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Jan 5

Harnessing the Power of Prompt-based Techniques for Generating School-Level Questions using Large Language Models

Designing high-quality educational questions is a challenging and time-consuming task. In this work, we propose a novel approach that utilizes prompt-based techniques to generate descriptive and reasoning-based questions. However, current question-answering (QA) datasets are inadequate for conducting our experiments on prompt-based question generation (QG) in an educational setting. Therefore, we curate a new QG dataset called EduProbe for school-level subjects, by leveraging the rich content of NCERT textbooks. We carefully annotate this dataset as quadruples of 1) Context: a segment upon which the question is formed; 2) Long Prompt: a long textual cue for the question (i.e., a longer sequence of words or phrases, covering the main theme of the context); 3) Short Prompt: a short textual cue for the question (i.e., a condensed representation of the key information or focus of the context); 4) Question: a deep question that aligns with the context and is coherent with the prompts. We investigate several prompt-based QG methods by fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based large language models (LLMs), namely PEGASUS, T5, MBART, and BART. Moreover, we explore the performance of two general-purpose pre-trained LLMs such as Text-Davinci-003 and GPT-3.5-Turbo without any further training. By performing automatic evaluation, we show that T5 (with long prompt) outperforms all other models, but still falls short of the human baseline. Under human evaluation criteria, TextDavinci-003 usually shows better results than other models under various prompt settings. Even in the case of human evaluation criteria, QG models mostly fall short of the human baseline. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/my625/PromptQG

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 2, 2023

EvalAgent: Discovering Implicit Evaluation Criteria from the Web

Evaluation of language model outputs on structured writing tasks is typically conducted with a number of desirable criteria presented to human evaluators or large language models (LLMs). For instance, on a prompt like "Help me draft an academic talk on coffee intake vs research productivity", a model response may be evaluated for criteria like accuracy and coherence. However, high-quality responses should do more than just satisfy basic task requirements. An effective response to this query should include quintessential features of an academic talk, such as a compelling opening, clear research questions, and a takeaway. To help identify these implicit criteria, we introduce EvalAgent, a novel framework designed to automatically uncover nuanced and task-specific criteria. EvalAgent first mines expert-authored online guidance. It then uses this evidence to propose diverse, long-tail evaluation criteria that are grounded in reliable external sources. Our experiments demonstrate that the grounded criteria produced by EvalAgent are often implicit (not directly stated in the user's prompt), yet specific (high degree of lexical precision). Further, EvalAgent criteria are often not satisfied by initial responses but they are actionable, such that responses can be refined to satisfy them. Finally, we show that combining LLM-generated and EvalAgent criteria uncovers more human-valued criteria than using LLMs alone.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 21, 2025

Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

LLMAuditor: A Framework for Auditing Large Language Models Using Human-in-the-Loop

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more pervasive across various users and scenarios, identifying potential issues when using these models becomes essential. Examples of such issues include: bias, inconsistencies, and hallucination. Although auditing the LLM for these problems is often warranted, such a process is neither easy nor accessible for most. An effective method is to probe the LLM using different versions of the same question. This could expose inconsistencies in its knowledge or operation, indicating potential for bias or hallucination. However, to operationalize this auditing method at scale, we need an approach to create those probes reliably and automatically. In this paper we propose the LLMAuditor framework which is an automatic, and scalable solution, where one uses a different LLM along with human-in-the-loop (HIL). This approach offers verifiability and transparency, while avoiding circular reliance on the same LLM, and increasing scientific rigor and generalizability. Specifically, LLMAuditor includes two phases of verification using humans: standardized evaluation criteria to verify responses, and a structured prompt template to generate desired probes. A case study using questions from the TruthfulQA dataset demonstrates that we can generate a reliable set of probes from one LLM that can be used to audit inconsistencies in a different LLM. This process is enhanced by our structured prompt template with HIL, which not only boosts the reliability of our approach in auditing but also yields the delivery of less hallucinated results. The novelty of our research stems from the development of a comprehensive, general-purpose framework that includes a HIL verified prompt template for auditing responses generated by LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024

OneReward: Unified Mask-Guided Image Generation via Multi-Task Human Preference Learning

In this paper, we introduce OneReward, a unified reinforcement learning framework that enhances the model's generative capabilities across multiple tasks under different evaluation criteria using only One Reward model. By employing a single vision-language model (VLM) as the generative reward model, which can distinguish the winner and loser for a given task and a given evaluation criterion, it can be effectively applied to multi-task generation models, particularly in contexts with varied data and diverse task objectives. We utilize OneReward for mask-guided image generation, which can be further divided into several sub-tasks such as image fill, image extend, object removal, and text rendering, involving a binary mask as the edit area. Although these domain-specific tasks share same conditioning paradigm, they differ significantly in underlying data distributions and evaluation metrics. Existing methods often rely on task-specific supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which limits generalization and training efficiency. Building on OneReward, we develop Seedream 3.0 Fill, a mask-guided generation model trained via multi-task reinforcement learning directly on a pre-trained base model, eliminating the need for task-specific SFT. Experimental results demonstrate that our unified edit model consistently outperforms both commercial and open-source competitors, such as Ideogram, Adobe Photoshop, and FLUX Fill [Pro], across multiple evaluation dimensions. Code and model are available at: https://one-reward.github.io

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025 4

MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

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/.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 4

Comparing Software Developers with ChatGPT: An Empirical Investigation

The advent of automation in particular Software Engineering (SE) tasks has transitioned from theory to reality. Numerous scholarly articles have documented the successful application of Artificial Intelligence to address issues in areas such as project management, modeling, testing, and development. A recent innovation is the introduction of ChatGPT, an ML-infused chatbot, touted as a resource proficient in generating programming codes and formulating software testing strategies for developers and testers respectively. Although there is speculation that AI-based computation can increase productivity and even substitute software engineers in software development, there is currently a lack of empirical evidence to verify this. Moreover, despite the primary focus on enhancing the accuracy of AI systems, non-functional requirements including energy efficiency, vulnerability, fairness (i.e., human bias), and safety frequently receive insufficient attention. This paper posits that a comprehensive comparison of software engineers and AI-based solutions, considering various evaluation criteria, is pivotal in fostering human-machine collaboration, enhancing the reliability of AI-based methods, and understanding task suitability for humans or AI. Furthermore, it facilitates the effective implementation of cooperative work structures and human-in-the-loop processes. This paper conducts an empirical investigation, contrasting the performance of software engineers and AI systems, like ChatGPT, across different evaluation metrics. The empirical study includes a case of assessing ChatGPT-generated code versus code produced by developers and uploaded in Leetcode.

  • 3 authors
·
May 19, 2023

The Evolving Role of Large Language Models in Scientific Innovation: Evaluator, Collaborator, and Scientist

Scientific innovation is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs). As science faces mounting challenges including information overload, disciplinary silos, and diminishing returns on conventional research methods, LLMs are emerging as powerful agents capable not only of enhancing scientific workflows but also of participating in and potentially leading the innovation process. Existing surveys mainly focus on different perspectives, phrases, and tasks in scientific research and discovery, while they have limitations in understanding the transformative potential and role differentiation of LLM. This survey proposes a comprehensive framework to categorize the evolving roles of LLMs in scientific innovation across three hierarchical levels: Evaluator, Collaborator, and Scientist. We distinguish between LLMs' contributions to structured scientific research processes and open-ended scientific discovery, thereby offering a unified taxonomy that clarifies capability boundaries, evaluation criteria, and human-AI interaction patterns at each level. Through an extensive analysis of current methodologies, benchmarks, systems, and evaluation metrics, this survey delivers an in-depth and systematic synthesis on LLM-driven scientific innovation. We present LLMs not only as tools for automating existing processes, but also as catalysts capable of reshaping the epistemological foundations of science itself. This survey offers conceptual clarity, practical guidance, and theoretical foundations for future research, while also highlighting open challenges and ethical considerations in the pursuit of increasingly autonomous AI-driven science. Resources related to this survey can be accessed on GitHub at: https://github.com/haoxuan-unt2024/llm4innovation.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 15, 2025

CHART-6: Human-Centered Evaluation of Data Visualization Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Data visualizations are powerful tools for communicating patterns in quantitative data. Yet understanding any data visualization is no small feat -- succeeding requires jointly making sense of visual, numerical, and linguistic inputs arranged in a conventionalized format one has previously learned to parse. Recently developed vision-language models are, in principle, promising candidates for developing computational models of these cognitive operations. However, it is currently unclear to what degree these models emulate human behavior on tasks that involve reasoning about data visualizations. This gap reflects limitations in prior work that has evaluated data visualization understanding in artificial systems using measures that differ from those typically used to assess these abilities in humans. Here we evaluated eight vision-language models on six data visualization literacy assessments designed for humans and compared model responses to those of human participants. We found that these models performed worse than human participants on average, and this performance gap persisted even when using relatively lenient criteria to assess model performance. Moreover, while relative performance across items was somewhat correlated between models and humans, all models produced patterns of errors that were reliably distinct from those produced by human participants. Taken together, these findings suggest significant opportunities for further development of artificial systems that might serve as useful models of how humans reason about data visualizations. All code and data needed to reproduce these results are available at: https://osf.io/e25mu/?view_only=399daff5a14d4b16b09473cf19043f18.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

GitTaskBench: A Benchmark for Code Agents Solving Real-World Tasks Through Code Repository Leveraging

Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks. Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness. By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment -- moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks. The benchmark and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/GitTaskBench.

  • 18 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025 1

Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the ways the general public accesses and consumes information. Their influence is particularly pronounced in pivotal sectors like healthcare, where lay individuals are increasingly appropriating LLMs as conversational agents for everyday queries. While LLMs demonstrate impressive language understanding and generation proficiencies, concerns regarding their safety remain paramount in these high-stake domains. Moreover, the development of LLMs is disproportionately focused on English. It remains unclear how these LLMs perform in the context of non-English languages, a gap that is critical for ensuring equity in the real-world use of these systems.This paper provides a framework to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs as multi-lingual dialogue systems for healthcare queries. Our empirically-derived framework XlingEval focuses on three fundamental criteria for evaluating LLM responses to naturalistic human-authored health-related questions: correctness, consistency, and verifiability. Through extensive experiments on four major global languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi, spanning three expert-annotated large health Q&A datasets, and through an amalgamation of algorithmic and human-evaluation strategies, we found a pronounced disparity in LLM responses across these languages, indicating a need for enhanced cross-lingual capabilities. We further propose XlingHealth, a cross-lingual benchmark for examining the multilingual capabilities of LLMs in the healthcare context. Our findings underscore the pressing need to bolster the cross-lingual capacities of these models, and to provide an equitable information ecosystem accessible to all.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023

What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation

With the development of artificial intelligence, particularly the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quantity and quality of automatically generated stories have significantly increased. This has led to the need for automatic story evaluation to assess the generative capabilities of computing systems and analyze the quality of both automatic-generated and human-written stories. Evaluating a story can be more challenging than other generation evaluation tasks. While tasks like machine translation primarily focus on assessing the aspects of fluency and accuracy, story evaluation demands complex additional measures such as overall coherence, character development, interestingness, etc. This requires a thorough review of relevant research. In this survey, we first summarize existing storytelling tasks, including text-to-text, visual-to-text, and text-to-visual. We highlight their evaluation challenges, identify various human criteria to measure stories, and present existing benchmark datasets. Then, we propose a taxonomy to organize evaluation metrics that have been developed or can be adopted for story evaluation. We also provide descriptions of these metrics, along with the discussion of their merits and limitations. Later, we discuss the human-AI collaboration for story evaluation and generation. Finally, we suggest potential future research directions, extending from story evaluation to general evaluations.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

Multi-Crit: Benchmarking Multimodal Judges on Pluralistic Criteria-Following

Large multimodal models (LMMs) are increasingly adopted as judges in multimodal evaluation systems due to their strong instruction following and consistency with human preferences. However, their ability to follow diverse, fine-grained evaluation criteria remains underexplored. We develop Multi-Crit, a benchmark for evaluating multimodal judges on their capacity to follow pluralistic criteria and produce reliable criterion-level judgments. Covering both open-ended generation and verifiable reasoning tasks, Multi-Crit is built through a rigorous data curation pipeline that gathers challenging response pairs with multi-criterion human annotations. It further introduces three novel metrics for systematically assessing pluralistic adherence, criterion-switching flexibility, and the ability to recognize criterion-level preference conflicts. Comprehensive analysis of 25 LMMs reveals that 1) proprietary models still struggle to maintain consistent adherence to pluralistic criteria--especially in open-ended evaluation; 2) open-source models lag further behind in flexibly following diverse criteria; and 3) critic fine-tuning with holistic judgment signals enhances visual grounding but fails to generalize to pluralistic criterion-level judgment. Additional analyses on reasoning fine-tuning, test-time scaling, and boundary consistency between open-source and proprietary models further probe the limits of current multimodal judges. As a pioneering study, Multi-Crit lays the foundation for building reliable and steerable multimodal AI evaluation.

BioMoDiffuse: Physics-Guided Biomechanical Diffusion for Controllable and Authentic Human Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

Reasoning or Not? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning LLMs for Dialogue Summarization

Dialogue summarization is a challenging task with significant practical value in customer service, meeting analysis, and conversational AI. Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in summarization tasks, the performance of step-by-step reasoning architectures-specifically Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) implementations such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1-remains unexplored for dialogue scenarios requiring concurrent abstraction and conciseness. In this work, we present the first comprehensive and systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs and non-reasoning LLMs across three major paradigms-generic, role-oriented, and query-oriented dialogue summarization. Our study spans diverse languages, domains, and summary lengths, leveraging strong benchmarks (SAMSum, DialogSum, CSDS, and QMSum) and advanced evaluation protocols that include both LLM-based automatic metrics and human-inspired criteria. Contrary to trends in other reasoning-intensive tasks, our findings show that explicit stepwise reasoning does not consistently improve dialogue summarization quality. Instead, reasoning LLMs are often prone to verbosity, factual inconsistencies, and less concise summaries compared to their non-reasoning counterparts. Through scenario-specific analyses and detailed case studies, we further identify when and why explicit reasoning may fail to benefit-or even hinder-summarization in complex dialogue contexts. Our work provides new insights into the limitations of current reasoning LLMs and highlights the need for targeted modeling and evaluation strategies for real-world dialogue summarization.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025

Machine Perceptual Quality: Evaluating the Impact of Severe Lossy Compression on Audio and Image Models

In the field of neural data compression, the prevailing focus has been on optimizing algorithms for either classical distortion metrics, such as PSNR or SSIM, or human perceptual quality. With increasing amounts of data consumed by machines rather than humans, a new paradigm of machine-oriented compressionx2013which prioritizes the retention of features salient for machine perception over traditional human-centric criteriax2013has emerged, creating several new challenges to the development, evaluation, and deployment of systems utilizing lossy compression. In particular, it is unclear how different approaches to lossy compression will affect the performance of downstream machine perception tasks. To address this under-explored area, we evaluate various perception modelsx2013including image classification, image segmentation, speech recognition, and music source separationx2013under severe lossy compression. We utilize several popular codecs spanning conventional, neural, and generative compression architectures. Our results indicate three key findings: (1) using generative compression, it is feasible to leverage highly compressed data while incurring a negligible impact on machine perceptual quality; (2) machine perceptual quality correlates strongly with deep similarity metrics, indicating a crucial role of these metrics in the development of machine-oriented codecs; and (3) using lossy compressed datasets, (e.g. ImageNet) for pre-training can lead to counter-intuitive scenarios where lossy compression increases machine perceptual quality rather than degrading it. To encourage engagement on this growing area of research, our code and experiments are available at: https://github.com/danjacobellis/MPQ.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 15, 2024

DEsignBench: Exploring and Benchmarking DALL-E 3 for Imagining Visual Design

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=

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023 2

Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences

As a relative quality comparison of model responses, human and Large Language Model (LLM) preferences serve as common alignment goals in model fine-tuning and criteria in evaluation. Yet, these preferences merely reflect broad tendencies, resulting in less explainable and controllable models with potential safety risks. In this work, we dissect the preferences of human and 32 different LLMs to understand their quantitative composition, using annotations from real-world user-model conversations for a fine-grained, scenario-wise analysis. We find that humans are less sensitive to errors, favor responses that support their stances, and show clear dislike when models admit their limits. On the contrary, advanced LLMs like GPT-4-Turbo emphasize correctness, clarity, and harmlessness more. Additionally, LLMs of similar sizes tend to exhibit similar preferences, regardless of their training methods, and fine-tuning for alignment does not significantly alter the preferences of pretrained-only LLMs. Finally, we show that preference-based evaluation can be intentionally manipulated. In both training-free and training-based settings, aligning a model with the preferences of judges boosts scores, while injecting the least preferred properties lowers them. This results in notable score shifts: up to 0.59 on MT-Bench (1-10 scale) and 31.94 on AlpacaEval 2.0 (0-100 scale), highlighting the significant impact of this strategic adaptation. Interactive Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/GAIR/Preference-Dissection-Visualization Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/GAIR/preference-dissection Code: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/Preference-Dissection

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 17, 2024

What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation

Imitating human demonstrations is a promising approach to endow robots with various manipulation capabilities. While recent advances have been made in imitation learning and batch (offline) reinforcement learning, a lack of open-source human datasets and reproducible learning methods make assessing the state of the field difficult. In this paper, we conduct an extensive study of six offline learning algorithms for robot manipulation on five simulated and three real-world multi-stage manipulation tasks of varying complexity, and with datasets of varying quality. Our study analyzes the most critical challenges when learning from offline human data for manipulation. Based on the study, we derive a series of lessons including the sensitivity to different algorithmic design choices, the dependence on the quality of the demonstrations, and the variability based on the stopping criteria due to the different objectives in training and evaluation. We also highlight opportunities for learning from human datasets, such as the ability to learn proficient policies on challenging, multi-stage tasks beyond the scope of current reinforcement learning methods, and the ability to easily scale to natural, real-world manipulation scenarios where only raw sensory signals are available. We have open-sourced our datasets and all algorithm implementations to facilitate future research and fair comparisons in learning from human demonstration data. Codebase, datasets, trained models, and more available at https://arise-initiative.github.io/robomimic-web/

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 6, 2021

Enhancing Paraphrase Type Generation: The Impact of DPO and RLHF Evaluated with Human-Ranked Data

Paraphrasing re-expresses meaning to enhance applications like text simplification, machine translation, and question-answering. Specific paraphrase types facilitate accurate semantic analysis and robust language models. However, existing paraphrase-type generation methods often misalign with human preferences due to reliance on automated metrics and limited human-annotated training data, obscuring crucial aspects of semantic fidelity and linguistic transformations. This study addresses this gap by leveraging a human-ranked paraphrase-type dataset and integrating Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align model outputs directly with human judgments. DPO-based training increases paraphrase-type generation accuracy by 3 percentage points over a supervised baseline and raises human preference ratings by 7 percentage points. A newly created human-annotated dataset supports more rigorous future evaluations. Additionally, a paraphrase-type detection model achieves F1 scores of 0.91 for addition/deletion, 0.78 for same polarity substitution, and 0.70 for punctuation changes. These findings demonstrate that preference data and DPO training produce more reliable, semantically accurate paraphrases, enabling downstream applications such as improved summarization and more robust question-answering. The PTD model surpasses automated metrics and provides a more reliable framework for evaluating paraphrase quality, advancing paraphrase-type research toward richer, user-aligned language generation and establishing a stronger foundation for future evaluations grounded in human-centric criteria.

  • 1 authors
·
May 28, 2025

MTalk-Bench: Evaluating Speech-to-Speech Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues via Arena-style and Rubrics Protocols

The rapid advancement of speech-to-speech (S2S) large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved real-time spoken interaction. However, current evaluation frameworks remain inadequate for assessing performance in complex, multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we introduce MTalk-Bench, a multi-turn S2S benchmark covering three core dimensions: Semantic Information, Paralinguistic Information, and Ambient Sound. Each dimension includes nine realistic scenarios, along with targeted tasks to assess specific capabilities such as reasoning. Our dual-method evaluation framework combines Arena-style evaluation (pairwise comparison) and Rubrics-based evaluation (absolute scoring) for relative and absolute assessment. The benchmark includes both model and human outputs, evaluated by human evaluators and LLMs. Experimental results reveal two sets of findings. Overall performance of S2S LLMs: (1) models excel at semantic information processing yet underperform on paralinguistic information and ambient sounds perception; (2) models typically regain coherence by increasing response length, sacrificing efficiency in multi-turn dialogues; (3) modality-aware, task-specific designs outperform brute scaling. Evaluation framework and reliability: (1) Arena and Rubrics yield consistent, complementary rankings, but reliable distinctions emerge only when performance gaps are large; (2) LLM-as-a-judge aligns with humans when gaps are clear or criteria explicit, but exhibits position and length biases and is reliable on nonverbal evaluation only with text annotations. These results highlight current limitations in S2S evaluation and the need for more robust, speech-aware assessment frameworks.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 22, 2025

Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?

Human evaluation is indispensable and inevitable for assessing the quality of texts generated by machine learning models or written by humans. However, human evaluation is very difficult to reproduce and its quality is notoriously unstable, hindering fair comparisons among different natural language processing (NLP) models and algorithms. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on unseen tasks when only the task instructions are provided. In this paper, we explore if such an ability of the LLMs can be used as an alternative to human evaluation. We present the LLMs with the exact same instructions, samples to be evaluated, and questions used to conduct human evaluation, and then ask the LLMs to generate responses to those questions; we dub this LLM evaluation. We use human evaluation and LLM evaluation to evaluate the texts in two NLP tasks: open-ended story generation and adversarial attacks. We show that the result of LLM evaluation is consistent with the results obtained by expert human evaluation: the texts rated higher by human experts are also rated higher by the LLMs. We also find that the results of LLM evaluation are stable over different formatting of the task instructions and the sampling algorithm used to generate the answer. We are the first to show the potential of using LLMs to assess the quality of texts and discuss the limitations and ethical considerations of LLM evaluation.

  • 2 authors
·
May 3, 2023

The illusion of a perfect metric: Why evaluating AI's words is harder than it looks

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) is crucial for the practical adoption of AI, but has been a longstanding research challenge. While human evaluation is considered the de-facto standard, it is expensive and lacks scalability. Practical applications have driven the development of various automatic evaluation metrics (AEM), designed to compare the model output with human-written references, generating a score which approximates human judgment. Over time, AEMs have evolved from simple lexical comparisons, to semantic similarity models and, more recently, to LLM-based evaluators. However, it seems that no single metric has emerged as a definitive solution, resulting in studies using different ones without fully considering the implications. This paper aims to show this by conducting a thorough examination of the methodologies of existing metrics, their documented strengths and limitations, validation methods, and correlations with human judgment. We identify several key challenges: metrics often capture only specific aspects of text quality, their effectiveness varies by task and dataset, validation practices remain unstructured, and correlations with human judgment are inconsistent. Importantly, we find that these challenges persist in the most recent type of metric, LLM-as-a-Judge, as well as in the evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), an increasingly relevant task in academia and industry. Our findings challenge the quest for the 'perfect metric'. We propose selecting metrics based on task-specific needs and leveraging complementary evaluations and advocate that new metrics should focus on enhanced validation methodologies.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation

Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation studies for summarization either exhibit a low inter-annotator agreement or have insufficient scale, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. Therefore, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: (1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for a high inter-annotator agreement. (2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of 22,000 summary-level annotations over 28 top-performing systems on three datasets. (3) We conduct a comparative study of four human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. (4) We evaluate 50 automatic metrics and their variants using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. The metrics we benchmarked include recent methods based on large language models (LLMs), GPTScore and G-Eval. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating LLMs, as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators' prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 15, 2022

TencentLLMEval: A Hierarchical Evaluation of Real-World Capabilities for Human-Aligned LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various natural language tasks. However, evaluating their alignment with human preferences remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a comprehensive human evaluation framework to assess LLMs' proficiency in following instructions on diverse real-world tasks. We construct a hierarchical task tree encompassing 7 major areas covering over 200 categories and over 800 tasks, which covers diverse capabilities such as question answering, reasoning, multiturn dialogue, and text generation, to evaluate LLMs in a comprehensive and in-depth manner. We also design detailed evaluation standards and processes to facilitate consistent, unbiased judgments from human evaluators. A test set of over 3,000 instances is released, spanning different difficulty levels and knowledge domains. Our work provides a standardized methodology to evaluate human alignment in LLMs for both English and Chinese. We also analyze the feasibility of automating parts of evaluation with a strong LLM (GPT-4). Our framework supports a thorough assessment of LLMs as they are integrated into real-world applications. We have made publicly available the task tree, TencentLLMEval dataset, and evaluation methodology which have been demonstrated as effective in assessing the performance of Tencent Hunyuan LLMs. By doing so, we aim to facilitate the benchmarking of advances in the development of safe and human-aligned LLMs.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 9, 2023

Style Over Substance: Evaluation Biases for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, accurately and comprehensively evaluating their performance becomes increasingly challenging. Human evaluations are conventionally considered the gold standard in natural language generation, but recent advancements incorporate state-of-the-art LLMs as proxies for human judges in evaluation processes. However, the extent to which humans and LLMs are capable evaluators remains uncertain. This study investigates the behavior of crowd-sourced and expert annotators, as well as LLMs, when comparing outputs from different models. To achieve this, we curate a dataset of intentionally flawed machine-generated answers. Our findings reveal a concerning bias in the evaluation process, as answers with factual errors are rated more favorably than answers that are too short or contained grammatical errors. To address this issue, we propose independently evaluating machine-generated text across multiple dimensions, rather than merging all the evaluation aspects into a single score. We instantiate this idea with the Elo rating system, resulting in the Multi-Elo Rating System. Empirical results from our study reveal that this proposed approach significantly enhances the quality of LLM-based evaluations, particularly in terms of factual accuracy. However, there is no significant improvement in crowd-sourced-based evaluations, indicating the need for further investigation and refinement.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 6, 2023

Quantifying and Optimizing Global Faithfulness in Persona-driven Role-playing

Persona-driven role-playing (PRP) aims to build AI characters that can respond to user queries by faithfully sticking with all persona statements. Unfortunately, existing faithfulness criteria for PRP are limited to coarse-grained LLM-based scoring without a clear definition or formulation. This paper presents a pioneering exploration to quantify PRP faithfulness as a fine-grained and explainable criterion, which also serves as a reliable reference for optimization. Our criterion first discriminates persona statements into active and passive constraints by identifying the query-statement relevance. Then, we incorporate all constraints following the principle that the AI character's response should be (a) entailed by active (relevant) constraints and (b) not contradicted by passive (irrelevant) constraints. We translate this principle mathematically into a novel Active-Passive-Constraint (APC) score, a constraint-wise sum of natural language inference (NLI) scores weighted by relevance scores. In practice, we build the APC scoring system by symbolically distilling small discriminators from GPT-4 for efficiency. We validate the quality of the APC score against human evaluation based on example personas with tens of statements, and the results show a high correlation. We further leverage it as a reward system in direct preference optimization (DPO) for better AI characters. Our experiments offer a fine-grained and explainable comparison between existing PRP techniques, revealing their advantages and limitations. We further find APC-based DPO to be one of the most competitive techniques for sticking with all constraints and can be well incorporated with other techniques. We then extend the scale of the experiments to real persons with hundreds of statements and reach a consistent conclusion.

  • 2 authors
·
May 13, 2024

A Novel Evaluation Framework for Image2Text Generation

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated image descriptions is challenging, requiring metrics that capture various aspects such as grammaticality, coverage, correctness, and truthfulness. While human evaluation offers valuable insights, its cost and time-consuming nature pose limitations. Existing automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, and CIDEr aim to bridge this gap but often show weak correlations with human judgment. We address this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation framework rooted in a modern large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4 or Gemini, capable of image generation. In our proposed framework, we begin by feeding an input image into a designated image captioning model, chosen for evaluation, to generate a textual description. Using this description, an LLM then creates a new image. By extracting features from both the original and LLM-created images, we measure their similarity using a designated similarity metric. A high similarity score suggests that the image captioning model has accurately generated textual descriptions, while a low similarity score indicates discrepancies, revealing potential shortcomings in the model's performance. Human-annotated reference captions are not required in our proposed evaluation framework, which serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of image captioning models. Its efficacy is confirmed through human evaluation.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3, 2024

PersonaEval: Are LLM Evaluators Human Enough to Judge Role-Play?

Current role-play studies often rely on unvalidated LLM-as-a-judge paradigms, which may fail to reflect how humans perceive role fidelity. A key prerequisite for human-aligned evaluation is role identification, the ability to recognize who is speaking based on dialogue context. We argue that any meaningful judgment of role-playing quality (how well a character is played) fundamentally depends on first correctly attributing words and actions to the correct persona (who is speaking). We present PersonaEval, the first benchmark designed to test whether LLM evaluators can reliably identify human roles. PersonaEval uses human-authored dialogues from novels, scripts, and video transcripts, challenging models to determine the correct persona according to the conversation context. Our experiments, including a human study, show that even the best-performing LLMs reach only around 69% accuracy, well below the level needed for reliable evaluation. In contrast, human participants perform near ceiling with 90.8% accuracy, highlighting that current LLM evaluators are still not human enough to effectively judge role-play scenarios. To better understand this gap, we examine training-time adaptation and test-time compute, suggesting that reliable evaluation requires more than task-specific tuning, but depends on strong, human-like reasoning abilities in LLM evaluators. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/maple-zhou/PersonaEval.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Rethinking MUSHRA: Addressing Modern Challenges in Text-to-Speech Evaluation

Despite rapid advancements in TTS models, a consistent and robust human evaluation framework is still lacking. For example, MOS tests fail to differentiate between similar models, and CMOS's pairwise comparisons are time-intensive. The MUSHRA test is a promising alternative for evaluating multiple TTS systems simultaneously, but in this work we show that its reliance on matching human reference speech unduly penalises the scores of modern TTS systems that can exceed human speech quality. More specifically, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the MUSHRA test, focusing on its sensitivity to factors such as rater variability, listener fatigue, and reference bias. Based on our extensive evaluation involving 471 human listeners across Hindi and Tamil we identify two primary shortcomings: (i) reference-matching bias, where raters are unduly influenced by the human reference, and (ii) judgement ambiguity, arising from a lack of clear fine-grained guidelines. To address these issues, we propose two refined variants of the MUSHRA test. The first variant enables fairer ratings for synthesized samples that surpass human reference quality. The second variant reduces ambiguity, as indicated by the relatively lower variance across raters. By combining these approaches, we achieve both more reliable and more fine-grained assessments. We also release MANGO, a massive dataset of 47,100 human ratings, the first-of-its-kind collection for Indian languages, aiding in analyzing human preferences and developing automatic metrics for evaluating TTS systems.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 19, 2024

IQA-EVAL: Automatic Evaluation of Human-Model Interactive Question Answering

To evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for question answering (QA), traditional methods typically focus on directly assessing the immediate responses generated by the models based on the given question and context. In the common use case of humans seeking AI assistant's help in finding information, these non-interactive evaluations do not account for the dynamic nature of human-model conversations, and interaction-aware evaluations have shown that accurate QA models are preferred by humans (Lee et al., 2023). Recent works in human-computer interaction (HCI) have employed human evaluators to conduct interactions and evaluations, but they are often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to scale. In this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation framework IQA-EVAL to Interactive Question Answering Evaluation. More specifically, we introduce LLM-based Evaluation Agent (LEA) that can: (1) simulate human behaviors to generate interactions with IQA models; (2) automatically evaluate the generated interactions. Moreover, we propose assigning personas to LEAs to better simulate groups of real human evaluators. We show that: (1) our evaluation framework with GPT-4 (or Claude) as the backbone model achieves a high correlation with human evaluations on the IQA task; (2) assigning personas to LEA to better represent the crowd further significantly improves correlations. Finally, we use our automatic metric to evaluate five recent representative LLMs with over 1000 questions from complex and ambiguous question answering tasks, which comes with a substantial cost of $5k if evaluated by humans.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 24, 2024

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

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

  • 6 authors
·
May 10, 2025

What are human values, and how do we align AI to them?

There is an emerging consensus that we need to align AI systems with human values (Gabriel, 2020; Ji et al., 2024), but it remains unclear how to apply this to language models in practice. We split the problem of "aligning to human values" into three parts: first, eliciting values from people; second, reconciling those values into an alignment target for training ML models; and third, actually training the model. In this paper, we focus on the first two parts, and ask the question: what are "good" ways to synthesize diverse human inputs about values into a target for aligning language models? To answer this question, we first define a set of 6 criteria that we believe must be satisfied for an alignment target to shape model behavior in accordance with human values. We then propose a process for eliciting and reconciling values called Moral Graph Elicitation (MGE), which uses a large language model to interview participants about their values in particular contexts; our approach is inspired by the philosophy of values advanced by Taylor (1977), Chang (2004), and others. We trial MGE with a representative sample of 500 Americans, on 3 intentionally divisive prompts (e.g. advice about abortion). Our results demonstrate that MGE is promising for improving model alignment across all 6 criteria. For example, almost all participants (89.1%) felt well represented by the process, and (89%) thought the final moral graph was fair, even if their value wasn't voted as the wisest. Our process often results in "expert" values (e.g. values from women who have solicited abortion advice) rising to the top of the moral graph, without defining who is considered an expert in advance.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024

HREF: Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following in Language Models

Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate various choices for automatic evaluation on a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We experiment with methods that leverage human-written responses and observe that they enhance the reliability of automatic evaluations across a wide range of tasks, resulting in up to a 3.2% improvement in agreement with human judges. We also discovered that human-written responses offer an orthogonal perspective to model-generated responses in following instructions and should be used as an additional context when comparing model responses. Based on these observations, we develop a new evaluation benchmark, Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following (HREF), comprising 4,258 samples across 11 task categories with a composite evaluation setup, employing a composite evaluation setup that selects the most reliable method for each category. In addition to providing reliable evaluation, HREF emphasizes individual task performance and is free from contamination. Finally, we study the impact of key design choices in HREF, including the size of the evaluation set, the judge model, the baseline model, and the prompt template. We host a live leaderboard that evaluates LLMs on the private evaluation set of HREF.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

KOFFVQA: An Objectively Evaluated Free-form VQA Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models in the Korean Language

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

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025 2

CritiQ: Mining Data Quality Criteria from Human Preferences

Language model heavily depends on high-quality data for optimal performance. Existing approaches rely on manually designed heuristics, the perplexity of existing models, training classifiers, or careful prompt engineering, which require significant expert experience and human annotation effort while introduce biases. We introduce CritiQ, a novel data selection method that automatically mines criteria from human preferences for data quality with only sim30 human-annotated pairs and performs efficient data selection. The main component, CritiQ Flow, employs a manager agent to evolve quality criteria and worker agents to make pairwise judgments. We build a knowledge base that extracts quality criteria from previous work to boost CritiQ Flow. Compared to perplexity- and classifier- based methods, verbal criteria are more interpretable and possess reusable value. After deriving the criteria, we train the CritiQ Scorer to give quality scores and perform efficient data selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the code, math, and logic domains, achieving high accuracy on human-annotated test sets. To validate the quality of the selected data, we continually train Llama 3.1 models and observe improved performance on downstream tasks compared to uniform sampling. Ablation studies validate the benefits of the knowledge base and the reflection process. We analyze how criteria evolve and the effectiveness of majority voting.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025 2

Automated Deep Learning: Neural Architecture Search Is Not the End

Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a highly effective approach for developing models in diverse contexts, including visual perception, speech recognition, and machine translation. However, the end-to-end process for applying DL is not trivial. It requires grappling with problem formulation and context understanding, data engineering, model development, deployment, continuous monitoring and maintenance, and so on. Moreover, each of these steps typically relies heavily on humans, in terms of both knowledge and interactions, which impedes the further advancement and democratization of DL. Consequently, in response to these issues, a new field has emerged over the last few years: automated deep learning (AutoDL). This endeavor seeks to minimize the need for human involvement and is best known for its achievements in neural architecture search (NAS), a topic that has been the focus of several surveys. That stated, NAS is not the be-all and end-all of AutoDL. Accordingly, this review adopts an overarching perspective, examining research efforts into automation across the entirety of an archetypal DL workflow. In so doing, this work also proposes a comprehensive set of ten criteria by which to assess existing work in both individual publications and broader research areas. These criteria are: novelty, solution quality, efficiency, stability, interpretability, reproducibility, engineering quality, scalability, generalizability, and eco-friendliness. Thus, ultimately, this review provides an evaluative overview of AutoDL in the early 2020s, identifying where future opportunities for progress may exist.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2021

LiveResearchBench: A Live Benchmark for User-Centric Deep Research in the Wild

Deep research -- producing comprehensive, citation-grounded reports by searching and synthesizing information from hundreds of live web sources -- marks an important frontier for agentic systems. To rigorously evaluate this ability, four principles are essential: tasks should be (1) user-centric, reflecting realistic information needs, (2) dynamic, requiring up-to-date information beyond parametric knowledge, (3) unambiguous, ensuring consistent interpretation across users, and (4) multi-faceted and search-intensive, requiring search over numerous web sources and in-depth analysis. Existing benchmarks fall short of these principles, often focusing on narrow domains or posing ambiguous questions that hinder fair comparison. Guided by these principles, we introduce LiveResearchBench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated tasks spanning daily life, enterprise, and academia, each requiring extensive, dynamic, real-time web search and synthesis. Built with over 1,500 hours of human labor, LiveResearchBench provides a rigorous basis for systematic evaluation. To evaluate citation-grounded long-form reports, we introduce DeepEval, a comprehensive suite covering both content- and report-level quality, including coverage, presentation, citation accuracy and association, consistency and depth of analysis. DeepEval integrates four complementary evaluation protocols, each designed to ensure stable assessment and high agreement with human judgments. Using LiveResearchBench and DeepEval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 frontier deep research systems, including single-agent web search, single-agent deep research, and multi-agent systems. Our analysis reveals current strengths, recurring failure modes, and key system components needed to advance reliable, insightful deep research.

Salesforce Salesforce
·
Oct 15, 2025 3

Psycholinguistic Word Features: a New Approach for the Evaluation of LLMs Alignment with Humans

The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is black{generally} better in the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a potential limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

HiPhO: How Far Are (M)LLMs from Humans in the Latest High School Physics Olympiad Benchmark?

Recently, the physical capabilities of (M)LLMs have garnered increasing attention. However, existing benchmarks for physics suffer from two major gaps: they neither provide systematic and up-to-date coverage of real-world physics competitions such as physics Olympiads, nor enable direct performance comparison with humans. To bridge these gaps, we present HiPhO, the first benchmark dedicated to high school physics Olympiads with human-aligned evaluation. Specifically, HiPhO highlights three key innovations. (1) Comprehensive Data: It compiles 13 latest Olympiad exams from 2024-2025, spanning both international and regional competitions, and covering mixed modalities that encompass problems spanning text-only to diagram-based. (2) Professional Evaluation: We adopt official marking schemes to perform fine-grained grading at both the answer and step level, fully aligned with human examiners to ensure high-quality and domain-specific evaluation. (3) Comparison with Human Contestants: We assign gold, silver, and bronze medals to models based on official medal thresholds, thereby enabling direct comparison between (M)LLMs and human contestants. Our large-scale evaluation of 30 state-of-the-art (M)LLMs shows that: across 13 exams, open-source MLLMs mostly remain at or below the bronze level; open-source LLMs show promising progress with occasional golds; closed-source reasoning MLLMs can achieve 6 to 12 gold medals; and most models still have a significant gap from full marks. These results highlight a substantial performance gap between open-source models and top students, the strong physical reasoning capabilities of closed-source reasoning models, and the fact that there is still significant room for improvement. HiPhO, as a rigorous, human-aligned, and Olympiad-focused benchmark for advancing multimodal physical reasoning, is open-source and available at https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO.

  • 17 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

Welzijn.AI: Developing Responsible Conversational AI for Elderly Care through Stakeholder Involvement

We present Welzijn.AI as new digital solution for monitoring (mental) well-being in elderly populations, and illustrate how development of systems like Welzijn.AI can align with guidelines on responsible AI development. Three evaluations with different stakeholders were designed to disclose new perspectives on the strengths, weaknesses, design characteristics, and value requirements of Welzijn.AI. Evaluations concerned expert panels and involved patient federations, general practitioners, researchers, and the elderly themselves. Panels concerned interviews, a co-creation session, and feedback on a proof-of-concept implementation. Interview results were summarized in terms of Welzijn.AI's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The co-creation session ranked a variety of value requirements of Welzijn.AI with the Hundred Dollar Method. User evaluation comprised analysing proportions of (dis)agreement on statements targeting Welzijn.AI's design characteristics, and ranking desired social characteristics. Experts in the panel interviews acknowledged Welzijn.AI's potential to combat loneliness and extract patterns from elderly behaviour. The proof-of-concept evaluation complemented the design characteristics most appealing to the elderly to potentially achieve this: empathetic and varying interactions. Stakeholders also link the technology to the implementation context: it could help activate an individual's social network, but support should also be available to empower users. Yet, non-elderly and elderly experts also disclose challenges in properly understanding the application; non-elderly experts also highlight issues concerning privacy. In sum, incorporating all stakeholder perspectives in system development remains challenging. Still, our results benefit researchers, policy makers, and health professionals that aim to improve elderly care with technology.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025

Reshaping Free-Text Radiology Notes Into Structured Reports With Generative Transformers

BACKGROUND: Radiology reports are typically written in a free-text format, making clinical information difficult to extract and use. Recently the adoption of structured reporting (SR) has been recommended by various medical societies thanks to the advantages it offers, e.g. standardization, completeness and information retrieval. We propose a pipeline to extract information from free-text radiology reports, that fits with the items of the reference SR registry proposed by a national society of interventional and medical radiology, focusing on CT staging of patients with lymphoma. METHODS: Our work aims to leverage the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer-based models to deal with automatic SR registry filling. With the availability of 174 radiology reports, we investigate a rule-free generative Question Answering approach based on a domain-specific version of T5 (IT5). Two strategies (batch-truncation and ex-post combination) are implemented to comply with the model's context length limitations. Performance is evaluated in terms of strict accuracy, F1, and format accuracy, and compared with the widely used GPT-3.5 Large Language Model. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire is used to collect human-expert feedback on the similarity between medical annotations and generated answers. RESULTS: The combination of fine-tuning and batch splitting allows IT5 to achieve notable results; it performs on par with GPT-3.5 albeit its size being a thousand times smaller in terms of parameters. Human-based assessment scores show a high correlation (Spearman's correlation coefficients>0.88, p-values<0.001) with AI performance metrics (F1) and confirm the superior ability of LLMs (i.e., GPT-3.5, 175B of parameters) in generating plausible human-like statements.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024