Rubrik's Cube: Testing a New Rubric for Evaluating Explanations on the CUBE dataset

The performance and usability of Large-Language Models (LLMs) are driving their use in explanation generation tasks. However, despite their widespread adoption, LLM explanations have been found to be unreliable, making it difficult for users to distinguish good from bad explanations. To address this issue, we present Rubrik's CUBE, an education-inspired rubric and a dataset of 26k explanations, written and later quality-annotated using the rubric by both humans and six open- and closed-source LLMs. The CUBE dataset focuses on two reasoning and two language tasks, providing the necessary diversity for us to effectively test our proposed rubric. Using Rubrik, we find that explanations are influenced by both task and perceived difficulty. Low quality stems primarily from a lack of conciseness in LLM-generated explanations, rather than cohesion and word choice. The full dataset, rubric, and code will be made available upon acceptance.

REVAL: A Comprehension Evaluation on Reliability and Values of Large Vision-Language Models

The rapid evolution of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has highlighted the necessity for comprehensive evaluation frameworks that assess these models across diverse dimensions. While existing benchmarks focus on specific aspects such as perceptual abilities, cognitive capabilities, and safety against adversarial attacks, they often lack the breadth and depth required to provide a holistic understanding of LVLMs' strengths and limitations. To address this gap, we introduce REVAL, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the \textbf{RE}liability and \textbf{VAL}ue of LVLMs. REVAL encompasses over 144K image-text Visual Question Answering (VQA) samples, structured into two primary sections: Reliability, which assesses truthfulness (\eg, perceptual accuracy and hallucination tendencies) and robustness (\eg, resilience to adversarial attacks, typographic attacks, and image corruption), and Values, which evaluates ethical concerns (\eg, bias and moral understanding), safety issues (\eg, toxicity and jailbreak vulnerabilities), and privacy problems (\eg, privacy awareness and privacy leakage). We evaluate 26 models, including mainstream open-source LVLMs and prominent closed-source models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro. Our findings reveal that while current LVLMs excel in perceptual tasks and toxicity avoidance, they exhibit significant vulnerabilities in adversarial scenarios, privacy preservation, and ethical reasoning. These insights underscore critical areas for future improvements, guiding the development of more secure, reliable, and ethically aligned LVLMs. REVAL provides a robust framework for researchers to systematically assess and compare LVLMs, fostering advancements in the field.

Evaluating LLMs' Assessment of Mixed-Context Hallucination Through the Lens of Summarization

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-as-a-judge has emerged as a widely adopted approach for text quality evaluation, including hallucination evaluation. While previous studies have focused exclusively on single-context evaluation (e.g., discourse faithfulness or world factuality), real-world hallucinations typically involve mixed contexts, which remains inadequately evaluated. In this study, we use summarization as a representative task to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' capability in detecting mixed-context hallucinations, specifically distinguishing between factual and non-factual hallucinations. Through extensive experiments across direct generation and retrieval-based models of varying scales, our main observations are: (1) LLMs' intrinsic knowledge introduces inherent biases in hallucination evaluation; (2) These biases particularly impact the detection of factual hallucinations, yielding a significant performance bottleneck; (3) The fundamental challenge lies in effective knowledge utilization, balancing between LLMs' intrinsic knowledge and external context for accurate mixed-context hallucination evaluation.

Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases

This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt LLMs to mimic L2 English learners with specific L1s (e.g., Japanese, Thai, Urdu) across seven languages, comparing their outputs to real L2 learner data. Our analysis examines L1-driven linguistic biases, such as reference word usage and avoidance behaviors, using information-theoretic and distributional density measures. Results show that modern LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5, LLAMA3.3, DeepseekV3, GPT-4o) replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human L2 data, with distinct influences from various languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin significantly affect tense agreement, and Urdu influences noun-verb collocations). Our results reveal the potential of LLMs for L2 dialogue generation and evaluation for future educational applications.

Knapsack Optimization-based Schema Linking for LLM-based Text-to-SQL Generation

Generating SQLs from user queries is a long-standing challenge, where the accuracy of initial schema linking significantly impacts subsequent SQL generation performance. However, current schema linking models still struggle with missing relevant schema elements or an excess of redundant ones. A crucial reason for this is that commonly used metrics, recall and precision, fail to capture relevant element missing and thus cannot reflect actual schema linking performance. Motivated by this, we propose an enhanced schema linking metric by introducing a restricted missing indicator. Accordingly, we introduce Knapsack optimization-based Schema Linking Agent (KaSLA), a plug-in schema linking agent designed to prevent the missing of relevant schema elements while minimizing the inclusion of redundant ones. KaSLA employs a hierarchical linking strategy that first identifies the optimal table linking and subsequently links columns within the selected table to reduce linking candidate space. In each linking process, it utilize a knapsack optimization approach to link potentially relevant elements while accounting for a limited tolerance of potential redundant ones.With this optimization, KaSLA-1.6B achieves superior schema linking results compared to large-scale LLMs, including deepseek-v3 with state-of-the-art (SOTA) schema linking method. Extensive experiments on Spider and BIRD benchmarks verify that KaSLA can significantly improve the SQL generation performance of SOTA text-to-SQL models by substituting their schema linking processes.

Confidence Intervals for Evaluation of Data Mining

In data mining, when binary prediction rules are used to predict a binary outcome, many performance measures are used in a vast array of literature for the purposes of evaluation and comparison. Some examples include classification accuracy, precision, recall, F measures, and Jaccard index. Typically, these performance measures are only approximately estimated from a finite dataset, which may lead to findings that are not statistically significant. In order to properly quantify such statistical uncertainty, it is important to provide confidence intervals associated with these estimated performance measures. We consider statistical inference about general performance measures used in data mining, with both individual and joint confidence intervals. These confidence intervals are based on asymptotic normal approximations and can be computed fast, without needs to do bootstrap resampling. We study the finite sample coverage probabilities for these confidence intervals and also propose a `blurring correction' on the variance to improve the finite sample performance. This 'blurring correction' generalizes the plus-four method from binomial proportion to general performance measures used in data mining. Our framework allows multiple performance measures of multiple classification rules to be inferred simultaneously for comparisons.

LLM-based Code-Switched Text Generation for Grammatical Error Correction

With the rise of globalisation, code-switching (CSW) has become a ubiquitous part of multilingual conversation, posing new challenges for natural language processing (NLP), especially in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). This work explores the complexities of applying GEC systems to CSW texts. Our objectives include evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art GEC systems on an authentic CSW dataset from English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, exploring synthetic data generation as a solution to data scarcity, and developing a model capable of correcting grammatical errors in monolingual and CSW texts. We generated synthetic CSW GEC data, resulting in one of the first substantial datasets for this task, and showed that a model trained on this data is capable of significant improvements over existing systems. This work targets ESL learners, aiming to provide educational technologies that aid in the development of their English grammatical correctness without constraining their natural multilingualism.

Cycle Contrastive Adversarial Learning for Unsupervised image Deraining

To tackle the difficulties in fitting paired real-world data for single image deraining (SID), recent unsupervised methods have achieved notable success. However, these methods often struggle to generate high-quality, rain-free images due to a lack of attention to semantic representation and image content, resulting in ineffective separation of content from the rain layer. In this paper, we propose a novel cycle contrastive generative adversarial network for unsupervised SID, called CCLGAN. This framework combines cycle contrastive learning (CCL) and location contrastive learning (LCL). CCL improves image reconstruction and rain-layer removal by bringing similar features closer and pushing dissimilar features apart in both semantic and discriminative spaces. At the same time, LCL preserves content information by constraining mutual information at the same location across different exemplars. CCLGAN shows superior performance, as extensive experiments demonstrate the benefits of CCLGAN and the effectiveness of its components.

Dysca: A Dynamic and Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Perception Ability of LVLMs

Currently many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the perception ability of the Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, most benchmarks conduct questions by selecting images from existing datasets, resulting in the potential data leakage. Besides, these benchmarks merely focus on evaluating LVLMs on the realistic style images and clean scenarios, leaving the multi-stylized images and noisy scenarios unexplored. In response to these challenges, we propose a dynamic and scalable benchmark named Dysca for evaluating LVLMs by leveraging synthesis images. Specifically, we leverage Stable Diffusion and design a rule-based method to dynamically generate novel images, questions and the corresponding answers. We consider 51 kinds of image styles and evaluate the perception capability in 20 subtasks. Moreover, we conduct evaluations under 4 scenarios (i.e., Clean, Corruption, Print Attacking and Adversarial Attacking) and 3 question types (i.e., Multi-choices, True-or-false and Free-form). Thanks to the generative paradigm, Dysca serves as a scalable benchmark for easily adding new subtasks and scenarios. A total of 8 advanced open-source LVLMs with 10 checkpoints are evaluated on Dysca, revealing the drawbacks of current LVLMs. The benchmark is released in \url{https://github.com/Benchmark-Dysca/Dysca}.

Evaluating the Quality of Hallucination Benchmarks for Large Vision-Language Models

Despite the rapid progress and outstanding performance of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in recent years, LVLMs have been plagued by the issue of hallucination, i.e., LVLMs tend to generate responses that are inconsistent with the corresponding visual inputs. To evaluate the degree of hallucination in LVLMs, previous works have proposed a series of benchmarks featuring different types of tasks and evaluation metrics. However, we find that the quality of the existing hallucination benchmarks varies, with some suffering from problems, e.g., inconsistent evaluation results under repeated tests, and misalignment with human evaluation. To this end, we propose a Hallucination benchmark Quality Measurement framework (HQM), which leverages various indicators to assess the reliability and validity of existing hallucination benchmarks separately. Specifically, for reliability we explore test-retest reliability and parallel-forms reliability, while for validity we examine criterion validity and coverage of hallucination types. Furthermore, based on the results of our quality measurement, we construct a High-Quality Hallucination Benchmark (HQH) for LVLMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of over 10 representative LVLMs, including GPT-4o and Gemini-Vision-Pro, to provide an in-depth analysis of the hallucination issues in existing models. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/HQHBench/HQHBench.