Amit Agarwal

Haodong Duan, Xinyu Fang, Junming Yang et al. · pku

We present VLMEvalKit: an open-source toolkit for evaluating large multi-modality models based on PyTorch. The toolkit aims to provide a user-friendly and comprehensive framework for researchers and developers to evaluate existing multi-modality models and publish reproducible evaluation results. In VLMEvalKit, we implement over 200+ different large multi-modality models, including both proprietary APIs and open-source models, as well as more than 80 different multi-modal benchmarks. By implementing a single interface, new models can be easily added to the toolkit, while the toolkit automatically handles the remaining workloads, including data preparation, distributed inference, prediction post-processing, and metric calculation. Although the toolkit is currently mainly used for evaluating large vision-language models, its design is compatible with future updates that incorporate additional modalities, such as audio and video. Based on the evaluation results obtained with the toolkit, we host OpenVLM Leaderboard, a comprehensive leaderboard to track the progress of multi-modality learning research. The toolkit is released on https://github.com/open-compass/VLMEvalKit and is actively maintained.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Tack Hwa Wong et al.

While the field of vision-language (VL) has achieved remarkable success in integrating visual and textual information across multiple languages and domains, there is still no dedicated framework for assessing human-centric alignment in vision-language systems. We offer two contributions to address this gap. First, we introduce Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation: a novel paradigm that aims to optimize model relevance to specific regional contexts while ensuring the retention of global generalization capabilities. Second, we present a simple, but effective adaptation method named Geographical-generalization-made-easy (GG-EZ), which utilizes regional data filtering and model merging. Through comprehensive experiments on 3 VL architectures: large vision-language models, text-to-image diffusion models, and vision-language embedding models, and a case study in Southeast Asia (SEA) regional adaptation, we demonstrate the importance of Anthropogenic Regional Adaptation and the effectiveness of GG-EZ, showing 5-15% gains in cultural relevance metrics across SEA while maintaining over 98% of global performance and even occasionally surpassing it. Our findings establish Anthropogenic Regional Alignment as a foundational paradigm towards applicability of multimodal vision-language models in diverse regions and demonstrate a simple-yet-effective baseline method that optimizes regional value alignment while preserving global generalization.

Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Meizhu Liu et al.

Reference-free image-to-text evaluators are now standard for scoring image-caption alignment, yet it is unclear whether they respect semantic invariances. We present an invariance probe on five popular evaluators (CLIPScore, PAC-S, UMIC, FLEUR, and a deterministic LLM judge) under semantics-preserving perturbations along three axes -- spatial (flips, context-preserving repositioning, light rotations), object (scale, category), and socio-linguistic framing (cultural/economic adjectives with neutral and length-matched controls). Across curated slices of three detection datasets and three caption evaluation suites, we find consistent non-semantic sensitivities, where benign spatial edits and simple phrasing changes shift scores by $\approx$6--9\% on average, and for systems separated by just 0.7\%, these shifts can cause ranking flips in up to $\sim$37\% of cases, particularly under spatial changes. A small human study also supports this finding and confirms that annotators generally judge perturbed pairs as equally correct, so these shifts reflect metric behavior rather than semantic change. We further propose invariance-calibrated scoring, a post-hoc adjustment that roughly halves median absolute sensitivity while retaining correlation with learned caption evaluators.

Amit Agarwal, Srikant Panda, Kulbhushan Pachauri

In this work, we propose Few Shot Domain Adapting Graph (FS-DAG), a scalable and efficient model architecture for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) in few-shot settings. FS-DAG leverages domain-specific and language/vision specific backbones within a modular framework to adapt to diverse document types with minimal data. The model is robust to practical challenges such as handling OCR errors, misspellings, and domain shifts, which are critical in real-world deployments. FS-DAG is highly performant with less than 90M parameters, making it well-suited for complex real-world applications for Information Extraction (IE) tasks where computational resources are limited. We demonstrate FS-DAG's capability through extensive experiments for information extraction task, showing significant improvements in convergence speed and performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, this work highlights the ongoing progress in developing smaller, more efficient models that do not compromise on performance. Code : https://github.com/oracle-samples/fs-dag

Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal, Arion Das et al.

Enterprise customers are increasingly adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) for critical communication tasks, such as drafting emails, crafting sales pitches, and composing casual messages. Deploying such models across different regions requires them to understand diverse cultural and linguistic contexts and generate safe and respectful responses. For enterprise applications, it is crucial to mitigate reputational risks, maintain trust, and ensure compliance by effectively identifying and handling unsafe or offensive language. To address this, we introduce SweEval, a benchmark simulating real-world scenarios with variations in tone (positive or negative) and context (formal or informal). The prompts explicitly instruct the model to include specific swear words while completing the task. This benchmark evaluates whether LLMs comply with or resist such inappropriate instructions and assesses their alignment with ethical frameworks, cultural nuances, and language comprehension capabilities. In order to advance research in building ethically aligned AI systems for enterprise use and beyond, we release the dataset and code: https://github.com/amitbcp/multilingual_profanity.

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz et al. · cambridge

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

Amit Agarwal, Srikant Panda, Angeline Charles et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), are recent advancement of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that have driven major advances in video understanding. However, their vulnerability to adversarial tampering and manipulations remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{MVTamperBench}, a benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLM robustness against five prevalent tampering techniques: rotation, masking, substitution, repetition, and dropping; based on real-world visual tampering scenarios such as surveillance interference, social media content edits, and misinformation injection. MVTamperBench comprises ~3.4K original videos, expanded into over ~17K tampered clips covering 19 distinct video manipulation tasks. This benchmark challenges models to detect manipulations in spatial and temporal coherence. We evaluate 45 recent MLLMs from 15+ model families. We reveal substantial variability in resilience across tampering types and show that larger parameter counts do not necessarily guarantee robustness. MVTamperBench sets a new benchmark for developing tamper-resilient MLLM in safety-critical applications, including detecting clickbait, preventing harmful content distribution, and enforcing policies on media platforms. We release all code, data, and benchmark to foster open research in trustworthy video understanding. Code: https://amitbcp.github.io/MVTamperBench/ Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/MVTamperBench

Guijin Son, Donghun Yang, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel et al.

Recent progress in reasoning models suggests that generating plausible attempts for research-level mathematics may be within reach, but verification remains a bottleneck, consuming scarce expert time. We hypothesize that a meaningful solution should contain enough method-level information that, when applied to a neighborhood of related questions, it should yield better downstream performance than incorrect solutions. Building on this idea, we propose \textbf{Consequence-Based Utility}, an oracle-free evaluator that scores each candidate by testing its value as an in-context exemplar in solving related yet verifiable questions. Our approach is evaluated on an original set of research-level math problems, each paired with one expert-written solution and nine LLM-generated solutions. Notably, Consequence-Based Utility consistently outperforms reward models, generative reward models, and LLM judges on ranking quality. Specifically, for GPT-OSS-120B, it improves Acc@1 from 67.2 to 76.3 and AUC from 71.4 to 79.6, with similarly large AUC gains on GPT-OSS-20B (69.0 to 79.2). Furthermore, compared to LLM-Judges, it also exhibits a larger solver-evaluator gap, maintaining a stronger correct-wrong separation even on instances where the underlying solver often fails to solve.

Srikant Panda, Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse domains but often exhibit disparities in how they handle real-life queries. To systematically investigate these effects within various disability contexts, we introduce \textbf{AccessEval (Accessibility Evaluation)}, a benchmark evaluating 21 closed- and open-source LLMs across 6 real-world domains and 9 disability types using paired Neutral and Disability-Aware Queries. We evaluated model outputs with metrics for sentiment, social perception, and factual accuracy. Our analysis reveals that responses to disability-aware queries tend to have a more negative tone, increased stereotyping, and higher factual error compared to neutral queries. These effects show notable variation by domain and disability type, with disabilities affecting hearing, speech, and mobility disproportionately impacted. These disparities reflect persistent forms of ableism embedded in model behavior. By examining model performance in real-world decision-making contexts, we better illuminate how such biases can translate into tangible harms for disabled users. This framing helps bridges the gap between technical evaluation and user impact, reinforcing importance of bias mitigation in day-to-day applications. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Srikant86/AccessEval

Meizhu Liu, Matthew Rowe, Amit Agarwal et al.

Audio-text retrieval enables semantic alignment between audio content and natural language queries, supporting applications in multimedia search, accessibility, and surveillance. However, current state-of-the-art approaches struggle with long, noisy, and weakly labeled audio due to their reliance on contrastive learning and large-batch training. We propose a novel multimodal retrieval framework that refines audio and text embeddings using a cross-modal embedding refinement module combining transformer-based projection, linear mapping, and bidirectional attention. To further improve robustness, we introduce a hybrid loss function blending cosine similarity, $\mathcal{L}_{1}$, and contrastive objectives, enabling stable training even under small-batch constraints. Our approach efficiently handles long-form and noisy audio (SNR 5 to 15) via silence-aware chunking and attention-based pooling. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate improvements over prior methods.

Jyotika Singh, Fang Tu, Aziza Mirzadova et al.

Benchmarks like GSM8K are popular measures of mathematical reasoning, but leaderboard gains can overstate true capability due to memorization of fixed test sets. Most robustness variants apply surface-level perturbations (paraphrases, renamings, number swaps, distractors) that largely preserve the underlying facts, and static releases can themselves become memorization targets over time. We introduce GSM-SEM, a reusable and stochastic framework for generating semantically diverse benchmark variants with substantially higher semantic variance than prior approaches. GSM-SEM perturbs problem statements by modifying entities, attributes, and/or relationships, frequently altering underlying facts and requiring models to recompute solutions under new conditions, while constraining generation to preserve the original calculations/answer and approximate problem difficulty. GSM-SEM generates fresh variants on each run without requiring re-annotation, reducing reliance on static public benchmarks for evaluation and thereby lowering the bias of memorization. We apply GSM-SEM on GSM8K and two existing variation suites (GSM-Symbolic and GSM-Plus), producing GSM8K-SEM, GSM-Symbolic-SEM, and GSM-Plus-SEM. Evaluating 14 SOTA LLMs, we observe consistent performance drops with larger decline when semantic perturbations are coupled with symbolic/plus variations (average drop rate 28% in maximum strictness configuration of GSM-SEM). We publicly release the three SEM variants as fully human-validated datasets. Finally, to demonstrate applicability beyond GSM-style math problems, we apply GSM-SEM to additional benchmarks including BigBenchHard, LogicBench, and NLR-BIRD.

Guijin Son, Donghun Yang, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel et al.

Recent frontier models employ long chain-of-thought reasoning to explore solution spaces in context and achieve stonger performance. While many works study distillation to build smaller yet capable models, most focus on English and little is known about language-specific reasoning. To bridge this gap, we first introduct **Language-Mixed CoT**, a reasoning schema that switches between English and a target language, using English as an anchor to excel in reasoning while minimizing translation artificats. As a Korean case study, we curate **Yi-Sang**: 5.79M native-Korean prompts from web Q&A, exams, STEM, and code; 3.7M long reasoning traces generated from Qwen3-32B; and a targeted 260k high-yield subset. We train ninve models (4B-35B) across six families (Qwen2.5, Llama-3.1, Gemma-3, etc). Our best model, **KO-REAson-35B**, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the highest overall average score (64.0 \pm 25), ranking first on 5/9 benchmarks and second on the remainder. Samller and mid-sized models also benefit substantially, with an average improvement of +18.6 points across teh evaluated nine benchmarks. Ablations show **Language-Mixed CoT** is more effective than monolingual CoT, also resulting in cross-lingual and mult-modal performance gains. We release our data-curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and models to advance research on language-specific reasoning. Data and model collection: https://huggingface.co/KOREAson.

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Bhargava Kumar et al.

Multimodal learning, a rapidly evolving field in artificial intelligence, seeks to construct more versatile and robust systems by integrating and analyzing diverse types of data, including text, images, audio, and video. Inspired by the human ability to assimilate information through many senses, this method enables applications such as text-to-video conversion, visual question answering, and image captioning. Recent developments in datasets that support multimodal language models (MLLMs) are highlighted in this overview. Large-scale multimodal datasets are essential because they allow for thorough testing and training of these models. With an emphasis on their contributions to the discipline, the study examines a variety of datasets, including those for training, domain-specific tasks, and real-world applications. It also emphasizes how crucial benchmark datasets are for assessing models' performance in a range of scenarios, scalability, and applicability. Since multimodal learning is always changing, overcoming these obstacles will help AI research and applications reach new heights.

Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal, Bhargava Kumar et al.

Accurate barcode detection and decoding in Identity documents is crucial for applications like security, healthcare, and education, where reliable data extraction and verification are essential. However, building robust detection models is challenging due to the lack of diverse, realistic datasets an issue often tied to privacy concerns and the wide variety of document formats. Traditional tools like Faker rely on predefined templates, making them less effective for capturing the complexity of real-world identity documents. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to synthetic data generation that uses LLMs to create contextually rich and realistic data without relying on predefined field. Using the vast knowledge LLMs have about different documents and content, our method creates data that reflects the variety found in real identity documents. This data is then encoded into barcode and overlayed on templates for documents such as Driver's licenses, Insurance cards, Student IDs. Our approach simplifies the process of dataset creation, eliminating the need for extensive domain knowledge or predefined fields. Compared to traditional methods like Faker, data generated by LLM demonstrates greater diversity and contextual relevance, leading to improved performance in barcode detection models. This scalable, privacy-first solution is a big step forward in advancing machine learning for automated document processing and identity verification.

Hansa Meghwani, Amit Agarwal, Priyaranjan Pattnayak et al.

Enterprise search systems often struggle to retrieve accurate, domain-specific information due to semantic mismatches and overlapping terminologies. These issues can degrade the performance of downstream applications such as knowledge management, customer support, and retrieval-augmented generation agents. To address this challenge, we propose a scalable hard-negative mining framework tailored specifically for domain-specific enterprise data. Our approach dynamically selects semantically challenging but contextually irrelevant documents to enhance deployed re-ranking models. Our method integrates diverse embedding models, performs dimensionality reduction, and uniquely selects hard negatives, ensuring computational efficiency and semantic precision. Evaluation on our proprietary enterprise corpus (cloud services domain) demonstrates substantial improvements of 15\% in MRR@3 and 19\% in MRR@10 compared to state-of-the-art baselines and other negative sampling techniques. Further validation on public domain-specific datasets (FiQA, Climate Fever, TechQA) confirms our method's generalizability and readiness for real-world applications.

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal

Tokenization is a critical component of Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for low resource languages, where subword segmentation influences vocabulary structure and downstream task accuracy. Although Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a standard tokenization method in multilingual language models, its suitability for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low resource Indic languages remains underexplored due to its limitations in handling morphological complexity. In this work, we systematically compare BPE, SentencePiece, and Character Level tokenization strategies using IndicBERT for NER tasks in low resource Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, and Odia, as well as extremely low resource Indic languages like Santali, Manipuri, and Sindhi. We assess both intrinsic linguistic properties tokenization efficiency, out of vocabulary (OOV) rates, and morphological preservation as well as extrinsic downstream performance, including fine tuning and zero shot cross lingual transfer. Our experiments show that SentencePiece is a consistently better performing approach than BPE for NER in low resource Indic Languages, particularly in zero shot cross lingual settings, as it better preserves entity consistency. While BPE provides the most compact tokenization form, it is not capable of generalization because it misclassifies or even fails to recognize entity labels when tested on unseen languages. In contrast, SentencePiece constitutes a better linguistic structural preservation model, benefiting extremely low resource and morphologically rich Indic languages, such as Santali and Manipuri, for superior entity recognition, as well as high generalization across scripts, such as Sindhi, written in Arabic. The results point to SentencePiece as the more effective tokenization strategy for NER within multilingual and low resource Indic NLP applications.

Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Patel, Priyaranjan Pattnayak et al.

The development of robust Document AI models has been constrained by limited access to high-quality, labeled datasets, primarily due to data privacy concerns, scarcity, and the high cost of manual annotation. Traditional methods of synthetic data generation, such as text and image augmentation, have proven effective for increasing data diversity but often fail to capture the complex layout structures present in real world documents. This paper proposes a novel approach to synthetic document layout generation using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). By representing document elements (e.g., text blocks, images, tables) as nodes in a graph and their spatial relationships as edges, GNNs are trained to generate realistic and diverse document layouts. This method leverages graph-based learning to ensure structural coherence and semantic consistency, addressing the limitations of traditional augmentation techniques. The proposed framework is evaluated on tasks such as document classification, named entity recognition (NER), and information extraction, demonstrating significant performance improvements. Furthermore, we address the computational challenges of GNN based synthetic data generation and propose solutions to mitigate domain adaptation issues between synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experimental results show that graph-augmented document layouts outperform existing augmentation techniques, offering a scalable and flexible solution for training Document AI models.

Vishnu Hari, Kalpana Panda, Srikant Panda et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) routinely infer users demographic traits from phrasing alone, which can result in biased responses, even when no explicit demographic information is provided. The role of disability cues in shaping these inferences remains largely uncharted. Thus, we present the first systematic audit of disability-conditioned demographic bias across eight state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LLMs ranging from 3B to 72B parameters. Using a balanced template corpus that pairs nine disability categories with six real-world business domains, we prompt each model to predict five demographic attributes - gender, socioeconomic status, education, cultural background, and locality - under both neutral and disability-aware conditions. Across a varied set of prompts, models deliver a definitive demographic guess in up to 97\% of cases, exposing a strong tendency to make arbitrary inferences with no clear justification. Disability context heavily shifts predicted attribute distributions, and domain context can further amplify these deviations. We observe that larger models are simultaneously more sensitive to disability cues and more prone to biased reasoning, indicating that scale alone does not mitigate stereotype amplification. Our findings reveal persistent intersections between ableism and other demographic stereotypes, pinpointing critical blind spots in current alignment strategies. We release our evaluation framework and results to encourage disability-inclusive benchmarking and recommend integrating abstention calibration and counterfactual fine-tuning to curb unwarranted demographic inference. Code and data will be released on acceptance.

Srikant Panda, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shahad Al-Khalifa et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to reflect social biases when demographic attributes, such as gender or race, are explicitly present in the input. But even in their absence, these models still infer user identities based solely on question phrasing. This subtle behavior has received far less attention, yet poses serious risks: it violates expectations of neutrality, infers unintended demographic information, and encodes stereotypes that undermine fairness in various domains including healthcare, finance and education. We introduce Demographic Attribute Inference from Questions (DAIQ), a task and framework for auditing an overlooked failure mode in language models: inferring user demographic attributes from questions that lack explicit demographic cues. Our approach leverages curated neutral queries, systematic prompting, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to uncover how models infer demographic information. We show that both open and closed source LLMs do assign demographic labels based solely on question phrasing. Prevalence and consistency of demographic inferences across diverse models reveal a systemic and underacknowledged risk: LLMs can fabricate demographic identities, reinforce societal stereotypes, and propagate harms that erode privacy, fairness, and trust posing a broader threat to social equity and responsible AI deployment. To mitigate this, we develop a prompt-based guardrail that substantially reduces identity inference and helps align model behavior with fairness and privacy objectives.

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal et al.

Clinical Question Answering (CQA) plays a crucial role in medical decision-making, enabling physicians to extract relevant information from Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). While transformer-based models such as BERT, BioBERT, and ClinicalBERT have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in CQA, existing models lack the ability to categorize extracted answers, which is critical for structured retrieval, content filtering, and medical decision support. To address this limitation, we introduce a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) framework that jointly trains CQA models for both answer extraction and medical categorization. In addition to predicting answer spans, our model classifies responses into five standardized medical categories: Diagnosis, Medication, Symptoms, Procedure, and Lab Reports. This categorization enables more structured and interpretable outputs, making clinical QA models more useful in real-world healthcare settings. We evaluate our approach on emrQA, a large-scale dataset for medical question answering. Results show that MTL improves F1-score by 2.2% compared to standard fine-tuning, while achieving 90.7% accuracy in answer categorization. These findings suggest that MTL not only enhances CQA performance but also introduces an effective mechanism for categorization and structured medical information retrieval.

Amit Agarwal, Hansa Meghwani, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel et al.

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases. This inconsistency undermines customer experience and operational reliability in multilingual settings such as customer support, content moderation, and information retrieval. Even with advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, we observe up to an 29% accuracy drop in non-English languages compared to English. We propose a practical, batch-wise alignment strategy for fine-tuning LLMs, leveraging semantically equivalent multilingual data in each training batch to directly align model outputs across languages. This approach improves non-English accuracy by up to 23.9% without compromising English performance, model reasoning, or retrieval quality. Our method is simple to implement, scalable, and integrates seamlessly with existing LLM training & deployment pipelines, enabling more robust and equitable multilingual AI solutions in industry.

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Amit Agarwal, Hansa Meghwani et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots have significantly advanced conversational AI by combining generative capabilities with external knowledge retrieval. Despite their success, enterprise-scale deployments face critical challenges, including diverse user queries, high latency, hallucinations, and difficulty integrating frequently updated domain-specific knowledge. This paper introduces a novel hybrid framework that integrates RAG with intent-based canned responses, leveraging predefined high-confidence responses for efficiency while dynamically routing complex or ambiguous queries to the RAG pipeline. Our framework employs a dialogue context manager to ensure coherence in multi-turn interactions and incorporates a feedback loop to refine intents, dynamically adjust confidence thresholds, and expand response coverage over time. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a balance of high accuracy (95\%) and low latency (180ms), outperforming RAG and intent-based systems across diverse query types, positioning it as a scalable and adaptive solution for enterprise conversational AI applications.

Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Srikant Panda et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive results on vision-language benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether these benchmarks assess genuine global reasoning or allow success via localized visual cues. Existing evaluation methods do not explicitly measure this distinction, hindering effective dataset curation and real-world focused model development. We introduce Region Comprehension Index (RCI), the first model-based score to directly quantify a dataset's reliance on global versus local visual information. RCI systematically compares reference-model performance on image patches versus full images, revealing if tasks require holistic image understanding or can be solved with partial or localized visual cues. When applying RCI to 13 widely used multimodal benchmarks, we observed that most of them favor localized reasoning and exhibit significant spatial biases, indicating potential risks in real-world applications. RCI equips researchers & practitioners with an actionable tool for diagnosing & mitigating these biases, enabling the construction of datasets and benchmarks to foster the development of robust, enterprise-ready multimodal systems.

Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal, Srikant Panda et al.

The reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in real-world settings is often undermined by sensitivity to irrelevant or distracting visual context, an aspect not captured by existing evaluation metrics. We introduce the \textbf{Patch Context Robustness Index (PCRI)}, the first systematic and interpretable score for quantifying MLLM robustness to variations in visual context granularity, measuring performance changes between localized image patches and full-image input. Applying PCRI to 19 state-of-the-art MLLMs across 15 vision-language benchmarks, we find that most leading models remain brittle to background noise, with only a few, such as InternVL2-26B and Qwen2VL-72B, demonstrating consistent robustness across tasks. PCRI analysis also highlights how different model architectures handle and integrate visual context, offering actionable diagnostic insight for both researchers and practitioners. PCRI enables rigorous comparison of context robustness, supporting principled model selection and guiding the development of future architectures and training strategies for robust, real-world deployment.

Jiashu He, Meizhu Liu, Olaitan P Olaleye et al.

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches introduce randomness without adequate robustness. Self-consistency improves reliability by aggregating multiple rollouts, but incurs significant computational overhead. We propose an entropy-guided decoding framework that introduces token-level adaptivity into generation. At each step, the model computes the entropy of the token distribution, identifies high-uncertainty positions, and selectively branches on these vulnerable points. A dynamic pool of partial rollouts is maintained and expanded until solutions are completed, concentrating computation where uncertainty is greatest and avoiding unnecessary exploration in confident regions. To enable efficient termination, we apply a rollout-level Entropy After </Think> (EAT) stopping criterion by performing entropy evaluation after the full reasoning trace, rather than incrementally at every step. Experiments on GSM8K, AMC2023, and their perturbed variants demonstrate that our method achieves consistently strong accuracy. Notably, on smaller LLMs, performance is comparable to GPT-5 while operating at a fraction of the cost.

Karan Dua, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Puneet Mittal et al.

Developing document understanding models at enterprise scale requires large, diverse, and well-annotated datasets spanning a wide range of document types. However, collecting such data is prohibitively expensive due to privacy constraints, legal restrictions, and the sheer volume of manual annotation needed - costs that can scale into millions of dollars. We introduce FlexDoc, a scalable synthetic data generation framework that combines Stochastic Schemas and Parameterized Sampling to produce realistic, multilingual semi-structured documents with rich annotations. By probabilistically modeling layout patterns, visual structure, and content variability, FlexDoc enables the controlled generation of diverse document variants at scale. Experiments on Key Information Extraction (KIE) tasks demonstrate that FlexDoc-generated data improves the absolute F1 Score by up to 11% when used to augment real datasets, while reducing annotation effort by over 90% compared to traditional hard-template methods. The solution is in active deployment, where it has accelerated the development of enterprise-grade document understanding models while significantly reducing data acquisition and annotation costs.

Eunsu Kim, Haneul Yoo, Guijin Son et al.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, the need for up-to-date and well-organized benchmarks becomes increasingly critical. However, many existing datasets are scattered, difficult to manage, and make it challenging to perform evaluations tailored to specific needs or domains, despite the growing importance of domain-specific models in areas such as math or code. In this paper, we introduce BenchHub, a dynamic benchmark repository that empowers researchers and developers to evaluate LLMs more effectively. BenchHub aggregates and automatically classifies benchmark datasets from diverse domains, integrating 303K questions across 38 benchmarks. It is designed to support continuous updates and scalable data management, enabling flexible and customizable evaluation tailored to various domains or use cases. Through extensive experiments with various LLM families, we demonstrate that model performance varies significantly across domain-specific subsets, emphasizing the importance of domain-aware benchmarking. We believe BenchHub can encourage better dataset reuse, more transparent model comparisons, and easier identification of underrepresented areas in existing benchmarks, offering a critical infrastructure for advancing LLM evaluation research.

Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett et al.

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data often used to train multilingual language models. In this paper, we introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. Many of the included languages have been previously under-served, making CommonLID a key resource for developing more representative high-quality text corpora. We show CommonLID's value by using it, alongside five other common evaluation sets, to test eight popular LID models. We analyse our results to situate our contribution and to provide an overview of the state of the art. In particular, we highlight that existing evaluations overestimate LID accuracy for many languages in the web domain. We make CommonLID and the code used to create it available under an open, permissive license.

Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Sanchari Chowdhuri, Amit Agarwal et al.

Clustering customer chat data is vital for cloud providers handling multi service queries. Traditional methods struggle with overlapping concerns and create broad, static clusters that degrade over time. Reclustering disrupts continuity, making issue tracking difficult. We propose an adaptive system that segments multi turn chats into service specific concerns and incrementally refines clusters as new issues arise. Cluster quality is tracked via DaviesBouldin Index and Silhouette Scores, with LLM based splitting applied only to degraded clusters. Our method improves Silhouette Scores by over 100\% and reduces DBI by 65.6\% compared to baselines, enabling scalable, real time analytics without full reclustering.

Eunsu Kim, Junyeong Park, Na Min An et al.

In a globalized world, cultural elements from diverse origins frequently appear together within a single visual scene. We refer to these as culture mixing scenarios, yet how Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) perceive them remains underexplored. We investigate culture mixing as a critical challenge for LVLMs and examine how current models behave when cultural items from multiple regions appear together. To systematically analyze these behaviors, we construct CultureMix, a food Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark with 23k diffusion-generated, human-verified culture mixing images across four subtasks: (1) food-only, (2) food+food, (3) food+background, and (4) food+food+background. Evaluating 10 LVLMs, we find consistent failures to preserve individual cultural identities in mixed settings. Models show strong background reliance, with accuracy dropping 14% when cultural backgrounds are added to food-only baselines, and they produce inconsistent predictions for identical foods across different contexts. To address these limitations, we explore three robustness strategies. We find supervised fine-tuning using a diverse culture mixing dataset substantially improve model consistency and reduce background sensitivity. We call for increased attention to culture mixing scenarios as a critical step toward developing LVLMs capable of operating reliably in culturally diverse real-world environments.

Jyotika Singh, Weiyi Sun, Amit Agarwal et al.

In modern industry systems like multi-turn chat agents, Text-to-SQL technology bridges natural language (NL) questions and database (DB) querying. The conversion of tabular DB results into NL representations (NLRs) enables the chat-based interaction. Currently, NLR generation is typically handled by large language models (LLMs), but information loss or errors in presenting tabular results in NL remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a novel evaluation method - Combo-Eval - for judgment of LLM-generated NLRs that combines the benefits of multiple existing methods, optimizing evaluation fidelity and achieving a significant reduction in LLM calls by 25-61%. Accompanying our method is NLR-BIRD, the first dedicated dataset for NLR benchmarking. Through human evaluations, we demonstrate the superior alignment of Combo-Eval with human judgments, applicable across scenarios with and without ground truth references.

Ishan Deshpande, Amandeep Kaur Reehal, Chandan Nath et al.

Accurate, timely, and farm-level crop type information is paramount for national food security, agricultural policy formulation, and economic planning, particularly in agriculturally significant nations like India. While remote sensing and machine learning have become vital tools for crop monitoring, existing approaches often grapple with challenges such as limited geographical scalability, restricted crop type coverage, the complexities of mixed-pixel and heterogeneous landscapes, and crucially, the robust in-season identification essential for proactive decision-making. We present a framework designed to address the critical data gaps for targeted data driven decision making which generates farm-level, in-season, multi-crop identification at national scale (India) using deep learning. Our methodology leverages the strengths of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, integrated with national-scale farm boundary data. The model successfully identifies 12 major crops (which collectively account for nearly 90% of India's total cultivated area showing an agreement with national crop census 2023-24 of 94% in winter, and 75% in monsoon season). Our approach incorporates an automated season detection algorithm, which estimates crop sowing and harvest periods. This allows for reliable crop identification as early as two months into the growing season and facilitates rigorous in-season performance evaluation. Furthermore, we have engineered a highly scalable inference pipeline, culminating in what is, to our knowledge, the first pan-India, in-season, farm-level crop type data product. The system's effectiveness and scalability are demonstrated through robust validation against national agricultural statistics, showcasing its potential to deliver actionable, data-driven insights for transformative agricultural monitoring and management across India.

Ishaan Gakhar, Aryesh Guha, Aryaman Gupta et al.

Traffic light detection under adverse weather conditions remains largely unexplored in ADAS systems, with existing approaches relying on complex deep learning methods that introduce significant computational overheads during training and deployment. This paper proposes Fourier Domain Adaptation (FDA), which requires only training data modifications without architectural changes, enabling effective adaptation to rainy and foggy conditions. FDA minimizes the domain gap between source and target domains, creating a dataset for reliable performance under adverse weather. The source domain merged LISA and S2TLD datasets, processed to address class imbalance. Established methods simulated rainy and foggy scenarios to form the target domain. Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) techniques were explored to leverage data more effectively, addressing the shortage of comprehensive datasets and poor performance of state-of-the-art models under hostile weather. Experimental results show FDA-augmented models outperform baseline models across mAP50, mAP50-95, Precision, and Recall metrics. YOLOv8 achieved a 12.25% average increase across all metrics. Average improvements of 7.69% in Precision, 19.91% in Recall, 15.85% in mAP50, and 23.81% in mAP50-95 were observed across all models, demonstrating FDA's effectiveness in mitigating adverse weather impact. These improvements enable real-world applications requiring reliable performance in challenging environmental conditions.

Krish Didwania, Pratinav Seth, Aditya Kasliwal et al.

Agriculture, vital for global sustenance, necessitates innovative solutions due to a lack of organized domain experts, particularly in developing countries where many farmers are impoverished and cannot afford expert consulting. Initiatives like Farmers Helpline play a crucial role in such countries, yet challenges such as high operational costs persist. Automating query resolution can alleviate the burden on traditional call centers, providing farmers with immediate and contextually relevant information. The integration of Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a transformative opportunity to empower farmers and bridge information gaps. Language models like transformers, the rising stars of AI, possess remarkable language understanding capabilities, making them ideal for addressing information gaps in agriculture. This work explores and demonstrates the transformative potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating query resolution for agricultural farmers, leveraging their expertise in deciphering natural language and understanding context. Using a subset of a vast dataset of real-world farmer queries collected in India, our study focuses on approximately 4 million queries from the state of Tamil Nadu, spanning various sectors, seasonal crops, and query types.

Shivank Garg, Abhishek Baghel, Amit Agarwal et al.

With the rise of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), ensuring reliable object detection in all weather conditions is crucial for safety and efficiency. Adverse weather like snow, rain, and fog presents major challenges for current detection systems, often resulting in failures and potential safety risks. This paper introduces a novel framework and pipeline designed to improve object detection under such conditions, focusing on traffic signal detection where traditional methods often fail due to domain shifts caused by adverse weather. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the limitations of existing techniques. Our proposed pipeline significantly enhances detection accuracy in snow, rain, and fog. Results show a 40.8% improvement in average IoU and F1 scores compared to naive fine-tuning and a 22.4% performance increase in domain shift scenarios, such as training on artificial snow and testing on rain images.

Deepak Uniyal, Amit Agarwal

Emerged in Wuhan city of China in December 2019, COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the world despite authorities having made available a number of vaccines. While the coronavirus has been around for a significant period of time, people and authorities still feel the need for awareness due to the mutating nature of the virus and therefore varying symptoms and prevention strategies. People and authorities resort to social media platforms the most to share awareness information and voice out their opinions due to their massive outreach in spreading the word in practically no time. People use a number of languages to communicate over social media platforms based on their familiarity, language outreach, and availability on social media platforms. The entire world has been hit by the coronavirus and India is the second worst-hit country in terms of the number of active coronavirus cases. India, being a multilingual country, offers a great opportunity to study the outreach of various languages that have been actively used across social media platforms. In this study, we aim to study the dataset related to COVID-19 collected in the period between February 2020 to July 2020 specifically for regional languages in India. This could be helpful for the Government of India, various state governments, NGOs, researchers, and policymakers in studying different issues related to the pandemic. We found that English has been the mode of communication in over 64% of tweets while as many as twelve regional languages in India account for approximately 4.77% of tweets.

Hyukseong Kwon, Amir Rahimi, Kevin G. Lee et al.

This paper proposes the CogSense system, which is inspired by sense-making cognition and perception in the mammalian brain to perform perception error detection and perception parameter adaptation using probabilistic signal temporal logic. As a specific application, a contrast-based perception adaption method is presented and validated. The proposed method evaluates perception errors using heterogeneous probe functions computed from the detected objects and subsequently solves a contrast optimization problem to correct perception errors. The CogSense probe functions utilize the characteristics of geometry, dynamics, and detected blob image quality of the objects to develop axioms in a probabilistic signal temporal logic framework. By evaluating these axioms, we can formally verify whether the detections are valid or erroneous. Further, using the CogSense axioms, we generate the probabilistic signal temporal logic-based constraints to finally solve the contrast-based optimization problem to reduce false positives and false negatives.

Vikram Sharma Mailthody, James Wei, Nicholas Chen et al.

COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted the way we live. Government bodies, universities, and companies worldwide are rapidly developing technologies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and safely reopen society. Essential analytics tools such as contact tracing, super-spreader event detection, and exposure mapping require collecting and analyzing sensitive user information. The increasing use of such powerful data-driven applications necessitates a secure, privacy-preserving infrastructure for computation on personal data. In this paper, we analyze two such computing infrastructures under development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. First, we present Safer Illinois, a system for decentralized health analytics supporting two applications currently deployed with widespread adoption: digital contact tracing and COVID-19 status cards. Second, we introduce the RokWall architecture for privacy-preserving centralized data analytics on sensitive user data. We discuss the architecture of these systems, design choices, threat models considered, and the challenges we experienced in developing production-ready systems for sensitive data analysis.

Amit Agarwal, James Bartusek, Vipul Goyal et al.

We initiate the study of multi-party computation for classical functionalities (in the plain model) with security against malicious polynomial-time quantum adversaries. We observe that existing techniques readily give a polynomial-round protocol, but our main result is a construction of *constant-round* post-quantum multi-party computation. We assume mildly super-polynomial quantum hardness of learning with errors (LWE), and polynomial quantum hardness of an LWE-based circular security assumption. Along the way, we develop the following cryptographic primitives that may be of independent interest: 1. A spooky encryption scheme for relations computable by quantum circuits, from the quantum hardness of an LWE-based circular security assumption. This yields the first quantum multi-key fully-homomorphic encryption scheme with classical keys. 2. Constant-round zero-knowledge secure against multiple parallel quantum verifiers from spooky encryption for relations computable by quantum circuits. To enable this, we develop a new straight-line non-black-box simulation technique against *parallel* verifiers that does not clone the adversary's state. This forms the heart of our technical contribution and may also be relevant to the classical setting. 3. A constant-round post-quantum non-malleable commitment scheme, from the mildly super-polynomial quantum hardness of LWE.

Wenlei Bao, Li-Wen Chang, Yang Chen et al.

Quantization has emerged to be an effective way to significantly boost the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) by utilizing low-bit computations. Despite having lower numerical precision, quantized DNNs are able to reduce both memory bandwidth and computation cycles with little losses of accuracy. Integer GEMM (General Matrix Multiplication) is critical to running quantized DNN models efficiently, as GEMM operations often dominate the computations in these models. Various approaches have been developed by leveraging techniques such as vectorization and memory layout to improve the performance of integer GEMM. However, these existing approaches are not fast enough in certain scenarios. We developed NGEMM, a compiler-based GEMM implementation for accelerating lower-precision training and inference. NGEMM has better use of the vector units by avoiding unnecessary vector computation that is introduced during tree reduction. We compared NGEMM's performance with the state-of-art BLAS libraries such as MKL. Our experimental results showed that NGEMM outperformed MKL non-pack and pack version by an average of 1.86x and 1.16x, respectively. We have applied NGEMM to a number of production services in Microsoft.

Amit Agarwal, Brijraj Singh, Jatin Bedi et al.

Microblogging sites are the direct platform for the users to express their views. It has been observed from previous studies that people are viable to flaunt their emotions for events (eg. natural catastrophes, sports, academics etc.), for persons (actor/actress, sports person, scientist) and for the places they visit. In this study we focused on a sport event, particularly the cricket tournament and collected the emotions of the fans for their favorite players using their tweets. Further, we acquired the stock market performance of the brands which are either endorsing the players or sponsoring the match in the tournament. It has been observed that performance of the player triggers the users to flourish their emotions over social media therefore, we observed correlation between players performance and fans' emotions. Therefore, we found the direct connection between player's performance with brand's behavior on stock market.