributions, the model adeptly projects corrupted or modified data back to the target manifold. This work is a first step towards a ``global projector'' that enables projecting any input into a target data distribution.

In standard transformer attention, a source token sends the same value vector to every receiver. The query determines how much to attend but not what to extract. This work introduces attention manifolds: learned 2D B-spline surfaces S_d(q_d, k_d) that modulate each value dimension based on the query-key interaction. Each surface is a tensor-product cubic B-spline initialized to zero, preserving pretrained behavior. Applied to LLaMA 3.2-1B-Instruct and 3B-Instruct, attention manifolds reduce WikiText-2 validation perplexity by 2--2.5 points with 0.3\% parameter overhead. Across 112 diverse prompts, surfaces change greedy-decoded output for 69\% (1B) to 83\% (3B) of cases, with the strongest effects on ambiguous and polysemous inputs (94--100\% change rate). The surfaces improve output quality: correcting factual errors (``the CAP theorem has three main components'' to ``it is impossible to guarantee all three''), increasing precision (``impossible to know certain properties'' to ``impossible to know both position and momentum''), and adding specificity (a generic quote to an attributed Saint Augustine citation, consistently at both scales). The learned surfaces are also mechanically editable: inverting a layer's coefficients changes greedy output for 9/10 prompts (KL~0.010), providing a geometric mechanism for model steering. Setting surface coefficients to -1 creates ``attention walls'' that block value flow through specific dimensions. In a preliminary experiment, a layer-wide wall redirects an explosive-device prompt from specific instructions to general educational content, suggesting a path toward safety-oriented manifold shaping.

A neural network with the widely-used ReLU activation has been shown to partition the sample space into many convex polytopes for prediction. However, the parameterized way a neural network and other machine learning models use to partition the space has imperfections, e.g., the compromised interpretability for complex models, the inflexibility in decision boundary construction due to the generic character of the model, and the risk of being trapped into shortcut solutions. In contrast, although the non-parameterized models can adorably avoid or downplay these issues, they are usually insufficiently powerful either due to over-simplification or the failure to accommodate the manifold structures of data. In this context, we first propose a new type of machine learning models referred to as Manifoldron that directly derives decision boundaries from data and partitions the space via manifold structure discovery. Then, we systematically analyze the key characteristics of the Manifoldron such as manifold characterization capability and its link to neural networks. The experimental results on 4 synthetic examples, 20 public benchmark datasets, and 1 real-world application demonstrate that the proposed Manifoldron performs competitively compared to the mainstream machine learning models. We have shared our code in https://github.com/wdayang/Manifoldron for free download and evaluation.

Evaluations (Evals) are a deployment bottleneck for real-world AI applications: public benchmarks rarely match a team's users, context, or policies, and human review is often tedious to scale. Motivated by our work with AI applications in the public sector, this project addresses recurring evaluation challenges encountered when applications must satisfy local policy and governance requirements. We present Kaleidoscope, an integrated workflow for contextual functional evaluation that links persona-based test generation, contextualized rubrics, and human review for reliability-gated automated scoring. Generated test cases are scored against application-specific rubrics; human annotations provide reviewable labels; and LLM judges automate scoring only when their agreement with those labels meets a configured threshold. Kaleidoscope is therefore a practical, inspectable, iterative workflow for product teams. We report early evidence from a three-week pilot across four organizational use cases and custom-rubric judge experiments on 108 annotated Q\&A pairs spanning four domains and 14 evaluation dimensions. The results highlight useful features for end-to-end reliable, automated scoring.

We propose MM-Vet, an evaluation benchmark that examines large multimodal models (LMMs) on complicated multimodal tasks. Recent LMMs have shown various intriguing abilities, such as solving math problems written on the blackboard, reasoning about events and celebrities in news images, and explaining visual jokes. Rapid model advancements pose challenges to evaluation benchmark development. Problems include: (1) How to systematically structure and evaluate the complicated multimodal tasks; (2) How to design evaluation metrics that work well across question and answer types; and (3) How to give model insights beyond a simple performance ranking. To this end, we present MM-Vet, designed based on the insight that the intriguing ability to solve complicated tasks is often achieved by a generalist model being able to integrate different core vision-language (VL) capabilities. MM-Vet defines 6 core VL capabilities and examines the 16 integrations of interest derived from the capability combination. For evaluation metrics, we propose an LLM-based evaluator for open-ended outputs. The evaluator enables the evaluation across different question types and answer styles, resulting in a unified scoring metric. We evaluate representative LMMs on MM-Vet, providing insights into the capabilities of different LMM system paradigms and models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/yuweihao/MM-Vet.

Drawing motivation from the manifold hypothesis, which posits that most high-dimensional data lies on or near low-dimensional manifolds, we apply manifold learning to the space of neural networks. We learn manifolds where datapoints are neural networks by introducing a distance between the hidden layer representations of the neural networks. These distances are then fed to the non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm PHATE to create a manifold of neural networks. We characterize this manifold using features of the representation, including class separation, hierarchical cluster structure, spectral entropy, and topological structure. Our analysis reveals that high-performing networks cluster together in the manifold, displaying consistent embedding patterns across all these features. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this approach for guiding hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search by sampling from the manifold.

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) evaluates diverse skills but models struggle with non-stationary data. We propose Continual AQA (CAQA) to refine models using sparse new data. Feature replay preserves memory without storing raw inputs. However, the misalignment between static old features and the dynamically changing feature manifold causes severe catastrophic forgetting. To address this novel problem, we propose Manifold-Aligned Graph Regularization (MAGR), which first aligns deviated old features to the current feature manifold, ensuring representation consistency. It then constructs a graph jointly arranging old and new features aligned with quality scores. Experiments show MAGR outperforms recent strong baselines with up to 6.56%, 5.66%, 15.64%, and 9.05% correlation gains on the MTL-AQA, FineDiving, UNLV-Dive, and JDM-MSA split datasets, respectively. This validates MAGR for continual assessment challenges arising from non-stationary skill variations.

A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a β-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

We adapt previous research on category theory and topological unsupervised learning to develop a functorial perspective on manifold learning, also known as nonlinear dimensionality reduction. We first characterize manifold learning algorithms as functors that map pseudometric spaces to optimization objectives and that factor through hierarchical clustering functors. We then use this characterization to prove refinement bounds on manifold learning loss functions and construct a hierarchy of manifold learning algorithms based on their equivariants. We express several popular manifold learning algorithms as functors at different levels of this hierarchy, including Metric Multidimensional Scaling, IsoMap, and UMAP. Next, we use interleaving distance to study the stability of a broad class of manifold learning algorithms. We present bounds on how closely the embeddings these algorithms produce from noisy data approximate the embeddings they would learn from noiseless data. Finally, we use our framework to derive a set of novel manifold learning algorithms, which we experimentally demonstrate are competitive with the state of the art.

Frontier language models sometimes recognize that they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior, undermining validity of benchmark results. Yet the field studies it without a shared foundation, conflating properties of the evaluation with properties of the model, and detection with behavioral response. We ground evaluation awareness in social psychology, decomposing it into an environment component (how recognizable the task is) and a model component that separates recognition from propensity to act on it. We operationalize the environment component through eight categorized trigger factors, such as placeholder entities and grading-style output formats, and study recognition and behavior through chain-of-thought monitoring. Across nine frontier models and four benchmarks, recognition rates depend on the specific pairing of model and benchmark rather than on either in isolation. Recognition rarely leads to behavioral change, and when it does, the direction depends on the type of evaluation perceived. Models are also more sensitive to safety than capability evaluations, placing safety benchmark validity at greater risk. To study which factors each model is sensitive to and how they interact, we propose EvalAwareBench, a factor-controlled benchmark of 100 paired safety-capability tasks where each of the eight factors can be independently toggled, varying evaluative signals while holding the underlying request fixed. Through EvalAwareBench, we find that no single factor uniformly affects all models, but stacking factors progressively raises evaluation awareness across all of them. Our framework and EvalAwareBench provide the tools to measure, attribute, and mitigate evaluation awareness, pointing to behavioral consistency under recognition as a promising path forward.

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.

Representation engineering methods have recently shown promise for enabling efficient steering of model behavior. However, evaluation pipelines for these methods have primarily relied on subjective demonstrations, instead of quantitative, objective metrics. We aim to take a step towards addressing this issue by advocating for four properties missing from current evaluations: (i) contexts sufficiently similar to downstream tasks should be used for assessing intervention quality; (ii) model likelihoods should be accounted for; (iii) evaluations should allow for standardized comparisons across different target behaviors; and (iv) baseline comparisons should be offered. We introduce an evaluation pipeline grounded in these criteria, offering both a quantitative and visual analysis of how effectively a given method works. We use this pipeline to evaluate two representation engineering methods on how effectively they can steer behaviors such as truthfulness and corrigibility, finding that some interventions are less effective than previously reported.

Generalization, the ability to perform well beyond the training context, is a hallmark of biological and artificial intelligence, yet anticipating unseen failures remains a central challenge. Conventional approaches often take a ``bottom-up'' mechanistic route by reverse-engineering interpretable features or circuits to build explanatory models. While insightful, these methods often struggle to provide the high-level, predictive signals for anticipating failure in real-world deployment. Here, we propose using a ``top-down'' approach to studying generalization failures inspired by medical biomarkers: identifying system-level measurements that serve as robust indicators of a model's future performance. Rather than mapping out detailed internal mechanisms, we systematically design and test network markers to probe structure, function links, identify prognostic indicators, and validate predictions in real-world settings. In image classification, we find that task-relevant geometric properties of in-distribution (ID) object manifolds consistently forecast poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. In particular, reductions in two geometric measures, effective manifold dimensionality and utility, predict weaker OOD performance across diverse architectures, optimizers, and datasets. We apply this finding to transfer learning with ImageNet-pretrained models. We consistently find that the same geometric patterns predict OOD transfer performance more reliably than ID accuracy. This work demonstrates that representational geometry can expose hidden vulnerabilities, offering more robust guidance for model selection and AI interpretability.

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet evaluating these methods remains challenging for two reasons: i) Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained evaluation on different prompt categories and evaluation dimensions. ii) Previous evaluation metrics only focus on a single aspect (e.g., text-3D alignment) and fail to perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. To address these problems, we first propose a comprehensive benchmark named MATE-3D. The benchmark contains eight well-designed prompt categories that cover single and multiple object generation, resulting in 1,280 generated textured meshes. We have conducted a large-scale subjective experiment from four different evaluation dimensions and collected 107,520 annotations, followed by detailed analyses of the results. Based on MATE-3D, we propose a novel quality evaluator named HyperScore. Utilizing hypernetwork to generate specified mapping functions for each evaluation dimension, our metric can effectively perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. HyperScore presents superior performance over existing metrics on MATE-3D, making it a promising metric for assessing and improving text-to-3D generation. The project is available at https://mate-3d.github.io/.

Retrieval-augmented agents can query external evidence, yet their reliability in multi-step reasoning remains limited: noisy retrieval may derail multi-hop question answering, while outcome-only reinforcement learning provides credit signals that are too coarse to optimize intermediate steps. We propose EvalAct (Evaluate-as-Action), which converts implicit retrieval quality assessment into an explicit action and enforces a coupled Search-to-Evaluate protocol so that each retrieval is immediately followed by a structured evaluation score, yielding process signals aligned with the interaction trajectory. To leverage these signals, we introduce Process-Calibrated Advantage Rescaling (PCAR), a GRPO-based optimization method that rescales advantages at the segment level according to evaluation scores, emphasizing reliable segments while updating uncertain ones conservatively. Experiments on seven open-domain QA benchmarks show that EvalAct achieves the best average accuracy, with the largest gains on multi-hop tasks, and ablations verify that the explicit evaluation loop drives the primary improvements while PCAR provides consistent additional benefits.

AI evaluation is undergoing a structural change. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as systems that act over time through tools, environments, users, and other agents, while many evaluation practices still inherit assumptions from response-centered benchmarks (e.g., fixed inputs, isolated outputs, and outcome judgments that can be made from a single response). The field has begun to build interactive benchmarks, but the resulting landscape is fragmented: benchmarks differ in what interaction artifacts they admit, how trajectories are scored, and what claims their results support. This position paper argues that interactive evaluation should be treated as a principled evaluation paradigm, not merely a new family of agent benchmarks. Simply adopting previous evaluation paradigms does not suffice. We define evaluation as an autonomous mapping from evidence to judgments, and show that interactive evaluation changes both sides of this mapping: the evidence becomes interaction-generated trajectories, while the evaluation procedure must assess process, recoverability, coordination, robustness, and system-level performance. Building on this definition, we propose a two-axis taxonomy, derive design principles and reporting standards, examine representative scenarios, and analyze how longstanding evaluation challenges reappear at the trajectory level.

The manifold hypothesis, which assumes that data lies on or close to an unknown manifold of low intrinsic dimension, is a staple of modern machine learning research. However, recent work has shown that real-world data exhibits distinct non-manifold structures, i.e. singularities, that can lead to erroneous findings. Detecting such singularities is therefore crucial as a precursor to interpolation and inference tasks. We address this issue by developing a topological framework that (i) quantifies the local intrinsic dimension, and (ii) yields a Euclidicity score for assessing the 'manifoldness' of a point along multiple scales. Our approach identifies singularities of complex spaces, while also capturing singular structures and local geometric complexity in image data.

The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data often lies on a lower-dimensional manifold and that utilizing this manifold as the target space yields more efficient representations. While numerous traditional manifold-based techniques exist for dimensionality reduction, their application in self-supervised learning has witnessed slow progress. The recent MSimCLR method combines manifold encoding with SimCLR but requires extremely low target encoding dimensions to outperform SimCLR, limiting its applicability. This paper introduces a novel learning paradigm using an unbalanced atlas (UA), capable of surpassing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. We investigated and engineered the DeepInfomax with an unbalanced atlas (DIM-UA) method by adapting the Spatiotemporal DeepInfomax (ST-DIM) framework to align with our proposed UA paradigm. The efficacy of DIM-UA is demonstrated through training and evaluation on the Atari Annotated RAM Interface (AtariARI) benchmark, a modified version of the Atari 2600 framework that produces annotated image samples for representation learning. The UA paradigm improves existing algorithms significantly as the number of target encoding dimensions grows. For instance, the mean F1 score averaged over categories of DIM-UA is ~75% compared to ~70% of ST-DIM when using 16384 hidden units.

Pretraining methods are typically compared by evaluating the accuracy of linear classifiers, transfer learning performance, or visually inspecting the representation manifold's (RM) lower-dimensional projections. We show that the differences between methods can be understood more clearly by investigating the RM directly, which allows for a more detailed comparison. To this end, we propose a framework and new metric to measure and compare different RMs. We also investigate and report on the RM characteristics for various pretraining methods. These characteristics are measured by applying sequentially larger local alterations to the input data, using white noise injections and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial attacks, and then tracking each datapoint. We calculate the total distance moved for each datapoint and the relative change in distance between successive alterations. We show that self-supervised methods learn an RM where alterations lead to large but constant size changes, indicating a smoother RM than fully supervised methods. We then combine these measurements into one metric, the Representation Manifold Quality Metric (RMQM), where larger values indicate larger and less variable step sizes, and show that RMQM correlates positively with performance on downstream tasks.

Evaluation is shifting from static QA toward agentic settings where models act through external tools. We identify a critical yet underexplored capability within this space - dexterous visual tool use: fine-grained, closed-loop parameterized visual action in which models infer tool parameters from visual evidence, and those parameters directly govern the final result. Existing benchmarks cover web navigation, GUI operation, and software engineering, but rarely target this coupling between visual evidence and execution precision. We propose EASEL, a benchmark evaluating a controlled instance of dexterous visual tool use that adopts reference-guided visual reconstruction as its primary proxy task: the agent incrementally paints a canvas to match a reference image. EASEL additionally includes semantic tasks spanning region annotation, handwriting, and path planning. We further provide EASEL-Data, a 440k-sample two-stage curriculum dataset for trajectory supervision, and EASEL-9B to investigate its effect on this capability. Evaluation of 25 models reveals that current multimodal agents systematically struggle on EASEL. Reconstruction similarity bottlenecks at low levels (0.40-0.54), while trajectory diagnostics expose severe closed-loop instability - models typically saturate early or degrade post-peak. Semantic tasks reveal sharp capability boundaries in precision annotation and path planning. EASEL-9B, trained on EASEL-Data, surpasses the base model by a relative 6.3%, ranking third among all evaluated models.

We introduce EvaLearn, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their learning capability and efficiency in challenging tasks, a critical, yet underexplored aspect of model potential. EvaLearn contains 648 challenging problems across six task types, grouped into 182 sequences, each sequence dedicated to one task type. Diverging from most existing benchmarks that evaluate models in parallel, EvaLearn requires models to solve problems sequentially, allowing them to leverage the experience gained from previous solutions. EvaLearn provides five comprehensive automated metrics to evaluate models and quantify their learning capability and efficiency. We extensively benchmark nine frontier models and observe varied performance profiles: some models, such as Claude-3.7-sonnet, start with moderate initial performance but exhibit strong learning ability, while some models struggle to benefit from experience and may even show negative transfer. Moreover, we investigate model performance under two learning settings and find that instance-level rubrics and teacher-model feedback further facilitate model learning. Importantly, we observe that current LLMs with stronger static abilities do not show a clear advantage in learning capability across all tasks, highlighting that EvaLearn evaluates a new dimension of model performance. We hope EvaLearn provides a novel evaluation perspective for assessing LLM potential and understanding the gap between models and human capabilities, promoting the development of deeper and more dynamic evaluation approaches. All datasets, the automatic evaluation framework, and the results studied in this paper are available at the GitHub repository.

Studies have been conducted to prevent specific concepts from being generated from pretrained text-to-image generative models, achieving concept erasure in various ways. However, the performance evaluation of these studies is still largely reliant on visualization, with the superiority of studies often determined by human subjectivity. The metrics of quantitative evaluation also vary, making comprehensive comparisons difficult. We propose EraseEval, an evaluation method that differs from previous evaluation methods in that it involves three fundamental evaluation criteria: (1) How well does the prompt containing the target concept be reflected, (2) To what extent the concepts related to the erased concept can reduce the impact of the erased concept, and (3) Whether other concepts are preserved. These criteria are evaluated and integrated into a single metric, such that a lower score is given if any of the evaluations are low, leading to a more robust assessment. We experimentally evaluated baseline concept erasure methods, organized their characteristics, and identified challenges with them. Despite being fundamental evaluation criteria, some concept erasure methods failed to achieve high scores, which point toward future research directions for concept erasure methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/fmp453/erase-eval.

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly used as evaluators in tasks (e.g., reward modeling, LLM-as-a-judge), where they act as proxies for human preferences or judgments. This leads to the need for meta-evaluation: evaluating the credibility of LLMs as evaluators. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on English, offering limited insight into LLMs' effectiveness as evaluators in non-English contexts. To address this, we introduce MM-Eval, a multilingual meta-evaluation benchmark that covers 18 languages across six categories. MM-Eval evaluates various dimensions, including language-specific challenges like linguistics and language hallucinations. Evaluation results show that both proprietary and open-source language models have considerable room for improvement. Further analysis reveals a tendency for these models to assign middle-ground scores to low-resource languages. We publicly release our benchmark and code.

We introduce Vibe-Eval: a new open benchmark and framework for evaluating multimodal chat models. Vibe-Eval consists of 269 visual understanding prompts, including 100 of hard difficulty, complete with gold-standard responses authored by experts. Vibe-Eval is open-ended and challenging with dual objectives: (i) vibe checking multimodal chat models for day-to-day tasks and (ii) rigorously testing and probing the capabilities of present frontier models. Notably, our hard set contains >50% questions that all frontier models answer incorrectly. We explore the nuances of designing, evaluating, and ranking models on ultra challenging prompts. We also discuss trade-offs between human and automatic evaluation, and show that automatic model evaluation using Reka Core roughly correlates to human judgment. We offer free API access for the purpose of lightweight evaluation and plan to conduct formal human evaluations for public models that perform well on the Vibe-Eval's automatic scores. We release the evaluation code and data, see https://github.com/reka-ai/reka-vibe-eval

For Large Language Models (LLMs), a disconnect persists between benchmark performance and real-world utility. Current evaluation frameworks remain fragmented, prioritizing technical metrics while neglecting holistic assessment for deployment. This survey introduces an anthropomorphic evaluation paradigm through the lens of human intelligence, proposing a novel three-dimensional taxonomy: Intelligence Quotient (IQ)-General Intelligence for foundational capacity, Emotional Quotient (EQ)-Alignment Ability for value-based interactions, and Professional Quotient (PQ)-Professional Expertise for specialized proficiency. For practical value, we pioneer a Value-oriented Evaluation (VQ) framework assessing economic viability, social impact, ethical alignment, and environmental sustainability. Our modular architecture integrates six components with an implementation roadmap. Through analysis of 200+ benchmarks, we identify key challenges including dynamic assessment needs and interpretability gaps. It provides actionable guidance for developing LLMs that are technically proficient, contextually relevant, and ethically sound. We maintain a curated repository of open-source evaluation resources at: https://github.com/onejune2018/Awesome-LLM-Eval.

Reliable evaluation is essential for developing and deploying large language models, yet in practice it often requires substantial manual effort: practitioners must identify appropriate benchmarks, reproduce heterogeneous evaluation codebases, configure dataset schema mappings, and interpret aggregated metrics. To address these challenges, we present One-Eval, an agentic evaluation system that converts natural-language evaluation requests into executable, traceable, and customizable evaluation workflows. One-Eval integrates (i) NL2Bench for intent structuring and personalized benchmark planning, (ii) BenchResolve for benchmark resolution, automatic dataset acquisition, and schema normalization to ensure executability, and (iii) Metrics \& Reporting for task-aware metric selection and decision-oriented reporting beyond scalar scores. The system further incorporates human-in-the-loop checkpoints for review, editing, and rollback, while preserving sample evidence trails for debugging and auditability. Experiments show that One-Eval can execute end-to-end evaluations from diverse natural-language requests with minimal user effort, supporting more efficient and reproducible evaluation in industrial settings. Our framework is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/One-Eval.

Evaluation benchmarks are the cornerstone of measuring capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as well as driving progress in said capabilities. Originally designed to make claims about capabilities (or lack thereof) in fully pretrained models, evaluation benchmarks are now also extensively used to decide between various training choices. Despite this widespread usage, we rarely quantify the variance in our evaluation benchmarks, which dictates whether differences in performance are meaningful. Here, we define and measure a range of metrics geared towards measuring variance in evaluation benchmarks, including seed variance across initialisations, and monotonicity during training. By studying a large number of models -- both openly available and pretrained from scratch -- we provide empirical estimates for a variety of variance metrics, with considerations and recommendations for practitioners. We also evaluate the utility and tradeoffs of continuous versus discrete performance measures and explore options for better understanding and reducing this variance. We find that simple changes, such as framing choice tasks (like MMLU) as completion tasks, can often reduce variance for smaller scale (sim7B) models, while more involved methods inspired from human testing literature (such as item analysis and item response theory) struggle to meaningfully reduce variance. Overall, our work provides insights into variance in evaluation benchmarks, suggests LM-specific techniques to reduce variance, and more generally encourages practitioners to carefully factor in variance when comparing models.

Dimensionality reduction is crucial both for visualization and preprocessing high dimensional data for machine learning. We introduce a novel method based on a hierarchy built on 1-nearest neighbor graphs in the original space which is used to preserve the grouping properties of the data distribution on multiple levels. The core of the proposal is an optimization-free projection that is competitive with the latest versions of t-SNE and UMAP in performance and visualization quality while being an order of magnitude faster in run-time. Furthermore, its interpretable mechanics, the ability to project new data, and the natural separation of data clusters in visualizations make it a general purpose unsupervised dimension reduction technique. In the paper, we argue about the soundness of the proposed method and evaluate it on a diverse collection of datasets with sizes varying from 1K to 11M samples and dimensions from 28 to 16K. We perform comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods on multiple metrics and target dimensions highlighting its efficiency and performance. Code is available at https://github.com/koulakis/h-nne

We present TransEvalnia, a prompting-based translation evaluation and ranking system that uses reasoning in performing its evaluations and ranking. This system presents fine-grained evaluations based on a subset of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (https://themqm.org/), returns an assessment of which translation it deems the best, and provides numerical scores for the various dimensions and for the overall translation. We show that TransEvalnia performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art MT-Ranker (Moosa et al. 2024) on our own English-Japanese data as well as several language pairs from various WMT shared tasks. Using Anthropic's Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct as the evaluation LLMs, we show that the evaluations returned are deemed highly acceptable to human raters, and that the scores assigned to the translations by Sonnet, as well as other LLMs, correlate well with scores assigned by the human raters. We also note the sensitivity of our system -- as well as MT-Ranker -- to the order in which the translations are presented, and we propose methods to address this position bias. All data, including the system's evaluation and reasoning, human assessments, as well as code is released.

Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. We present a mixed-initiative approach to ``validate the validators'' -- aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions (be it prompts or code) with human requirements. Our interface, EvalGen, provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. While generating candidate implementations (Python functions, LLM grader prompts), EvalGen asks humans to grade a subset of LLM outputs; this feedback is used to select implementations that better align with user grades. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. In particular, we identify a phenomenon we dub criteria drift: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria. What is more, some criteria appears dependent on the specific LLM outputs observed (rather than independent criteria that can be defined a priori), raising serious questions for approaches that assume the independence of evaluation from observation of model outputs. We present our interface and implementation details, a comparison of our algorithm with a baseline approach, and implications for the design of future LLM evaluation assistants.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key paradigm for enhancing the reasoning of large language models, yet the high dimensionality of parameter updates makes its training dynamics hard to analyze. We study reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and use vector steering to identify a low-dimensional effective manifold in activation space associated with RL-induced gains. We uncover two geometric properties. (1) Effective Manifold Capacity: the capacity needed to reproduce RL gains can be very small but is not infinitely compressible; at extremely low capacity, intervention dimensionality and input-dependent expressiveness become key constraints, and this requirement varies with injection depth. (2) Control Manifold Separation: effective control directions lie mainly in the low-variance complement of the activation principal subspace. Within a task and base model, the learned geometry stays largely consistent across training configurations, and across tasks geometric alignment correlates with capability transfer. Experiments on 5 LLMs and 6 verifiable-reward tasks support these findings. We then propose Alpha-Stabler, a plug-and-play framework with a Predictor that monitors principal-subspace intrusion for early collapse warnings, and a Controller that removes the principal-subspace component of activation gradients during backpropagation while preserving the orthogonal complement. Alpha-Stabler stabilizes training for 2,000 steps and consistently improves RL gains, offering practical insights for robust post-training. Code: https://github.com/caiyuchen-ustc/On_Policy_Vector_Training

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to models capable of producing highly realistic images. Yet, reliably evaluating their outputs remains challenging, especially at scale. Existing automatic evaluators, often relying on a static prompt set, struggle to capture subtle failure modes such as partial prompt misalignment, compositional errors, or visually plausible but semantically incorrect generations. In this work, we introduce DynEval, a Dynamic Evaluation framework designed to jointly assess text-to-image alignment and image quality of T2I models. To support scalable training beyond limited human-annotated data, we construct two large datasets. First, we build GenDB, a collection of 500K prompt-image pairs generated from human-written prompts drawn from DiffusionDB using a tiered prompt-model generation strategy. Second, building upon GenDB, we construct DynEvalInstruct, a 250K instruction dataset comprising prompt-image-response triplets distilled from a structured evaluation pipeline that decomposes evaluation into text-image alignment and visual quality reasoning. Using this dataset, we perform full fine-tuning of a compact evaluator through a curriculum learning strategy to effectively distill the superior evaluation capabilities of a larger teacher vision-language model, resulting in DynEval-2B and DynEval-4B. In extensive comparisons against existing evaluators across 11 benchmarks, our evaluator achieves a higher overall correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it provides fine-grained analysis of the capabilities and failure modes of 36 T2I models across 42 subcategories and 9 semantic dimensions.

The evaluation of machine-generated image captions poses an interesting yet persistent challenge. Effective evaluation measures must consider numerous dimensions of similarity, including semantic relevance, visual structure, object interactions, caption diversity, and specificity. Existing highly-engineered measures attempt to capture specific aspects, but fall short in providing a holistic score that aligns closely with human judgments. Here, we propose CLAIR, a novel method that leverages the zero-shot language modeling capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate candidate captions. In our evaluations, CLAIR demonstrates a stronger correlation with human judgments of caption quality compared to existing measures. Notably, on Flickr8K-Expert, CLAIR achieves relative correlation improvements over SPICE of 39.6% and over image-augmented methods such as RefCLIP-S of 18.3%. Moreover, CLAIR provides noisily interpretable results by allowing the language model to identify the underlying reasoning behind its assigned score. Code is available at https://davidmchan.github.io/clair/

Proper evaluations are crucial for better understanding, troubleshooting, interpreting model behaviors and further improving model performance. While using scalar-based error metrics provides a fast way to overview model performance, they are often too abstract to display certain weak spots and lack information regarding important model properties, such as robustness. This not only hinders machine learning models from being more interpretable and gaining trust, but also can be misleading to both model developers and users. Additionally, conventional evaluation procedures often leave researchers unclear about where and how model fails, which complicates model comparisons and further developments. To address these issues, we propose a novel evaluation workflow, named Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO) Evaluation. The goal of NERO evaluation is to turn focus from traditional scalar-based metrics onto evaluating and visualizing models equivariance, closely capturing model robustness, as well as to allow researchers quickly investigating interesting or unexpected model behaviors. NERO evaluation is consist of a task-agnostic interactive interface and a set of visualizations, called NERO plots, which reveals the equivariance property of the model. Case studies on how NERO evaluation can be applied to multiple research areas, including 2D digit recognition, object detection, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and 3D point cloud classification, demonstrate that NERO evaluation can quickly illustrate different model equivariance, and effectively explain model behaviors through interactive visualizations of the model outputs. In addition, we propose consensus, an alternative to ground truths, to be used in NERO evaluation so that model equivariance can still be evaluated with new, unlabeled datasets.

Automated research systems support literature synthesis, ideation, experiments, writing, and peer review, but their evaluation is dispersed across tasks, benchmarks, and studies that are difficult to compare directly. We review this literature from the perspective of evaluation design and evidence, covering six targets: literature synthesis, research ideation, executable workflows, scholarly writing and communication, automatic peer review, and end-to-end research. We compare task construction, evidence sources, evaluators, and scoring procedures to explain the capabilities assessed by different designs. Our synthesis highlights three recurring lessons: output checks, process checks, and human studies provide complementary information; evaluator calibration is specific to the property being assessed; and resource budgets and attempt selection are integral to interpreting performance comparisons. We identify diagnostic evaluation designs and documented gaps in supporting evidence, and translate these comparisons into reporting and audit recommendations for specific evaluation settings. The survey helps readers navigate existing evaluations, select appropriate benchmarks, and design subsequent studies.

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this work, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each item we can recommend is a node of an undirected graph and its expected rating is similar to the one of its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret with respect to the optimal policy would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose three algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly and sublinearly in this dimension. Our experiments on content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens of node evaluations.

Empirical evaluation serves as the primary compass guiding research progress in foundation models. Despite a large body of work focused on training frontier vision-language models (VLMs), approaches to their evaluation remain nascent. To guide their maturation, we propose three desiderata that evaluations should satisfy: (1) faithfulness to the modality and application, (2) discriminability between models of varying quality, and (3) efficiency in compute. Through this lens, we identify critical failure modes that violate faithfulness and discriminability, misrepresenting model capabilities: (i) multiple-choice formats reward guessing, poorly reflect downstream use cases, and saturate early as models improve; (ii) blindly solvable questions, which can be answered without images, constitute up to 70% of some evaluations; and (iii) mislabeled or ambiguous samples compromise up to 42% of examples in certain datasets. Regarding efficiency, the computational burden of evaluating frontier models has become prohibitive: by some accounts, nearly 20% of development compute is devoted to evaluation alone. Rather than discarding existing benchmarks, we curate them via transformation and filtering to maximize fidelity and discriminability. We find that converting multiple-choice questions to generative tasks reveals sharp capability drops of up to 35%. In addition, filtering blindly solvable and mislabeled samples improves discriminative power while simultaneously reducing computational cost. We release DatBench-Full, a cleaned evaluation suite of 33 datasets spanning nine VLM capabilities, and DatBench, a discriminative subset that achieves 13x average speedup (up to 50x) while closely matching the discriminative power of the original datasets. Our work outlines a path toward evaluation practices that are both rigorous and sustainable as VLMs continue to scale.

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing heterogeneous objectives, which together give rise to a 'seesaw effect' of competing metrics and pervasive reward hacking. Inspired by the success of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) in the large language model community, we propose Flow-OPD, the first unified post-training framework that integrates on-policy distillation into Flow Matching models. Flow-OPD adopts a two-stage alignment strategy: it first cultivates domain-specialized teacher models via single-reward GRPO fine-tuning, allowing each expert to reach its performance ceiling in isolation; it then establishes a robust initial policy through a Flow-based Cold-Start scheme and seamlessly consolidates heterogeneous expertise into a single student via a three-step orchestration of on-policy sampling, task-routing labeling, and dense trajectory-level supervision. We further introduce Manifold Anchor Regularization (MAR), which leverages a task-agnostic teacher to provide full-data supervision that anchors generation to a high-quality manifold, effectively mitigating the aesthetic degradation commonly observed in purely RL-driven alignment. Built upon Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium, Flow-OPD raises the GenEval score from 63 to 92 and the OCR accuracy from 59 to 94, yielding an overall improvement of roughly 10 points over vanilla GRPO, while preserving image fidelity and human-preference alignment and exhibiting an emergent 'teacher-surpassing' effect. These results establish Flow-OPD as a scalable alignment paradigm for building generalist text-to-image models.

3D generation is experiencing rapid advancements, while the development of 3D evaluation has not kept pace. How to keep automatic evaluation equitably aligned with human perception has become a well-recognized challenge. Recent advances in the field of language and image generation have explored human preferences and showcased respectable fitting ability. However, the 3D domain still lacks such a comprehensive preference dataset over generative models. To mitigate this absence, we develop 3DGen-Arena, an integrated platform in a battle manner. Then, we carefully design diverse text and image prompts and leverage the arena platform to gather human preferences from both public users and expert annotators, resulting in a large-scale multi-dimension human preference dataset 3DGen-Bench. Using this dataset, we further train a CLIP-based scoring model, 3DGen-Score, and a MLLM-based automatic evaluator, 3DGen-Eval. These two models innovatively unify the quality evaluation of text-to-3D and image-to-3D generation, and jointly form our automated evaluation system with their respective strengths. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our scoring model in predicting human preferences, exhibiting a superior correlation with human ranks compared to existing metrics. We believe that our 3DGen-Bench dataset and automated evaluation system will foster a more equitable evaluation in the field of 3D generation, further promoting the development of 3D generative models and their downstream applications.

The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that the response properties of sensory systems are adapted to the statistics of their inputs such that they capture maximal information about the environment, subject to biological constraints. While elegant, information theoretic properties are notoriously difficult to measure in practical settings or to employ as objective functions in optimization. This difficulty has necessitated that computational models designed to test the hypothesis employ several different information metrics ranging from approximations and lower bounds to proxy measures like reconstruction error. Recent theoretical advances have characterized a novel and ecologically relevant efficiency metric, the manifold capacity, which is the number of object categories that may be represented in a linearly separable fashion. However, calculating manifold capacity is a computationally intensive iterative procedure that until now has precluded its use as an objective. Here we outline the simplifying assumptions that allow manifold capacity to be optimized directly, yielding Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations (MMCR). The resulting method is closely related to and inspired by advances in the field of self supervised learning (SSL), and we demonstrate that MMCRs are competitive with state of the art results on standard SSL benchmarks. Empirical analyses reveal differences between MMCRs and representations learned by other SSL frameworks, and suggest a mechanism by which manifold compression gives rise to class separability. Finally we evaluate a set of SSL methods on a suite of neural predictivity benchmarks, and find MMCRs are higly competitive as models of the ventral stream.

Recent advances have made long-form report-generating systems widely available. This has prompted evaluation frameworks that use LLM-as-judge protocols and claim verification, along with meta-evaluation frameworks that seek to validate these methods. Many of the meta-evaluations estimate an evaluation quality's by comparing its assessments against human pairwise preferences. Prior work, however, suggests that human pairwise preference may be overly simplistic and can fail to capture nuances of expert expectations. We conduct a case study in meta-evaluation for long-form QA benchmarks using ScholarQA-CS2, a benchmark designed for assessing retrieval-augmented deep-research QA in the scientific domain. We comprehensively validate the benchmark through human pairwise preference judgments, then critically examine the strengths, weaknesses, and confounders of this approach. We show that pairwise preference rankings are best suited for system-level evaluation, while explicit metric-wise annotations and expert annotators are critical for reliable metric-level assessment, with subjectivity remaining a key challenge. Based on our findings, we offer practical guidelines for designing future meta-evaluations that better align evaluation methods, annotator expertise, and reporting practices. By surfacing these methodological challenges, we aim to advance evaluation standards for deep-research systems.

LLM-based agents are increasingly capable of generating complex 3D structures, with the potential to reshape how objects are designed and realized in the physical world. Yet, producing elegant geometry is fundamentally different from producing objects that can be built and perform their intended functions. Existing evaluations largely focus on geometric quality while overlooking physical realizability. We introduce LMBuild, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on generating buildable and functional structures. LMBuild represents generated objects as assembled structures comprising part decompositions, joints, materials, and sequences. To support reproducible evaluation, we provide a unified framework consisting of: (1) an interactive environment in which agents can use tools to retrieve, create, and place components to construct objects; (2) a curated benchmark that repurposes established CAD datasets and augments them with knowledge from Wikipedia; and (3) a evaluation framework covering structural soundness, functional affordance, design quality, and physical realization. Evaluations across 30 systems reveal several intriguing findings: (a) Soundness and alignment are no longer the primary bottlenecks for frontier closed-source models, while functional affordance and physical operability remain substantially more challenging; (b) stronger models more effectively create new components, whereas weaker models tend to rely on retrieval; and (c) providing functional specifications substantially improves part completeness, kinematics, and physical operability. These results show that generating real-world structures requires deeper reasoning about functional affordances, mechanics, and designing and creating novel components. We expect LMBuild to provide a foundation for measuring progress and incentivizing research toward agents that generate buildable and functional structures.

In Multi-Task Learning (MTL), tasks may compete and limit the performance achieved on each other, rather than guiding the optimization to a solution, superior to all its single-task trained counterparts. Since there is often not a unique solution optimal for all tasks, practitioners have to balance tradeoffs between tasks' performance, and resort to optimality in the Pareto sense. Most MTL methodologies either completely neglect this aspect, and instead of aiming at learning a Pareto Front, produce one solution predefined by their optimization schemes, or produce diverse but discrete solutions. Recent approaches parameterize the Pareto Front via neural networks, leading to complex mappings from tradeoff to objective space. In this paper, we conjecture that the Pareto Front admits a linear parameterization in parameter space, which leads us to propose Pareto Manifold Learning, an ensembling method in weight space. Our approach produces a continuous Pareto Front in a single training run, that allows to modulate the performance on each task during inference. Experiments on multi-task learning benchmarks, ranging from image classification to tabular datasets and scene understanding, show that Pareto Manifold Learning outperforms state-of-the-art single-point algorithms, while learning a better Pareto parameterization than multi-point baselines.

WANDR (Wide ANd Deep Research) is a benchmark of 500 realistic, challenging data-collection tasks for research agents. Each task requires a system to discover a large set of entities that satisfy specified criteria (breadth), investigate each entity through multiple coordinated web searches (depth), and return independently verifiable records with supporting sources and excerpts. Tasks are represented as qualification key hierarchies that specify the entities, relationships, evidence, and required count at each level; a hierarchy with n companies, m employees per company, and k sources per employee requires n x m x k records. This structure supports diverse workflows such as market mapping, due diligence, literature review, product comparison, and talent sourcing, with targets ranging from dozens to thousands of records. WANDR replaces static gold answer sets with task-specific judges that refetch cited pages and verify each record against its evidence, allowing evaluation of current and changing facts. Record verdicts are aggregated into soft and hard precision, recall, and F1 scores that distinguish factual quality, coverage, and hierarchical completeness. The tasks are derived from de-identified product-usage logs and produced through a semi-automated pipeline with automated checks, empirical audits, and human review where needed. We evaluate six production research systems and find that the benchmark is far from saturated: at high effort, the strongest system reaches only 0.363 soft F1 and 0.133 hard F1. Performance degrades as target volume and hierarchy depth increase, with incomplete discovery, missing enrichment, and incomplete evidence construction remaining major bottlenecks. The benchmark and evaluation harness are available at https://github.com/perplexityai/wandr.

This paper introduces the Manifold Probe, a supervised method for discovering representation manifolds in superposition. The method generalizes linear regression probes by learning the space of features of a concept that can be linearly predicted from the representations, and then learning the directions used to encode them. We demonstrate the probe on representations of time and space in Llama 2-7b, finding manifolds which linearly represent an interpretable set of features in each case. In the case of time, we show that by steering along the manifold, we can influence the model's completions about the years in which famous songs, movies and books were released, providing evidence that the Manifold Probe can discover manifolds which are causally involved in model behaviour.

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each item we can recommend is a node and its expected rating is similar to its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret with respect to the optimal policy would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose two algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly and sublinearly in this dimension. Our experiments on real-world content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens of nodes evaluations.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, defines a standardized interface for connecting large language models (LLMs) to external tools, data sources, and services. Within months of release, hundreds of community-built MCP servers appeared on GitHub, but no software-maintenance literature has yet described how the ecosystem is being structured in production. This industry experience paper catalogues five recurring MCP server architectural patterns observed across an enumerated corpus of fifteen independently developed servers (five production servers from the ANSYR voice AI platform plus ten public servers from the official MCP registry): Resource Gateway, Tool Orchestrator, Stateful Session Server, Proxy Aggregator, and Domain-Specific Adapter. Each pattern is described in the structured form of Gamma et al.: context, problem, solution, and consequences. We also document four anti-patterns and a set of cross-cutting concerns around authentication, versioning, and observability. The quantitative evaluation contributes three measurements: inter-rater reliability of the taxonomy across two independent LLM raters on 54 held-out servers (Cohen's kappa = 0.76), which also localizes three pattern-boundary ambiguities; transport overhead measured end-to-end on loopback and modeled for cross-host paths; and a tool-count study showing tool-selection accuracy drops below 90% between 10 and 15 tools per context for Claude Haiku 4.5 and between 20 and 30 tools for Sonnet 4. Code, corpus, and prompts are released as a replication package.

The recent emergence of Large Vision-Language Models(VLMs) has resulted in a variety of different benchmarks for evaluating such models. Despite this, we observe that most existing evaluation methods suffer from the fact that they either require the model to choose from pre-determined responses, sacrificing open-endedness, or evaluate responses using a judge model, resulting in subjective and unreliable evaluation. In addition, we observe a lack of benchmarks for VLMs in the Korean language, which are necessary as a separate metric from more common English language benchmarks, as the performance of generative language models can differ significantly based on the language being used. Therefore, we present KOFFVQA, a general-purpose free-form visual question answering benchmark in the Korean language for the evaluation of VLMs. Our benchmark consists of 275 carefully crafted questions each paired with an image and grading criteria covering 10 different aspects of VLM performance. The grading criteria eliminate the problem of unreliability by allowing the judge model to grade each response based on a pre-determined set of rules. By defining the evaluation criteria in an objective manner, even a small open-source model can be used to evaluate models on our benchmark reliably. In addition to evaluating a large number of existing VLMs on our benchmark, we also experimentally verify that our method of using pre-existing grading criteria for evaluation is much more reliable than existing methods. Our evaluation code is available at https://github.com/maum-ai/KOFFVQA

Evaluating Generative 3D models remains challenging due to misalignment between automated metrics and human perception of quality. Current benchmarks rely on image-based metrics that ignore 3D structure or geometric measures that fail to capture perceptual appeal and real-world utility. To address this gap, we present 3D Arena, an open platform for evaluating image-to-3D generation models through large-scale human preference collection using pairwise comparisons. Since launching in June 2024, the platform has collected 123,243 votes from 8,096 users across 19 state-of-the-art models, establishing the largest human preference evaluation for Generative 3D. We contribute the iso3d dataset of 100 evaluation prompts and demonstrate quality control achieving 99.75% user authenticity through statistical fraud detection. Our ELO-based ranking system provides reliable model assessment, with the platform becoming an established evaluation resource. Through analysis of this preference data, we present insights into human preference patterns. Our findings reveal preferences for visual presentation features, with Gaussian splat outputs achieving a 16.6 ELO advantage over meshes and textured models receiving a 144.1 ELO advantage over untextured models. We provide recommendations for improving evaluation methods, including multi-criteria assessment, task-oriented evaluation, and format-aware comparison. The platform's community engagement establishes 3D Arena as a benchmark for the field while advancing understanding of human-centered evaluation in Generative 3D.

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains.

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

Multi-dimensional evaluation is the dominant paradigm for human evaluation in Natural Language Generation (NLG), i.e., evaluating the generated text from multiple explainable dimensions, such as coherence and fluency. However, automatic evaluation in NLG is still dominated by similarity-based metrics, and we lack a reliable framework for a more comprehensive evaluation of advanced models. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-dimensional evaluator UniEval for NLG. We re-frame NLG evaluation as a Boolean Question Answering (QA) task, and by guiding the model with different questions, we can use one evaluator to evaluate from multiple dimensions. Furthermore, thanks to the unified Boolean QA format, we are able to introduce an intermediate learning phase that enables UniEval to incorporate external knowledge from multiple related tasks and gain further improvement. Experiments on three typical NLG tasks show that UniEval correlates substantially better with human judgments than existing metrics. Specifically, compared to the top-performing unified evaluators, UniEval achieves a 23% higher correlation on text summarization, and over 43% on dialogue response generation. Also, UniEval demonstrates a strong zero-shot learning ability for unseen evaluation dimensions and tasks. Source code, data and all pre-trained evaluators are available on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/maszhongming/UniEval).

Forming a reliable judgement of a machine learning (ML) model's appropriateness for an application ecosystem is critical for its responsible use, and requires considering a broad range of factors including harms, benefits, and responsibilities. In practice, however, evaluations of ML models frequently focus on only a narrow range of decontextualized predictive behaviours. We examine the evaluation gaps between the idealized breadth of evaluation concerns and the observed narrow focus of actual evaluations. Through an empirical study of papers from recent high-profile conferences in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities, we demonstrate a general focus on a handful of evaluation methods. By considering the metrics and test data distributions used in these methods, we draw attention to which properties of models are centered in the field, revealing the properties that are frequently neglected or sidelined during evaluation. By studying these properties, we demonstrate the machine learning discipline's implicit assumption of a range of commitments which have normative impacts; these include commitments to consequentialism, abstractability from context, the quantifiability of impacts, the limited role of model inputs in evaluation, and the equivalence of different failure modes. Shedding light on these assumptions enables us to question their appropriateness for ML system contexts, pointing the way towards more contextualized evaluation methodologies for robustly examining the trustworthiness of ML models

Automatic evaluation of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems relies on fine-grained dimensions like faithfulness and relevance, as judged by expert human annotators. Meta-evaluation benchmarks support the development of automatic evaluators that correlate well with human judgement. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on English or use translated data, which fails to capture cultural nuances. A native approach provides a better representation of the end user experience. In this work, we develop a Multilingual End-to-end Meta-Evaluation RAG benchmark (MEMERAG). Our benchmark builds on the popular MIRACL dataset, using native-language questions and generating responses with diverse large language models (LLMs), which are then assessed by expert annotators for faithfulness and relevance. We describe our annotation process and show that it achieves high inter-annotator agreement. We then analyse the performance of the answer-generating LLMs across languages as per the human evaluators. Finally we apply the dataset to our main use-case which is to benchmark multilingual automatic evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge). We show that our benchmark can reliably identify improvements offered by advanced prompting techniques and LLMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/MEMERAG

The rapid release of both language models and benchmarks makes it increasingly costly to evaluate every model on every dataset. In practice, models are often evaluated on different samples, making scores difficult to compare across studies. To address this, we propose a framework based on multidimensional Item Response Theory (IRT) that uses anchor items to calibrate new benchmarks to the evaluation suite while holding previously calibrated item parameters fixed. Our approach supports a realistic evaluation setting in which datasets are introduced over time and models are evaluated only on the datasets available at the time of evaluation, while a fixed anchor set for each dataset is used so that results from different evaluation periods can be compared directly. In large-scale experiments on more than 400 models, our framework predicts full-evaluation performance within 2-3 percentage points using only 100 anchor questions per dataset, with Spearman ρgeq 0.9 for ranking preservation, showing that it is possible to extend benchmark suites over time while preserving score comparability, at a constant evaluation cost per new dataset. Code available at https://github.com/eliyahabba/growing-pains

With diffusion and flow matching models achieving state-of-the-art generating performance, the interest of the community now turned to reducing the inference time without sacrificing sample quality. Consistency Models (CMs), which are trained to be consistent on diffusion or probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE) trajectories, enable one or two-step flow or diffusion sampling. However, CMs typically require prolonged training with large batch sizes to obtain competitive sample quality. In this paper, we examine the training dynamics of CMs near convergence and discover that CM tangents -- CM output update directions -- are quite oscillatory, in the sense that they move parallel to the data manifold, not towards the manifold. To mitigate oscillatory tangents, we propose a new loss function, called the manifold feature distance (MFD), which provides manifold-aligned tangents that point toward the data manifold. Consequently, our method -- dubbed Align Your Tangent (AYT) -- can accelerate CM training by orders of magnitude and even out-perform the learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (LPIPS). Furthermore, we find that our loss enables training with extremely small batch sizes without compromising sample quality. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/AYT

The assessment of evaluation metrics (meta-evaluation) is crucial for determining the suitability of existing metrics in text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. Human-based meta-evaluation is costly and time-intensive, and automated alternatives are scarce. We address this gap and propose CROC: a scalable framework for automated Contrastive Robustness Checks that systematically probes and quantifies metric robustness by synthesizing contrastive test cases across a comprehensive taxonomy of image properties. With CROC, we generate a pseudo-labeled dataset (CROC^{syn}) of over one million contrastive prompt-image pairs to enable a fine-grained comparison of evaluation metrics. We also use the dataset to train CROCScore, a new metric that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source methods, demonstrating an additional key application of our framework. To complement this dataset, we introduce a human-supervised benchmark (CROC^{hum}) targeting especially challenging categories. Our results highlight robustness issues in existing metrics: for example, many fail on prompts involving negation, and all tested open-source metrics fail on at least 25% of cases involving correct identification of body parts.

Practitioners prune neural networks for efficiency gains and generalization improvements, but few scrutinize the factors determining the prunability of a neural network the maximum fraction of weights that pruning can remove without compromising the model's test accuracy. In this work, we study the properties of input data that may contribute to the prunability of a neural network. For high dimensional input data such as images, text, and audio, the manifold hypothesis suggests that these high dimensional inputs approximately lie on or near a significantly lower dimensional manifold. Prior work demonstrates that the underlying low dimensional structure of the input data may affect the sample efficiency of learning. In this paper, we investigate whether the low dimensional structure of the input data affects the prunability of a neural network.

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.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile, numerous large scale benchmarks have been developed to thoroughly assess their capabilities. These benchmarks typically consist of diverse datasets and prompts to evaluate different aspects of LLM performance. However, comprehensive evaluations on hundreds or thousands of prompts incur tremendous costs in terms of computation, money, and time. In this work, we investigate strategies to improve evaluation efficiency by selecting a subset of examples from each benchmark using a learned policy. Our approach models the dependencies across test examples, allowing accurate prediction of the evaluation outcomes for the remaining examples based on the outcomes of the selected ones. Consequently, we only need to acquire the actual evaluation outcomes for the selected subset. We rigorously explore various subset selection policies and introduce a novel RL-based policy that leverages the captured dependencies. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the number of evaluation prompts required while maintaining accurate performance estimates compared to previous methods.

Human evaluation is critical for validating the performance of text-to-image generative models, as this highly cognitive process requires deep comprehension of text and images. However, our survey of 37 recent papers reveals that many works rely solely on automatic measures (e.g., FID) or perform poorly described human evaluations that are not reliable or repeatable. This paper proposes a standardized and well-defined human evaluation protocol to facilitate verifiable and reproducible human evaluation in future works. In our pilot data collection, we experimentally show that the current automatic measures are incompatible with human perception in evaluating the performance of the text-to-image generation results. Furthermore, we provide insights for designing human evaluation experiments reliably and conclusively. Finally, we make several resources publicly available to the community to facilitate easy and fast implementations.

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning problems that involve graphs, such as content-based recommendation. In this problem, each recommended item is a node and its expected rating is similar to its neighbors. The goal is to recommend items that have high expected ratings. We aim for the algorithms where the cumulative regret would not scale poorly with the number of nodes. In particular, we introduce the notion of an effective dimension, which is small in real-world graphs, and propose two algorithms for solving our problem that scale linearly in this dimension. Our experiments on real-world content recommendation problem show that a good estimator of user preferences for thousands of items can be learned from just tens nodes evaluations.

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose DR^{3}-Eval, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR^{3}-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR^{3}-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR^{3}-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control. Our code and data are publicly available.

Deep Research Agents generate analyst-grade reports, yet evaluating them remains challenging due to the absence of a single ground truth and the multidimensional nature of research quality. Recent benchmarks propose distinct methodologies, yet they suffer from the Mirage of Synthesis, where strong surface-level fluency and citation alignment can obscure underlying factual and reasoning defects. We characterize this gap by introducing a taxonomy across four verticals that exposes a critical capability mismatch: static evaluators inherently lack the tool-use capabilities required to assess temporal validity and factual correctness. To address this, we propose DREAM (Deep Research Evaluation with Agentic Metrics), a framework that instantiates the principle of capability parity by making evaluation itself agentic. DREAM structures assessment through an evaluation protocol combining query-agnostic metrics with adaptive metrics generated by a tool-calling agent, enabling temporally aware coverage, grounded verification, and systematic reasoning probes. Controlled evaluations demonstrate DREAM is significantly more sensitive to factual and temporal decay than existing benchmarks, offering a scalable, reference-free evaluation paradigm.

The automatic generation of visualizations is an old task that, through the years, has shown more and more interest from the research and practitioner communities. Recently, large language models (LLM) have become an interesting option for supporting generative tasks related to visualization, demonstrating initial promising results. At the same time, several pitfalls, like the multiple ways of instructing an LLM to generate the desired result, the different perspectives leading the generation (code-based, image-based, grammar-based), and the presence of hallucinations even for the visualization generation task, make their usage less affordable than expected. Following similar initiatives for benchmarking LLMs, this paper copes with the problem of modeling the evaluation of a generated visualization through an LLM. We propose a theoretical evaluation stack, EvaLLM, that decomposes the evaluation effort in its atomic components, characterizes their nature, and provides an overview of how to implement and interpret them. We also designed and implemented an evaluation platform that provides a benchmarking resource for the visualization generation task. The platform supports automatic and manual scoring conducted by multiple assessors to support a fine-grained and semantic evaluation based on the EvaLLM stack. Two case studies on GPT3.5-turbo with Code Interpreter and Llama2-70-b models show the benefits of EvaLLM and illustrate interesting results on the current state-of-the-art LLM-generated visualizations.

Matching submissions with suitable reviewers at scale is a growing challenge for major venues, yet existing approaches either rely on coarse proxy signals that conflate general relatedness with true suitability, or require expensive human annotations that are difficult to scale for training. We propose MERIT, a two-stage framework that bridges this gap by converting criterion-level expertise matching into scalable suitability supervision. In the first stage, we train a reviewer assessor via reinforcement learning to identify the expertise dimensions a paper requires, match them against the reviewer's prior work, and produce a suitability decision, with rewards provided by an LLM judge guided by paper-specific expertise rubrics. In the second stage, we distill the assessor's predictions into an embedding-based retriever for efficient large-scale assignment. Experiments show that our 4B reviewer assessor outperforms larger general-purpose LLMs on suitability classification, and the resulting retriever achieves state-of-the-art performance across LR-Bench and the CMU Gold dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Luli3220/MERIT.

UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a novel manifold learning technique for dimension reduction. UMAP is constructed from a theoretical framework based in Riemannian geometry and algebraic topology. The result is a practical scalable algorithm that applies to real world data. The UMAP algorithm is competitive with t-SNE for visualization quality, and arguably preserves more of the global structure with superior run time performance. Furthermore, UMAP has no computational restrictions on embedding dimension, making it viable as a general purpose dimension reduction technique for machine learning.

There is an increasing imperative to anticipate and understand the performance and safety of generative AI systems in real-world deployment contexts. However, the current evaluation ecosystem is insufficient: Commonly used static benchmarks face validity challenges, and ad hoc case-by-case audits rarely scale. In this piece, we advocate for maturing an evaluation science for generative AI systems. While generative AI creates unique challenges for system safety engineering and measurement science, the field can draw valuable insights from the development of safety evaluation practices in other fields, including transportation, aerospace, and pharmaceutical engineering. In particular, we present three key lessons: Evaluation metrics must be applicable to real-world performance, metrics must be iteratively refined, and evaluation institutions and norms must be established. Applying these insights, we outline a concrete path toward a more rigorous approach for evaluating generative AI systems.

Deep research systems are widely used for multi-step web research, analysis, and cross-source synthesis, yet their evaluation remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often require annotation-intensive task construction, rely on static evaluation dimensions, or fail to reliably verify facts when citations are missing. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DeepResearchEval, an automated framework for deep research task construction and agentic evaluation. For task construction, we propose a persona-driven pipeline generating realistic, complex research tasks anchored in diverse user profiles, applying a two-stage filter Task Qualification and Search Necessity to retain only tasks requiring multi-source evidence integration and external retrieval. For evaluation, we propose an agentic pipeline with two components: an Adaptive Point-wise Quality Evaluation that dynamically derives task-specific evaluation dimensions, criteria, and weights conditioned on each generated task, and an Active Fact-Checking that autonomously extracts and verifies report statements via web search, even when citations are missing.

Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, these general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time. These issues led us to reexamine traditional approaches and explore radically different design choices. In this paper, we present Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

We present Manify, an open-source Python library for non-Euclidean representation learning. Leveraging manifold learning techniques, Manify provides tools for learning embeddings in (products of) non-Euclidean spaces, performing classification and regression with data that lives in such spaces, and estimating the curvature of a manifold. Manify aims to advance research and applications in machine learning by offering a comprehensive suite of tools for manifold-based data analysis. Our source code, examples, datasets, results, and documentation are available at https://github.com/pchlenski/manify

Model-based evaluation is at the heart of successful model development -- as a reward model for training, and as a replacement for human evaluation. To train such evaluators, the standard approach is to collect a large amount of human preference judgments over model responses, which is costly and the data becomes stale as models improve. In this work, we present an approach that aims to im-prove evaluators without human annotations, using synthetic training data only. Starting from unlabeled instructions, our iterative self-improvement scheme generates contrasting model outputs and trains an LLM-as-a-Judge to produce reasoning traces and final judgments, repeating this training at each new iteration using the improved predictions. Without any labeled preference data, our Self-Taught Evaluator can improve a strong LLM (Llama3-70B-Instruct) from 75.4 to 88.3 (88.7 with majority vote) on RewardBench. This outperforms commonly used LLM judges such as GPT-4 and matches the performance of the top-performing reward models trained with labeled examples.

Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce ScholarBench, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. ScholarBench targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, ScholarBench evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.

Recent advancements in visual generative models have enabled high-quality image and video generation, opening diverse applications. However, evaluating these models often demands sampling hundreds or thousands of images or videos, making the process computationally expensive, especially for diffusion-based models with inherently slow sampling. Moreover, existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook specific user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. In contrast, humans can quickly form impressions of a model's capabilities by observing only a few samples. To mimic this, we propose the Evaluation Agent framework, which employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round, while offering detailed, user-tailored analyses. It offers four key advantages: 1) efficiency, 2) promptable evaluation tailored to diverse user needs, 3) explainability beyond single numerical scores, and 4) scalability across various models and tools. Experiments show that Evaluation Agent reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. The Evaluation Agent framework is fully open-sourced to advance research in visual generative models and their efficient evaluation.

Evaluation has traditionally focused on ranking candidates for a specific skill. Modern generalist models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), decidedly outpace this paradigm. Open-ended evaluation systems, where candidate models are compared on user-submitted prompts, have emerged as a popular solution. Despite their many advantages, we show that the current Elo-based rating systems can be susceptible to and even reinforce biases in data, intentional or accidental, due to their sensitivity to redundancies. To address this issue, we propose evaluation as a 3-player game, and introduce novel game-theoretic solution concepts to ensure robustness to redundancy. We show that our method leads to intuitive ratings and provide insights into the competitive landscape of LLM development.

Comprehensive and constructive evaluation protocols play an important role in the development of sophisticated text-to-video (T2V) generation models. Existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on temporal consistency and content continuity, yet largely ignore the dynamics of video content. Dynamics are an essential dimension for measuring the visual vividness and the honesty of video content to text prompts. In this study, we propose an effective evaluation protocol, termed DEVIL, which centers on the dynamics dimension to evaluate T2V models. For this purpose, we establish a new benchmark comprising text prompts that fully reflect multiple dynamics grades, and define a set of dynamics scores corresponding to various temporal granularities to comprehensively evaluate the dynamics of each generated video. Based on the new benchmark and the dynamics scores, we assess T2V models with the design of three metrics: dynamics range, dynamics controllability, and dynamics-based quality. Experiments show that DEVIL achieves a Pearson correlation exceeding 90% with human ratings, demonstrating its potential to advance T2V generation models. Code is available at https://github.com/MingXiangL/DEVIL.

Evaluations should do more than measure a models current performance. They should tell us what to fix for the next model iteration and provide a way to generate targeted post training data. Most evaluation pipelines identify weak examples, topics, or categories, but they leave the underlying capability failure implicit: they say where a model fails, not why. We introduce CRAFT, a method that converts any rubric based evaluation dataset into a model specific diagnosis of weak capabilities. CRAFT treats each grading criterion as a capability probe: it extracts a capability description from every prompt rubric pair, clusters these descriptions into a hierarchical capability tree, scores the target model at every node, and selects low performing nodes dynamically across tree levels, at the granularity where each failure is clearest. The selected weak capabilities then direct the generation of targeted supervised finetuning data. Holding the data generation, finetuning, and evaluation setup fixed, we compare CRAFT against prompt level EvalTree clustering and untargeted random generation on four open source models, two professional domains (finance and legal), and 13 held out benchmarks disjoint from the diagnostic data. CRAFT achieves the strongest finance domain average for all four models under repeated temperature decoding; on legal domain, it is strongest for three of four models and remains within the decoding variance bands of the best baseline on the fourth. Diagnosing weaknesses at the level of rubric criteria, rather than prompts or categories, thus yields both a sharper picture of what a model cannot do and measurably better models after finetuning on that diagnosis.

Benchmarks are pivotal in driving AI progress, and invalid benchmark questions frequently undermine their reliability. Manually identifying and correcting errors among thousands of benchmark questions is not only infeasible but also a critical bottleneck for reliable evaluation. In this work, we introduce a framework for systematic benchmark revision that leverages statistical analysis of response patterns to flag potentially invalid questions for further expert review. Our approach builds on a core assumption commonly used in AI evaluations that the mean score sufficiently summarizes model performance. This implies a unidimensional latent construct underlying the measurement experiment, yielding expected ranges for various statistics for each item. When empirically estimated values for these statistics fall outside the expected range for an item, the item is more likely to be problematic. Across nine widely used benchmarks, our method guides expert review to identify problematic questions with up to 84\% precision. In addition, we introduce an LLM-judge first pass to review questions, further reducing human effort. Together, these components provide an efficient and scalable framework for systematic benchmark revision.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into medical practice holds transformative potential, yet their real-world clinical utility remains limited by critical alignment challenges: (1) a disconnect between static evaluation benchmarks and dynamic clinical cognitive needs, (2) difficulties in adapting to evolving, multi-source medical standards, and (3) the inability of conventional reward models to capture nuanced, multi-dimensional medical quality criteria. To address these gaps, we propose MR-RML (Multidimensional Rubric-oriented Reward Model Learning) via GPRC (Geometric Projection Reference Constraints), a novel alignment framework that integrates medical standards into a structured "Dimensions-Scenarios-Disciplines" matrix to guide data generation and model optimization. MR-RML introduces three core innovations: (1) a "Dimensions-Scenarios-Disciplines" medical standard system that embeds domain standards into the full training pipeline; (2) an independent multi-dimensional reward model that decomposes evaluation criteria, shifting from real-time rubric-based scoring to internalized reward modeling for improved consistency and cost-efficiency; (3) geometric projection reference constraints that transform medical cognitive logic into mathematical regularization, aligning scoring gradients with clinical reasoning and enabling synthetic data-driven training. Through extensive evaluations on the authoritative medical benchmark Healthbench, our method yields substantial performance gains over the base LLM Qwen-32B (45% on the full subset and 85% on Hard subset, respectively). It achieves a SOTA among open-source LLMs with scores of 62.7 (full subset) and 44.7 (hard subset), while also outperforming the majority of closed-source models.

Large vision language models (VLMs) report strong accuracy on medical question-answering, yet it remains unclear whether they reason from visual evidence or exploit textual shortcuts. We introduce a counterfactual evaluation framework that decouples visual and textual contributions by substituting input images with controlled surrogates blank, pixel-shuffled, image-absent, and CLIP-retrieved hard negatives and derive a suite of grounding metrics including the Visual Reliance Score (VRS) and Visual Hallucination Rate (VHR). We further introduce CORAL (COntrastive Retrieval-Augmented Learning), a 7B-parameter LoRA fine-tune of Qwen2.5-VL-7B trained with a Contrastive Grounding Objective (CGO) that penalises answer invariance under hard-negative image swaps. On a paired controlled evaluation across four closed-form medical VQA benchmarks (PathVQA, PMC-VQA, SLAKE, VQA-RAD; n=400 total), CORAL improves macro accuracy by +6.7 pp (P(Delta>0)=0.988) and reduces VHR by 8.0 pp (P<0.001) over the matched Qwen2.5-VL-7B base; neither MedVLThinker RL variant achieves a significant gain on either metric. Cross-domain diagnostics further reveal that image substitution costs only <=6.5 pp on medical benchmarks versus 48-61 pp on general-domain tasks, situating the grounding gap that CGO targets. We discuss evaluation limitations openly including train/eval benchmark overlap and underpowered secondary metrics and release our framework, training code, and model weights to support reproducible grounding audits of medical VLMs.

The potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in domain of medical imaging raise the demands of systematic and rigorous evaluation frameworks that are aligned with the real-world medical imaging practice. Existing practices that report single or coarse-grained metrics are lack the granularity required for specialized clinical support and fail to assess the reliability of reasoning mechanisms. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift toward multidimensional, fine-grained and in-depth evaluation. Based on a two-stage systematic construction pipeline designed for this paradigm, we instantiate it with MedRCube. We benchmark 33 MLLMs, Lingshu-32B achieve top-tier performance. Crucially, MedRCube exposes a series of pronounced insights inaccessible under prior evaluation settings. Furthermore, we introduce a credibility evaluation subset to quantify reasoning credibility, uncover a highly significant positive association between shortcut behavior and diagnostic task performance, raising concerns for clinically trustworthy deployment. The resources of this work can be found at https://github.com/F1mc/MedRCube.

Entity resolution (record linkage, microclustering) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Looking for a needle in a haystack, traditional evaluation methods use sophisticated, application-specific sampling schemes to find matching pairs of records among an immense number of non-matches. We propose an alternative that facilitates the creation of representative, reusable benchmark data sets without necessitating complex sampling schemes. These benchmark data sets can then be used for model training and a variety of evaluation tasks. Specifically, we propose an entity-centric data labeling methodology that integrates with a unified framework for monitoring summary statistics, estimating key performance metrics such as cluster and pairwise precision and recall, and analyzing root causes for errors. We validate the framework in an application to inventor name disambiguation and through simulation studies. Software: https://github.com/OlivierBinette/er-evaluation/

Interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation, enabling models to produce and interpret both images and text in arbitrary sequences, have become a pivotal area in multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements, the evaluation of this capability remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks suffer from limitations in data scale, scope, and evaluation depth, while current evaluation metrics are often costly or biased, lacking in reliability for practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIE, a large-scale knowledge-intensive benchmark for evaluating interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). MMIE comprises 20K meticulously curated multimodal queries, spanning 3 categories, 12 fields, and 102 subfields, including mathematics, coding, physics, literature, health, and arts. It supports both interleaved inputs and outputs, offering a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended question formats to evaluate diverse competencies. Moreover, we propose a reliable automated evaluation metric, leveraging a scoring model fine-tuned with human-annotated data and systematic evaluation criteria, aimed at reducing bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and metrics in providing a comprehensive evaluation of interleaved LVLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight LVLMs, revealing that even the best models show significant room for improvement, with most achieving only moderate results. We believe MMIE will drive further advancements in the development of interleaved LVLMs. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://mmie-bench.github.io/.

The rapid growth in submissions to machine learning venues has strained the scientific peer-review system and intensified interest in LLM-based automated peer reviewers. However, how good these systems are actually, especially compared to human reviewers at catching scientific gaps, remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce PRISM (Peer Review Intelligence via Structured Multi-dimensional assessment), a benchmarking framework that evaluates review quality across four dimensions: Depth of Analysis, Novelty Assessment,Flaw Identification & Major Issues Prioritization, and Multi-dimensional Constructiveness. Unlike most existing evaluations based on surface-level metrics like ROUGE and BLEU, or unconstrained LLM-as-a-judge prompting that conflates fluency with rigor, PRISM grounds each dimension in argument mining, retrieval-augmented verification, and consensus-based scoring. We apply PRISM to benchmark five leading automated reviewer systems and human reviewers on a stratified corpus of reviews from ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS. The results reveal that LLMs can match or beat human reviewers on individual dimensions: comparable depth of analysis, stronger novelty verification, and highly accurate critique prioritization. However, no single system consistently matches the balanced performance of the human baseline across all dimensions at once. Each exhibits a distinct specialization profile with characteristic blind spots -- failure modes that aggregate metrics miss entirely. The implication is that LLM reviewers are best understood as targeted supplements to human review, effective within specific dimensions, but unreliable as standalone replacements. Our demo and key results can be found at https://khanhthanhdev.github.io/prism-page/.

Current embodied VLM evaluation relies on static, expert-defined, manually annotated benchmarks that exhibit severe redundancy and coverage imbalance. This labor intensive paradigm drains computational and annotation resources, inflates costs, and distorts model rankings, ultimately stifling iterative development. To address this, we propose Agentic Automatic Evaluation (A2Eval), the first agentic framework that automates benchmark curation and evaluation through two collaborative agents. The Data Agent autonomously induces capability dimensions and assembles a balanced, compact evaluation suite, while the Eval Agent synthesizes and validates executable evaluation pipelines, enabling fully autonomous, high-fidelity assessment. Evaluated across 10 benchmarks and 13 models, A2Eval compresses evaluation suites by 85%, reduces overall computational costs by 77%, and delivers a 4.6x speedup while preserving evaluation quality. Crucially, A2Eval corrects systematic ranking biases, improves human alignment to Spearman's rho=0.85, and maintains high ranking fidelity (Kendall's tau=0.81), establishing a new standard for high-fidelity, low-cost embodied assessment. Our code and data will be public soon.

Existing benchmarks for scientific data analysis evaluate LLMs primarily on code execution or workflow completion, overlooking that scientific analysis serves to support distinct types of scientific claims: hypothesis exploration, statistical inference, mechanistic explanation, each with different assumptions and validity criteria. We introduce SDABench, a benchmark that reorganizes evaluation around six capabilities (descriptive, exploratory, inferential, predictive, causal, and mechanistic) across five domains (Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Geography, Physics). SDABench comprises 527 real-data instances (SDA-Real) and 6000 synthetic instances (SDA-Synth), each in both multiple-choice and open-ended formats, constructed through an automated pipeline. Evaluating 15 representative LLMs, we find that models handle descriptive analysis well but degrade sharply on tasks requiring assumption selection, latent-process modeling, or mechanistic reasoning. SDABench further provides a five-stage error analysis framework that locates where LLMs fail: more advanced models more reliably identify the relevant scope and variables, but still struggle to select appropriate analytical procedures, model variable relationships, and draw valid conclusions.

In this paper, we uncover a systematic bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models~(LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. To address this issue, we propose a calibration framework with three simple yet effective strategies: 1) Multiple Evidence Calibration, which requires the evaluator model to generate multiple evaluation evidence before assigning ratings; 2) Balanced Position Calibration, which aggregates results across various orders to determine the final score; 3) Human-in-the-Loop Calibration, which introduces a balanced position diversity entropy to measure the difficulty of each example and seeks human assistance when needed. We also manually annotate the "win/tie/lose" outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark's question prompt, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully mitigates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. We release our code and human annotation at https://github.com/i-Eval/FairEval to facilitate future research.

Generating and editing presentation slides requires models to combine accurate text rendering, instruction following, visual grounding, aesthetic design, and precise editing within one canvas. Existing work covers only subsets of these capabilities and lacks large-scale slide-native supervision and diagnostic evaluation. We formulate four slide-centric tasks and build a scalable data engine with over 13M continual-pretraining records and 1.9M supervised fine-tuning records. We also introduce VisSlideBench, a benchmark of 1,527 manually screened instances that covers all four tasks with task-specific, multidimensional evaluation. Its automatic rankings agree with blinded, dimension-wise human rankings. Using these resources, we train InfoVis, a unified 9B slide generation and editing model. On VisSlideBench, InfoVis leads every evaluated open-source model on all eleven metrics and scores 7.94 overall against 7.99 for Nano-Banana-2. Starting from FLUX.2-klein-base-9B, slide-specific post-training adds 1.6 points overall, with the largest generation gains in content faithfulness; the remaining gap to proprietary models is smallest in content faithfulness and largest in aesthetic quality. Built on InfoVis, our document-to-slide workflow achieves the second-highest Aesthetics score on the external SlidesGen-Bench. We will release the model, code, data, and benchmark.

Evaluation metrics are central to binary target segmentation because they determine how progress is measured, compared, and interpreted. In this paper, target denotes the task-defined positive region to be segmented rather than a generic foreground object. It may be salient, camouflaged, transparent, glass-like, mirror-like, shadow-like, lesion-like, or defined by other application-specific semantics. We treat existing metrics as compositions of modular design choices rather than isolated formulas. The proposed framework decomposes each metric into five stages covering prediction representation, target extraction, target matching, score computation, and metric reporting. We use this framework to analyze representative metrics and show how newer metrics address specific limits in earlier protocols. The stage choices keep each metric's assumptions visible. We then discuss the design space opened by the framework and its implications for task-aware evaluation protocols. Reference code is available at https://github.com/lartpang/PySODMetrics.

Current benchmarks for assessing vision-language models (VLMs) often focus on their perception or problem-solving capabilities and neglect other critical aspects such as fairness, multilinguality, or toxicity. Furthermore, they differ in their evaluation procedures and the scope of the evaluation, making it difficult to compare models. To address these issues, we extend the HELM framework to VLMs to present the Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models (VHELM). VHELM aggregates various datasets to cover one or more of the 9 aspects: visual perception, knowledge, reasoning, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety. In doing so, we produce a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of the capabilities of the VLMs across these important factors. In addition, we standardize the standard inference parameters, methods of prompting, and evaluation metrics to enable fair comparisons across models. Our framework is designed to be lightweight and automatic so that evaluation runs are cheap and fast. Our initial run evaluates 22 VLMs on 21 existing datasets to provide a holistic snapshot of the models. We uncover new key findings, such as the fact that efficiency-focused models (e.g., Claude 3 Haiku or Gemini 1.5 Flash) perform significantly worse than their full models (e.g., Claude 3 Opus or Gemini 1.5 Pro) on the bias benchmark but not when evaluated on the other aspects. For transparency, we release the raw model generations and complete results on our website (https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/vhelm/v2.0.1). VHELM is intended to be a living benchmark, and we hope to continue adding new datasets and models over time.

In this time when biased information, deep fakes, and propaganda proliferate, the accessibility of reliable data sources is more important than ever. National statistical institutes provide curated data that contain quantitative information on a wide range of topics. However, that information is typically spread across many tables and the plain numbers may be arduous to process. Hence, this open data may be practically inaccessible. We ask the question "Are current Generative AI models capable of facilitating the identification of the right data and the fully-automatic creation of charts to provide information in visual form, corresponding to user queries?". We present a structured evaluation of recent large language models' (LLMs) capabilities to generate charts from complex data in response to user queries. Working with diverse public data from Statistics Netherlands, we assessed multiple LLMs on their ability to identify relevant data tables, perform necessary manipulations, and generate appropriate visualizations autonomously. We propose a new evaluation framework spanning three dimensions: data retrieval & pre-processing, code quality, and visual representation. Results indicate that locating and processing the correct data represents the most significant challenge. Additionally, LLMs rarely implement visualization best practices without explicit guidance. When supplemented with information about effective chart design, models showed marked improvement in representation scores. Furthermore, an agentic approach with iterative self-evaluation led to excellent performance across all evaluation dimensions. These findings suggest that LLMs' effectiveness for automated chart generation can be enhanced through appropriate scaffolding and feedback mechanisms, and that systems can already reach the necessary accuracy across the three evaluation dimensions.

Large-scale image generation has benefited from advances in data scale, quality, rebalancing, and recaptioning, yet conventional pipelines typically optimize task-specific datasets in isolation. A central challenge is not only how to curate each task-specific corpus, but also how to organize heterogeneous supervision according to the dependencies among generative capabilities. We present a capability-driven data infrastructure that couples capability-specific supervision construction with capability-aligned curriculum scheduling. Its three specialized yet interoperable data engines build complementary relational supervision for text-image grounding, inter-image transformation, and image-knowledge association, while caption experts align T2I and editing supervision across tasks and granularities. A multi-stage curriculum jointly evolves task composition, visual-concept distribution, data quality, and image resolution along the dependency order of capability acquisition, with capability-aware evaluation closing the loop through targeted retrieval, expert construction, and gap-aware resampling. At scale, the framework curates a 440M-image T2I corpus, 120M editing pairs, and over 27M image-entity pairs. With this infrastructure, we train multimodal diffusion models at two scales from scratch, with 3B and 6B sizes respectively. We conduct quantitative evaluation on CPI-Bench, along with qualitative evaluations across diverse text-to-image and editing scenarios. Experimental results present broad visual coverage, versatile rendering, and effective transfer across generative capabilities.

Sequential recommendation increasingly employs latent multi-step reasoning to enhance test-time computation. Despite empirical gains, existing approaches largely drive intermediate reasoning states via target-dominant objectives without imposing explicit feasibility constraints. This results in latent drift, where reasoning trajectories deviate into implausible regions. We argue that effective recommendation reasoning should instead be viewed as navigation on a collaborative manifold rather than free-form latent refinement. To this end, we propose ManCAR (Manifold-Constrained Adaptive Reasoning), a principled framework that grounds reasoning within the topology of a global interaction graph. ManCAR constructs a local intent prior from the collaborative neighborhood of a user's recent actions, represented as a distribution over the item simplex. During training, the model progressively aligns its latent predictive distribution with this prior, forcing the reasoning trajectory to remain within the valid manifold. At test time, reasoning proceeds adaptively until the predictive distribution stabilizes, avoiding over-refinement. We provide a variational interpretation of ManCAR to theoretically validate its drift-prevention and adaptive test-time stopping mechanisms. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that ManCAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to a 46.88% relative improvement w.r.t. NDCG@10. Our code is available at https://github.com/FuCongResearchSquad/ManCAR.

Proprietary LMs such as GPT-4 are often employed to assess the quality of responses from various LMs. However, concerns including transparency, controllability, and affordability strongly motivate the development of open-source LMs specialized in evaluations. On the other hand, existing open evaluator LMs exhibit critical shortcomings: 1) they issue scores that significantly diverge from those assigned by humans, and 2) they lack the flexibility to perform both direct assessment and pairwise ranking, the two most prevalent forms of assessment. Additionally, they do not possess the ability to evaluate based on custom evaluation criteria, focusing instead on general attributes like helpfulness and harmlessness. To address these issues, we introduce Prometheus 2, a more powerful evaluator LM than its predecessor that closely mirrors human and GPT-4 judgements. Moreover, it is capable of processing both direct assessment and pair-wise ranking formats grouped with a user-defined evaluation criteria. On four direct assessment benchmarks and four pairwise ranking benchmarks, Prometheus 2 scores the highest correlation and agreement with humans and proprietary LM judges among all tested open evaluator LMs. Our models, code, and data are all publicly available at https://github.com/prometheus-eval/prometheus-eval.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

We introduce RoboEval, a structured evaluation framework and benchmark for robotic manipulation that augments binary success with principled behavioral and outcome metrics. Existing evaluations often collapse performance into outcome counts, masking differences in execution quality and obscuring failure structure. RoboEval provides eight bimanual tasks with systematically controlled variations, more than three thousand expert demonstrations, and a modular simulation platform for reproducible experimentation. All tasks are instrumented with standardized metrics that quantify efficiency, coordination, and safety/stability, as well as outcome measures that trace stagewise progress and localize failure modes. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art visuomotor policies, we validate these metrics by analyzing their stability under variation, discriminative power across policies with similar success rates, and correlation with task success. Project Page: https://robo-eval.github.io

We introduce IND-Eval, a public benchmark that organizes industrial time series across domains into source-specific forecasting tasks. Relative to established benchmarks such as GIFT-Eval, it emphasizes finer sampling resolutions and a greater prevalence of multivariate forecasting. Evaluating Chronos-2, TiRex-2, and TimesFM-3, we find that TimesFM-3 achieves the lowest source-balanced aggregate nMASE and nCRPS and leads seven of nine sources under each metric; source-specific exceptions reinforce the need for domain-representative evaluation for model selection. These findings also motivate improving domain alignment during pretraining, where real industrial data are often too scarce to close domain-specific gaps directly; we therefore investigate whether a domain's statistical structure can guide simulator design. In a case study on two offshore well-monitoring regimes, we improve a general simulator's coverage using an oscillator-augmented simulation pipeline. This lowers forecasting error in the target domain but reduces performance on the subset of GIFT-Eval with natively univariate targets. A 50/50 mixture of the general and augmented simulation recipes achieves the lowest error among the three training recipes for all four event-metric pairs in the case study while recovering most of the lost GIFT-Eval performance. Together, these results illustrate how domain-representative evaluation can guide model selection and the composition of simulated data while revealing a trade-off between specialization and generality.

Efficient and accurate evaluation is crucial for the continuous improvement of large language models (LLMs). Among various assessment methods, subjective evaluation has garnered significant attention due to its superior alignment with real-world usage scenarios and human preferences. However, human-based evaluations are costly and lack reproducibility, making precise automated evaluators (judgers) vital in this process. In this report, we introduce CompassJudger-1, the first open-source all-in-one judge LLM. CompassJudger-1 is a general-purpose LLM that demonstrates remarkable versatility. It is capable of: 1. Performing unitary scoring and two-model comparisons as a reward model; 2. Conducting evaluations according to specified formats; 3. Generating critiques; 4. Executing diverse tasks like a general LLM. To assess the evaluation capabilities of different judge models under a unified setting, we have also established JudgerBench, a new benchmark that encompasses various subjective evaluation tasks and covers a wide range of topics. CompassJudger-1 offers a comprehensive solution for various evaluation tasks while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to diverse requirements. Both CompassJudger and JudgerBench are released and available to the research community athttps://github.com/open-compass/CompassJudger. We believe that by open-sourcing these tools, we can foster collaboration and accelerate progress in LLM evaluation methodologies.

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

Individual user fairness is commonly understood as treating similar users similarly. In Recommender Systems (RSs), several evaluation measures exist for quantifying individual user fairness. These measures evaluate fairness via either: (i) the disparity in RS effectiveness scores regardless of user similarity, or (ii) the disparity in items recommended to similar users regardless of item relevance. Both disparity in recommendation effectiveness and user similarity are very important in fairness, yet no existing individual user fairness measure simultaneously accounts for both. In brief, current user fairness evaluation measures implement a largely incomplete definition of fairness. To fill this gap, we present Pairwise User unFairness (PUF), a novel evaluation measure of individual user fairness that considers both effectiveness disparity and user similarity. PUF is the only measure that can express this important distinction. We empirically validate that PUF does this consistently across 4 datasets and 7 rankers, and robustly when varying user similarity or effectiveness. In contrast, all other measures are either almost insensitive to effectiveness disparity or completely insensitive to user similarity. We contribute the first RS evaluation measure to reliably capture both user similarity and effectiveness in individual user fairness. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/PUF-individual-user-fairness-recsys.

As a typical and practical application of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have gained extensive attention, particularly in vertical domains where LLMs may lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an omnidirectional and automatic RAG benchmark, OmniEval, in the financial domain. Our benchmark is characterized by its multi-dimensional evaluation framework, including (1) a matrix-based RAG scenario evaluation system that categorizes queries into five task classes and 16 financial topics, leading to a structured assessment of diverse query scenarios; (2) a multi-dimensional evaluation data generation approach, which combines GPT-4-based automatic generation and human annotation, achieving an 87.47\% acceptance ratio in human evaluations on generated instances; (3) a multi-stage evaluation system that evaluates both retrieval and generation performance, result in a comprehensive evaluation on the RAG pipeline; and (4) robust evaluation metrics derived from rule-based and LLM-based ones, enhancing the reliability of assessments through manual annotations and supervised fine-tuning of an LLM evaluator. Our experiments demonstrate the comprehensiveness of OmniEval, which includes extensive test datasets and highlights the performance variations of RAG systems across diverse topics and tasks, revealing significant opportunities for RAG models to improve their capabilities in vertical domains. We open source the code of our benchmark in https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen an impressive wave of advances recently, with models now excelling in a variety of tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and program synthesis. However, their potential to effectively use tools via API calls remains unfulfilled. This is a challenging task even for today's state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4, largely due to their inability to generate accurate input arguments and their tendency to hallucinate the wrong usage of an API call. We release Gorilla, a finetuned LLaMA-based model that surpasses the performance of GPT-4 on writing API calls. When combined with a document retriever, Gorilla demonstrates a strong capability to adapt to test-time document changes, enabling flexible user updates or version changes. It also substantially mitigates the issue of hallucination, commonly encountered when prompting LLMs directly. To evaluate the model's ability, we introduce APIBench, a comprehensive dataset consisting of HuggingFace, TorchHub, and TensorHub APIs. The successful integration of the retrieval system with Gorilla demonstrates the potential for LLMs to use tools more accurately, keep up with frequently updated documentation, and consequently increase the reliability and applicability of their outputs. Gorilla's code, model, data, and demo are available at https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu

Progress in machine learning is measured by careful evaluation on problems of outstanding common interest. However, the proliferation of benchmark suites and environments, adversarial attacks, and other complications has diluted the basic evaluation model by overwhelming researchers with choices. Deliberate or accidental cherry picking is increasingly likely, and designing well-balanced evaluation suites requires increasing effort. In this paper we take a step back and propose Nash averaging. The approach builds on a detailed analysis of the algebraic structure of evaluation in two basic scenarios: agent-vs-agent and agent-vs-task. The key strength of Nash averaging is that it automatically adapts to redundancies in evaluation data, so that results are not biased by the incorporation of easy tasks or weak agents. Nash averaging thus encourages maximally inclusive evaluation -- since there is no harm (computational cost aside) from including all available tasks and agents.

AI evaluation results are produced at scale but reported inconsistently across leaderboards, model cards, benchmark papers, and company blogs. The cost is interpretive: readers cannot reliably compare results across sources, identify what a report omits, or trace an aggregate claim to its underlying evidence. Recent efforts address isolated components but leave three gaps: they cover only narrow slices of the evaluation lifecycle and do not compose into a single interpretable record; they specify static representations that do not differentiate the questions different stakeholders bring to the same evidence; and they remain proposals on paper, lacking the extraction infrastructure required for adoption at scale. We present , an operational reporting layer that composes benchmark metadata, evaluation run data, and model metadata into a unified record. We (1) derive a reporting schema from a structured review of 52 papers and 10 stakeholder interviews, (2) implement four interpretive signals (reproducibility, documentation completeness, provenance and risk, and score comparability), rendered through reader modes calibrated to research and non-research audiences, and (3) deploy a monitoring tool that applies across 5,816 models, 635 benchmarks, and 101,843 results, surfacing systematic gaps in current reporting practice.

This paper presents a new, provably-convergent algorithm for computing the flag-mean and flag-median of a set of points on a flag manifold under the chordal metric. The flag manifold is a mathematical space consisting of flags, which are sequences of nested subspaces of a vector space that increase in dimension. The flag manifold is a superset of a wide range of known matrix spaces, including Stiefel and Grassmanians, making it a general object that is useful in a wide variety computer vision problems. To tackle the challenge of computing first order flag statistics, we first transform the problem into one that involves auxiliary variables constrained to the Stiefel manifold. The Stiefel manifold is a space of orthogonal frames, and leveraging the numerical stability and efficiency of Stiefel-manifold optimization enables us to compute the flag-mean effectively. Through a series of experiments, we show the competence of our method in Grassmann and rotation averaging, as well as principal component analysis. We release our source code under https://github.com/nmank/FlagAveraging.

Cluster analysis relies on effective benchmarks for evaluating and comparing different algorithms. Simulation studies on synthetic data are popular because important features of the data sets, such as the overlap between clusters, or the variation in cluster shapes, can be effectively varied. Unfortunately, creating evaluation scenarios is often laborious, as practitioners must translate higher-level scenario descriptions like "clusters with very different shapes" into lower-level geometric parameters such as cluster centers, covariance matrices, etc. To make benchmarks more convenient and informative, we propose synthetic data generation based on direct specification of high-level scenarios, either through verbal descriptions or high-level geometric parameters. Our open-source Python package repliclust implements this workflow, making it easy to set up interpretable and reproducible benchmarks for cluster analysis. A demo of data generation from verbal inputs is available at https://demo.repliclust.org.