Pablo N. Mendes

Darvin Yi, Teng Liu, Mattie Terzolo et al.

As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly undertake digital work, reliable frameworks are needed to evaluate their real-world competence, adaptability, and capacity for human collaboration. Existing benchmarks remain largely static, synthetic, or domain-limited, providing limited insight into how agents perform in dynamic, economically meaningful environments. We introduce UpBench, a dynamically evolving benchmark grounded in real jobs drawn from the global Upwork labor marketplace. Each task corresponds to a verified client transaction, anchoring evaluation in genuine work activity and financial outcomes. UpBench employs a rubric-based evaluation framework, in which expert freelancers decompose each job into detailed, verifiable acceptance criteria and assess AI submissions with per-criterion feedback. This structure enables fine-grained analysis of model strengths, weaknesses, and instruction-following fidelity beyond binary pass/fail metrics. Human expertise is integrated throughout the data pipeline (from job curation and rubric construction to evaluation) ensuring fidelity to real professional standards and supporting research on human-AI collaboration. By regularly refreshing tasks to reflect the evolving nature of online work, UpBench provides a scalable, human-centered foundation for evaluating agentic systems in authentic labor-market contexts, offering a path toward a collaborative framework, where AI amplifies human capability through partnership rather than replacement.

Silvia Terragni, Hoang Cuong, Joachim Daiber et al. · apple-ml

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential as effective search relevance evaluators. However, there is a lack of comprehensive guidance on which models consistently perform optimally across various contexts or within specific use cases. In this paper, we assess several LLMs and Multimodal Language Models (MLLMs) in terms of their alignment with human judgments across multiple multimodal search scenarios. Our analysis investigates the trade-offs between cost and accuracy, highlighting that model performance varies significantly depending on the context. Interestingly, in smaller models, the inclusion of a visual component may hinder performance rather than enhance it. These findings highlight the complexities involved in selecting the most appropriate model for practical applications.

Sujan Perera, Pablo N. Mendes, Adarsh Alex et al.

Over the years, Twitter has become one of the largest communication platforms providing key data to various applications such as brand monitoring, trend detection, among others. Entity linking is one of the major tasks in natural language understanding from tweets and it associates entity mentions in text to corresponding entries in knowledge bases in order to provide unambiguous interpretation and additional con- text. State-of-the-art techniques have focused on linking explicitly mentioned entities in tweets with reasonable success. However, we argue that in addition to explicit mentions i.e. The movie Gravity was more ex- pensive than the mars orbiter mission entities (movie Gravity) can also be mentioned implicitly i.e. This new space movie is crazy. you must watch it!. This paper introduces the problem of implicit entity linking in tweets. We propose an approach that models the entities by exploiting their factual and contextual knowledge. We demonstrate how to use these models to perform implicit entity linking on a ground truth dataset with 397 tweets from two domains, namely, Movie and Book. Specifically, we show: 1) the importance of linking implicit entities and its value addition to the standard entity linking task, and 2) the importance of exploiting contextual knowledge associated with an entity for linking their implicit mentions. We also make the ground truth dataset publicly available to foster the research in this new research area.