Large Language Model
WebUIBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in WebUI-to-Code
Lin, Zhiyu, Zhou, Zhengda, Zhao, Zhiyuan, Wan, Tianrui, Ma, Yilun, Gao, Junyu, Li, Xuelong
With the rapid advancement of Generative AI technology, Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs) have the potential to act as AI software engineers capable of executing complex web application development. Considering that the model requires a confluence of multidimensional sub-capabilities to address the challenges of various development phases, constructing a multi-view evaluation framework is crucial for accurately guiding the enhancement of development efficiency. However, existing benchmarks usually fail to provide an assessment of sub-capabilities and focus solely on webpage generation outcomes. In this work, we draw inspiration from the principles of software engineering and further propose WebUIBench, a benchmark systematically designed to evaluate MLLMs in four key areas: WebUI Perception, HTML Programming,WebUI-HTML Understanding, and WebUI-to-Code. WebUIBench comprises 21K high-quality question-answer pairs derived from over 0.7K real-world websites. The extensive evaluation of 29 mainstream MLLMs uncovers the skill characteristics and various weakness that models encountered during the development process.
LLM Unlearning Should Be Form-Independent
Ye, Xiaotian, Zhang, Mengqi, Wu, Shu
Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to erase or suppress undesirable knowledge within the model, offering promise for controlling harmful or private information to prevent misuse. However, recent studies highlight its limited efficacy in real-world scenarios, hindering practical adoption. In this study, we identify a pervasive issue underlying many downstream failures: the effectiveness of existing unlearning methods heavily depends on the form of training samples and frequently fails to generalize to alternate expressions of the same knowledge. We formally characterize this problem as Form-Dependent Bias and systematically investigate its specific manifestation patterns across various downstream tasks. To quantify its prevalence and support future research, we introduce ORT, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of unlearning methods against variations in knowledge expression. Results reveal that Form-Dependent Bias is both widespread and severe among current techniques. We argue that LLM unlearning should be form-independent to address the endless forms of downstream tasks encountered in real-world security-critical scenarios. Towards this goal, we introduce Rank-one Concept Redirection (ROCR), a novel training-free method, as a promising solution path. ROCR performs unlearning by targeting the invariants in downstream tasks, specifically the activated dangerous concepts. It is capable of modifying model parameters within seconds to redirect the model's perception of a specific unlearning target concept to another harmless concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ROCR significantly improves unlearning effectiveness compared to traditional methods while generating highly natural outputs.
Re-ranking Reasoning Context with Tree Search Makes Large Vision-Language Models Stronger
Yang, Qi, Zhang, Chenghao, Fan, Lubin, Ding, Kun, Ye, Jieping, Xiang, Shiming
Recent advancements in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly improved performance in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks through multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, existing methods still face challenges, such as the scarcity of knowledge with reasoning examples and erratic responses from retrieved knowledge. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a multimodal RAG framework, termed RCTS, which enhances LVLMs by constructing a Reasoning Context-enriched knowledge base and a Tree Search re-ranking method. Specifically, we introduce a self-consistent evaluation mechanism to enrich the knowledge base with intrinsic reasoning patterns. We further propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search with Heuristic Rewards (MCTS-HR) to prioritize the most relevant examples. This ensures that LVLMs can leverage high-quality contextual reasoning for better and more consistent responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple VQA datasets, significantly outperforming In-Context Learning (ICL) and Vanilla-RAG methods. It highlights the effectiveness of our knowledge base and re-ranking method in improving LVLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/yannqi/RCTS-RAG.
REMoH: A Reflective Evolution of Multi-objective Heuristics approach via Large Language Models
Forniรฉs-Tabuenca, Diego, Uribe, Alejandro, Otamendi, Urtzi, Artetxe, Arkaitz, Rivera, Juan Carlos, de Lacalle, Oier Lopez
Multi-objective optimization is fundamental in complex decision-making tasks. Traditional algorithms, while effective, often demand extensive problem-specific modeling and struggle to adapt to nonlinear structures. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer enhanced explainability, adaptability, and reasoning. This work proposes Reflective Evolution of Multi-objective Heuristics (REMoH), a novel framework integrating NSGA-II with LLM-based heuristic generation. A key innovation is a reflection mechanism that uses clustering and search-space reflection to guide the creation of diverse, high-quality heuristics, improving convergence and maintaining solution diversity. The approach is evaluated on the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSSP) in-depth benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods using three instance datasets: Dauzere, Barnes, and Brandimarte. Results demonstrate that REMoH achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art approaches with reduced modeling effort and enhanced adaptability. These findings underscore the potential of LLMs to augment traditional optimization, offering greater flexibility, interpretability, and robustness in multi-objective scenarios.
NeurIPS 2025 E2LM Competition : Early Training Evaluation of Language Models
Yagoubi, Mouadh, Dahou, Yasser, Mokeddem, Billel, Belkada, Younes, Le-Khac, Phuc H., Boussaha, Basma El Amel, Alami, Reda, Zuo, Jingwei, Marsili, Damiano, Farooq, Mugariya, Lalmas, Mounia, Gkioxari, Georgia, Gallinari, Patrick, Torr, Philip, Hacid, Hakim
Existing benchmarks have proven effective for assessing the performance of fully trained large language models. However, we find striking differences in the early training stages of small models, where benchmarks often fail to provide meaningful or discriminative signals. To explore how these differences arise, this competition tackles the challenge of designing scientific knowledge evaluation tasks specifically tailored for measuring early training progress of language models. Participants are invited to develop novel evaluation methodologies or adapt existing benchmarks to better capture performance differences among language models. To support this effort, we provide three pre-trained small models (0.5B, 1B, and 3B parameters), along with intermediate checkpoints sampled during training up to 200B tokens. All experiments and development work can be run on widely available free cloud-based GPU platforms, making participation accessible to researchers with limited computational resources. Submissions will be evaluated based on three criteria: the quality of the performance signal they produce, the consistency of model rankings at 1 trillion tokens of training, and their relevance to the scientific knowledge domain. By promoting the design of tailored evaluation strategies for early training, this competition aims to attract a broad range of participants from various disciplines, including those who may not be machine learning experts or have access to dedicated GPU resources. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to make foundational LLM research more systematic and benchmark-informed from the earliest phases of model development.
Swiss Parliaments Corpus Re-Imagined (SPC_R): Enhanced Transcription with RAG-based Correction and Predicted BLEU
Timmel, Vincenzo, Vogel, Manfred, Perruchoud, Daniel, Kakooee, Reza
This paper presents a new long-form release of the Swiss Parliaments Corpus, converting entire multi-hour Swiss German debate sessions (each aligned with the official session protocols) into high-quality speech-text pairs. Our pipeline starts by transcribing all session audio into Standard German using Whisper Large-v3 under high-compute settings. We then apply a two-step GPT-4o correction process: first, GPT-4o ingests the raw Whisper output alongside the official protocols to refine misrecognitions, mainly named entities. Second, a separate GPT-4o pass evaluates each refined segment for semantic completeness. We filter out any segments whose Predicted BLEU score (derived from Whisper's average token log-probability) and GPT-4o evaluation score fall below a certain threshold. The final corpus contains 801 hours of audio, of which 751 hours pass our quality control. Compared to the original sentence-level SPC release, our long-form dataset achieves a 6-point BLEU improvement, demonstrating the power of combining robust ASR, LLM-based correction, and data-driven filtering for low-resource, domain-specific speech corpora.
ETA: Efficiency through Thinking Ahead, A Dual Approach to Self-Driving with Large Models
Hamdan, Shadi, Sima, Chonghao, Yang, Zetong, Li, Hongyang, Gรผney, Fatma
How can we benefit from large models without sacrificing inference speed, a common dilemma in self-driving systems? A prevalent solution is a dual-system architecture, employing a small model for rapid, reactive decisions and a larger model for slower but more informative analyses. Existing dual-system designs often implement parallel architectures where inference is either directly conducted using the large model at each current frame or retrieved from previously stored inference results. However, these works still struggle to enable large models for a timely response to every online frame. Our key insight is to shift intensive computations of the current frame to previous time steps and perform a batch inference of multiple time steps to make large models respond promptly to each time step. T o achieve the shifting, we introduce Efficiency through Thinking Ahead (ETA), an asynchronous system designed to: (1) propagate informative features from the past to the current frame using future predictions from the large model, (2) extract current frame features using a small model for real-time responsiveness, and (3) integrate these dual features via an action mask mechanism that emphasizes action-critical image regions.
Towards a Small Language Model Lifecycle Framework
Miraghaei, Parsa, Moreschini, Sergio, Kolehmainen, Antti, Hรคstbacka, David
Benchmark suites such as MMLU and HellaSwag measure core capabilities but are vulnerable to data contamination, making careful curation and transparent reporting essential [OS21], [OS2], [OS13], [OS6]. Trustworthiness evaluation covers robustness to adversarial inputs, privacy protection, reliability (including hallucination and consistency), and safety concerns such as toxicity and bias [OS2], [OS6], all of which are vital for user-facing or high-stakes deployments. Resource efficiency--spanning computational cost, memory, energy, and deployment overhead--is particularly important for SLMs and shapes deployment strategies in constrained environments [OS5], [OS6]. Automated evaluation methods range from statistical scorers like BLEU and ROUGE to model-based and hybrid approaches, with the latter providing stronger alignment with human judgment and greater scalability [OS29], [OS30]. Ultimately, evaluation should be an integrated, continuous process that informs model iteration, balances performance with sustainability and safety, and supports real-world usability at scale.
Training Superior Sparse Autoencoders for Instruct Models
Li, Jiaming, Ye, Haoran, Chen, Yukun, Li, Xinyue, Zhang, Lei, Alinejad-Rokny, Hamid, Peng, Jimmy Chih-Hsien, Yang, Min
As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the extraction of human-interpretable features from LLMs. However, existing SAE training methods are primarily designed for base models, resulting in reduced reconstruction quality and interpretability when applied to instruct models. To bridge this gap, we propose $\underline{\textbf{F}}$inetuning-$\underline{\textbf{a}}$ligned $\underline{\textbf{S}}$equential $\underline{\textbf{T}}$raining ($\textit{FAST}$), a novel training method specifically tailored for instruct models. $\textit{FAST}$ aligns the training process with the data distribution and activation patterns characteristic of instruct models, resulting in substantial improvements in both reconstruction and feature interpretability. On Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, $\textit{FAST}$ achieves a mean squared error of 0.6468 in token reconstruction, significantly outperforming baseline methods with errors of 5.1985 and 1.5096. In feature interpretability, $\textit{FAST}$ yields a higher proportion of high-quality features, for Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, $21.1\%$ scored in the top range, compared to $7.0\%$ and $10.2\%$ for $\textit{BT(P)}$ and $\textit{BT(F)}$. Surprisingly, we discover that intervening on the activations of special tokens via the SAEs leads to improvements in output quality, suggesting new opportunities for fine-grained control of model behavior. Code, data, and 240 trained SAEs are available at https://github.com/Geaming2002/FAST.
How Benchmark Prediction from Fewer Data Misses the Mark
Zhang, Guanhua, Dorner, Florian E., Hardt, Moritz
Large language model (LLM) evaluation is increasingly costly, prompting interest in methods that speed up evaluation by shrinking benchmark datasets. Benchmark prediction (also called efficient LLM evaluation) aims to select a small subset of evaluation points and predict overall benchmark performance from that subset. In this paper, we systematically assess the strengths and limitations of 11 benchmark prediction methods across 19 diverse benchmarks. First, we identify a highly competitive baseline: Take a random sample and fit a regression model on the sample to predict missing entries. Outperforming most existing methods, this baseline challenges the assumption that careful subset selection is necessary for benchmark prediction. Second, we discover that all existing methods crucially depend on model similarity. They work best when interpolating scores among similar models. The effectiveness of benchmark prediction sharply declines when new models have higher accuracy than previously seen models. In this setting of extrapolation, none of the previous methods consistently beat a simple average over random samples. To improve over the sample average, we introduce a new method inspired by augmented inverse propensity weighting. This method consistently outperforms the random sample average even for extrapolation. However, its performance still relies on model similarity and the gains are modest in general. This shows that benchmark prediction fails just when it is most needed: at the evaluation frontier, where the goal is to evaluate new models of unknown capabilities.