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May 15

ORCA: Orchestrated Reasoning with Collaborative Agents for Document Visual Question Answering

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) remains challenging for existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs), especially under complex reasoning and multi-step workflows. Current approaches struggle to decompose intricate questions into manageable sub-tasks and often fail to leverage specialized processing paths for different document elements. We present ORCA: Orchestrated Reasoning with Collaborative Agents for Document Visual Question Answering, a novel multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through strategic agent coordination and iterative refinement. ORCA begins with a reasoning agent that decomposes queries into logical steps, followed by a routing mechanism that activates task-specific agents from a specialized agent dock. Our framework leverages a set of specialized AI agents, each dedicated to a distinct modality, enabling fine-grained understanding and collaborative reasoning across diverse document components. To ensure answer reliability, ORCA employs a debate mechanism with stress-testing, and when necessary, a thesis-antithesis adjudication process. This is followed by a sanity checker to ensure format consistency. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new paradigm for collaborative agent systems in vision-language reasoning.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 2

MedObvious: Exposing the Medical Moravec's Paradox in VLMs via Clinical Triage

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used for tasks like medical report generation and visual question answering. However, fluent diagnostic text does not guarantee safe visual understanding. In clinical practice, interpretation begins with pre-diagnostic sanity checks: verifying that the input is valid to read (correct modality and anatomy, plausible viewpoint and orientation, and no obvious integrity violations). Existing benchmarks largely assume this step is solved, and therefore miss a critical failure mode: a model can produce plausible narratives even when the input is inconsistent or invalid. We introduce MedObvious, a 1,880-task benchmark that isolates input validation as a set-level consistency capability over small multi-panel image sets: the model must identify whether any panel violates expected coherence. MedObvious spans five progressive tiers, from basic orientation/modality mismatches to clinically motivated anatomy/viewpoint verification and triage-style cues, and includes five evaluation formats to test robustness across interfaces. Evaluating 17 different VLMs, we find that sanity checking remains unreliable: several models hallucinate anomalies on normal (negative-control) inputs, performance degrades when scaling to larger image sets, and measured accuracy varies substantially between multiple-choice and open-ended settings. These results show that pre-diagnostic verification remains unsolved for medical VLMs and should be treated as a distinct, safety-critical capability before deployment.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 23

The State of Human-centered NLP Technology for Fact-checking

Misinformation threatens modern society by promoting distrust in science, changing narratives in public health, heightening social polarization, and disrupting democratic elections and financial markets, among a myriad of other societal harms. To address this, a growing cadre of professional fact-checkers and journalists provide high-quality investigations into purported facts. However, these largely manual efforts have struggled to match the enormous scale of the problem. In response, a growing body of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies have been proposed for more scalable fact-checking. Despite tremendous growth in such research, however, practical adoption of NLP technologies for fact-checking still remains in its infancy today. In this work, we review the capabilities and limitations of the current NLP technologies for fact-checking. Our particular focus is to further chart the design space for how these technologies can be harnessed and refined in order to better meet the needs of human fact-checkers. To do so, we review key aspects of NLP-based fact-checking: task formulation, dataset construction, modeling, and human-centered strategies, such as explainable models and human-in-the-loop approaches. Next, we review the efficacy of applying NLP-based fact-checking tools to assist human fact-checkers. We recommend that future research include collaboration with fact-checker stakeholders early on in NLP research, as well as incorporation of human-centered design practices in model development, in order to further guide technology development for human use and practical adoption. Finally, we advocate for more research on benchmark development supporting extrinsic evaluation of human-centered fact-checking technologies.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2023

Is Your Model Really A Good Math Reasoner? Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning with Checklist

Exceptional mathematical reasoning ability is one of the key features that demonstrate the power of large language models (LLMs). How to comprehensively define and evaluate the mathematical abilities of LLMs, and even reflect the user experience in real-world scenarios, has emerged as a critical issue. Current benchmarks predominantly concentrate on problem-solving capabilities, which presents a substantial risk of model overfitting and fails to accurately represent genuine mathematical reasoning abilities. In this paper, we argue that if a model really understands a problem, it should be robustly and readily applied across a diverse array of tasks. Motivated by this, we introduce MATHCHECK, a well-designed checklist for testing task generalization and reasoning robustness, as well as an automatic tool to generate checklists efficiently. MATHCHECK includes multiple mathematical reasoning tasks and robustness test types to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of both mathematical reasoning ability and behavior testing. Utilizing MATHCHECK, we develop MATHCHECK-GSM and MATHCHECK-GEO to assess mathematical textual reasoning and multi-modal reasoning capabilities, respectively, serving as upgraded versions of benchmarks including GSM8k, GeoQA, UniGeo, and Geometry3K. We adopt MATHCHECK-GSM and MATHCHECK-GEO to evaluate over 20 LLMs and 11 MLLMs, assessing their comprehensive mathematical reasoning abilities. Our results demonstrate that while frontier LLMs like GPT-4o continue to excel in various abilities on the checklist, many other model families exhibit a significant decline. Further experiments indicate that, compared to traditional math benchmarks, MATHCHECK better reflects true mathematical abilities and represents mathematical intelligence more linearly, thereby supporting our design. On our MATHCHECK, we can easily conduct detailed behavior analysis to deeply investigate models.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 4

SmartDoc: A Context-Aware Agentic Method Comment Generation Plugin

Context: The software maintenance phase involves many activities such as code refactoring, bug fixing, code review or testing. Program comprehension is key to all these activities, as it demands developers to grasp the knowledge (e.g., implementation details) required to modify the codebase. Methods as main building blocks in a program can offer developers this knowledge source for code comprehension. However, reading entire method statements can be challenging, which necessitates precise and up-to-date comments. Objective: We propose a solution as an IntelliJ IDEA plugin, named SmartDoc, that assists developers in generating context-aware method comments. Method: This plugin acts as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent that has its own memory and is augmented by target methods' context. When a request is initiated by the end-user, the method content and all its nested method calls are used in the comment generation. At the beginning, these nested methods are visited and a call graph is generated. This graph is then traversed using depth-first search (DFS), enabling the provision of full-context to enrich Large Language Model (LLM) prompts. Result: The product is a software, as a plugin, developed for Java codebase and installable on IntelliJ IDEA. This plugin can serve concurrently for methods whose comments are being updated , and it shares memory across all flows to avoid redundant calls. o measure the accuracy of this solution, a dedicated test case is run to record SmartDoc generated comments and their corresponding ground truth. For each collected result-set, three metrics are computed, BERTScore, BLEU and ROUGE-1. These metrics will determine how accurate the generated comments are in comparison to the ground truth. Result: The obtained accuracy, in terms of the precision, recall and F1, is promising, and lies in the range of 0.80 to 0.90 for BERTScore.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 1, 2025

130k Lines of Formal Topology in Two Weeks: Simple and Cheap Autoformalization for Everyone?

This is a brief description of a project that has already autoformalized a large portion of the general topology from the Munkres textbook (which has in total 241 pages in 7 chapters and 39 sections). The project has been running since November 21, 2025 and has as of January 4, 2026, produced 160k lines of formalized topology. Most of it (about 130k lines) have been done in two weeks,from December 22 to January 4, for an LLM subscription cost of about \$100. This includes a 3k-line proof of Urysohn's lemma, a 2k-line proof of Urysohn's Metrization theorem, over 10k-line proof of the Tietze extension theorem, and many more (in total over 1.5k lemmas/theorems). The approach is quite simple and cheap: build a long-running feedback loop between an LLM and a reasonably fast proof checker equipped with a core foundational library. The LLM is now instantiated as ChatGPT (mostly 5.2) or Claude Sonnet (4.5) run through the respective Codex or Claude Code command line interfaces. The proof checker is Chad Brown's higher-order set theory system Megalodon, and the core library is Brown's formalization of basic set theory and surreal numbers (including reals, etc). The rest is some prompt engineering and technical choices which we describe here. Based on the fast progress, low cost, virtually unknown ITP/library, and the simple setup available to everyone, we believe that (auto)formalization may become quite easy and ubiquitous in 2026, regardless of which proof assistant is used.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 5

Is Your Automated Software Engineer Trustworthy?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly used in software engineering tasks, with an increased focus on bug report resolution over the past year. However, most proposed systems fail to properly handle uncertain or incorrect inputs and outputs. Existing LLM-based tools and coding agents respond to every issue and generate a patch for every case, even when the input is vague or their own output is incorrect. There are no mechanisms in place to abstain when confidence is low. This leads to unreliable behaviour, such as hallucinated code changes or responses based on vague issue reports. We introduce BouncerBench, a benchmark that evaluates whether LLM-based software agents can refuse to act when inputs are ill-defined or refuse to respond when their own outputs are likely to be incorrect. Unlike prior benchmarks that implicitly incentivize models to generate responses even when uncertain, BouncerBench aims to improve precision by targeting two overlooked failure points: (1) vague or underspecified issue descriptions in tickets and (2) logically or functionally incorrect code patches created by the system. It measures whether proposed systems can distinguish actionable issues from vague tickets and valid patches from untrustworthy ones. We also implement a basic input and output bouncer, evaluating how well current LLMs can abstain when needed. Our results show that most models fail to abstain from underspecified inputs or incorrect outputs. Hence, we conclude that there is significant room for improvement before LLMs can be trusted to make correct decisions and recommendations in real-world software engineering workflows. BouncerBench provides a first step toward evaluating and building more cautious, trustworthy code agents. The replication package, dataset, and leaderboard can be found at bouncerbench.com

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 21, 2025

Thought Manipulation: External Thought Can Be Efficient for Large Reasoning Models

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated the effectiveness of scaling test-time computation to enhance reasoning capabilities in multiple tasks. However, LRMs typically suffer from "overthinking" problems, where models generate significantly redundant reasoning steps while bringing limited performance gains. Existing work relies on fine-tuning to mitigate overthinking, which requires additional data, unconventional training setups, risky safety misalignment, and poor generalization. Through empirical analysis, we reveal an important characteristic of LRM behaviors that placing external CoTs generated by smaller models between the thinking token (<think> and </think>) can effectively manipulate the model to generate fewer thoughts. Building on these insights, we propose a simple yet efficient pipeline, ThoughtMani, to enable LRMs to bypass unnecessary intermediate steps and reduce computational costs significantly. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the utility and efficiency of ThoughtMani. For instance, when applied to QwQ-32B on the LiveBench/Code dataset, ThoughtMani keeps the original performance and reduces output token counts by approximately 30%, with little overhead from the CoT generator. Furthermore, we find that ThoughtMani enhances safety alignment by an average of 10%. Since model vendors typically serve models of different sizes simultaneously, ThoughtMani provides an effective way to construct more efficient and accessible LRMs for real-world applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 18, 2025 2

ACPBench Hard: Unrestrained Reasoning about Action, Change, and Planning

The ACPBench dataset provides atomic reasoning tasks required for efficient planning. The dataset is aimed at distilling the complex plan generation task into separate atomic reasoning tasks in their easiest possible form, boolean or multiple-choice questions, where the model has to choose the right answer from the provided options. While the aim of ACPBench is to test the simplest form of reasoning about action and change, when tasked with planning, a model does not typically have options to choose from and thus the reasoning required for planning dictates an open-ended, generative form for these tasks. To that end, we introduce ACPBench Hard, a generative version of ACPBench, with open-ended questions which the model needs to answer. Models that perform well on these tasks could in principle be integrated into a planner or be used directly as a policy. We discuss the complexity of these tasks as well as the complexity of validating the correctness of their answers and present validation algorithms for each task. Equipped with these validators, we test the performance of a variety of models on our tasks and find that for most of these tasks the performance of even the largest models is still subpar. Our experiments show that no model outperforms another in these tasks and with a few exceptions all tested language models score below 65%, indicating that even the current frontier language models have a long way to go before they can reliably reason about planning. In fact, even the so-called reasoning models struggle with solving these reasoning tasks. ACPBench Hard collection is available at the following link: https://ibm.github.io/ACPBench

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testing

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift in programming, giving rise to "vibe coding", where users can build complete projects and even control computers using natural language instructions. This paradigm has driven automated webpage development, but it introduces a new requirement about how to automatically verify whether the web functionalities are reliably implemented. Existing works struggle to adapt, relying on static visual similarity or predefined checklists that constrain their utility in open-ended environments. Furthermore, they overlook a vital aspect of software quality, namely latent logical constraints. To address these gaps, we introduce WebTestBench, a benchmark for evaluating end-to-end automated web testing. WebTestBench encompasses comprehensive dimensions across diverse web application categories. We decompose the testing process into two cascaded sub-tasks, checklist generation and defect detection, and propose WebTester, a baseline framework for this task. Evaluating popular LLMs with WebTester reveals severe challenges, including insufficient test completeness, detection bottlenecks, and long-horizon interaction unreliability. These findings expose a substantial gap between current computer-use agent capabilities and industrial-grade deployment demands. We hope that WebTestBench provides valuable insights and guidance for advancing end-to-end automated web testing. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/friedrichor/WebTestBench.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 26

A & B == B & A: Triggering Logical Reasoning Failures in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have propelled Artificial Intelligence (AI) to new heights, enabling breakthroughs in various tasks such as writing assistance, code generation, and machine translation. A significant distinction of advanced LLMs, such as ChatGPT, is their demonstrated ability to "reason." However, evaluating the reasoning ability of LLMs remains a challenge as most existing evaluations focus on their accuracy on the downstream tasks rather than directly assessing their reasoning processes. Efforts have been made to develop benchmarks and metrics to assess reasoning in LLMs, but they suffer from data leakage or limited scope. In this paper, we introduce LogicAsker, an automatic approach that comprehensively evaluates and improves the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs under a set of atomic reasoning skills based on propositional and predicate logic. The results provide insights into LLMs' reasoning abilities and reveal the logical rules the LLMs did not learn well. We evaluate LogicAsker on six widely deployed LLMs, including GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Vicuna, and Guanaco. The results show that test cases from LogicAsker can find logical reasoning failures in different LLMs with a rate of 25\% - 94\%. In addition, the test cases of LogicAsker can be further used to design demonstration examples for in-context learning, which effectively improves the logical reasoning ability of LLMs, e.g., 10\% for GPT-4. As far as we know, our work is the first to create prompts based on testing results to improve LLMs' formal reasoning ability effectively. All the code, data, and results will be released for reproduction and future research.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 1, 2024

Let's Verify Math Questions Step by Step

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning. To enable such capabilities, many existing works distill strong reasoning models into long chains of thought or design algorithms to construct high-quality math QA data for training. However, these efforts primarily focus on generating correct reasoning paths and answers, while largely overlooking the validity of the questions themselves. In this work, we propose Math Question Verification (MathQ-Verify), a novel five-stage pipeline designed to rigorously filter ill-posed or under-specified math problems. MathQ-Verify first performs format-level validation to remove redundant instructions and ensure that each question is syntactically well-formed. It then formalizes each question, decomposes it into atomic conditions, and verifies them against mathematical definitions. Next, it detects logical contradictions among these conditions, followed by a goal-oriented completeness check to ensure the question provides sufficient information for solving. To evaluate this task, we use existing benchmarks along with an additional dataset we construct, containing 2,147 math questions with diverse error types, each manually double-validated. Experiments show that MathQ-Verify achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, improving the F1 score by up to 25 percentage points over the direct verification baseline. It further attains approximately 90% precision and 63% recall through a lightweight model voting scheme. MathQ-Verify offers a scalable and accurate solution for curating reliable mathematical datasets, reducing label noise and avoiding unnecessary computation on invalid questions. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/scuuy/MathQ-Verify.

  • 11 authors
·
May 20, 2025

A New Era in Software Security: Towards Self-Healing Software via Large Language Models and Formal Verification

In this paper we present a novel solution that combines the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Formal Verification strategies to verify and automatically repair software vulnerabilities. Initially, we employ Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to locate the software vulnerability and derive a counterexample. The counterexample provides evidence that the system behaves incorrectly or contains a vulnerability. The counterexample that has been detected, along with the source code, are provided to the LLM engine. Our approach involves establishing a specialized prompt language for conducting code debugging and generation to understand the vulnerability's root cause and repair the code. Finally, we use BMC to verify the corrected version of the code generated by the LLM. As a proof of concept, we create ESBMC-AI based on the Efficient SMT-based Context-Bounded Model Checker (ESBMC) and a pre-trained Transformer model, specifically gpt-3.5-turbo, to detect and fix errors in C programs. Our experimentation involved generating a dataset comprising 1000 C code samples, each consisting of 20 to 50 lines of code. Notably, our proposed method achieved an impressive success rate of up to 80% in repairing vulnerable code encompassing buffer overflow and pointer dereference failures. We assert that this automated approach can effectively incorporate into the software development lifecycle's continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) process.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2023

Reasoning Runtime Behavior of a Program with LLM: How Far Are We?

Large language models for code (i.e., code LLMs) have shown strong code understanding and generation capabilities. To evaluate the capabilities of code LLMs in various aspects, many benchmarks have been proposed (e.g., HumanEval and ClassEval). Code reasoning is one of the most essential abilities of code LLMs, but existing benchmarks for code reasoning are not sufficient. Typically, they focus on predicting the input and output of a program, ignoring the evaluation of the intermediate behavior during program execution, as well as the logical consistency (e.g., the model should not give the correct output if the prediction of execution path is wrong) when performing the reasoning. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a framework, namely REval, for evaluating code reasoning abilities and consistency of code LLMs with program execution. We utilize existing code benchmarks and adapt them to new benchmarks within our framework. A large-scale empirical study is conducted and most LLMs show unsatisfactory performance on both Runtime Behavior Reasoning (i.e., an average accuracy of 44.4%) and Incremental Consistency Evaluation (i.e., an average IC score of 10.3). Evaluation results of current code LLMs reflect the urgent need for the community to strengthen the code reasoning capability of code LLMs. Our code, data, and \newname leaderboard are available at https://r-eval.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

ClaimVer: Explainable Claim-Level Verification and Evidence Attribution of Text Through Knowledge Graphs

In the midst of widespread misinformation and disinformation through social media and the proliferation of AI-generated texts, it has become increasingly difficult for people to validate and trust information they encounter. Many fact-checking approaches and tools have been developed, but they often lack appropriate explainability or granularity to be useful in various contexts. A text validation method that is easy to use, accessible, and can perform fine-grained evidence attribution has become crucial. More importantly, building user trust in such a method requires presenting the rationale behind each prediction, as research shows this significantly influences people's belief in automated systems. It is also paramount to localize and bring users' attention to the specific problematic content, instead of providing simple blanket labels. In this paper, we present ClaimVer, a human-centric framework tailored to meet users' informational and verification needs by generating rich annotations and thereby reducing cognitive load. Designed to deliver comprehensive evaluations of texts, it highlights each claim, verifies it against a trusted knowledge graph (KG), presents the evidence, and provides succinct, clear explanations for each claim prediction. Finally, our framework introduces an attribution score, enhancing applicability across a wide range of downstream tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering

Automatic fact verification has received significant attention recently. Contemporary automatic fact-checking systems focus on estimating truthfulness using numerical scores which are not human-interpretable. A human fact-checker generally follows several logical steps to verify a verisimilitude claim and conclude whether its truthful or a mere masquerade. Popular fact-checking websites follow a common structure for fact categorization such as half true, half false, false, pants on fire, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to have an aspect-based (delineating which part(s) are true and which are false) explainable system that can assist human fact-checkers in asking relevant questions related to a fact, which can then be validated separately to reach a final verdict. In this paper, we propose a 5W framework (who, what, when, where, and why) for question-answer-based fact explainability. To that end, we present a semi-automatically generated dataset called FACTIFY-5WQA, which consists of 391, 041 facts along with relevant 5W QAs - underscoring our major contribution to this paper. A semantic role labeling system has been utilized to locate 5Ws, which generates QA pairs for claims using a masked language model. Finally, we report a baseline QA system to automatically locate those answers from evidence documents, which can serve as a baseline for future research in the field. Lastly, we propose a robust fact verification system that takes paraphrased claims and automatically validates them. The dataset and the baseline model are available at https: //github.com/ankuranii/acl-5W-QA

  • 8 authors
·
May 7, 2023

What the HellaSwag? On the Validity of Common-Sense Reasoning Benchmarks

Common-sense reasoning is a key language model capability because it encapsulates not just specific factual knowledge but rather general language and world understanding. Measuring common-sense reasoning, therefore, is crucial for language models of different sizes and applications. One of the most widely used benchmarks for evaluating such capabilities is HellaSwag; however, in this paper, we show that it has severe construct validity issues. These issues range from basic ungrammaticality and numerous typos to misleading prompts or equally correct options. Furthermore, we show that if models are evaluated only on answer texts, or with "Lorem ipsum dolor..." instead of the question, more than 65% of model predictions remain the same, and this cannot be attributed merely to contamination. Since benchmark scores are an essential part of model selection in both research and commercial applications, these validity issues can have severe consequences. In particular, knowing that taking benchmark scores at face value is ubiquitous, inadequate evaluation leads to ill-informed decisions about models. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate critical validity issues posed by HellaSwag and illustrate them with various evaluations using generative language models of different sizes. We argue that this benchmark does not accurately measure common-sense reasoning and, therefore, should not be used for evaluation in its current state. Based on the results of our study, we propose requirements that should be met by future common-sense reasoning benchmarks. In addition, we release GoldenSwag, a corrected subset of HellaSwag, which, to our belief, facilitates acceptable common-sense reasoning evaluation.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

AsserT5: Test Assertion Generation Using a Fine-Tuned Code Language Model

Writing good software tests can be challenging, therefore approaches that support developers are desirable. While generating complete tests automatically is such an approach commonly proposed in research, developers may already have specific test scenarios in mind and thus just require help in selecting the most suitable test assertions for these scenarios. This can be done using deep learning models to predict assertions for given test code. Prior research on assertion generation trained these models specifically for the task, raising the question how much the use of larger models pre-trained on code that have emerged since then can improve their performance. In particular, while abstracting identifiers has been shown to improve specifically trained models, it remains unclear whether this also generalises to models pre-trained on non-abstracted code. Finally, even though prior work demonstrated high accuracy it remains unclear how this translates into the effectiveness of the assertions at their intended application -- finding faults. To shed light on these open questions, in this paper we propose AsserT5, a new model based on the pre-trained CodeT5 model, and use this to empirically study assertion generation. We find that the abstraction and the inclusion of the focal method are useful also for a fine-tuned pre-trained model, resulting in test assertions that match the ground truth assertions precisely in up to 59.5\% of cases, more than twice as precise as prior models. However, evaluation on real bugs from the Defects4J dataset shows that out of 138 bugs detectable with assertions in real-world projects, AsserT5 was only able to suggest fault-finding assertions for 33, indicating the need for further improvements.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

How Many Code and Test Cases Are Enough? Evaluating Test Cases Generation from a Binary-Matrix Perspective

Evaluating test cases automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. Existing benchmarks often evaluate the exclusion ratio on large, unstructured collections of wrong codes, suffering from high computational costs and score inflation. Furthermore, they inadvertently reward generators that detect common, trivial bugs, while failing to penalize their inability to identify rare yet critical faults. In this work, we connect two fundamental questions: (1) What is the minimal set of wrong codes sufficient to represent the entire error space? and (2) What is the minimal set of test cases needed to distinguish them? We introduce a novel framework that formalizes benchmark construction as finding an optimal diagnostic basis in a binary code-test matrix, where rows represent wrong codes and columns represent test case results. The rank of this matrix specifies the minimal number of independent error patterns (wrong codes) and provides a tight upper bound on the number of test cases required for complete fault coverage. Our objective is to identify a basis of size equal to the matrix rank that maximizes internal diversity. To tackle this NP-hard problem, we propose WrongSelect, an efficient approximation algorithm to select maximally diverse wrong codes. Applying this framework to millions of competitive programming submissions, we construct TC-Bench, a compact, diverse, and inflation-resistant benchmark. Extensive experiments show that even the most advanced test case generation methods achieve only ~60% exclusion rates on TC-Bench, exposing a significant gap in their diagnostic power and highlighting substantial room for future improvement. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Luoberta/TC-Bench and our code is at: https://github.com/Luowaterbi/TC-Bench.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

How susceptible are LLMs to Logical Fallacies?

This paper investigates the rational thinking capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-round argumentative debates by exploring the impact of fallacious arguments on their logical reasoning performance. More specifically, we present Logic Competence Measurement Benchmark (LOGICOM), a diagnostic benchmark to assess the robustness of LLMs against logical fallacies. LOGICOM involves two agents: a persuader and a debater engaging in a multi-round debate on a controversial topic, where the persuader tries to convince the debater of the correctness of its claim. First, LOGICOM assesses the potential of LLMs to change their opinions through reasoning. Then, it evaluates the debater's performance in logical reasoning by contrasting the scenario where the persuader employs logical fallacies against one where logical reasoning is used. We use this benchmark to evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 using a dataset containing controversial topics, claims, and reasons supporting them. Our findings indicate that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adjust their opinion through reasoning. However, when presented with logical fallacies, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are erroneously convinced 41% and 69% more often, respectively, compared to when logical reasoning is used. Finally, we introduce a new dataset containing over 5k pairs of logical vs. fallacious arguments. The source code and dataset of this work are made publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 18, 2023

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store structured factual knowledge by linking entities through relationships, crucial for many applications. These applications depend on the KG's factual accuracy, so verifying facts is essential, yet challenging. Expert manual verification is ideal but impractical on a large scale. Automated methods show promise but are not ready for real-world KGs. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential with their semantic understanding and knowledge access, yet their suitability and effectiveness for KG fact validation remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce FactCheck, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs for KG fact validation across three key dimensions: (1) LLMs internal knowledge; (2) external evidence via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); and (3) aggregated knowledge employing a multi-model consensus strategy. We evaluated open-source and commercial LLMs on three diverse real-world KGs. FactCheck also includes a RAG dataset with 2+ million documents tailored for KG fact validation. Additionally, we offer an interactive exploration platform for analyzing verification decisions. The experimental analyses demonstrate that while LLMs yield promising results, they are still not sufficiently stable and reliable to be used in real-world KG validation scenarios. Integrating external evidence through RAG methods yields fluctuating performance, providing inconsistent improvements over more streamlined approaches -- at higher computational costs. Similarly, strategies based on multi-model consensus do not consistently outperform individual models, underscoring the lack of a one-fits-all solution. These findings further emphasize the need for a benchmark like FactCheck to systematically evaluate and drive progress on this difficult yet crucial task.

FactCheck-AI Fact Check
·
Feb 11 2

Measuring Chain-of-Thought Monitorability Through Faithfulness and Verbosity

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This visibility could help us spot unsafe or misaligned behavior (monitorability), but only if the CoT is transparent about its internal reasoning (faithfulness). Fully measuring faithfulness is difficult, so researchers often focus on examining the CoT in cases where the model changes its answer after adding a cue to the input. This proxy finds some instances of unfaithfulness but loses information when the model maintains its answer, and does not investigate aspects of reasoning not tied to the cue. We extend these results to a more holistic sense of monitorability by introducing verbosity: whether the CoT lists every factor needed to solve the task. We combine faithfulness and verbosity into a single monitorability score that shows how well the CoT serves as the model's external `working memory', a property that many safety schemes based on CoT monitoring depend on. We evaluate instruction-tuned and reasoning models on BBH, GPQA, and MMLU. Our results show that models can appear faithful yet remain hard to monitor when they leave out key factors, and that monitorability differs sharply across model families. We release our evaluation code using the Inspect library to support reproducible future work.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 31, 2025

TruthTensor: Evaluating LLMs through Human Imitation on Prediction Market under Drift and Holistic Reasoning

Evaluating language models and AI agents remains fundamentally challenging because static benchmarks fail to capture real-world uncertainty, distribution shift, and the gap between isolated task accuracy and human-aligned decision-making under evolving conditions. This paper introduces TruthTensor, a novel, reproducible evaluation paradigm that measures reasoning models not only as prediction engines but as human-imitation systems operating in socially-grounded, high-entropy environments. Building on forward-looking, contamination-free tasks, our framework anchors evaluation to live prediction markets and combines probabilistic scoring to provide a holistic view of model behavior. TruthTensor complements traditional correctness metrics with drift-centric diagnostics and explicit robustness checks for reproducibility. It specify human vs. automated evaluation roles, annotation protocols, and statistical testing procedures to ensure interpretability and replicability of results. In experiments across 500+ real markets (political, economic, cultural, technological), TruthTensor demonstrates that models with similar forecast accuracy can diverge markedly in calibration, drift, and risk-sensitivity, underscoring the need to evaluate models along multiple axes (accuracy, calibration, narrative stability, cost, and resource efficiency). TruthTensor therefore operationalizes modern evaluation best practices, clear hypothesis framing, careful metric selection, transparent compute/cost reporting, human-in-the-loop validation, and open, versioned evaluation contracts, to produce defensible assessments of LLMs in real-world decision contexts. We publicly released TruthTensor at https://truthtensor.com.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 19

ReasoningShield: Content Safety Detection over Reasoning Traces of Large Reasoning Models

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are transforming the AI landscape with advanced reasoning capabilities. While the generated reasoning traces enhance model transparency, they can still contain unsafe content, even when the final answer appears safe. Existing moderation tools, primarily designed for question-answer (QA) pairs, are empirically ineffective at detecting hidden risks embedded in reasoning traces. After identifying the key challenges, we formally define the question-thought (QT) moderation task and propose ReasoningShield, the first safety detection model tailored to identify potential risks in the reasoning trace before reaching the final answer. To construct the model, we synthesize a high-quality reasoning safety detection dataset comprising over 8,000 question-thought pairs spanning ten risk categories and three safety levels. Our dataset construction process incorporates a comprehensive human-AI collaborative annotation pipeline, which achieves over 93% annotation accuracy while significantly reducing human costs. On a diverse set of in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, ReasoningShield outperforms mainstream content safety moderation models in identifying risks within reasoning traces, with an average F1 score exceeding 0.92. Notably, despite being trained on our QT dataset only, ReasoningShield also demonstrates competitive performance in detecting unsafe question-answer pairs on traditional benchmarks, rivaling baselines trained on 10 times larger datasets and base models, which strongly validates the quality of our dataset. Furthermore, ReasoningShield is built upon compact 1B/3B base models to facilitate lightweight deployment and provides human-friendly risk analysis by default. To foster future research, we publicly release all the resources.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

B4: Towards Optimal Assessment of Plausible Code Solutions with Plausible Tests

Selecting the best code solution from multiple generated ones is an essential task in code generation, which can be achieved by using some reliable validators (e.g., developer-written test cases) for assistance. Since reliable test cases are not always available and can be expensive to build in practice, researchers propose to automatically generate test cases to assess code solutions. However, when both code solutions and test cases are plausible and not reliable, selecting the best solution becomes challenging. Although some heuristic strategies have been proposed to tackle this problem, they lack a strong theoretical guarantee and it is still an open question whether an optimal selection strategy exists. Our work contributes in two ways. First, we show that within a Bayesian framework, the optimal selection strategy can be defined based on the posterior probability of the observed passing states between solutions and tests. The problem of identifying the best solution is then framed as an integer programming problem. Second, we propose an efficient approach for approximating this optimal (yet uncomputable) strategy, where the approximation error is bounded by the correctness of prior knowledge. We then incorporate effective prior knowledge to tailor code generation tasks. Both theoretical and empirical studies confirm that existing heuristics are limited in selecting the best solutions with plausible test cases. Our proposed approximated optimal strategy B4 significantly surpasses existing heuristics in selecting code solutions generated by large language models (LLMs) with LLM-generated tests, achieving a relative performance improvement by up to 50% over the strongest heuristic and 246% over the random selection in the most challenging scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZJU-CTAG/B4.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 13, 2024 2

Tiny QA Benchmark++: Ultra-Lightweight, Synthetic Multilingual Dataset Generation & Smoke-Tests for Continuous LLM Evaluation

Tiny QA Benchmark++ (TQB++) presents an ultra-lightweight, multilingual smoke-test suite designed to give large-language-model (LLM) pipelines a unit-test style safety net dataset that runs in seconds with minimal cost. Born out of the tight feedback-loop demands building the Comet Opik prompt-optimization SDK, where waiting on heavyweight benchmarks breaks developer flow. TQB++ couples a 52-item English gold set (less than 20 kB) with a tiny synthetic-data generator pypi package built on provider-agnostic LiteLLM. The generator lets practitioners mint their own tiny packs in any language, domain, or difficulty, while ten ready-made packs already cover Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Every dataset ships with Croissant metadata and plug-and-play files for OpenAI-Evals, LangChain, and standard CI tools, so teams can drop deterministic micro-benchmarks directly into pull-request gates, prompt-engineering loops, and production dashboards without touching GPU budgets. A complete TQB++ run adds only a few seconds to pipeline latency yet reliably flags prompt-template errors, tokenizer drift, and fine-tuning side-effects long before full-scale suites like MMLU or BIG-Bench would finish configuring. The entire framework is released to accelerate continuous, resource-efficient quality assurance across the generative-AI ecosystem.

  • 1 authors
·
May 17, 2025 3

VibeTensor: System Software for Deep Learning, Fully Generated by AI Agents

VIBETENSOR is an open-source research system software stack for deep learning, generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance. In this paper, "fully generated" refers to code provenance: implementation changes were produced and applied as agent-proposed diffs; validation relied on agent-run builds, tests, and differential checks, without per-change manual diff review. It implements a PyTorch-style eager tensor library with a C++20 core (CPU+CUDA), a torch-like Python overlay via nanobind, and an experimental Node.js/TypeScript interface. Unlike thin bindings, VIBETENSOR includes its own tensor/storage system, schema-lite dispatcher, reverse-mode autograd, CUDA runtime (streams/events/graphs), a stream-ordered caching allocator with diagnostics, and a stable C ABI for dynamically loaded operator plugins. We view this release as a milestone for AI-assisted software engineering: it shows coding agents can generate a coherent deep learning runtime spanning language bindings down to CUDA memory management, validated primarily by builds and tests. We describe the architecture, summarize the workflow used to produce and validate the system, and evaluate the artifact. We report repository scale and test-suite composition, and summarize reproducible microbenchmarks from an accompanying AI-generated kernel suite, including fused attention versus PyTorch SDPA/FlashAttention. We also report end-to-end training sanity checks on 3 small workloads (sequence reversal, ViT, miniGPT) on NVIDIA H100 (Hopper, SM90) and Blackwell-class GPUs; multi-GPU results are Blackwell-only and use an optional CUTLASS-based ring-allreduce plugin gated on CUDA 13+ and sm103a toolchain support. Finally, we discuss failure modes in generated system software, including a "Frankenstein" composition effect where locally correct subsystems interact to yield globally suboptimal performance.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 20

RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation

LLM agents enhanced by tree search algorithms have yielded notable performances in code generation. However, current search algorithms in this domain suffer from low search quality due to several reasons: 1) Ineffective design of the search space for the high-reasoning demands of code generation tasks, 2) Inadequate integration of code feedback with the search algorithm, and 3) Poor handling of negative feedback during the search, leading to reduced search efficiency and quality. To address these challenges, we propose to search for the reasoning process of the code and use the detailed feedback of code execution to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. In this paper, we introduce RethinkMCTS, which employs the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to conduct thought-level searches before generating code, thereby exploring a wider range of strategies. More importantly, we construct verbal feedback from fine-grained code execution feedback to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. This ensures that the search progresses along the correct reasoning paths, thus improving the overall search quality of the tree by leveraging execution feedback. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RethinkMCTS outperforms previous search-based and feedback-based code generation baselines. On the HumanEval dataset, it improves the pass@1 of GPT-3.5-turbo from 70.12 to 89.02 and GPT-4o-mini from 87.20 to 94.51. It effectively conducts more thorough exploration through thought-level searches and enhances the search quality of the entire tree by incorporating rethink operation.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Paper Reviewing

Given the rapid ascent of large language models (LLMs), we study the question: (How) can large language models help in reviewing of scientific papers or proposals? We first conduct some pilot studies where we find that (i) GPT-4 outperforms other LLMs (Bard, Vicuna, Koala, Alpaca, LLaMa, Dolly, OpenAssistant, StableLM), and (ii) prompting with a specific question (e.g., to identify errors) outperforms prompting to simply write a review. With these insights, we study the use of LLMs (specifically, GPT-4) for three tasks: 1. Identifying errors: We construct 13 short computer science papers each with a deliberately inserted error, and ask the LLM to check for the correctness of these papers. We observe that the LLM finds errors in 7 of them, spanning both mathematical and conceptual errors. 2. Verifying checklists: We task the LLM to verify 16 closed-ended checklist questions in the respective sections of 15 NeurIPS 2022 papers. We find that across 119 {checklist question, paper} pairs, the LLM had an 86.6% accuracy. 3. Choosing the "better" paper: We generate 10 pairs of abstracts, deliberately designing each pair in such a way that one abstract was clearly superior than the other. The LLM, however, struggled to discern these relatively straightforward distinctions accurately, committing errors in its evaluations for 6 out of the 10 pairs. Based on these experiments, we think that LLMs have a promising use as reviewing assistants for specific reviewing tasks, but not (yet) for complete evaluations of papers or proposals.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 1, 2023

HumanEval Pro and MBPP Pro: Evaluating Large Language Models on Self-invoking Code Generation

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024 3

Verifying the Verifiers: Unveiling Pitfalls and Potentials in Fact Verifiers

Fact verification is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM applications. In this study, we evaluate 12 pre-trained LLMs and one specialized fact-verifier, including frontier LLMs and open-weight reasoning LLMs, using a collection of examples from 14 fact-checking benchmarks. We share three findings intended to guide future development of more robust fact verifiers. First, we highlight the importance of addressing annotation errors and ambiguity in datasets, demonstrating that approximately 16\% of ambiguous or incorrectly labeled data substantially influences model rankings. Neglecting this issue may result in misleading conclusions during comparative evaluations, and we suggest using a systematic pipeline utilizing LLM-as-a-judge to help identify these issues at scale. Second, we discover that frontier LLMs with few-shot in-context examples, often overlooked in previous works, achieve top-tier performance. We therefore recommend future studies include comparisons with these simple yet highly effective baselines. Lastly, despite their effectiveness, frontier LLMs incur substantial costs, motivating the development of small, fine-tuned fact verifiers. We show that these small models still have room for improvement, particularly on instances that require complex reasoning. Encouragingly, we demonstrate that augmenting training with synthetic multi-hop reasoning data significantly enhances their capabilities in such instances. We release our code, model, and dataset at https://github.com/just1nseo/verifying-the-verifiers

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

Frustrated with Code Quality Issues? LLMs can Help!

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality issues. However, developers need to spend extra efforts to revise their code to improve code quality based on the tool findings. In this work, we investigate the use of (instruction-following) large language models (LLMs) to assist developers in revising code to resolve code quality issues. We present a tool, CORE (short for COde REvisions), architected using a pair of LLMs organized as a duo comprised of a proposer and a ranker. Providers of static analysis tools recommend ways to mitigate the tool warnings and developers follow them to revise their code. The proposer LLM of CORE takes the same set of recommendations and applies them to generate candidate code revisions. The candidates which pass the static quality checks are retained. However, the LLM may introduce subtle, unintended functionality changes which may go un-detected by the static analysis. The ranker LLM evaluates the changes made by the proposer using a rubric that closely follows the acceptance criteria that a developer would enforce. CORE uses the scores assigned by the ranker LLM to rank the candidate revisions before presenting them to the developer. CORE could revise 59.2% Python files (across 52 quality checks) so that they pass scrutiny by both a tool and a human reviewer. The ranker LLM is able to reduce false positives by 25.8% in these cases. CORE produced revisions that passed the static analysis tool in 76.8% Java files (across 10 quality checks) comparable to 78.3% of a specialized program repair tool, with significantly much less engineering efforts.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023

Vibe Checker: Aligning Code Evaluation with Human Preference

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed vibe coding, where users leverage LLMs to generate and iteratively refine code through natural language interactions until it passes their vibe check. Vibe check is tied to real-world human preference and goes beyond functionality: the solution should feel right, read cleanly, preserve intent, and remain correct. However, current code evaluation remains anchored to pass@k and captures only functional correctness, overlooking the non-functional instructions that users routinely apply. In this paper, we hypothesize that instruction following is the missing piece underlying vibe check that represents human preference in coding besides functional correctness. To quantify models' code instruction following capabilities with measurable signals, we present VeriCode, a taxonomy of 30 verifiable code instructions together with corresponding deterministic verifiers. We use the taxonomy to augment established evaluation suites, resulting in Vibe Checker, a testbed to assess both code instruction following and functional correctness. Upon evaluating 31 leading LLMs, we show that even the strongest models struggle to comply with multiple instructions and exhibit clear functional regression. Most importantly, a composite score of functional correctness and instruction following correlates the best with human preference, with the latter emerging as the primary differentiator on real-world programming tasks. Our work identifies core factors of the vibe check, providing a concrete path for benchmarking and developing models that better align with user preferences in coding.

deepmind Deepmind
·
Oct 8, 2025 2

ClawArena: Benchmarking AI Agents in Evolving Information Environments

AI agents deployed as persistent assistants must maintain correct beliefs as their information environment evolves. In practice, evidence is scattered across heterogeneous sources that often contradict one another, new information can invalidate earlier conclusions, and user preferences surface through corrections rather than explicit instructions. Existing benchmarks largely assume static, single-authority settings and do not evaluate whether agents can keep up with this complexity. We introduce ClawArena, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents in evolving information environments. Each scenario maintains a complete hidden ground truth while exposing the agent only to noisy, partial, and sometimes contradictory traces across multi-channel sessions, workspace files, and staged updates. Evaluation is organized around three coupled challenges: multi-source conflict reasoning, dynamic belief revision, and implicit personalization, whose interactions yield a 14-category question taxonomy. Two question formats, multi-choice (set-selection) and shell-based executable checks, test both reasoning and workspace grounding. The current release contains 64 scenarios across 8 professional domains, totaling 1{,}879 evaluation rounds and 365 dynamic updates. Experiments on five agent frameworks and five language models show that both model capability (15.4% range) and framework design (9.2%) substantially affect performance, that self-evolving skill frameworks can partially close model-capability gaps, and that belief revision difficulty is determined by update design strategy rather than the mere presence of updates. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/ClawArena.

ViFactCheck: A New Benchmark Dataset and Methods for Multi-domain News Fact-Checking in Vietnamese

The rapid spread of information in the digital age highlights the critical need for effective fact-checking tools, particularly for languages with limited resources, such as Vietnamese. In response to this challenge, we introduce ViFactCheck, the first publicly available benchmark dataset designed specifically for Vietnamese fact-checking across multiple online news domains. This dataset contains 7,232 human-annotated pairs of claim-evidence combinations sourced from reputable Vietnamese online news, covering 12 diverse topics. It has been subjected to a meticulous annotation process to ensure high quality and reliability, achieving a Fleiss Kappa inter-annotator agreement score of 0.83. Our evaluation leverages state-of-the-art pre-trained and large language models, employing fine-tuning and prompting techniques to assess performance. Notably, the Gemma model demonstrated superior effectiveness, with an impressive macro F1 score of 89.90%, thereby establishing a new standard for fact-checking benchmarks. This result highlights the robust capabilities of Gemma in accurately identifying and verifying facts in Vietnamese. To further promote advances in fact-checking technology and improve the reliability of digital media, we have made the ViFactCheck dataset, model checkpoints, fact-checking pipelines, and source code freely available on GitHub. This initiative aims to inspire further research and enhance the accuracy of information in low-resource languages.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

DeCon: Detecting Incorrect Assertions via Postconditions Generated by a Large Language Model

Recently, given the docstring for the target problem and the target function signature, large language models (LLMs) have been used not only to generate source code, but also to generate test cases, consisting of test inputs and assertions (e.g., in the form of checking an actual output against the expected output). However, as shown by our empirical study on assertions generated by four LLMs for the HumanEval benchmark, over 62% of the generated assertions are incorrect (i.e., failed on the ground-truth problem solution). To detect incorrect assertions (given the docstring and the target function signature along with a sample of example inputs and outputs), in this paper, we propose a new approach named DeCon to effectively detect incorrect assertions via LLM-generated postconditions for the target problem (a postcondition is a predicate that must always be true just after the execution of the ground-truth problem solution). Our approach requires a small set of I/O examples (i.e., a sample of example inputs and outputs) for the target problem (e.g., the I/O examples included in the docstring for a target problem in HumanEval). We use the given I/O examples to filter out those LLM-generated postconditions that are violated by at least one given I/O example. We then use the remaining postconditions to detect incorrect assertions as those assertions that violate at least one remaining postcondition. Experimental results show that DeCon can detect averagely more than 64% (63% and 65.5% detected by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, respectively) incorrect assertions generated by four state-of-the-art LLMs, and DeCon can also improve the effectiveness of these LLMs in code generation by 4% in terms of Pass@1. In addition, although DeCon might filter out correct assertions, the fault-finding ability of the remaining correct assertions decreases only slightly.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 5, 2025

Critique Ability of Large Language Models

Critical thinking is essential for rational decision-making and problem-solving. This skill hinges on the ability to provide precise and reasoned critiques and is a hallmark of human intelligence. In the era of large language models (LLMs), this study explores the ability of LLMs to deliver accurate critiques across various tasks. We are interested in this topic as a capable critic model could not only serve as a reliable evaluator, but also as a source of supervised signals for model tuning. Particularly, if a model can self-critique, it has the potential for autonomous self-improvement. To examine this, we introduce a unified evaluation framework for assessing the critique abilities of LLMs. We develop a benchmark called CriticBench, which comprises 3K high-quality natural language queries and corresponding model responses; and annotate the correctness of these responses. The benchmark cover tasks such as math problem-solving, code completion, and question answering. We evaluate multiple LLMs on the collected dataset and our analysis reveals several noteworthy insights: (1) Critique is generally challenging for most LLMs, and this capability often emerges only when models are sufficiently large. (2) In particular, self-critique is especially difficult. Even top-performing LLMs struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. (3) Models tend to have lower critique accuracy on problems where they are most uncertain. To this end, we introduce a simple yet effective baseline named self-check, which leverages self-critique to improve task performance for various models. We hope this study serves as an initial exploration into understanding the critique abilities of LLMs, and aims to inform future research, including the development of more proficient critic models and the application of critiques across diverse tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2023

Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, to mitigate hallucinations in CoT that are notoriously difficult to detect, current methods such as process reward models (PRMs) or self-consistency operate as opaque boxes and do not provide checkable evidence for their judgments, possibly limiting their effectiveness. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the idea that "the gold standard for supporting a mathematical claim is to provide a proof". We propose a retrospective, step-aware formal verification framework Safe. Rather than assigning arbitrary scores, we strive to articulate mathematical claims in formal mathematical language Lean 4 at each reasoning step and provide formal proofs to identify hallucinations. We evaluate our framework Safe across multiple language models and various mathematical datasets, demonstrating a significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. We also propose FormalStep as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first endeavor to utilize formal mathematical language Lean 4 for verifying natural language content generated by LLMs, aligning with the reason why formal mathematical languages were created in the first place: to provide a robust foundation for hallucination-prone human-written proofs.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Towards Neural Synthesis for SMT-Assisted Proof-Oriented Programming

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

  • 7 authors
·
May 2, 2024

Towards Automated Formal Verification of Backend Systems with LLMs

Software testing plays a critical role in ensuring that systems behave as intended. However, existing automated testing approaches struggle to match the capabilities of human engineers due to key limitations such as test locality, lack of general reliability, and business logic blindness. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages functional programming and type systems to translate Scala backend code into formal Lean representations. Our pipeline automatically generates theorems that specify the intended behavior of APIs and database operations, and uses LLM-based provers to verify them. When a theorem is proved, the corresponding logic is guaranteed to be correct and no further testing is needed. If the negation of a theorem is proved instead, it confirms a bug. In cases where neither can be proved, human intervention is required. We evaluate our method on realistic backend systems and find that it can formally verify over 50% of the test requirements, which suggests that half of a testing engineer's workload can be automated. Additionally, with an average cost of only $2.19 per API, LLM-based verification is significantly more cost-effective than manual testing and can be scaled easily through parallel execution. Our results indicate a promising direction for scalable, AI-powered software testing, with the potential to greatly improve engineering productivity as models continue to advance.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

RepoMasterEval: Evaluating Code Completion via Real-World Repositories

With the growing reliance on automated code completion tools in software development, the need for robust evaluation benchmarks has become critical. However, existing benchmarks focus more on code generation tasks in function and class level and provide rich text description to prompt the model. By contrast, such descriptive prompt is commonly unavailable in real development and code completion can occur in wider range of situations such as in the middle of a function or a code block. These limitations makes the evaluation poorly align with the practical scenarios of code completion tools. In this paper, we propose RepoMasterEval, a novel benchmark for evaluating code completion models constructed from real-world Python and TypeScript repositories. Each benchmark datum is generated by masking a code snippet (ground truth) from one source code file with existing test suites. To improve test accuracy of model generated code, we employ mutation testing to measure the effectiveness of the test cases and we manually crafted new test cases for those test suites with low mutation score. Our empirical evaluation on 6 state-of-the-art models shows that test argumentation is critical in improving the accuracy of the benchmark and RepoMasterEval is able to report difference in model performance in real-world scenarios. The deployment of RepoMasterEval in a collaborated company for one month also revealed that the benchmark is useful to give accurate feedback during model training and the score is in high correlation with the model's performance in practice. Based on our findings, we call for the software engineering community to build more LLM benchmarks tailored for code generation tools taking the practical and complex development environment into consideration.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

Don't Take the Premise for Granted: Evaluating the Premise Critique Ability of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the Premise Critique Ability for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs' reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the Premise Critique Bench (PCBench), designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs. Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to detect than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs' proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/Premise_Critique.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29, 2025

EHRCon: Dataset for Checking Consistency between Unstructured Notes and Structured Tables in Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are integral for storing comprehensive patient medical records, combining structured data (e.g., medications) with detailed clinical notes (e.g., physician notes). These elements are essential for straightforward data retrieval and provide deep, contextual insights into patient care. However, they often suffer from discrepancies due to unintuitive EHR system designs and human errors, posing serious risks to patient safety. To address this, we developed EHRCon, a new dataset and task specifically designed to ensure data consistency between structured tables and unstructured notes in EHRs. EHRCon was crafted in collaboration with healthcare professionals using the MIMIC-III EHR dataset, and includes manual annotations of 3,943 entities across 105 clinical notes checked against database entries for consistency. EHRCon has two versions, one using the original MIMIC-III schema, and another using the OMOP CDM schema, in order to increase its applicability and generalizability. Furthermore, leveraging the capabilities of large language models, we introduce CheckEHR, a novel framework for verifying the consistency between clinical notes and database tables. CheckEHR utilizes an eight-stage process and shows promising results in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. The code is available at https://github.com/dustn1259/EHRCon.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024 7

MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes

Several studies showed that Large Language Models (LLMs) can answer medical questions correctly, even outperforming the average human score in some medical exams. However, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted to assess the ability of language models to validate existing or generated medical text for correctness and consistency. In this paper, we introduce MEDEC (https://github.com/abachaa/MEDEC), the first publicly available benchmark for medical error detection and correction in clinical notes, covering five types of errors (Diagnosis, Management, Treatment, Pharmacotherapy, and Causal Organism). MEDEC consists of 3,848 clinical texts, including 488 clinical notes from three US hospital systems that were not previously seen by any LLM. The dataset has been used for the MEDIQA-CORR shared task to evaluate seventeen participating systems [Ben Abacha et al., 2024]. In this paper, we describe the data creation methods and we evaluate recent LLMs (e.g., o1-preview, GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) for the tasks of detecting and correcting medical errors requiring both medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We also conducted a comparative study where two medical doctors performed the same task on the MEDEC test set. The results showed that MEDEC is a sufficiently challenging benchmark to assess the ability of models to validate existing or generated notes and to correct medical errors. We also found that although recent LLMs have a good performance in error detection and correction, they are still outperformed by medical doctors in these tasks. We discuss the potential factors behind this gap, the insights from our experiments, the limitations of current evaluation metrics, and share potential pointers for future research.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 26, 2024

Benchmarking AI Models in Software Engineering: A Review, Search Tool, and Enhancement Protocol

Benchmarks are essential for consistent evaluation and reproducibility. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Software Engineering (AI4SE) has given rise to numerous benchmarks for tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, this surge presents challenges: (1) scattered benchmark knowledge across tasks, (2) difficulty in selecting relevant benchmarks, (3) the absence of a uniform standard for benchmark development, and (4) limitations of existing benchmarks. In this paper, we review 173 studies and identify 204 AI4SE benchmarks. We classify these benchmarks, analyze their limitations, and expose gaps in practices. Based on our review, we created BenchScout, a semantic search tool to find relevant benchmarks, using automated clustering of the contexts from associated studies. We conducted a user study with 22 participants to evaluate BenchScout's usability, effectiveness, and intuitiveness which resulted in average scores of 4.5, 4.0, and 4.1 out of 5. To advance benchmarking standards, we propose BenchFrame, a unified method to enhance benchmark quality. As a case study, we applied BenchFrame to the HumanEval benchmark and addressed its main limitations. This led to HumanEvalNext, featuring (1) corrected errors, (2) improved language conversion, (3) expanded test coverage, and (4) increased difficulty. We then evaluated ten state-of-the-art code language models on HumanEval, HumanEvalPlus, and HumanEvalNext. On HumanEvalNext, models showed a pass@1 score reduction of 31.22% and 19.94% compared to HumanEval and HumanEvalPlus, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025 2

Towards Comprehensive Stage-wise Benchmarking of Large Language Models in Fact-Checking

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world fact-checking systems, yet existing evaluations focus predominantly on claim verification and overlook the broader fact-checking workflow, including claim extraction and evidence retrieval. This narrow focus prevents current benchmarks from revealing systematic reasoning failures, factual blind spots, and robustness limitations of modern LLMs. To bridge this gap, we present FactArena, a fully automated arena-style evaluation framework that conducts comprehensive, stage-wise benchmarking of LLMs across the complete fact-checking pipeline. FactArena integrates three key components: (i) an LLM-driven fact-checking process that standardizes claim decomposition, evidence retrieval via tool-augmented interactions, and justification-based verdict prediction; (ii) an arena-styled judgment mechanism guided by consolidated reference guidelines to ensure unbiased and consistent pairwise comparisons across heterogeneous judge agents; and (iii) an arena-driven claim-evolution module that adaptively generates more challenging and semantically controlled claims to probe LLMs' factual robustness beyond fixed seed data. Across 16 state-of-the-art LLMs spanning seven model families, FactArena produces stable and interpretable rankings. Our analyses further reveal significant discrepancies between static claim-verification accuracy and end-to-end fact-checking competence, highlighting the necessity of holistic evaluation. The proposed framework offers a scalable and trustworthy paradigm for diagnosing LLMs' factual reasoning, guiding future model development, and advancing the reliable deployment of LLMs in safety-critical fact-checking applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 5 2

HLE-Verified: A Systematic Verification and Structured Revision of Humanity's Last Exam

Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) has become a widely used benchmark for evaluating frontier large language models on challenging, multi-domain questions. However, community-led analyses have raised concerns that HLE contains a non-trivial number of noisy items, which can bias evaluation results and distort cross-model comparisons. To address this challenge, we introduce HLE-Verified, a verified and revised version of HLE with a transparent verification protocol and fine-grained error taxonomy. Our construction follows a two-stage validation-and-repair workflow resulting in a certified benchmark. In Stage I, each item undergoes binary validation of the problem and final answer through domain-expert review and model-based cross-checks, yielding 641 verified items. In Stage II, flawed but fixable items are revised under strict constraints preserving the original evaluation intent, through dual independent expert repairs, model-assisted auditing, and final adjudication, resulting in 1,170 revised-and-certified items. The remaining 689 items are released as a documented uncertain set with explicit uncertainty sources and expertise tags for future refinement. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art language models on HLE and HLE-Verified, observing an average absolute accuracy gain of 7--10 percentage points on HLE-Verified. The improvement is particularly pronounced on items where the original problem statement and/or reference answer is erroneous, with gains of 30--40 percentage points. Our analyses further reveal a strong association between model confidence and the presence of errors in the problem statement or reference answer, supporting the effectiveness of our revisions. Overall, HLE-Verified improves HLE-style evaluations by reducing annotation noise and enabling more faithful measurement of model capabilities. Data is available at: https://github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/HLE-Verified

skylenage-ai Skylenage
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Feb 14 3

The Specification as Quality Gate: Three Hypotheses on AI-Assisted Code Review

The dominant industry response to AI-generated code quality problems is to deploy AI reviewers. This paper argues that this response is structurally circular when executable specifications are absent: without an external reference, both the generating agent and the reviewing agent reason from the same artefact, share the same training distribution, and exhibit correlated failures. The review checks code against itself, not against intent. Three hypotheses are developed. First, that correlated errors in homogeneous LLM pipelines echo rather than cancel, a claim supported by convergent empirical evidence from multiple 2025-2026 studies and by three small contrived experiments reported here. The first two experiments are same-family (Claude reviewing Claude-generated code); the third extends to a cross-family panel of four models from three families. All use a planted bug corpus rather than a natural defect sample; they are directional evidence, not a controlled demonstration. Second, that executable specifications perform a domain transition in the Cynefin sense, converting enabling constraints into governing constraints and moving the problem from the complex domain to the complicated domain, a transition that AI makes economically viable at scale. Third, that the defect classes lying outside the reach of executable specifications form a well-defined residual, which is the legitimate and bounded target for AI review. The combined argument implies an architecture: specifications first, deterministic verification pipeline second, AI review only for the structural and architectural residual. This is not a claim that AI review is valueless. It is a claim about what it is actually for, and about what happens when it is deployed without the foundation that makes it non-circular.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 25