Daily Papers

Most 3D object generators focus on aesthetic quality, often neglecting physical constraints necessary in applications. One such constraint is that the 3D object should be self-supporting, i.e., remains balanced under gravity. Prior approaches to generating stable 3D objects used differentiable physics simulators to optimize geometry at test-time, which is slow, unstable, and prone to local optima. Inspired by the literature on aligning generative models to external feedback, we propose Direct Simulation Optimization (DSO), a framework to use the feedback from a (non-differentiable) simulator to increase the likelihood that the 3D generator outputs stable 3D objects directly. We construct a dataset of 3D objects labeled with a stability score obtained from the physics simulator. We can then fine-tune the 3D generator using the stability score as the alignment metric, via direct preference optimization (DPO) or direct reward optimization (DRO), a novel objective, which we introduce, to align diffusion models without requiring pairwise preferences. Our experiments show that the fine-tuned feed-forward generator, using either DPO or DRO objective, is much faster and more likely to produce stable objects than test-time optimization. Notably, the DSO framework works even without any ground-truth 3D objects for training, allowing the 3D generator to self-improve by automatically collecting simulation feedback on its own outputs.

Large language models are prominently used in real-world applications, often tasked with reasoning over large volumes of documents. An exciting development in this space is models boasting extended context capabilities, with some accommodating over 2 million tokens. Such long context model capabilities remain uncertain in production systems, motivating the need to benchmark their performance on real world use cases. We address this challenge by proposing SWiM, an evaluation framework that addresses the limitations of standard tests. Testing the framework on eight long context models, we find that even strong models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus degrade in performance when information is present in the middle of the context window (lost-in-the-middle effect). Next, in addition to our benchmark, we propose medoid voting, a simple, but effective training-free approach that helps alleviate this effect, by generating responses a few times, each time randomly permuting documents in the context, and selecting the medoid answer. We evaluate medoid voting on single document QA tasks, achieving up to a 24% lift in accuracy.

The rapid progress and widespread deployment of LLMs and LLM-powered agents has outpaced our ability to evaluate them. Hand-crafted, static benchmarks are the primary tool for assessing model capabilities, but these quickly become saturated. In contrast, dynamic benchmarks evolve alongside the models they evaluate, but are expensive to create and continuously update. To address these challenges, we develop BeTaL (Benchmark Tuning with an LLM-in-the-loop), a framework that leverages environment design principles to automate the process of dynamic benchmark design. BeTaL works by parameterizing key design choices in base benchmark templates and uses LLMs to reason through the resulting parameter space to obtain target properties (such as difficulty and realism) in a cost-efficient manner. We validate this approach on its ability to create benchmarks with desired difficulty levels. Using BeTaL, we create two new benchmarks and extend a popular agentic benchmark tau-bench. Extensive evaluation on these three tasks and multiple target difficulty levels shows that BeTaL produces benchmarks much closer to the desired difficulty, with average deviations ranging from 5.3% to 13.2% -- a 2-4x improvement over the baselines.

As AI agents integrate into enterprise applications, their evaluation demands benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world operations. Instead, existing benchmarks overemphasize open-domains such as code, use narrow accuracy metrics, and lack authentic complexity. We present UNDERWRITE, an expert-first, multi-turn insurance underwriting benchmark designed in close collaboration with domain experts to capture real-world enterprise challenges. UNDERWRITE introduces critical realism factors often absent in current benchmarks: proprietary business knowledge, noisy tool interfaces, and imperfect simulated users requiring careful information gathering. Evaluating 13 frontier models, we uncover significant gaps between research lab performance and enterprise readiness: the most accurate models are not the most efficient, models hallucinate domain knowledge despite tool access, and pass^k results show a 20% drop in performance. The results from UNDERWRITE demonstrate that expert involvement in benchmark design is essential for realistic agent evaluation, common agentic frameworks exhibit brittleness that skews performance reporting, and hallucination detection in specialized domains demands compositional approaches. Our work provides insights for developing benchmarks that better align with enterprise deployment requirements.

HiveLink, the IoT-based Smart Bee Hive Monitoring System addresses the challenges faced by beekeepers in managing the influence of environmental impact, diseases, and collapse in honey bee colonies. Integrated with advanced sensors, the system monitors temperature, humidity, hive weight, and diurnal cycle. Leveraging IoT technology, the system provides real-time data, remote connectivity, and actionable insights for beekeepers. Monitoring the hive with the system enables early disease detection, proactive interventions, and optimized hive management. Minimizing manual inspections, enhancing productivity, and promoting sustainable practices to mitigate environmental impact and support honey bee populations. Therefore, this system is a demonstration of technology-driven solution to ensure the well-being of bee hives by facilitating data-driven decision-making and contributes to the resilience of beekeeping in the face of diverse challenges.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a critical medical imaging modality in clinical diagnosis and research, yet its complexity and heterogeneity pose challenges for automated analysis, particularly in scalable and generalizable machine learning applications. While foundation models have revolutionized natural language and vision tasks, their application to MRI remains limited due to data scarcity and narrow anatomical focus. In this work, we present Decipher-MR, a 3D MRI-specific vision-language foundation model trained on a large-scale dataset comprising 200,000 MRI series from over 22,000 studies spanning diverse anatomical regions, sequences, and pathologies. Decipher-MR integrates self-supervised vision learning with report-guided text supervision to build robust, generalizable representations, enabling effective adaptation across broad applications. To enable robust and diverse clinical tasks with minimal computational overhead, Decipher-MR supports a modular design that enables tuning of lightweight, task-specific decoders attached to a frozen pretrained encoder. Following this setting, we evaluate Decipher-MR across diverse benchmarks including disease classification, demographic prediction, anatomical localization, and cross-modal retrieval, demonstrating consistent performance gains over existing foundation models and task-specific approaches. Our results establish Decipher-MR as a scalable and versatile foundation for MRI-based AI, facilitating efficient development across clinical and research domains.

Question answering systems are typically evaluated on factual correctness, yet many real-world applications-such as education and career guidance-require mentorship: responses that provide reflection and guidance. Existing QA benchmarks rarely capture this distinction, particularly in multilingual and long-form settings. We introduce MentorQA, the first multilingual dataset and evaluation framework for mentorship-focused question answering from long-form videos, comprising nearly 9,000 QA pairs from 180 hours of content across four languages. We define mentorship-focused evaluation dimensions that go beyond factual accuracy, capturing clarity, alignment, and learning value. Using MentorQA, we compare Single-Agent, Dual-Agent, RAG, and Multi-Agent QA architectures under controlled conditions. Multi-Agent pipelines consistently produce higher-quality mentorship responses, with especially strong gains for complex topics and lower-resource languages. We further analyze the reliability of automated LLM-based evaluation, observing substantial variation in alignment with human judgments. Overall, this work establishes mentorship-focused QA as a distinct research problem and provides a multilingual benchmark for studying agentic architectures and evaluation design in educational AI. The dataset and evaluation framework are released at https://github.com/AIM-SCU/MentorQA.

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the finetuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to instructions. Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) requires specifically constructed and annotated datasets. However, existing datasets are almost all in the English language. In this work, our primary goal is to bridge the language gap by building a human-curated instruction-following dataset spanning 65 languages. We worked with fluent speakers of languages from around the world to collect natural instances of instructions and completions. Furthermore, we create the most extensive multilingual collection to date, comprising 513 million instances through templating and translating existing datasets across 114 languages. In total, we contribute four key resources: we develop and open-source the Aya Annotation Platform, the Aya Dataset, the Aya Collection, and the Aya Evaluation Suite. The Aya initiative also serves as a valuable case study in participatory research, involving collaborators from 119 countries. We see this as a valuable framework for future research collaborations that aim to bridge gaps in resources.

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

Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies.

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.