Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation

Evaluating models on large benchmarks is very resource-intensive, especially during the period of rapid model evolution. Existing efficient evaluation methods estimate the performance of target models by testing them only on a small and static coreset of the benchmark, which is derived from the publicly available evaluation results of source models. These methods rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models. However, we demonstrate that it doesn't generalize well in practice. To alleviate the inconsistency issue, we present TailoredBench, a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model. Specifically, a Global-coreset is first constructed as a probe to identify the most consistent source models for each target model with an adaptive source model selection strategy. Afterwards, a scalable K-Medoids clustering algorithm is proposed to extend the Global-coreset to a tailored Native-coreset for each target model. According to the predictions on Native-coresets, we obtain the performance of target models on the whole benchmark with a calibrated estimation strategy. Comprehensive experiments on 5 benchmarks across over 300 models demonstrate that compared to best performing baselines, TailoredBench achieves an average reduction of 31.4% in MAE of accuracy estimates under the same inference budgets, showcasing strong effectiveness and generalizability.

From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MARKERGEN

Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), their length-controllable text generation (LCTG) ability remains below expectations, posing a major limitation for practical applications. Existing methods mainly focus on end-to-end training to reinforce adherence to length constraints. However, the lack of decomposition and targeted enhancement of LCTG sub-abilities restricts further progress.To bridge this gap, we conduct a bottom-up decomposition of LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and perform a detailed error analysis.On this basis, we propose MarkerGen, a simple-yet-effective plug-and-play approach that:(1) mitigates LLM fundamental deficiencies via external tool integration;(2) conducts explicit length modeling with dynamically inserted markers;(3) employs a three-stage generation scheme to better align length constraints while maintaining content quality.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MarkerGen significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability.

InsBank: Evolving Instruction Subset for Ongoing Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) typically undergo instruction tuning to enhance alignment. Recent studies emphasize that quality and diversity of instruction data are more crucial than quantity, highlighting the need to select diverse, high-quality subsets to reduce training costs. However, how to evolve these selected subsets alongside the development of new instruction data remains insufficiently explored. To achieve LLMs' ongoing alignment, we introduce Instruction Bank (InsBank), a continuously updated repository that integrates the latest valuable instruction data. We further propose Progressive Instruction Bank Evolution (PIBE), a novel framework designed to evolve InsBank effectively and efficiently over time. PIBE employs a gradual data selection strategy to maintain long-term efficiency, leveraging a representation-based diversity score to capture relationships between data points and retain historical information for comprehensive diversity evaluation. This also allows for flexible combination of diversity and quality scores during data selection and ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIBE significantly outperforms baselines in InsBank evolution and is able to extract budget-specific subsets, demonstrating its effectiveness and adaptability.

UniCBE: An Uniformity-driven Comparing Based Evaluation Framework with Unified Multi-Objective Optimization

Human preference plays a significant role in measuring large language models and guiding them to align with human values. Unfortunately, current comparing-based evaluation (CBE) methods typically focus on a single optimization objective, failing to effectively utilize scarce yet valuable preference signals. To address this, we delve into key factors that can enhance the accuracy, convergence, and scalability of CBE: suppressing sampling bias, balancing descending process of uncertainty, and mitigating updating uncertainty. Following the derived guidelines, we propose UniCBE, a unified uniformity-driven CBE framework which simultaneously optimize these core objectives by constructing and integrating three decoupled sampling probability matrices, each designed to ensure uniformity in specific aspects. We further ablate the optimal tuple sampling and preference aggregation strategies to achieve efficient CBE. On the AlpacaEval benchmark, UniCBE saves over 17% of evaluation budgets while achieving a Pearson correlation with ground truth exceeding 0.995, demonstrating excellent accuracy and convergence. In scenarios where new models are continuously introduced, UniCBE can even save over 50% of evaluation costs, highlighting its improved scalability.

A Robust Quadruped Robot with Twisting Waist for Flexible Motions

The waist plays a crucial role in the agile movement of many animals in nature. It provides the torso with additional degrees of freedom and flexibility, inspiring researchers to incorporate this biological feature into robotic structures to enhance robot locomotion. This paper presents a cost-effective and low-complexity waist mechanism integrated into the structure of the open-source robot solo8, adding a new degree of freedom (DOF) to its torso. We refer to this novel robot as solo9. Additionally, we propose a full-body control method for the waist-equipped quadruped robot based on generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL). During training, the discriminator is used as input for iterative optimization of the policy and dataset, enabling solo9 to achieve flexible steering maneuvers across various gaits. Extensive tests of solo9's steering capabilities, terrain adaptability, and robustness are conducted in both simulation and real-world scenarios, with detailed comparisons to solo8 and solo12, demonstrating the effectiveness of the control algorithm and the advantages of the waist mechanism.

Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We theoretically and experimentally confirm that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.

Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning

Self-consistency (SC), a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning, shows significant gains across various multi-step reasoning tasks but comes with a high cost due to multiple sampling with the preset size. Its variants, Adaptive self-consistency (ASC) and Early-stopping self-consistency (ESC), dynamically adjust the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples, reducing the cost of SC with minimal impact on performance. Both methods, however, do not exploit the prior information about question difficulty. It often results in unnecessary repeated sampling for easy questions that could be accurately answered with just one attempt, wasting resources. To tackle this problem, we propose Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC), which leverages the difficulty information from both prior and posterior perspectives to adaptively allocate inference resources, further reducing the cost of SC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DSC, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning on six benchmarks. The empirical results show that DSC consistently surpasses the strong baseline ASC and ESC in terms of costs by a significant margin, while attaining comparable performances.