Table 5 shows the performance for the three MIL variants on the Few-Shot and Many-Shot test119 settings.

This underlines the necessity to explicitly evaluate and finetune FMs on such expert tasks, arguably ones that appear the most in practical real-world applications.

We thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on our manuscript. This should help both contextualize each task's difficulty and illustrate what it involves. Reviewer 3 noted the Section 2 task descriptions could be better presented. We have reformatted it so that "the order We also changed our description of IMP ALA to match Reviewer 5's suggestion. Regarding the task suite, Reviewer 4 raised a thoughtful consideration on whether "most of the findings translate when Some 3D tasks in the suite already have '2D-like' semi-counterparts that do not require navigation, '2D-like' because everything is fully observable and the agent has a first-person point of view from a fixed point, without Spot the Difference level, was overall harder than Change Detection for our ablation models.

In order to illustrate the main idea from our paper in a simplified context, we show in this section how observed hidden-layer activity in a linear feedforward network can be used to infer the learning rule that is used to train the network. Consider the simple feedforward network shown in Fig. S1. N (0, Σ) is noise injected into the network. This is similar to learning with Feedback Alignment [4], except that here we do not assume that the readout weights are being learned. Equations (11) and (13) provide predictions for how the hidden-layer activity is expected to evolve under either SL or RL.

Context: Large language models (LLMs) are released faster than users' ability to evaluate them rigorously. When LLMs underpin research, such as identifying relevant literature for systematic reviews (SRs), robust empirical assessment is essential. Objective: We identify and discuss key challenges in assessing LLM performance for selecting relevant literature, identify good (evaluation) practices, and propose recommendations. Method: Using a recent large-scale study as an example, we identify problems with the use of traditional metrics for assessing the performance of Gen-AI tools for identifying relevant literature in SRs. We analyzed 27 additional papers investigating this issue, extracted the performance metrics, and found both good practices and widespread problems, especially with the use and reporting of performance metrics for SR screening. Results: Major weaknesses included: i) a failure to use metrics that are robust to imbalanced data and do not directly indicate whether results are better than chance, e.g., the use of Accuracy, ii) a failure to consider the impact of lost evidence when making claims concerning workload savings, and iii) pervasive failure to report the full confusion matrix (or performance metrics from which it can be reconstructed) which is essential for future meta-analyses. On the positive side, we extract good (evaluation) practices on which our recommendations for researchers and practitioners, as well as policymakers, are built. Conclusions: SR screening evaluations should prioritize lost evidence/recall alongside chance-anchored and cost-sensitive Weighted MCC (WMCC) metric, report complete confusion matrices, treat unclassifiable outputs as referred-back positives for assessment, adopt leakage-aware designs with non-LLM baselines and open artifacts, and ground conclusions in cost-benefit analysis where FNs carry higher penalties than FPs.

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-clean generic detector (YOLO-World), a general-purpose VLM independently answers True/False queries for each region. This simple procedure reduces cross-box interference, supports abstention and multiple matches, and requires no fine-tuning. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, our method not only surpasses a zero-shot GroundingDINO baseline but also exceeds reported results for GroundingDINO trained on REC and GroundingDINO+CRG. Controlled studies with identical proposals confirm that verification significantly outperforms selection-based prompting, and results hold with open VLMs. Overall, we show that workflow design, rather than task-specific pretraining, drives strong zero-shot REC performance.

Reward modeling, crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, is often bottlenecked by the high cost of preference data. Existing textual data synthesis methods are computationally expensive. We propose a novel framework LENS for synthesizing preference data directly in the LLM's latent embedding space. Our method employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn a structured latent representation of response embeddings. By performing controlled perturbations in this latent space and decoding back to the embedding space, we efficiently generate diverse, semantically consistent synthetic preference pairs, bypassing costly text generation and annotation. We provide theoretical guarantees that our synthesized pairs approximately preserve original preference ordering and improve reward model generalization. Empirically, our latent-space synthesis significantly outperforms text-based augmentation on standard benchmarks, achieving superior results while being 18x faster in generation and using a 16,000x smaller model. Our work offers a scalable and effective alternative for enhancing reward modeling through efficient data augmentation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/lens