Question Answering
AVERIMATEC: ADataset for Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web
Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVERIMATEC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVERIMATEC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a ฮบ = 0.742 on verdicts and 74.7% consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.
Knowledge-based Visual Question Answer with Multimodal Processing, Retrieval and Filtering
The task of Knowlegde-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires the model to understand visual features and retrieve external knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have been employed to address this problem through knowledge base querying. However, existing work demonstrate two limitations: insufficient interactivity during knowledge retrieval and ineffective organization of retrieved information for Visual-Language Model (VLM). To address these challenges, we propose a three-stage visual language model with Process, Retrieve and Filter (VLM-PRF) framework. For interactive retrieval, VLM-PRF uses reinforcement learning (RL) to guide the model to strategically process information via tool-driven operations. For knowledge filtering, our method trains the VLM to transform the raw retrieved information into into task-specific knowledge. With a dual reward as supervisory signals, VLM-PRF successfully enable model to optimize retrieval strategies and answer generation capabilities simultaneously. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
In the Eye of MLLM: Benchmarking Egocentric Video Intent Understanding with Gaze-Guided Prompting
The emergence of advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly enhanced AI assistants' ability to process complex information across modalities. Recently, egocentric videos, by directly capturing user focus, actions, and context in an unified coordinate, offer an exciting opportunity to enable proactive and personalized AI user experiences with MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks overlook the crucial role of gaze as an indicator of user intent. To address this gap, we introduce EgoGazeVQA, an egocentric gaze-guided video question answering benchmark that leverages gaze information to improve the understanding of longer daily-life videos. EgoGazeVQA consists of gaze-based QA pairs generated by MLLMs and refined by human annotators. Our experiments reveal that existing MLLMs struggle to accurately interpret user intentions using only global visual tokens. In contrast, our gaze-guided intent prompting methods significantly enhance performance by integrating spatial, temporal, and intent-related cues. We further conduct experiments on gaze-related fine-tuning and analyze how gaze estimation accuracy impacts prompting effectiveness. These results underscore the value of gaze for more personalized and effective AI assistants in egocentric settings.
CXReasonBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Structured Diagnostic Reasoning in Chest X-rays
Recent progress in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has enabled promising applications in medical tasks, such as report generation and visual question answering. However, existing benchmarks focus mainly on the final diagnostic answer, offering limited insight into whether models engage in clinically meaningful reasoning. To address this, we present CheXStruct and CXReasonBench, a structured pipeline and benchmark built on the publicly available MIMIC-CXR-JPG dataset. CheXStruct automatically derives a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps directly from chest X-rays, such as segmenting anatomical regions, deriving anatomical landmarks and diagnostic measurements, computing diagnostic indices, and applying clinical thresholds. CXReasonBench leverages this pipeline to evaluate whether models can perform clinically valid reasoning steps and to what extent they can learn from structured guidance, enabling fine-grained and transparent assessment of diagnostic reasoning.The benchmark comprises 18,988 QA pairs across 12 diagnostic tasks and 1,200 cases, each paired with up to 4 visual inputs, and supports multi-path, multi-stage evaluation including visual grounding via anatomical region selection and diagnostic measurements.Even the strongest of 12 evaluated LVLMs struggle with structured reasoning and generalization, often failing to link abstract knowledge with anatomically grounded visual interpretation.
MAGNET: A Multi-agent Framework for Finding Audio-Visual Needles by Reasoning over Multi-Video Haystacks
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown remarkable progress in audiovisual understanding, yet they struggle with real-world scenarios that require complex reasoning across extensive video collections. Existing benchmarks for video question answering remain limited in scope, typically involving one clip per query, which falls short of representing the challenges of large-scale, audiovisual retrieval and reasoning encountered in practical applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task named AVHaystacksQA, where the goal is to identify salient segments across different videos in response to a query and link them together to generate the most informative answer. To this end, we present AVHaystacks, an audio-visual benchmark comprising 3100 annotated QA pairs designed to assess the capabilities of LMMs in multi-video retrieval and temporal grounding task. Additionally, we propose a model-agnostic, multi-agent framework MAGNET to address this challenge, achieving up to 89% and 65% relative improvements over baseline methods on BLEU@4 and GPT evaluation scores in QA task on our proposed AVHaystacks. To enable robust evaluation of multi-video retrieval and temporal grounding for optimal response generation, we introduce two new metrics, STEM, which captures alignment errors between a ground truth and a predicted step sequence and MTGS, to facilitate balanced and interpretable evaluation of segment-level grounding performance.
Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimomal Generation for Document Question Answering
Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) faces dual challenges in processing lengthy multimodal documents (text, images, tables) and performing cross-modal reasoning. Current document retrieval-augmented generation (DocRAG) methods remain limited by their text-centric approaches, frequently missing critical visual information. The field also lacks robust benchmarks for assessing multimodal evidence selection and integration. We introduce MMDocRAG, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 4,055 expert-annotated QA pairs with multi-page, cross-modal evidence chains. Our framework introduces innovative metrics for evaluating multimodal quote selection and enables answers that interleave text with relevant visual elements.
A faster way to estimate AI power consumption
Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a rapid prediction tool that tells data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. Their method produces reliable power estimates in a few seconds, unlike traditional modeling techniques that can take hours or even days to yield results. Moreover, their prediction tool can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations -- even emerging designs that haven't been deployed yet.
Introducing ARFBench: A time series question-answering benchmark based on real incidents
More than a trillion dollars are lost every year due to system failures. To resolve them, engineers must troubleshoot outages quickly. An important task in incident response involves analyzing observability metrics, or time series data that snapshot the health of software systems. For example, an engineer for a service may use Datadog to answer questions like "When did latency start increasing?" and "What metrics outside of latency are also behaving abnormally?" to localize the root cause of the anomalous behavior. These time series question-answering (TSQA) tasks are essential for engineers, and present challenging and necessary tasks for SRE models and agents to perform.
MEQA: A Benchmark for Multi-hop Event-centric Question Answering with Explanations
Existing benchmarks for multi-hop question answering (QA) primarily evaluate models based on their ability to reason about entities and the relationships between them. However, there's a lack of insight into how these models perform in terms of both events and entities. In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-automatic question generation strategy by composing event structures from information extraction (IE) datasets and present the first Multi-hop Event-centric Question Answering (MEQA) benchmark. It contains (1) 2,243 challenging questions that require a diverse range of complex reasoning over entity-entity, entity-event, and event-event relations; (2) corresponding multi-step QA-format event reasoning chain (explanation) which leads to the answer for each question. We also introduce two metrics for evaluating explanations: completeness and logical consistency. We conduct comprehensive benchmarking and analysis, which shows that MEQA is challenging for the latest state-of-the-art models encompassing large language models (LLMs); and how they fall short of providing faithful explanations of the event-centric reasoning process.
ECG Question Answering Combined With Electrocardiogram
Question answering (QA) in the field of healthcare has received much attention due to significant advancements in natural language processing. However, existing healthcare QA datasets primarily focus on medical images, clinical notes, or structured electronic health record tables. This leaves the vast potential of combining electrocardiogram (ECG) data with these systems largely untapped. To address this gap, we present ECG-QA, the first QA dataset specifically designed for ECG analysis. The dataset comprises a total of 70 question templates that cover a wide range of clinically relevant ECG topics, each validated by an ECG expert to ensure their clinical utility. As a result, our dataset includes diverse ECG interpretation questions, including those that require a comparative analysis of two different ECGs. In addition, we have conducted numerous experiments to provide valuable insights for future research directions. We believe that ECG-QA will serve as a valuable resource for the development of intelligent QA systems capable of assisting clinicians in ECG interpretations.