CLSep 24, 2025
Let's Play Across Cultures: A Large Multilingual, Multicultural Benchmark for Assessing Language Models' Understanding of SportsPunit Kumar Singh, Nishant Kumar, Akash Ghosh et al.
Language Models (LMs) are primarily evaluated on globally popular sports, often overlooking regional and indigenous sporting traditions. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{\textit{CultSportQA}}, a benchmark designed to assess LMs' understanding of traditional sports across 60 countries and 6 continents, encompassing four distinct cultural categories. The dataset features 33,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across text and image modalities, each of which is categorized into three key types: history-based, rule-based, and scenario-based. To evaluate model performance, we employ zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across a diverse set of Large Language Models (LLMs), Small Language Models (SLMs), and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLMs). By providing a comprehensive multilingual and multicultural sports benchmark, \textbf{\textit{CultSportQA}} establishes a new standard for assessing AI's ability to understand and reason about traditional sports.
LGAug 21, 2025
CALR: Corrective Adaptive Low-Rank Decomposition for Efficient Large Language Model Layer CompressionMuchammad Daniyal Kautsar, Afra Majida Hariono, Widyawan et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant deployment challenges due to their immense size and computational requirements. Model compression techniques are essential for making these models practical for resource-constrained environments. A prominent compression strategy is low-rank factorization via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to reduce model parameters by approximating weight matrices. However, standard SVD focuses on minimizing matrix reconstruction error, often leading to a substantial loss of the model's functional performance. This performance degradation occurs because existing methods do not adequately correct for the functional information lost during compression. To address this gap, we introduce Corrective Adaptive Low-Rank Decomposition (CALR), a two-component compression approach. CALR combines a primary path of SVD-compressed layers with a parallel, learnable, low-rank corrective module that is explicitly trained to recover the functional residual error. Our experimental evaluation on SmolLM2-135M, Qwen3-0.6B, and Llama-3.2-1B, demonstrates that CALR can reduce parameter counts by 26.93% to 51.77% while retaining 59.45% to 90.42% of the original model's performance, consistently outperforming LaCo, ShortGPT, and LoSparse. CALR's success shows that treating functional information loss as a learnable signal is a highly effective compression paradigm. This approach enables the creation of significantly smaller, more efficient LLMs, advancing their accessibility and practical deployment in real-world applications.