Christos Emmanouilidis

Ahmed Y. Radwan, Christos Emmanouilidis, Hina Tabassum et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are a major focus of recent AI research. However, most prior work focuses on static image understanding, while their ability to process sequential audio-video data remains underexplored. This gap highlights the need for a high-quality benchmark to systematically evaluate MLLM performance in a real-world setting. We introduce SONIC-O1, a comprehensive, fully human-verified benchmark spanning 13 real-world conversational domains with 4,958 annotations and demographic metadata. SONIC-O1 evaluates MLLMs on key tasks, including open-ended summarization, multiple-choice question (MCQ) answering, and temporal localization with supporting rationales (reasoning). Experiments on closed- and open-source models reveal limitations. While the performance gap in MCQ accuracy between two model families is relatively small, we observe a substantial 22.6% performance difference in temporal localization between the best performing closed-source and open-source models. Performance further degrades across demographic groups, indicating persistent disparities in model behavior. Overall, SONIC-O1 provides an open evaluation suite for temporally grounded and socially robust multimodal understanding. We release SONIC-O1 for reproducibility and research: Project page: https://vectorinstitute.github.io/sonic-o1/ Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/vector-institute/sonic-o1 Github: https://github.com/vectorinstitute/sonic-o1 Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/vector-institute/sonic-o1-leaderboard

Guillermo Gil de Avalle, Laura Maruster, Shaina Raza et al.

Language models increasingly serve as advisory systems in maintenance operations. To prevent hallucination, recent systems ground these models in procedural documentation to constrain them to approved steps. In practice, however, operator queries frequently stray from this path, requiring models to recognise out-of-scope inputs mid-conversation, a dynamic that current benchmarks rarely prioritise. We introduce DiagFlowBench, a dataset of 50 industrial diagnostic flowcharts from a consumer manufacturer converted into 1,676 multi-turn conversations that contrast compliant with out-of-scope utterances. Evaluating a panel of ten commercial and open-weight models reveals high variability in abstention rates, with models commonly selecting a real but contextually inadequate step rather than fabricating facts. The inherent plausibility and authority of this mapped but wrong advice exposes a challenging vulnerability for grounding systems.