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The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models&#39; abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models.

ACL 2024

SceMQA: A Scientific College Entrance Level Multimodal Question Answering Benchmark

multimodel benchmark

llms

scientific reasoning

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models' abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Extending large language models (LLMs) to process longer inputs is crucial for numerous applications. However, the considerable computational cost of transformers, coupled with limited generalization of positional encoding, restricts the size of their context window. We introduce Cross-Attention to Parallel Encodings (CAPE), a framework that can be applied to any existing decoder-only LLMs for context expansion. CAPE leverages a small encoder to process a long input chunk by chunk and enables the frozen decoder to cross-attend to the additional contexts. CAPE is efficient, generalizable, and versatile: trained with 8K-token documents, CAPE extends the context window of LLaMA-2 to 128K tokens, offering $10\times$ of the throughput with only 1/6 of the memory. CAPE yields strong performance on language modeling and in-context learning. CAPE also excels in retrieval-augmented applications, while existing long-context models degenerate with retrieved contexts. We further introduce a CAPE variant that can extend the context window of instruction-tuned models with only unlabeled data, and showcase its effectiveness on LLaMA-2-Chat, leading to a strong instruction-following model that can leverage very long context on downstream tasks.

Long-Context Language Modeling with Parallel Context Encoding

Machine learning models have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to examples from unseen domains. This study focuses on a specific problem of domain generalization, where a model is trained on one source domain and tested on multiple target domains that are unseen during training. We propose IMO: Invariant features Masks for Out-of-Distribution text classification, to achieve OOD generalization by learning invariant features. During training, IMO would learn sparse mask layers to remove irrelevant features for prediction, where the remaining features keep invariant. Additionally, IMO has an attention module at the token level to focus on tokens that are useful for prediction. Our comprehensive experiments show that IMO substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of various evaluation metrics and settings.

IMO: Greedy Layer-Wise Sparse Representation Learning for Out-of-Distribution Text Classification with Pre-trained Models

In this work, we present the largest benchmark to date on linguistic acceptability: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability---MELA, with 46K samples covering 10 languages from a diverse set of language families. We establish LLM baselines on this benchmark, and investigate cross-lingual transfer in acceptability judgements with XLM-R. In pursuit of multilingual interpretability, we conduct probing experiments with fine-tuned XLM-R to explore the process of syntax capability acquisition. Our results show that GPT-4o exhibits a strong multilingual ability, outperforming fine-tuned XLM-R, while open-source multilingual models lag behind by a noticeable gap. Cross-lingual transfer experiments show that transfer in acceptability judgment is non-trivial: 500 Icelandic fine-tuning examples lead to 23 MCC performance in a completely unrelated language---Chinese. Results of our probing experiments indicate that training on MELA improves the performance of XLM-R on syntax-related tasks.

MELA: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability

The current charge prediction datasets mostly focus on single-defendant criminal cases.
However, real-world criminal cases usually involve multiple defendants whose criminal facts are intertwined. 
In an early attempt to fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark that encompasses legal cases involving multiple defendants, where each defendant is labeled with a charge and four types of crime elements, \emph{i.e.,} \textit{Object Element}, \textit{Objective Element}, \textit{Subject Element}, and \textit{Subjective Element}. 
Based on the dataset, we further develop an interpretable model called EJudge that incorporates crime elements and legal rules to infer charges. We observe that predicting crime charges while providing corresponding rationales benefits the interpretable AI system. Extensive experiments show that EJudge significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods, which verify the importance of crime elements and legal rules in multi-defendant charge prediction. The source code and dataset are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCP_1-6010}.

Through the MUD: A Multi-Defendant Charge Prediction Benchmark with Linked Crime Elements

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) is increasing the demand for methods that detect machine-generated text to prevent misuse. The goal of our study is to stress test the detectors’ robustness to malicious attacks under realistic scenarios. We comprehensively study the robustness of popular machine-generated text detectors under attacks from diverse categories: editing, paraphrasing, co-generating, and prompting. Our attacks assume limited access to the generator LLMs, and we compare the performance of detectors on different attacks under different budget levels. Our experiments reveal that almost none of the existing detectors remain robust under all the attacks, and all detectors exhibit different loopholes. Averaging all detectors, the performance drops by 35% across all attacks. Further, we investigate the reasons behind these defects and propose initial out-of-the-box patches.

Stumbling Blocks: Stress Testing the Robustness of Machine-Generated Text Detectors Under Attacks

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, there are increasing debates regarding whether these models truly understand and apply mathematical knowledge or merely rely on shortcuts for mathematical reasoning. One essential and frequently occurring evidence is that when the math questions are slightly changed, LLMs can behave incorrectly. This motivates us to evaluate the robustness of LLMs' math reasoning capability by testing a wide range of question variations. We introduce the adversarial grade school math (GSM-Plus) dataset, an extension of GSM8K augmented with various mathematical perturbations. Our experiments on 25 LLMs and 4 prompting techniques show that while LLMs exhibit different levels of math reasoning abilities, their performances are far from robust. In particular, even for problems that have been solved in GSM8K, LLMs can make mistakes when new statements are added or the question targets are altered. We also explore whether more robust performance can be achieved by composing existing prompting methods, in which we try an iterative method that generates and verifies each intermediate thought based on its reasoning goal and calculation result.

GSM-Plus: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs as Mathematical Problem Solvers

This paper investigates using knowledge editing techniques to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs). We construct a benchmark, SafeEdit, which covers nine unsafe categories with various powerful attack prompts and equips comprehensive metrics for systematic evaluation. We conduct experiments with several knowledge editing approaches, indicating that knowledge editing has the potential to efficiently detoxify LLMs with limited impact on general performance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, dubbed Detoxifying with Intraoperative Neural Monitoring (DINM), to diminish the toxicity of LLMs within a few tuning steps via only one instance. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the internal mechanism for various detoxifying approaches, demonstrating that previous methods like SFT and DPO may merely suppress the activations of toxic parameters, while DINM mitigates the toxicity of the toxic parameters to a certain extent, making permanent adjustments. We hope that these insights could shed light on future work of developing detoxifying approaches and the underlying knowledge mechanisms of LLMs.

Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance for many language tasks, most of them can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. Recent works have proposed methods to improve LLMs' long context capabilities by extending context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms. However, comprehensive benchmarks tailored for evaluating long context understanding are lacking. In this paper, we introduce LongBench, the first bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding, enabling a more rigorous evaluation of long context understanding. LongBench comprises 21 datasets across 6 task categories in both English and Chinese, with an average length of 6,711 words (English) and 13,386 characters (Chinese). These tasks cover key long-text application areas including single-doc QA, multi-doc QA, summarization, few-shot learning, synthetic tasks, and code completion. All datasets in LongBench are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Upon comprehensive evaluation of 8 LLMs on LongBench, we find that: (1) Commercial model (GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k) outperforms other open-sourced models, but still struggles on longer contexts. (2) Scaled position embedding and fine-tuning on longer sequences lead to substantial improvement on long context understanding. (3) Context compression technique such as retrieval brings improvement for model with weak ability on long contexts, but the performance still lags behind models that have strong long context understanding capability.

LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding

Despite significant strides in multimodal tasks, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are plagued by the critical issue of hallucination. The reliable detection of such hallucinations in MLLMs has, therefore, become a vital aspect of model evaluation and the safeguarding of practical application deployment. Prior research in this domain has been constrained by a narrow focus on singular tasks, an inadequate range of hallucination categories addressed, and a lack of detailed granularity. In response to these challenges, our work expands the investigative horizons of hallucination detection. We present a novel meta-evaluation benchmark, MHaluBench, meticulously crafted to facilitate the evaluation of advancements in hallucination detection methods. Additionally, we unveil a novel unified multimodal hallucination detection framework, UNIHD, which leverages a suite of auxiliary tools to validate the occurrence of hallucinations robustly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UNIHD through meticulous evaluation and comprehensive analysis. We also provide strategic insights on the application of specific tools for addressing various categories of hallucinations.

Unified Hallucination Detection for Multimodal Large Language Models

In the real world, knowledge is constantly evolving, which can render existing knowledge-based datasets outdated. This unreliability highlights the critical need for continuous updates to ensure both accuracy and relevance in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this, we propose GrowOVER-QA and GrowOVER-Dialogue, dynamic open-domain QA and dialogue benchmarks that undergo a continuous cycle of updates, keeping pace with the rapid evolution of knowledge. Our research indicates that retrieval-augmented language models (RaLMs) struggle with knowledge that has not been trained on or recently updated. Consequently, we introduce a novel retrieval-interactive language model framework, where the language model evaluates and reflects on its answers for further re-retrieval. Our exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our training-free framework significantly improves upon existing methods, performing comparably to or even surpassing continuously trained language models.

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Long-Context Language Modeling with Parallel Context Encoding

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