Daily Papers

Human evaluation is the gold standard for multilingual NLP, but is often skipped in practice and substituted with automatic metrics, because it is notoriously complex and slow to set up with existing tools with substantial engineering and operational overhead. We introduce Pearmut, a lightweight yet feature-rich platform that makes end-to-end human evaluation as easy to run as automatic evaluation. Pearmut removes common entry barriers and provides support for evaluating multilingual tasks, with a particular focus on machine translation. The platform implements standard evaluation protocols, including DA, ESA, or MQM, but is also extensible to allow prototyping new protocols. It features document-level context, absolute and contrastive evaluation, attention checks, ESAAI pre-annotations and both static and active learning-based assignment strategies. Pearmut enables reliable human evaluation to become a practical, routine component of model development and diagnosis rather than an occasional effort.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at zero-shot inference but often degrade under test-time domain shifts. For this reason, episodic test-time adaptation strategies have recently emerged as powerful techniques for adapting VLMs to a single unlabeled image. However, existing adaptation strategies, such as test-time prompt tuning, typically require backpropagating through large encoder weights or altering core model components. In this work, we introduce Spectrum-Aware Test-Time Steering (STS), a lightweight adaptation framework that extracts a spectral subspace from the textual embeddings to define principal semantic directions and learns to steer latent representations in a spectrum-aware manner by adapting a small number of per-sample shift parameters to minimize entropy across augmented views. STS operates entirely at inference in the latent space, without backpropagation through or modification of the frozen encoders. Building on standard evaluation protocols, our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that STS largely surpasses or compares favorably against state-of-the-art test-time adaptation methods, while introducing only a handful of additional parameters and achieving inference speeds up to 8x faster with a 12x smaller memory footprint than conventional test-time prompt tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/kdafnis/STS.

Recently, Agentic AI has become an increasingly popular research field. However, we argue that current agent research practices lack standardization and scientific rigor, making it hard to conduct fair comparisons among methods. As a result, it is still unclear how different design choices in agent frameworks affect effectiveness, and measuring their progress remains challenging. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical study on GAIA benchmark and BrowseComp to examine the impact of popular design choices in key agent components in a fair and rigorous manner. We find that the lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works, even open-sourced ones, non-reproducible, with significant variance between random runs. Therefore, we introduce a more robust evaluation protocol to stabilize comparisons. Our study reveals which components and designs are crucial for effective agents, while others are redundant, despite seeming logical. Based on our findings, we build and open-source OAgents, a new foundation agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. OAgents offers a modular design for various agent components, promoting future research in Agentic AI.

We propose a new comprehensive benchmark to revolutionize the current deepfake detection field to the next generation. Predominantly, existing works identify top-notch detection algorithms and models by adhering to the common practice: training detectors on one specific dataset (e.g., FF++) and testing them on other prevalent deepfake datasets. This protocol is often regarded as a "golden compass" for navigating SoTA detectors. But can these stand-out "winners" be truly applied to tackle the myriad of realistic and diverse deepfakes lurking in the real world? If not, what underlying factors contribute to this gap? In this work, we found the dataset (both train and test) can be the "primary culprit" due to: (1) forgery diversity: Deepfake techniques are commonly referred to as both face forgery and entire image synthesis. Most existing datasets only contain partial types of them, with limited forgery methods implemented; (2) forgery realism: The dominated training dataset, FF++, contains out-of-date forgery techniques from the past four years. "Honing skills" on these forgeries makes it difficult to guarantee effective detection generalization toward nowadays' SoTA deepfakes; (3) evaluation protocol: Most detection works perform evaluations on one type, which hinders the development of universal deepfake detectors. To address this dilemma, we construct a highly diverse deepfake detection dataset called DF40, which comprises 40 distinct deepfake techniques. We then conduct comprehensive evaluations using 4 standard evaluation protocols and 8 representative detection methods, resulting in over 2,000 evaluations. Through these evaluations, we provide an extensive analysis from various perspectives, leading to 7 new insightful findings. We also open up 4 valuable yet previously underexplored research questions to inspire future works. Our project page is https://github.com/YZY-stack/DF40.

Clinical data in hospitals are increasingly accessible for research through clinical data warehouses, however these documents are unstructured. It is therefore necessary to extract information from medical reports to conduct clinical studies. Transfer learning with BERT-like models such as CamemBERT has allowed major advances, especially for named entity recognition. However, these models are trained for plain language and are less efficient on biomedical data. This is why we propose a new French public biomedical dataset on which we have continued the pre-training of CamemBERT. Thus, we introduce a first version of CamemBERT-bio, a specialized public model for the French biomedical domain that shows 2.54 points of F1 score improvement on average on different biomedical named entity recognition tasks. Our findings demonstrate the success of continual pre-training from a French model and contrast with recent proposals on the same domain and language. One of our key contributions highlights the importance of using a standard evaluation protocol that enables a clear view of the current state-of-the-art for French biomedical models.

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.

The discovery and identification of molecules in biological and environmental samples is crucial for advancing biomedical and chemical sciences. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is the leading technique for high-throughput elucidation of molecular structures. However, decoding a molecular structure from its mass spectrum is exceptionally challenging, even when performed by human experts. As a result, the vast majority of acquired MS/MS spectra remain uninterpreted, thereby limiting our understanding of the underlying (bio)chemical processes. Despite decades of progress in machine learning applications for predicting molecular structures from MS/MS spectra, the development of new methods is severely hindered by the lack of standard datasets and evaluation protocols. To address this problem, we propose MassSpecGym -- the first comprehensive benchmark for the discovery and identification of molecules from MS/MS data. Our benchmark comprises the largest publicly available collection of high-quality labeled MS/MS spectra and defines three MS/MS annotation challenges: de novo molecular structure generation, molecule retrieval, and spectrum simulation. It includes new evaluation metrics and a generalization-demanding data split, therefore standardizing the MS/MS annotation tasks and rendering the problem accessible to the broad machine learning community. MassSpecGym is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

A comprehensive benchmark is yet to be established in the Image Manipulation Detection & Localization (IMDL) field. The absence of such a benchmark leads to insufficient and misleading model evaluations, severely undermining the development of this field. However, the scarcity of open-sourced baseline models and inconsistent training and evaluation protocols make conducting rigorous experiments and faithful comparisons among IMDL models challenging. To address these challenges, we introduce IMDL-BenCo, the first comprehensive IMDL benchmark and modular codebase. IMDL-BenCo: i) decomposes the IMDL framework into standardized, reusable components and revises the model construction pipeline, improving coding efficiency and customization flexibility; ii) fully implements or incorporates training code for state-of-the-art models to establish a comprehensive IMDL benchmark; and iii) conducts deep analysis based on the established benchmark and codebase, offering new insights into IMDL model architecture, dataset characteristics, and evaluation standards. Specifically, IMDL-BenCo includes common processing algorithms, 8 state-of-the-art IMDL models (1 of which are reproduced from scratch), 2 sets of standard training and evaluation protocols, 15 GPU-accelerated evaluation metrics, and 3 kinds of robustness evaluation. This benchmark and codebase represent a significant leap forward in calibrating the current progress in the IMDL field and inspiring future breakthroughs. Code is available at: https://github.com/scu-zjz/IMDLBenCo.

This study introduces SentiGOLD, a Bangla multi-domain sentiment analysis dataset. Comprising 70,000 samples, it was created from diverse sources and annotated by a gender-balanced team of linguists. SentiGOLD adheres to established linguistic conventions agreed upon by the Government of Bangladesh and a Bangla linguistics committee. Unlike English and other languages, Bangla lacks standard sentiment analysis datasets due to the absence of a national linguistics framework. The dataset incorporates data from online video comments, social media posts, blogs, news, and other sources while maintaining domain and class distribution rigorously. It spans 30 domains (e.g., politics, entertainment, sports) and includes 5 sentiment classes (strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, and strongly positive). The annotation scheme, approved by the national linguistics committee, ensures a robust Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) with a Fleiss' kappa score of 0.88. Intra- and cross-dataset evaluation protocols are applied to establish a standard classification system. Cross-dataset evaluation on the noisy SentNoB dataset presents a challenging test scenario. Additionally, zero-shot experiments demonstrate the generalizability of SentiGOLD. The top model achieves a macro f1 score of 0.62 (intra-dataset) across 5 classes, setting a benchmark, and 0.61 (cross-dataset from SentNoB) across 3 classes, comparable to the state-of-the-art. Fine-tuned sentiment analysis model can be accessed at https://sentiment.bangla.gov.bd.

Factual questions typically can be answered correctly at different levels of granularity. For example, both ``August 4, 1961'' and ``1961'' are correct answers to the question ``When was Barack Obama born?''. Standard question answering (QA) evaluation protocols, however, do not explicitly take this into account and compare a predicted answer against answers of a single granularity level. In this work, we propose GRANOLA QA, a novel evaluation setting where a predicted answer is evaluated in terms of accuracy and informativeness against a set of multi-granularity answers. We present a simple methodology for enriching existing datasets with multi-granularity answers, and create GRANOLA-EQ, a multi-granularity version of the EntityQuestions dataset. We evaluate a range of decoding methods on GRANOLA-EQ, including a new algorithm, called Decoding with Response Aggregation (DRAG), that is geared towards aligning the response granularity with the model's uncertainty. Our experiments show that large language models with standard decoding tend to generate specific answers, which are often incorrect. In contrast, when evaluated on multi-granularity answers, DRAG yields a nearly 20 point increase in accuracy on average, which further increases for rare entities. Overall, this reveals that standard evaluation and decoding schemes may significantly underestimate the knowledge encapsulated in LMs.

Small, fast, and lightweight drones present significant challenges for traditional RGB cameras due to their limitations in capturing fast-moving objects, especially under challenging lighting conditions. Event cameras offer an ideal solution, providing high temporal definition and dynamic range, yet existing benchmarks often lack fine temporal resolution or drone-specific motion patterns, hindering progress in these areas. This paper introduces the Florence RGB-Event Drone dataset (FRED), a novel multimodal dataset specifically designed for drone detection, tracking, and trajectory forecasting, combining RGB video and event streams. FRED features more than 7 hours of densely annotated drone trajectories, using 5 different drone models and including challenging scenarios such as rain and adverse lighting conditions. We provide detailed evaluation protocols and standard metrics for each task, facilitating reproducible benchmarking. The authors hope FRED will advance research in high-speed drone perception and multimodal spatiotemporal understanding.

Recent advancements in image manipulation have achieved unprecedented progress in generating photorealistic content, but also simultaneously eliminating barriers to arbitrary manipulation and editing, raising concerns about multimedia authenticity and cybersecurity. However, existing Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL) methodologies predominantly focus on splicing or copy-move forgeries, lacking dedicated benchmarks for inpainting-based manipulations. To bridge this gap, we present COCOInpaint, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for inpainting detection, with three key contributions: 1) High-quality inpainting samples generated by six state-of-the-art inpainting models, 2) Diverse generation scenarios enabled by four mask generation strategies with optional text guidance, and 3) Large-scale coverage with 258,266 inpainted images with rich semantic diversity. Our benchmark is constructed to emphasize intrinsic inconsistencies between inpainted and authentic regions, rather than superficial semantic artifacts such as object shapes. We establish a rigorous evaluation protocol using three standard metrics to assess existing IMDL approaches. The dataset will be made publicly available to facilitate future research in this area.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a robust model from source domains that generalize well on unseen target domains. Recent studies focus on generating novel domain samples or features to diversify distributions complementary to source domains. Yet, these approaches can hardly deal with the restriction that the samples synthesized from various domains can cause semantic distortion. In this paper, we propose an online one-stage Cross Contrasting Feature Perturbation (CCFP) framework to simulate domain shift by generating perturbed features in the latent space while regularizing the model prediction against domain shift. Different from the previous fixed synthesizing strategy, we design modules with learnable feature perturbations and semantic consistency constraints. In contrast to prior work, our method does not use any generative-based models or domain labels. We conduct extensive experiments on a standard DomainBed benchmark with a strict evaluation protocol for a fair comparison. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, and quantitative analyses illustrate that our approach can alleviate the domain shift problem in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extend Large Language Models to the vision domain. Initial efforts towards LMMs used holistic images and text prompts to generate ungrounded textual responses. Very recently, region-level LMMs have been used to generate visually grounded responses. However, they are limited to only referring a single object category at a time, require users to specify the regions in inputs, or cannot offer dense pixel-wise object grounding. In this work, we present Grounding LMM (GLaMM), the first model that can generate natural language responses seamlessly intertwined with corresponding object segmentation masks. GLaMM not only grounds objects appearing in the conversations but is flexible enough to accept both textual and optional visual prompts (region of interest) as input. This empowers users to interact with the model at various levels of granularity, both in textual and visual domains. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks for the novel setting of generating visually grounded detailed conversations, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation protocol with our curated grounded conversations. Our proposed Grounded Conversation Generation (GCG) task requires densely grounded concepts in natural scenes at a large-scale. To this end, we propose a densely annotated Grounding-anything Dataset (GranD) using our proposed automated annotation pipeline that encompasses 7.5M unique concepts grounded in a total of 810M regions available with segmentation masks. Besides GCG, GLaMM also performs effectively on several downstream tasks e.g., referring expression segmentation, image and region-level captioning and vision-language conversations. Project Page: https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/groundingLMM.

Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality images from textual descriptions. However, their increasing popularity has raised significant copyright concerns, as these models can be misused to reproduce copyrighted content without authorization. In response, recent studies have proposed various copyright protection methods, including adversarial perturbation, concept erasure, and watermarking techniques. However, their effectiveness and robustness against advanced attacks remain largely unexplored. Moreover, the lack of unified evaluation frameworks has hindered systematic comparison and fair assessment of different approaches. To bridge this gap, we systematize existing copyright protection methods and attacks, providing a unified taxonomy of their design spaces. We then develop CopyrightMeter, a unified evaluation framework that incorporates 17 state-of-the-art protections and 16 representative attacks. Leveraging CopyrightMeter, we comprehensively evaluate protection methods across multiple dimensions, thereby uncovering how different design choices impact fidelity, efficacy, and resilience under attacks. Our analysis reveals several key findings: (i) most protections (16/17) are not resilient against attacks; (ii) the "best" protection varies depending on the target priority; (iii) more advanced attacks significantly promote the upgrading of protections. These insights provide concrete guidance for developing more robust protection methods, while its unified evaluation protocol establishes a standard benchmark for future copyright protection research in text-to-image generation.

Liveness Detection (LivDet) is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the objec-tive to assess and report state-of-the-art in Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). LivDet-2023 Noncontact Fingerprint is the first edition of the noncontact fingerprint-based PAD competition for algorithms and systems. The competition serves as an important benchmark in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD, offering (a) independent assessment of the state-of-the-art in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD for algorithms and systems, and (b) common evaluation protocol, which includes finger photos of a variety of Presentation Attack Instruments (PAIs) and live fingers to the biometric research community (c) provides standard algorithm and system evaluation protocols, along with the comparative analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms from academia and industry with both old and new android smartphones. The winning algorithm achieved an APCER of 11.35% averaged overall PAIs and a BPCER of 0.62%. The winning system achieved an APCER of 13.0.4%, averaged over all PAIs tested over all the smartphones, and a BPCER of 1.68% over all smartphones tested. Four-finger systems that make individual finger-based PAD decisions were also tested. The dataset used for competition will be available 1 to all researchers as per data share protocol

We present Music Arena, an open platform for scalable human preference evaluation of text-to-music (TTM) models. Soliciting human preferences via listening studies is the gold standard for evaluation in TTM, but these studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to compare, as study protocols may differ across systems. Moreover, human preferences might help researchers align their TTM systems or improve automatic evaluation metrics, but an open and renewable source of preferences does not currently exist. We aim to fill these gaps by offering *live* evaluation for TTM. In Music Arena, real-world users input text prompts of their choosing and compare outputs from two TTM systems, and their preferences are used to compile a leaderboard. While Music Arena follows recent evaluation trends in other AI domains, we also design it with key features tailored to music: an LLM-based routing system to navigate the heterogeneous type signatures of TTM systems, and the collection of *detailed* preferences including listening data and natural language feedback. We also propose a rolling data release policy with user privacy guarantees, providing a renewable source of preference data and increasing platform transparency. Through its standardized evaluation protocol, transparent data access policies, and music-specific features, Music Arena not only addresses key challenges in the TTM ecosystem but also demonstrates how live evaluation can be thoughtfully adapted to unique characteristics of specific AI domains. Music Arena is available at: https://music-arena.org

We introduce CPP-UT-Bench, a benchmark dataset to measure C++ unit test generation capability of a large language model (LLM). CPP-UT-Bench aims to reflect a broad and diverse set of C++ codebases found in the real world. The dataset includes 2,653 {code, unit test} pairs drawn from 14 different opensource C++ codebases spanned across nine diverse domains including machine learning, software testing, parsing, standard input-output, data engineering, logging, complete expression evaluation, key value storage, and server protocols. We demonstrated the effectiveness of CPP-UT-Bench as a benchmark dataset through extensive experiments in in-context learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and full-parameter fine-tuning. We also discussed the challenges of the dataset compilation and insights we learned from in-context learning and fine-tuning experiments. Besides the CPP-UT-Bench dataset and data compilation code, we are also offering the fine-tuned model weights for further research. For nine out of ten experiments, our fine-tuned LLMs outperformed the corresponding base models by an average of more than 70%.

AI control protocols serve as a defense mechanism to stop untrusted LLM agents from causing harm in autonomous settings. Prior work treats this as a security problem, stress testing with exploits that use the deployment context to subtly complete harmful side tasks, such as backdoor insertion. In practice, most AI control protocols are fundamentally based on LLM monitors, which can become a central point of failure. We study adaptive attacks by an untrusted model that knows the protocol and the monitor model, which is plausible if the untrusted model was trained with a later knowledge cutoff or can search for this information autonomously. We instantiate a simple adaptive attack vector by which the attacker embeds publicly known or zero-shot prompt injections in the model outputs. Using this tactic, frontier models consistently evade diverse monitors and complete malicious tasks on two main AI control benchmarks. The attack works universally against current protocols that rely on a monitor. Furthermore, the recent Defer-to-Resample protocol even backfires, as its resampling amplifies the prompt injection and effectively reframes it as a best-of-n attack. In general, adaptive attacks on monitor models represent a major blind spot in current control protocols and should become a standard component of evaluations for future AI control mechanisms.

We propose DyGFormer, a new Transformer-based architecture for dynamic graph learning. DyGFormer is conceptually simple and only needs to learn from nodes' historical first-hop interactions by: (1) a neighbor co-occurrence encoding scheme that explores the correlations of the source node and destination node based on their historical sequences; (2) a patching technique that divides each sequence into multiple patches and feeds them to Transformer, allowing the model to effectively and efficiently benefit from longer histories. We also introduce DyGLib, a unified library with standard training pipelines, extensible coding interfaces, and comprehensive evaluating protocols to promote reproducible, scalable, and credible dynamic graph learning research. By performing exhaustive experiments on thirteen datasets for dynamic link prediction and dynamic node classification tasks, we find that DyGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing nodes' correlations and long-term temporal dependencies. Moreover, some results of baselines are inconsistent with previous reports, which may be caused by their diverse but less rigorous implementations, showing the importance of DyGLib. All the used resources are publicly available at https://github.com/yule-BUAA/DyGLib.

In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agent-tool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench -- a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.

Perceiving and generating diverse modalities are crucial for AI models to effectively learn from and engage with real-world signals, necessitating reliable evaluations for their development. We identify two major issues in current evaluations: (1) inconsistent standards, shaped by different communities with varying protocols and maturity levels; and (2) significant query, grading, and generalization biases. To address these, we introduce MixEval-X, the first any-to-any real-world benchmark designed to optimize and standardize evaluations across input and output modalities. We propose multi-modal benchmark mixture and adaptation-rectification pipelines to reconstruct real-world task distributions, ensuring evaluations generalize effectively to real-world use cases. Extensive meta-evaluations show our approach effectively aligns benchmark samples with real-world task distributions and the model rankings correlate strongly with that of crowd-sourced real-world evaluations (up to 0.98). We provide comprehensive leaderboards to rerank existing models and organizations and offer insights to enhance understanding of multi-modal evaluations and inform future research.