Daily Papers

Existing on-device AI architectures for resource-constrained environments face two critical limitations: they lack compactness, with parameter requirements scaling proportionally to task complexity, and they exhibit poor generalizability, performing effectively only on specific application domains (e.g., models designed for regression tasks cannot adapt to natural language processing (NLP) applications). In this paper, we propose CURA, an architecture inspired by analog audio signal processing circuits that provides a compact and lightweight solution for diverse machine learning tasks across multiple domains. Our architecture offers three key advantages over existing approaches: (1) Compactness: it requires significantly fewer parameters regardless of task complexity; (2) Generalizability: it adapts seamlessly across regression, classification, complex NLP, and computer vision tasks; and (3) Complex pattern recognition: it can capture intricate data patterns while maintaining extremely low model complexity. We evaluated CURA across diverse datasets and domains. For compactness, it achieved equivalent accuracy using up to 2,500 times fewer parameters compared to baseline models. For generalizability, it demonstrated consistent performance across four NLP benchmarks and one computer vision dataset, nearly matching specialized existing models (achieving F1-scores up to 90%). Lastly, it delivers superior forecasting accuracy for complex patterns, achieving 1.6 times lower mean absolute error and 2.1 times lower mean squared error than competing models.

Healthcare AI agents handle patient consultation, clinical reasoning over text and images, interactive diagnosis, and electronic health record (EHR) tool use, yet specialized agentic models that cover these use cases together remain limited. These capabilities fail in different ways, and a narrow update for one task can degrade another. We present Cura 1T, a healthcare-specialized LLM built on the open-weight Kimi-K2.6 and trained through a human-gated recursive self-improvement (RSI) loop. Specifically, in each round, the RSI harness plans a target capability, trains the model, evaluates benchmark trajectories, and refines the data mixture from observed failures with targeted synthetic and curated examples rather than a single generic medical-data update. Across the healthcare evaluation suite, Cura 1T ranks at or near the top among frontier baselines while remaining competitive on out-of-domain reasoning and agentic benchmarks.

Large vision-language models are generally applicable to many downstream tasks, but come at an exorbitant training cost that only large institutions can afford. This paper trades generality for efficiency and presents Curation in Training (CiT), a simple and efficient vision-text learning algorithm that couples a data objective into training. CiT automatically yields quality data to speed-up contrastive image-text training and alleviates the need for an offline data filtering pipeline, allowing broad data sources (including raw image-text pairs from the web). CiT contains two loops: an outer loop curating the training data and an inner loop consuming the curated training data. The text encoder connects the two loops. Given metadata for tasks of interest, e.g., class names, and a large pool of image-text pairs, CiT alternatively selects relevant training data from the pool by measuring the similarity of their text embeddings and embeddings of the metadata. In our experiments, we observe that CiT can speed up training by over an order of magnitude, especially if the raw data size is large.

This paper addresses the challenges of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values via preference learning (PL), with a focus on the issues of incomplete and corrupted data in preference datasets. We propose a novel method for robustly and completely recalibrating values within these datasets to enhance LLMs resilience against the issues. In particular, we devise a guaranteed polynomial time ranking algorithm that robustifies several existing models, such as the classic Bradley--Terry--Luce (BTL) (Bradley and Terry, 1952) model and certain generalizations of it. To the best of our knowledge, our present work is the first to propose an algorithm that provably recovers an {\epsilon}-optimal ranking with high probability while allowing as large as O(n) perturbed pairwise comparison results per model response. Furthermore, we show robust recovery results in the partially observed setting. Our experiments confirm that our algorithms handle adversarial noise and unobserved comparisons well in both general and LLM preference dataset settings. This work contributes to the development and scaling of more reliable and ethically aligned AI models by equipping the dataset curation pipeline with the ability to handle missing and maliciously manipulated inputs.

The development of robust AI models relies heavily on the quality and variety of training data available. In fields where data scarcity is prevalent, synthetic data generation offers a vital solution. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to creating synthetic datasets, grounded in real-world diversity and enriched through strategic diversification. We synthesize data using a comprehensive collection of news articles spanning 12 languages and originating from 125 countries, to ensure a breadth of linguistic and cultural representations. Through enforced topic diversification, translation, and summarization, the resulting dataset accurately mirrors real-world complexities and addresses the issue of underrepresentation in traditional datasets. This methodology, applied initially to Named Entity Recognition (NER), serves as a model for numerous AI disciplines where data diversification is critical for generalizability. Preliminary results demonstrate substantial improvements in performance on traditional NER benchmarks, by up to 7.3%, highlighting the effectiveness of our synthetic data in mimicking the rich, varied nuances of global data sources. This paper outlines the strategies employed for synthesizing diverse datasets and provides such a curated dataset for NER.

Vector databases have emerged as key enablers for bridging intelligent applications with unstructured data, providing generic search and management support for embedding vectors extracted from the raw unstructured data. As multiple data users can share the same database infrastructure, multi-tenancy support for vector databases is increasingly desirable. This hinges on an efficient filtered search operation, i.e., only querying the vectors accessible to a particular tenant. Multi-tenancy in vector databases is currently achieved by building either a single, shared index among all tenants, or a per-tenant index. The former optimizes for memory efficiency at the expense of search performance, while the latter does the opposite. Instead, this paper presents Curator, an in-memory vector index design tailored for multi-tenant queries that simultaneously achieves the two conflicting goals, low memory overhead and high performance for queries, vector insertion, and deletion. Curator indexes each tenant's vectors with a tenant-specific clustering tree and encodes these trees compactly as sub-trees of a shared clustering tree. Each tenant's clustering tree adapts dynamically to its unique vector distribution, while maintaining a low per-tenant memory footprint. Our evaluation, based on two widely used data sets, confirms that Curator delivers search performance on par with per-tenant indexing, while maintaining memory consumption at the same level as metadata filtering on a single, shared index.

Performance bugs challenge software development, degrading performance and wasting computational resources. Software developers invest substantial effort in addressing these issues. Curating these performance bugs can offer valuable insights to the software engineering research community, aiding in developing new mitigation strategies. However, there is no large-scale open-source performance bugs dataset available. To bridge this gap, we propose PerfCurator, a repository miner that collects performance bug-related commits at scale. PerfCurator employs PcBERT-KD, a 125M parameter BERT model trained to classify performance bug-related commits. Our evaluation shows PcBERT-KD achieves accuracy comparable to 7 billion parameter LLMs but with significantly lower computational overhead, enabling cost-effective deployment on CPU clusters. Utilizing PcBERT-KD as the core component, we deployed PerfCurator on a 50-node CPU cluster to mine GitHub repositories. This extensive mining operation resulted in the construction of a large-scale dataset comprising 114K performance bug-fix commits in Python, 217.9K in C++, and 76.6K in Java. Our results demonstrate that this large-scale dataset significantly enhances the effectiveness of data-driven performance bug detection systems.

Large language models (LLMs) and high-capacity encoders have advanced zero and few-shot classification, but their inference cost and latency limit practical deployment. We propose training lightweight text classifiers using dynamically generated supervision from an LLM. Our method employs an iterative, agentic loop in which the LLM curates training data, analyzes model successes and failures, and synthesizes targeted examples to address observed errors. This closed-loop generation and evaluation process progressively improves data quality and adapts it to the downstream classifier and task. Across four widely used benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms standard zero and few-shot baselines. These results indicate that LLMs can serve effectively as data curators, enabling accurate and efficient classification without the operational cost of large-model deployment.

The inability to filter out in advance all potentially problematic data from the pre-training of large language models has given rise to the need for methods for unlearning specific pieces of knowledge after training. Existing techniques overlook the need for continuous and immediate action, causing them to suffer from degraded utility as updates accumulate and protracted exposure of sensitive information. To address these issues, we propose Continual Unlearning in Real Time with Ensured Preservation of LLM Knowledge (CURaTE). Our method begins by training a sentence embedding model on a dataset designed to enable the formation of sharp decision boundaries for determining whether a given input prompt corresponds to any stored forget requests. The similarity of a given input to the forget requests is then used to determine whether to answer or return a refusal response. We show that even with such a simple approach, not only does CURaTE achieve more effective forgetting than existing methods, but by avoiding modification of the language model parameters, it also maintains near perfect knowledge preservation over any number of updates and is the only method capable of continual unlearning in real-time.

Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce *Curation-Bench*, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents command-line access to inspect data, implement policies, submit them to a fixed training/evaluation pipeline, and revise. In a vision-language instruction-tuning instantiation, out-of-the-box agents reach strong published data-selection baselines within ten iterations. However, trajectory analysis reveals a persistent *execution-research gap*: agents mainly tune local policy variants rather than explore new policy families, even when given strategy guides and paper references. Scaffolds requiring each iteration to cite, instantiate, and adapt a prior method shift agents toward method-guided exploration. The scaffolded agent autonomously composes -- without human design input -- a data-selection policy that outperforms strong published baselines at one-tenth their data budget. Overall, current agents can run the curation loop, but reliable data research requires scaffolded method adaptation, not open-ended prompting alone. Code and benchmark are open-sourced.

Recursive retraining of generative models poses a critical representation challenge: when synthetic outputs are curated based on a fixed reward signal, the model tends to collapse onto a narrow set of outputs that over-optimize that objective. Prior work suggests that such collapse is unavoidable without adding real data into the mix. We revisit this conclusion from an alignment perspective and show that collapse can be mitigated through curation based on multiple reward functions. We formalize the dynamics of recursive training under heterogeneous preferences and prove that, under certain conditions, the model converges to a stable distribution that allocates probability mass across competing high-reward regions. The limiting distribution preserves diversity and provably satisfies a weighted Nash bargaining solution, offering a formal interpretation of value aggregation in synthetic retraining loops.

Large language model (LLM) agents require post-training methods that can improve long-horizon decision making from environment feedback. However, existing agentic post-training pipelines often treat data curation as a fixed preprocessing step, focusing mainly on data augmentation while neglecting filtering, refinement, and adaptation to downstream failures. We propose CurateEvo, a failure-driven dynamic evolution framework for agentic post-training data curation. CurateEvo represents the curation strategy as executable code and iteratively rewrites it using failed trajectories from a held-out development set. At each epoch, the evolved strategy transforms a fixed raw corpus into supervised fine-tuning data, reinforcement learning data, and an inference-time memory bank. The evolution process first improves effectiveness by diagnosing recurring failure modes and augmenting, filtering, or refining data accordingly, and then improves efficiency by pruning redundant or low-utility training turns under a cost-aware objective. Experiments on ACEBench-Agent, BFCL-V4, and τ^2-Bench under both labeled and wild-data settings show that CurateEvo consistently outperforms prior curation methods, improving average scores by 3.2 and 2.7 points, respectively. Further analyses demonstrate that CurateEvo is compatible with different post-training recipes and substantially reduces curation overhead.

Discharge summaries require extracting critical information from lengthy electronic health records (EHRs), a process that is labor-intensive when performed manually. Large language models (LLMs) can improve generation efficiency; however, they are prone to producing faithfulness hallucinations, statements that contradict source records, posing direct risks to patient safety. To address this, we present CuraView, a multi-agent framework for sentence-level detection and evidence-grounded explanation of faithfulness hallucinations in discharge summaries. CuraView constructs a GraphRAG-based knowledge graph from patient-level EHRs and implements a closed-loop generation-detection pipeline with sentence-level evidence retrieval and classification spanning four evidence grades from strong support to direct contradiction (E1-E4), yielding structured and interpretable evidence chains. We evaluate CuraView on a subset of 250 patients from the Discharge-Me benchmark, with 50 patients held out for testing. Our fine-tuned Qwen3-14B detection model achieves an F1 of 0.831 on the safety-critical E4 metric (90.9% recall, 76.5% precision) and an F1 of 0.823 on E3+E4, representing a 50.0% relative improvement over the base model and outperforming RAGTruth-style and QAGS-style baselines. These results demonstrate that evidence-chain-based graph retrieval verification substantially improves the factual reliability of clinical documentation, while simultaneously producing reusable annotated datasets for downstream model training and distillation.

Data curation is a critical part of post-training pipelines for large language models, yet existing tools often treat ingestion, deduplication, synthetic generation, and quality filtering as separate stages. This fragmentation makes it difficult to audit pipeline decisions or understand why individual samples are rejected. CuratorKIT is an open-source Python library that covers this full lifecycle in a single configurable pipeline. The framework is composed of six source format readers and automatic schema detection, a pre-generation data hygiene layer for credentials, PII, and toxic content, eight LLM-powered generation tasks, three complementary quality gates with provenance-exact hallucination verification, structured adaptive recovery, and five training-ready export formats compatible with TRL, Unsloth, and AlignTune. Every pipeline decision is recorded in an append-only per-sample provenance chain, and rejected samples carry structured failure reasons rather than being silently discarded. CuratorKIT supports 100+ LLM providers through LiteLLM, exposes both a Python API and a YAML-driven CLI, and is designed for practitioners who need reproducible, auditable data pipelines at scale .

Many robot demonstration datasets contain heterogeneous demonstrations of varying quality. This heterogeneity may benefit policy pre-training, but can hinder robot performance when used with a final imitation learning objective. In particular, some strategies in the data may be less reliable than others or may be underrepresented in the data, leading to poor performance when such strategies are sampled at test time. Moreover, such unreliable or underrepresented strategies can be difficult even for people to discern, and sifting through demonstration datasets is time-consuming and costly. On the other hand, policy performance when trained on such demonstrations can reflect the reliability of different strategies. We thus propose for robots to self-curate based on online robot experience (Demo-SCORE). More specifically, we train and cross-validate a classifier to discern successful policy roll-outs from unsuccessful ones and use the classifier to filter heterogeneous demonstration datasets. Our experiments in simulation and the real world show that Demo-SCORE can effectively identify suboptimal demonstrations without manual curation. Notably, Demo-SCORE achieves over 15-35% higher absolute success rate in the resulting policy compared to the base policy trained with all original demonstrations.

Large language models are commonly trained on a mixture of filtered web data and curated high-quality corpora, such as social media conversations, books, or technical papers. This curation process is believed to be necessary to produce performant models with broad zero-shot generalization abilities. However, as larger models requiring pretraining on trillions of tokens are considered, it is unclear how scalable is curation and whether we will run out of unique high-quality data soon. At variance with previous beliefs, we show that properly filtered and deduplicated web data alone can lead to powerful models; even significantly outperforming models from the state-of-the-art trained on The Pile. Despite extensive filtering, the high-quality data we extract from the web is still plentiful, and we are able to obtain five trillion tokens from CommonCrawl. We publicly release an extract of 600 billion tokens from our RefinedWeb dataset, and 1.3/7.5B parameters language models trained on it.

Data curation is a wide-ranging area which contains many critical but time-consuming data processing tasks. However, the diversity of such tasks makes it challenging to develop a general-purpose data curation system. To address this issue, we present Lingua Manga, a user-friendly and versatile system that utilizes pre-trained large language models. Lingua Manga offers automatic optimization for achieving high performance and label efficiency while facilitating flexible and rapid development. Through three example applications with distinct objectives and users of varying levels of technical proficiency, we demonstrate that Lingua Manga can effectively assist both skilled programmers and low-code or even no-code users in addressing data curation challenges.

Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.

In the realm of large language models (LLMs), enhancing instruction-following capability often involves curating expansive training data. This is achieved through two primary schemes: i) Scaling-Inputs: Amplifying (input, output) pairs per task instruction, aiming for better instruction adherence. ii) Scaling Input-Free Tasks: Enlarging tasks, each composed of an (instruction, output) pair (without requiring a separate input anymore). However, LLMs under Scaling-Inputs tend to be overly sensitive to inputs, leading to misinterpretation or non-compliance with instructions. Conversely, Scaling Input-Free Tasks demands a substantial number of tasks but is less effective in instruction following when dealing with instances in Scaling-Inputs. This work introduces MUFFIN, a new scheme of instruction-following dataset curation. Specifically, we automatically Scale Tasks per Input by diversifying these tasks with various input facets. Experimental results across four zero-shot benchmarks, spanning both Scaling-Inputs and Scaling Input-Free Tasks schemes, reveal that LLMs, at various scales, trained on MUFFIN generally demonstrate superior instruction-following capabilities compared to those trained on the two aforementioned schemes.

Data curation is an essential component of large-scale pretraining. In this work, we demonstrate that jointly selecting batches of data is more effective for learning than selecting examples independently. Multimodal contrastive objectives expose the dependencies between data and thus naturally yield criteria for measuring the joint learnability of a batch. We derive a simple and tractable algorithm for selecting such batches, which significantly accelerate training beyond individually-prioritized data points. As performance improves by selecting from larger super-batches, we also leverage recent advances in model approximation to reduce the associated computational overhead. As a result, our approach--multimodal contrastive learning with joint example selection (JEST)--surpasses state-of-the-art models with up to 13times fewer iterations and 10times less computation. Essential to the performance of JEST is the ability to steer the data selection process towards the distribution of smaller, well-curated datasets via pretrained reference models, exposing the level of data curation as a new dimension for neural scaling laws.

Image captioning models are typically trained by treating all samples equally, neglecting to account for mismatched or otherwise difficult data points. In contrast, recent work has shown the effectiveness of training models by scheduling the data using curriculum learning strategies. This paper contributes to this direction by actively curating difficult samples in datasets without increasing the total number of samples. We explore the effect of using three data curation methods within the training process: complete removal of an sample, caption replacement, or image replacement via a text-to-image generation model. Experiments on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets with the BLIP and BEiT-3 models demonstrate that these curation methods do indeed yield improved image captioning models, underscoring their efficacy.

Data curation is the problem of how to collect and organize samples into a dataset that supports efficient learning. Despite the centrality of the task, little work has been devoted towards a large-scale, systematic comparison of various curation methods. In this work, we take steps towards a formal evaluation of data curation strategies and introduce SELECT, the first large-scale benchmark of curation strategies for image classification. In order to generate baseline methods for the SELECT benchmark, we create a new dataset, ImageNet++, which constitutes the largest superset of ImageNet-1K to date. Our dataset extends ImageNet with 5 new training-data shifts, each approximately the size of ImageNet-1K itself, and each assembled using a distinct curation strategy. We evaluate our data curation baselines in two ways: (i) using each training-data shift to train identical image classification models from scratch (ii) using the data itself to fit a pretrained self-supervised representation. Our findings show interesting trends, particularly pertaining to recent methods for data curation such as synthetic data generation and lookup based on CLIP embeddings. We show that although these strategies are highly competitive for certain tasks, the curation strategy used to assemble the original ImageNet-1K dataset remains the gold standard. We anticipate that our benchmark can illuminate the path for new methods to further reduce the gap. We release our checkpoints, code, documentation, and a link to our dataset at https://github.com/jimmyxu123/SELECT.

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on high-quality, meticulously curated datasets is widely recognized as critical for enhancing their performance and generalization capabilities. This study explores the untapped potential of Common Crawl as a comprehensive and flexible resource for pre-training LLMs, addressing both general-purpose language understanding and specialized domain knowledge. We introduce RedStone, an innovative and scalable pipeline engineered to extract and process data from Common Crawl, facilitating the creation of extensive and varied pre-training datasets. Unlike traditional datasets, which often require expensive curation and domain-specific expertise, RedStone leverages the breadth of Common Crawl to deliver datasets tailored to a wide array of domains. In this work, we exemplify its capability by constructing pre-training datasets across multiple fields, including general language understanding, code, mathematics, and question-answering tasks. The flexibility of RedStone allows for easy adaptation to other specialized domains, significantly lowering the barrier to creating valuable domain-specific datasets. Our findings demonstrate that Common Crawl, when harnessed through effective pipelines like RedStone, can serve as a rich, renewable source of pre-training data, unlocking new avenues for domain adaptation and knowledge discovery in LLMs. This work also underscores the importance of innovative data acquisition strategies and highlights the role of web-scale data as a powerful resource in the continued evolution of LLMs. RedStone code and data samples will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/redstone.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to address some issues within the semiconductor industry. However, they are often general-purpose models that lack the specialized knowledge needed to tackle the unique challenges of this sector, such as the intricate physics and chemistry of semiconductor devices and processes. SemiKong, the first industry-specific LLM for the semiconductor domain, provides a foundation that can be used to develop tailored proprietary models. With SemiKong 1.0, we aim to develop a foundational model capable of understanding etching problems at an expert level. Our key contributions include (a) curating a comprehensive corpus of semiconductor-related texts, (b) creating a foundational model with in-depth semiconductor knowledge, and (c) introducing a framework for integrating expert knowledge, thereby advancing the evaluation process of domain-specific AI models. Through fine-tuning a pre-trained LLM using our curated dataset, we have shown that SemiKong outperforms larger, general-purpose LLMs in various semiconductor manufacturing and design tasks. Our extensive experiments underscore the importance of developing domain-specific LLMs as a foundation for company- or tool-specific proprietary models, paving the way for further research and applications in the semiconductor domain. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/aitomatic/semikong

This paper presents Objaverse++, a curated subset of Objaverse enhanced with detailed attribute annotations by human experts. Recent advances in 3D content generation have been driven by large-scale datasets such as Objaverse, which contains over 800,000 3D objects collected from the Internet. Although Objaverse represents the largest available 3D asset collection, its utility is limited by the predominance of low-quality models. To address this limitation, we manually annotate 10,000 3D objects with detailed attributes, including aesthetic quality scores, texture color classifications, multi-object composition flags, transparency characteristics, etc. Then, we trained a neural network capable of annotating the tags for the rest of the Objaverse dataset. Through experiments and a user study on generation results, we demonstrate that models pre-trained on our quality-focused subset achieve better performance than those trained on the larger dataset of Objaverse in image-to-3D generation tasks. In addition, by comparing multiple subsets of training data filtered by our tags, our results show that the higher the data quality, the faster the training loss converges. These findings suggest that careful curation and rich annotation can compensate for the raw dataset size, potentially offering a more efficient path to develop 3D generative models. We release our enhanced dataset of approximately 500,000 curated 3D models to facilitate further research on various downstream tasks in 3D computer vision. In the near future, we aim to extend our annotations to cover the entire Objaverse dataset.

Multimodal information retrieval (MIR) faces inherent challenges due to the heterogeneity of data sources and the complexity of cross-modal alignment. While previous studies have identified modal gaps in feature spaces, a systematic approach to address these challenges remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce UNITE, a universal framework that tackles these challenges through two critical yet underexplored aspects: data curation and modality-aware training configurations. Our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of how modality-specific data properties influence downstream task performance across diverse scenarios. Moreover, we propose Modal-Aware Masked Contrastive Learning (MAMCL) to mitigate the competitive relationships among the instances of different modalities. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal retrieval benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by notable margins. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that strategic modality curation and tailored training protocols are pivotal for robust cross-modal representation learning. This work not only advances MIR performance but also provides a foundational blueprint for future research in multimodal systems. Our project is available at https://friedrichor.github.io/projects/UNITE.

On-device virtual assistants like Siri and Google Assistant are increasingly pivotal, yet their capabilities are hamstrung by a reliance on rigid, developer-dependent APIs. GUI agents offer a powerful, API-independent alternative, but their adoption is hindered by the perception of poor performance, as even the best models (e.g. Qwen3-VL-235B) scores are capped at around 60% on benchmarks like AndroidControl, far from viability for real-world use. Our research reveals that issue lies not only with the models but with the benchmarks themselves. We identified notable shortcomings in AndroidControl, including ambiguities and factual errors, which systematically underrates agent capabilities. To address this critical oversight, we enhanced AndroidControl into AndroidControl-Curated, a refined version of the benchmark improved through a rigorous purification pipeline. On this enhanced benchmark, state-of-the-art models achieve success rates nearing 75% on complex tasks (15% improvement), reflecting that on-device GUI agents are actually closer to practical deployment than previously thought. We introduce our new SOTA model, Magma-R1- 3B, post-trained on just 2.4k curated samples using 60 hours of an H20 GPU (approximately $60). Despite being 200 times smaller in parameters, this model delivers performance comparable to Qwen3- VL-235B. We release both AndroidControl-Curated benchmark and Magma-R1 model to the research community, encouraging adoption of this enhanced benchmark to better reflect model capabilities and accelerate the development of robust, on-device virtual assistants.

We study data curation for multimodal reasoning through the NeurIPS 2025 Data Curation for Vision-Language Reasoning (DCVLR) challenge, which isolates dataset selection by fixing the model and training protocol. Using a compact curated dataset derived primarily from Walton Multimodal Cold Start, our submission placed first in the challenge. Through post-competition ablations, we show that difficulty-based example selection on an aligned base dataset is the dominant driver of performance gains. Increasing dataset size does not reliably improve mean accuracy under the fixed training recipe, but mainly reduces run-to-run variance, while commonly used diversity and synthetic augmentation heuristics provide no additional benefit and often degrade performance. These results characterize DCVLR as a saturation-regime evaluation and highlight the central role of alignment and difficulty in data-efficient multimodal reasoning.

Symbolic music research has relied almost exclusively on MIDI-based datasets; text-based engraving formats such as LilyPond remain unexplored for music understanding. We present BMdataset, a musicologically curated dataset of 393 LilyPond scores (2,646 movements) transcribed by experts directly from original Baroque manuscripts, with metadata covering composer, musical form, instrumentation, and sectional attributes. Building on this resource, we introduce LilyBERT (weights can be found at https://huggingface.co/csc-unipd/lilybert), a CodeBERT-based encoder adapted to symbolic music through vocabulary extension with 115 LilyPond-specific tokens and masked language model pre-training. Linear probing on the out-of-domain Mutopia corpus shows that, despite its modest size (~90M tokens), fine-tuning on BMdataset alone outperforms continuous pre-training on the full PDMX corpus (~15B tokens) for both composer and style classification, demonstrating that small, expertly curated datasets can be more effective than large, noisy corpora for music understanding. Combining broad pre-training with domain-specific fine-tuning yields the best results overall (84.3% composer accuracy), confirming that the two data regimes are complementary. We release the dataset, tokenizer, and model to establish a baseline for representation learning on LilyPond.

Data curation is a critical yet under-researched step in the machine translation training paradigm. To train translation systems, data acquisition relies primarily on human translations and digital parallel sources or, to a limited degree, synthetic generation. But, for low-resource languages, human translation to generate sufficient data is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a framework that screens source sentences to form efficient parallel text, ensuring optimal MT system performance in low-resource environments. We approach this by evaluating English-Hindi bi-text to determine effective sentence selection strategies for optimal MT system training. Our extensively tested framework, (Lexical And Linguistically Informed Text Analysis) LALITA, targets source sentence selection using lexical and linguistic features to curate parallel corpora. We find that by training mostly on complex sentences from both existing and synthetic datasets, our method significantly improves translation quality. We test this by simulating low-resource data availabilty with curated datasets of 50K to 800K English sentences and report improved performances on all data sizes. LALITA demonstrates remarkable efficiency, reducing data needs by more than half across multiple languages (Hindi, Odia, Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, and German). This approach not only reduces MT systems training cost by reducing training data requirement, but also showcases LALITA's utility in data augmentation.

This work presents the largest curation of Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) acoustic data to date, also containing other marine mammals in their environment. We systematically search all available public archival hydrophone data within the SRKW habitat (over 30 years of audio data). The search consists of a weakly-supervised, positive-unlabelled, active learning strategy to identify all instances of marine mammals. The resulting transformer-based presence or absence classifiers outperform state-of-the-art classifiers on 3 of 4 expert-annotated datasets in terms of accuracy and energy efficiency. The fleet of WHISPER detection models range from 0.58 (0.48-0.67) AUROC with WHISPER-tiny to 0.77 (0.63-0.93) with WHISPER-large-v3. Our multiclass species classifier obtains a top-1 accuracy of 53.2\% (11 train classes, 4 test classes) and our ecotype classifier obtains a top-1 accuracy of 33.6\% (4 train classes, 5 test classes) on the DCLDE-2026 dataset. We yield 919 hours of SRKW data, 230 hours of Bigg's orca data, 1374 hours of orca data from unlabelled ecotypes, 1501 hours of humpback data, 88 hours of sea lion data, 246 hours of pacific white-sided dolphin data, and over 784 hours of unspecified marine mammal data. This SRKW dataset is larger than DCLDE-2026, Ocean Networks Canada, and OrcaSound combined. The curated species labels are available under CC-BY 4.0 license, and the corresponding audio data are available under the licenses of the original owners. The comprehensive nature of this dataset makes it suitable for unsupervised machine translation, habitat usage surveys, and conservation endeavours for this critically endangered ecotype.

Imitation-learning policies inherit the quality of the demonstrations they are trained on, and a growing set of curation metrics promise to score and filter low-quality demonstrations automatically. These metrics are each validated on different data with different protocols, so it is unclear which of them actually identify the demonstrations that harm a policy. We build a controlled testbed in which demonstration defects are injected with known type, and audit seven curation metrics along two axes: how well each separates defective from clean demonstrations, and whether training a behavior-cloning policy on each metric's curated subset improves task success. We study two defect regimes. Subtle perturbations (correlated action noise, tremor, truncation) are detectable by multivariate outlier scoring and, once removed, recover the full downstream gap. Structural errors, where the demonstration executes a wrong action at a key moment, are invisible to every action-only metric we test, and two of them are inverted: they score defective demonstrations as higher quality and, used for curation, tend to leave the policy at or below the uncurated baseline rather than above it. Only metrics that examine the state trajectory detect structural errors, and even the best of them recovers just a third of the downstream gap. High detection accuracy does not guarantee downstream improvement. We release the testbed and all curation implementations.

Social media platforms like TikTok have become a key source of health information, with studies reporting inaccuracies in posts. As Large Language Model (LLM) providers increasingly integrate LLMs into digital platforms to fact-check content (e.g., Grok and Perplexity on X and WhatsApp, respectively) and are being used by people to fact-check information, deploying these systems in critical areas such as reproductive health without rigorous evaluation can cause serious harm. We introduce RELIANCE, an expert-annotated dataset of health information on TikTok surrounding pregnancy and postpartum queries, serving as both an analysis of the reproductive health information landscape and an evaluation of LLMs' capabilities in fact-checking this content. Our dataset comprises 409 annotated sentences from 336 videos across 56 clinician-reviewed queries, annotated by three expert clinicians in Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Internal Medicine. Our findings reveal that nearly 60\% of the health information in the videos we sampled is accurate. Furthermore, LLM evaluations reveal a gap between evaluating specific claims and evaluating the entire content (15\%). We believe that our methodology, dataset, and tool will support the machine learning community in improving LLMs for important domains with real-world data, extending to other platforms and languages, and helping the health community further understand the information landscape on social media. Our dataset and code are made available at https://realize-lab.github.io/RELIANCE/.

Data curation has shifted the quality-compute frontier for language-model and contrastive image-text pretraining, but its role for vision-language models (VLMs) is far less established. We ask how far data curation alone can take VLM performance, holding architecture, training recipe, and compute fixed and varying only the training data. Our pipeline, applied to the MAmmoTH-VL single-image subset, lifts performance by +11.7pp on average across 20 public VLM benchmarks (spanning grounding, VQA, OCR/documents, captioning, spatial/3D, counting, charts, math, brand-ID, and multi-image reasoning) and by +11.3pp on average across all nine capability axes of DatBench, our high-fidelity VLM eval suite. At 2B, our curated model surpasses InternVL3.5-2B by 9.9pp at ~17x less training compute and closes the gap to Qwen3-VL-2B to within 1.8pp at ~87x less compute, from pretraining alone. Beyond accuracy, curation delivers four further properties: (1) Reliability: per-capability std across training seeds drops by ~67% and the lift survives a 4k-to-16k context-length sweep; (2) OOD generalization: the 9-eval OOD average rises by +7.2pp, and multi-image BLINK rises by +3.09pp despite single-image-only training, with Visual Correspondence gaining +11.8pp; (3) Behavioral gains beyond benchmarks: across ~1,100 open-ended queries the curated 2B is more honest and more specific than the matched-compute baseline, and more concise and less refusal-prone than a frontier 2B reference; (4) Pareto-dominance on inference cost: at every scale (1B, 2B, 4B) the curated model raises accuracy while lowering response FLOPs vs. the matched-compute baseline, and the curated 4B matches near-frontier accuracy at 3.3x lower response FLOPs than Qwen3-VL-4B. Data curation is a high-leverage tool for building better VLMs, reaching near-frontier accuracy at up to ~150x less training compute.

Long-term egocentric video enables personalized AI assistants to reason about daily life. However, as video histories grow to hundreds of hours spanning months or years, reprocessing raw clips for every query becomes computationally prohibitive. Memory systems offer a scalable alternative by compacting videos into text representations, but often fail on practical benchmarks: either the memory does not preserve key evidence, or the retriever fails to locate relevant entries due to retrieval competition in growing search spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce MemLife, a multimodal memory system that constructs entity-grounded, first-person text episodes and retrieves them via a time-indexed agentic reader. Without training or query-time video access, MemLife improves over the strongest training-free baseline by 4.6--12.0% across four long-horizon benchmarks. To further improve memory quality, we propose MemOpt, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the memory writer to produce faithful, informative, and retrievable memories. MemOpt consistently improves MemLife by 2.7--5.0% across different video and question distributions, with gains that generalize across writer and reader backbones and memory systems.

In robot imitation learning, policy performance is tightly coupled with the quality and composition of the demonstration data. Yet, developing a precise understanding of how individual demonstrations contribute to downstream outcomes - such as closed-loop task success or failure - remains a persistent challenge. We propose CUPID, a robot data curation method based on a novel influence function-theoretic formulation for imitation learning policies. Given a set of evaluation rollouts, CUPID estimates the influence of each training demonstration on the policy's expected return. This enables ranking and selection of demonstrations according to their impact on the policy's closed-loop performance. We use CUPID to curate data by 1) filtering out training demonstrations that harm policy performance and 2) subselecting newly collected trajectories that will most improve the policy. Extensive simulated and hardware experiments show that our approach consistently identifies which data drives test-time performance. For example, training with less than 33% of curated data can yield state-of-the-art diffusion policies on the simulated RoboMimic benchmark, with similar gains observed in hardware. Furthermore, hardware experiments show that our method can identify robust strategies under distribution shift, isolate spurious correlations, and even enhance the post-training of generalist robot policies. Videos and code are made available at: https://cupid-curation.github.io.

The synthesis of inductive loop invariants remains a critical bottleneck in automated program verification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in mitigating this issue, they often fail on complex programs, producing invariants that are invalid or computationally ineffective. Although fine-tuning is a natural strategy to address these limitations, obtaining high-quality training data remains an open challenge. We first formalize the properties required for a high-quality training invariant, and then present Wonda, a rigorous data curation pipeline that extracts such invariants from raw verifier output via AST-based normalization followed by LLM-driven semantic rewriting and augmentation with provable quality guarantees. Fine-tuning Small Language Models (SLMs) on Wonda-curated data yields consistent gains across the Qwen3, Llama-3.1, and Mistral families: the 4B and 8B Qwen3 models nearly double invariant correctness and double speedup rates, while Llama-3.1-8B triples both. On the challenging InvBench suite, the same 4B model outperforms an off-the-shelf model 20x its size and matches the end-to-end verification time of GPT-OSS-120B, while a 14B Qwen3 model matches that of the frontier model GPT-5.2, all without test-time compute overhead. Our code is publicly available on GitHub.

This report studies passage retrieval and re-ranking on the MS MARCO benchmark using lightweight Qwen3-0.6B models. Across three experimental settings --- BM25-then-reranking task, corpus-wide dense retrieval task, and dense retrieval then re-ranking task --- the results demonstrate that competitive ranking performance can be achieved without complex architectural modifications, custom loss functions, or cross-encoder distillation. Instead, substantial gains stem from data-centric strategies: corpus-targeted continued pre-training, rigorous data curation, hard-negative mining, training--inference distribution alignment, and weight merging via Model Soup. In particular, Model Soup delivers marked performance gains while preserving the inference efficiency of a single model. These findings highlight how data curation and weight merging can push sub-billion-parameter models to state-of-the-art performance. My models can be downloaded from Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/shuguangh/models

We introduce HumanCentric-Scenes-AI, a human-curated dataset of 296 AI-generated stimuli that depict people across four contexts in which people encounter AI-generated media. The Surveillance subset contains 85 AI-generated CCTV-style images. The Occupations subset contains 128 AI-generated occupational portraits in a balanced paired design covering 64 occupations with one female and one male version of each. The AI-edited subset contains 27 real photographs in which a region was altered or replaced by a generative model. The Video subset contains 56 AI-generated short videos. We curated the images and videos manually over multiple rounds to make them as photorealistic as possible. For each stimulus we release the file, the generation prompt where recorded, and per-stimulus metadata. We report depicted-gender distributions from an initial set of 134 generations without a specified gender and compare them with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational gender shares. We report edit-region size and its association with zero-shot detection difficulty for the AI-edited subset. We report image-quality distributions for the Surveillance subset and subject-category coverage for the Video subset. HumanCentric-Scenes-AI is intended first for human-perception research, and also for calibration of AI-detection classifiers and bias analysis of generative models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in multi-turn agentic workloads that require sustained interaction with complex environments. Existing reflective prompt optimizers such as GEPA learn from failed rollouts, but agentic failures can also come from prompt weaknesses, harness limitations, stochastic execution, or noisy judges. We argue that such failures may not provide useful learning signal, and may even be harmful; and thus it is essential to curate which tasks are provided to the prompt optimizer for better performance. We introduce GEPA-Curator, a framework that augments the prompt optimizer to select which agent experiences should shape prompt optimization. In particular, GEPA-Curator consists of two components: task curation, which filters out tasks that are likely to provide noisy or unreliable learning signals, and prior success retrieval, which selectively retrieves past successful trajectories for a task and provides them as additional context to the prompt optimizer. We evaluate GEPA-Curator on GoBrowse, ALFWorld, AppWorld, and τ-bench, using both Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 5 as optimizer models. GEPA-Curator matches or exceeds the mean performance of both baselines, with gains of up to 20.7% over GEPA and 21.2% over ACE.

Brain foundation models have transformed medical artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience by reducing the reliance on task-specific data through large-scale pretraining. While they have been successful with non-invasive neuroimaging data, their adoption in functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has lagged due to the limited size and heterogeneity of public datasets, which are collected under varying protocols, devices, and sensor configurations. In addition, no single fNIRS dataset is comparable in size to the largest datasets in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), or magnetoencephalography (MEG). The fNIRS datasets are also spread across different platforms and often have insufficient information, or lack the protocols that would make them easier to use. Given the advances in EEG foundation models that enable flexible modeling across diverse EEG montages, we curated 1,955 hours of fNIRS data from 67 public datasets spanning 2,798 participants, representing the largest fNIRS curation effort to date. The curated data include oxygenated (HbO) and deoxygenated (HbR) hemoglobin signals along with the three-dimensional position of every channel in the standard space of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), which makes positions comparable across datasets. We release dataloaders that handle each dataset automatically, along with the minimal preprocessing pipeline used to prepare the data, at https://github.com/sposso/fnirs-datasets. This work aims to facilitate the future development of foundation models for fNIRS.

Community Question Answering (CQA) fora such as Stack Overflow and Yahoo! Answers contain a rich resource of answers to a wide range of community-based questions. Each question thread can receive a large number of answers with different perspectives. One goal of answer summarization is to produce a summary that reflects the range of answer perspectives. A major obstacle for this task is the absence of a dataset to provide supervision for producing such summaries. Recent works propose heuristics to create such data, but these are often noisy and do not cover all answer perspectives present. This work introduces a novel dataset of 4,631 CQA threads for answer summarization curated by professional linguists. Our pipeline gathers annotations for all subtasks of answer summarization, including relevant answer sentence selection, grouping these sentences based on perspectives, summarizing each perspective, and producing an overall summary. We analyze and benchmark state-of-the-art models on these subtasks and introduce a novel unsupervised approach for multi-perspective data augmentation that boosts summarization performance according to automatic evaluation. Finally, we propose reinforcement learning rewards to improve factual consistency and answer coverage and analyze areas for improvement.

Large datasets of paired images and text have become increasingly popular for learning generic representations for vision and vision-and-language tasks. Such datasets have been built by querying search engines or collecting HTML alt-text -- since web data is noisy, they require complex filtering pipelines to maintain quality. We explore alternate data sources to collect high quality data with minimal filtering. We introduce RedCaps -- a large-scale dataset of 12M image-text pairs collected from Reddit. Images and captions from Reddit depict and describe a wide variety of objects and scenes. We collect data from a manually curated set of subreddits, which give coarse image labels and allow us to steer the dataset composition without labeling individual instances. We show that captioning models trained on RedCaps produce rich and varied captions preferred by humans, and learn visual representations that transfer to many downstream tasks.

As language models are adapted by a more sophisticated and diverse set of users, the importance of guaranteeing that they provide factually correct information supported by verifiable sources is critical across fields of study & professions. This is especially the case for high-stakes fields, such as medicine and law, where the risk of propagating false information is high and can lead to undesirable societal consequences. Previous work studying factuality and attribution has not focused on analyzing these characteristics of language model outputs in domain-specific scenarios. In this work, we present an evaluation study analyzing various axes of factuality and attribution provided in responses from a few systems, by bringing domain experts in the loop. Specifically, we first collect expert-curated questions from 484 participants across 32 fields of study, and then ask the same experts to evaluate generated responses to their own questions. We also ask experts to revise answers produced by language models, which leads to ExpertQA, a high-quality long-form QA dataset with 2177 questions spanning 32 fields, along with verified answers and attributions for claims in the answers.

Given thousands of equally accurate machine learning (ML) models, how can users choose among them? A recent ML technique enables domain experts and data scientists to generate a complete Rashomon set for sparse decision trees--a huge set of almost-optimal interpretable ML models. To help ML practitioners identify models with desirable properties from this Rashomon set, we develop TimberTrek, the first interactive visualization system that summarizes thousands of sparse decision trees at scale. Two usage scenarios highlight how TimberTrek can empower users to easily explore, compare, and curate models that align with their domain knowledge and values. Our open-source tool runs directly in users' computational notebooks and web browsers, lowering the barrier to creating more responsible ML models. TimberTrek is available at the following public demo link: https://poloclub.github.io/timbertrek.

The proliferation of open-source scientific software for science and research presents opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we introduce the SciCat dataset -- a comprehensive collection of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, designed to address the need for a curated repository of scientific and research software. This collection is crucial for understanding the creation of scientific software and aiding in its development. To ensure extensive coverage, our approach involves selecting projects from a pool of 131 million deforked repositories from the World of Code data source. Subsequently, we analyze README.md files using OpenAI's advanced language models. Our classification focuses on software designed for scientific purposes, research-related projects, and research support software. The SciCat dataset aims to become an invaluable tool for researching science-related software, shedding light on emerging trends, prevalent practices, and challenges in the field of scientific software development. Furthermore, it includes data that can be linked to the World of Code, GitHub, and other platforms, providing a solid foundation for conducting comparative studies between scientific and non-scientific software.

The massive growth of image-text data through web crawling inherently presents the challenge of variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel algorithm, rooted in human knowledge, to compress this vast corpus of web-crawled image-text datasets to a compact and high-quality form. Our method unfolds in three major steps. First, we collect an image-text dataset, wherein each image is associated with multiple captions sourced from diverse origins. Then, to systemically capture human preferences regarding the best caption paired with each image, we establish a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria for critically guiding the alignment assessment from labelers. Lastly, we train a reward model on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of image-text alignment. The resulting reward model thus can act as a human-like referee to filter misaligned/low-quality image-text pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we are able to secure (or even improve) model performance by compressing the image-text datasets up to ~90%. An impressive example is that, by aggressively reducing the total training sample from 130M to 15.5M (e.g., ~9x smaller), our BLIP-B/16 models still consistently show superior performance compared with the full-size-dataset counterpart on image-text retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO) by ~2.5% in Recall@1, and on image-captioning (Nocaps, COCO) by ~10.0% in CIDEr and ~2.7% in SPICE.

Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.

Being predominant in digital entertainment for decades, video games have been recognized as valuable software artifacts by the software engineering (SE) community just recently. Such an acknowledgment has unveiled several research opportunities, spanning from empirical studies to the application of AI techniques for classification tasks. In this respect, several curated game datasets have been disclosed for research purposes even though the collected data are insufficient to support the application of advanced models or to enable interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the majority of those are limited to PC games, thus excluding notorious gaming platforms, e.g., PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. In this paper, we propose PlayMyData, a curated dataset composed of 99,864 multi-platform games gathered by IGDB website. By exploiting a dedicated API, we collect relevant metadata for each game, e.g., description, genre, rating, gameplay video URLs, and screenshots. Furthermore, we enrich PlayMyData with the timing needed to complete each game by mining the HLTB website. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive dataset in the domain that can be used to support different automated tasks in SE. More importantly, PlayMyData can be used to foster cross-domain investigations built on top of the provided multimedia data.

The web contains large-scale, diverse, and abundant information to satisfy the information-seeking needs of humans. Through meticulous data collection, preprocessing, and curation, webpages can be used as a fundamental data resource for language model pretraining. However, when confronted with the progressively revolutionized and intricate nature of webpages, rule-based/feature-based web scrapers are becoming increasingly inadequate. This paper presents a simple, fast, and effective Neural web Scraper (NeuScraper) to help extract primary and clean text contents from webpages. Experimental results show that NeuScraper surpasses the baseline scrapers by achieving more than a 20% improvement, demonstrating its potential in extracting higher-quality data to facilitate the language model pretraining. All of the code is available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/NeuScraper.

Large Language Models have become the de facto approach to sequence-to-sequence text generation tasks, but for specialized tasks/domains, a pretrained LLM lacks specific capabilities to produce accurate or well-formatted responses. Supervised fine-tuning specializes a LLM by training it on dataset of example prompts with target responses, but real-world data tends to be noisy. While many fine-tuning algorithms exist, here we consider a data-centric AI perspective on LLM fine-tuning, studying how to systematically curate the training dataset to improve the LLM produced via any fine-tuning algorithm. We introduce an automated data curation pipeline CLEAR (Confidence-based LLM Evaluation And Rectification) for instruction tuning datasets, that can be used with any LLM and fine-tuning procedure. CLEAR estimates which training data is low-quality and either filters or corrects it. Automatically identifying which data to filter or correct is done via LLM-derived confidence estimates, to ensure only confident modifications to the dataset. Unlike existing data curation techniques, CLEAR is a comprehensive framework that can improve a dataset (and trained model outputs) without additional fine-tuning computations. We don't assume access to a stronger LLM than the model being fine-tuned (e.g.\ relying on GPT-4 when fine-tuning GPT-3.5), to see whether CLEAR can meaningfully improve the capabilities of any LLM. Experiments reveal that CLEAR consistently improves the performance of fine-tuned models across many datasets and models (like GPT-3.5 and Llama2).

Self-supervised features are the cornerstone of modern machine learning systems. They are typically pre-trained on data collections whose construction and curation typically require extensive human effort. This manual process has some limitations similar to those encountered in supervised learning, e.g., the crowd-sourced selection of data is costly and time-consuming, preventing scaling the dataset size. In this work, we consider the problem of automatic curation of high-quality datasets for self-supervised pre-training. We posit that such datasets should be large, diverse and balanced, and propose a clustering-based approach for building ones satisfying all these criteria. Our method involves successive and hierarchical applications of k-means on a large and diverse data repository to obtain clusters that distribute uniformly among data concepts, followed by a hierarchical, balanced sampling step from these clusters. Extensive experiments on three different data domains including web-based images, satellite images and text show that features trained on our automatically curated datasets outperform those trained on uncurated data while being on par or better than ones trained on manually curated data.

The quality of datasets plays an increasingly crucial role in the research and development of modern artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the proliferation of open dataset platforms nowadays, data quality issues, such as insufficient documentation, inaccurate annotations, and ethical concerns, remain common in datasets widely used in AI. Furthermore, these issues are often subtle and difficult to be detected by rule-based scripts, requiring expensive manual identification and verification by dataset users or maintainers. With the increasing capability of large language models (LLMs), it is promising to streamline the curation of datasets with LLM agents. In this work, as the initial step towards this goal, we propose a dataset curation agent benchmark, DCA-Bench, to measure LLM agents' capability of detecting hidden dataset quality issues. Specifically, we collect diverse real-world dataset quality issues from eight open dataset platforms as a testbed. Additionally, to establish an automatic pipeline for evaluating the success of LLM agents, which requires a nuanced understanding of the agent outputs, we implement a dedicated Evaluator using another LLM agent. We demonstrate that the LLM-based Evaluator empirically aligns well with human evaluation, allowing reliable automatic evaluation on the proposed benchmark. We further conduct experiments on several baseline LLM agents on the proposed benchmark and demonstrate the complexity of the task, indicating that applying LLMs to real-world dataset curation still requires further in-depth exploration and innovation. Finally, the proposed benchmark can also serve as a testbed for measuring the capability of LLMs in problem discovery rather than just problem-solving. The benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/TRAIS-Lab/dca-bench.

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the total training sample size from 158k to 14k (9times smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.

Data is a crucial element in large language model (LLM) alignment. Recent studies have explored using LLMs for efficient data collection. However, LLM-generated data often suffers from quality issues, with underrepresented or absent aspects and low-quality datapoints. To address these problems, we propose Data Advisor, an enhanced LLM-based method for generating data that takes into account the characteristics of the desired dataset. Starting from a set of pre-defined principles in hand, Data Advisor monitors the status of the generated data, identifies weaknesses in the current dataset, and advises the next iteration of data generation accordingly. Data Advisor can be easily integrated into existing data generation methods to enhance data quality and coverage. Experiments on safety alignment of three representative LLMs (i.e., Mistral, Llama2, and Falcon) demonstrate the effectiveness of Data Advisor in enhancing model safety against various fine-grained safety issues without sacrificing model utility.

Speech datasets available in the public domain are often underutilized because of challenges in discoverability and interoperability. A comprehensive framework has been designed to survey, catalog, and curate available speech datasets, which allows replicable evaluation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. A case study focused on the Polish language was conducted; the framework was applied to curate more than 24 datasets and evaluate 25 combinations of ASR systems and models. This research constitutes the most extensive comparison to date of both commercial and free ASR systems for the Polish language. It draws insights from 600 system-model-test set evaluations, marking a significant advancement in both scale and comprehensiveness. The results of surveys and performance comparisons are available as interactive dashboards (https://huggingface.co/spaces/amu-cai/pl-asr-leaderboard) along with curated datasets (https://huggingface.co/datasets/amu-cai/pl-asr-bigos-v2, https://huggingface.co/datasets/pelcra/pl-asr-pelcra-for-bigos) and the open challenge call (https://poleval.pl/tasks/task3). Tools used for evaluation are open-sourced (https://github.com/goodmike31/pl-asr-bigos-tools), facilitating replication and adaptation for other languages, as well as continuous expansion with new datasets and systems.

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a cost-effective alternative to human annotation, they often suffer from inaccuracies and biases, even in powerful models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce DS2, a Diversity-aware Score curation method for Data Selection. By systematically modeling error patterns through a score transition matrix, DS2 corrects LLM-based scores and promotes diversity in the selected data samples. Our approach shows that a curated subset (just 3.3% of the original dataset) outperforms full-scale datasets (300k samples) across various machine-alignment benchmarks, and matches or surpasses human-aligned datasets such as LIMA with the same sample size (1k samples). These findings challenge conventional data scaling assumptions, highlighting that redundant, low-quality samples can degrade performance and reaffirming that "more can be less."

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this work we explore an alternative, yet simple approach -- active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining. Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs. We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

The quality and size of a pretraining dataset significantly influence the performance of large language models (LLMs). While there have been numerous efforts in the curation of such a dataset for English users, there is a relative lack of similar initiatives for Traditional Chinese. Building upon this foundation of FineWeb, we introduce FineWeb-zhtw, a dataset tailored specifically for Traditional Chinese users. We came up with multiple stages of meticulously designed filters to cater to the linguistic difference between English and Traditional Chinese, to ensure comprehensiveness and quality. We determined effectiveness from querying dataset samples with three main objectives. Our code and datasets are publicly available.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in interpreting remote sensing (RS) images through language-guided semantic understanding. However, the effectiveness of these VLMs critically depends on high-quality image-text training data that captures rich semantic relationships between visual content and language descriptions. Unlike natural images, RS lacks large-scale interleaved image-text pairs from web data, making data collection challenging. While current approaches rely primarily on rule-based methods or flagship VLMs for data synthesis, a systematic framework for automated quality assessment of such synthetically generated RS visionlanguage data is notably absent. To fill this gap, we propose a novel score model trained on large-scale RS visionlanguage preference data for automated quality assessment. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning CLIP or advanced VLMs (e.g., Qwen2-VL) with the top 30% of data ranked by our score model achieves superior interpretation accuracy compared to both full-data fine-tuning and CLIP-score-based ranking approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate applications of our scoring model for reinforcement learning (RL) training and best-of-N (BoN) testtime scaling, enabling significant improvements in VLM performance for RS tasks.

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often provide suboptimal performance on low-resource languages like Urdu. This paper introduces UrduLLaMA 1.0, a model derived from the open-source Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct architecture and continually pre-trained on 128 million Urdu tokens, capturing the rich diversity of the language. To enhance instruction-following and translation capabilities, we leverage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine tune the model on 41,000 Urdu instructions and approximately 50,000 English-Urdu translation pairs. Evaluation across three machine translation datasets demonstrates significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, establishing a new benchmark for Urdu LLMs. These findings underscore the potential of targeted adaptation strategies with limited data and computational resources to address the unique challenges of low-resource languages.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in three-dimensional (3D) agricultural research, particularly for maize, has been limited by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse datasets. While 2D image datasets are abundant, they fail to capture essential structural details such as leaf architecture, plant volume, and spatial arrangements that 3D data provide. To address this limitation, we present AgriField3D (https://baskargroup.github.io/AgriField3D/), a curated dataset of 3D point clouds of field-grown maize plants from a diverse genetic panel, designed to be AI-ready for advancing agricultural research. Our dataset comprises over 1,000 high-quality point clouds collected using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner, complemented by procedural models that provide structured, parametric representations of maize plants. These procedural models, generated using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and optimized via a two-step process combining Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and differentiable programming, enable precise, scalable reconstructions of leaf surfaces and plant architectures. To enhance usability, we performed graph-based segmentation to isolate individual leaves and stalks, ensuring consistent labeling across all samples. We also conducted rigorous manual quality control on all datasets, correcting errors in segmentation, ensuring accurate leaf ordering, and validating metadata annotations. The dataset further includes metadata detailing plant morphology and quality, alongside multi-resolution subsampled versions (100k, 50k, 10k points) optimized for various computational needs. By integrating point cloud data of field grown plants with high-fidelity procedural models and ensuring meticulous manual validation, AgriField3D provides a comprehensive foundation for AI-driven phenotyping, plant structural analysis, and 3D applications in agricultural research.

Text-to-video generation has demonstrated promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, yet existing approaches are limited by dataset quality and computational resources. To address these limitations, this paper presents a comprehensive approach that advances both data curation and model design. We introduce CFC-VIDS-1M, a high-quality video dataset constructed through a systematic coarse-to-fine curation pipeline. The pipeline first evaluates video quality across multiple dimensions, followed by a fine-grained stage that leverages vision-language models to enhance text-video alignment and semantic richness. Building upon the curated dataset's emphasis on visual quality and temporal coherence, we develop RACCOON, a transformer-based architecture with decoupled spatial-temporal attention mechanisms. The model is trained through a progressive four-stage strategy designed to efficiently handle the complexities of video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our integrated approach of high-quality data curation and efficient training strategy generates visually appealing and temporally coherent videos while maintaining computational efficiency. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

Vision foundation models (FMs) are accelerating the development of digital pathology algorithms and transforming biomedical research. These models learn, in a self-supervised manner, to represent histological features in highly heterogeneous tiles extracted from whole-slide images (WSIs) of real-world patient samples. The performance of these FMs is significantly influenced by the size, diversity, and balance of the pre-training data. However, data selection has been primarily guided by expert knowledge at the WSI level, focusing on factors such as disease classification and tissue types, while largely overlooking the granular details available at the tile level. In this paper, we investigate the potential of unsupervised automatic data curation at the tile-level, taking into account 350 million tiles. Specifically, we apply hierarchical clustering trees to pre-extracted tile embeddings, allowing us to sample balanced datasets uniformly across the embedding space of the pretrained FM. We further identify these datasets are subject to a trade-off between size and balance, potentially compromising the quality of representations learned by FMs, and propose tailored batch sampling strategies to mitigate this effect. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through improved performance on a diverse range of clinically relevant downstream tasks.

We introduce {rm C{small LEVER}}, a high-quality, curated benchmark of 161 problems for end-to-end verified code generation in Lean. Each problem consists of (1) the task of generating a specification that matches a held-out ground-truth specification, and (2) the task of generating a Lean implementation that provably satisfies this specification. Unlike prior benchmarks, {rm C{small LEVER}} avoids test-case supervision, LLM-generated annotations, and specifications that leak implementation logic or allow vacuous solutions. All outputs are verified post-hoc using Lean's type checker to ensure machine-checkable correctness. We use {rm C{small LEVER}} to evaluate several few-shot and agentic approaches based on state-of-the-art language models. These methods all struggle to achieve full verification, establishing it as a challenging frontier benchmark for program synthesis and formal reasoning. Our benchmark can be found on GitHub(https://github.com/trishullab/clever) as well as HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/datasets/amitayusht/clever). All our evaluation code is also available online(https://github.com/trishullab/clever-prover).

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based large language models (LLMs) are widely used in finance for their excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, standardized documents (e.g., SEC filing) share similar formats such as repetitive boilerplate texts, and similar table structures. This similarity forces traditional RAG methods to misidentify near-duplicate text, leading to duplicate retrieval that undermines accuracy and completeness. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Retrieval with Evidence Curation (HiREC) framework. Our approach first performs hierarchical retrieval to reduce confusion among similar texts. It first retrieve related documents and then selects the most relevant passages from the documents. The evidence curation process removes irrelevant passages. When necessary, it automatically generates complementary queries to collect missing information. To evaluate our approach, we construct and release a Large-scale Open-domain Financial (LOFin) question answering benchmark that includes 145,897 SEC documents and 1,595 question-answer pairs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/deep-over/LOFin-bench-HiREC.

The quality of foundation models depends heavily on their training data. Consequently, great efforts have been put into dataset curation. Yet most approaches rely on manual tuning of coarse-grained mixtures of large buckets of data, or filtering by hand-crafted heuristics. An approach that is ultimately more scalable (let alone more satisfying) is to learn which data is actually valuable for training. This type of meta-learning could allow more sophisticated, fine-grained, and effective curation. Our proposed DataRater is an instance of this idea. It estimates the value of training on any particular data point. This is done by meta-learning using `meta-gradients', with the objective of improving training efficiency on held out data. In extensive experiments across a range of model scales and datasets, we find that using our DataRater to filter data is highly effective, resulting in significantly improved compute efficiency.

We propose an approach for curating multimodal data that we used for our entry in the 2023 DataComp competition filtering track. Our technique combines object detection and weak supervision-based ensembling. In the first of two steps in our approach, we employ an out-of-the-box zero-shot object detection model to extract granular information and produce a variety of filter designs. In the second step, we employ weak supervision to ensemble filtering rules. This approach results in a 4% performance improvement when compared to the best-performing baseline, producing the top-ranking position in the small scale track at the time of writing. Furthermore, in the medium scale track, we achieve a noteworthy 4.2% improvement over the baseline by simply ensembling existing baselines with weak supervision.

Despite the critical role of reward models (RMs) in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), current state-of-the-art open RMs perform poorly on most existing evaluation benchmarks, failing to capture the spectrum of nuanced and sophisticated human preferences. Even approaches that incorporate advanced training techniques have not yielded meaningful performance improvements. We hypothesize that this brittleness stems primarily from limitations in preference datasets, which are often narrowly scoped, synthetically labeled, or lack rigorous quality control. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale preference dataset comprising 40 million preference pairs, named SynPref-40M. To enable data curation at scale, we design a human-AI synergistic two-stage pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of human annotation quality and AI scalability. In this pipeline, humans provide verified annotations, while large language models perform automatic curation based on human guidance. Training on this preference mixture, we introduce Skywork-Reward-V2, a suite of eight reward models ranging from 0.6B to 8B parameters, trained on a carefully curated subset of 26 million preference pairs from SynPref-40M. We demonstrate that Skywork-Reward-V2 is versatile across a wide range of capabilities, including alignment with human preferences, objective correctness, safety, resistance to stylistic biases, and best-of-N scaling, achieving state-of-the-art performance across seven major reward model benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that the effectiveness of our approach stems not only from data scale but also from high-quality curation. The Skywork-Reward-V2 series represents substantial progress in open reward models, highlighting the untapped potential of existing preference datasets and demonstrating how human-AI curation synergy can unlock significantly higher data quality.

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this successful strategy and the theory and practice of finding optimal policies via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on existing literature, we clarify that SFT can be understood as maximizing a lower bound on the RL objective in a sparse reward setting. Giving support to its often observed good performance. From this viewpoint, we realize that a small modification to SFT leads to an importance weighted variant that behaves closer to training with RL as it: i) optimizes a tighter bound to the RL objective and, ii) can improve performance compared to SFT on curated data. We refer to this variant as importance weighted supervised fine-tuning (iw-SFT). We show that it is easy to implement and can be further generalized to training with quality scored data. The resulting SFT variants are competitive with more advanced RL algorithms for large language models and for training policies in continuous control tasks. For example achieving 66.7% on the AIME 2024 dataset.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are highly effective but often underperform on specialized tasks; for example, Llava-1.5 struggles with chart and diagram understanding due to scarce task-specific training data. Existing training data, sourced from general-purpose datasets, fails to capture the nuanced details needed for these tasks. We introduce MM-Gen, a scalable method that generates task-specific, high-quality synthetic text for candidate images by leveraging stronger models. MM-Gen employs a three-stage targeted process: partitioning data into subgroups, generating targeted text based on task descriptions, and filtering out redundant and outlier data. Fine-tuning VLMs with data generated by MM-Gen leads to significant performance gains, including 29% on spatial reasoning and 15% on diagram understanding for Llava-1.5 (7B). Compared to human-curated caption data, MM-Gen achieves up to 1.6x better improvements for the original models, proving its effectiveness in enhancing task-specific VLM performance and bridging the gap between general-purpose datasets and specialized requirements. Code available at https://github.com/sjoshi804/MM-Gen.

The rapid expansion of chemistry literature poses significant challenges for researchers seeking to efficiently access domain-specific knowledge. To support advancements in chemistry-focused natural language processing (NLP), we present ChemRxivQuest, a curated dataset of 970 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs derived from 155 ChemRxiv preprints across 17 subfields of chemistry. Each QA pair is explicitly linked to its source text segment to ensure traceability and contextual accuracy. ChemRxivQuest was constructed using an automated pipeline that combines optical character recognition (OCR), GPT-4o-based QA generation, and a fuzzy matching technique for answer verification. The dataset emphasizes conceptual, mechanistic, applied, and experimental questions, enabling applications in retrieval-based QA systems, search engine development, and fine-tuning of domain-adapted large language models. We analyze the dataset's structure, coverage, and limitations, and outline future directions for expansion and expert validation. ChemRxivQuest provides a foundational resource for chemistry NLP research, education, and tool development.

As more speech technologies rely on a supervised deep learning approach with clean speech as the ground truth, a methodology to onboard said speech at scale is needed. However, this approach needs to minimize the dependency on human listening and annotation, only requiring a human-in-the-loop when needed. In this paper, we address this issue by outlining Speech Enhancement-based Curation Pipeline (SECP) which serves as a framework to onboard clean speech. This clean speech can then train a speech enhancement model, which can further refine the original dataset and thus close the iterative loop. By running two iterative rounds, we observe that enhanced output used as ground truth does not degrade model performance according to Delta_{PESQ}, a metric used in this paper. We also show through comparative mean opinion score (CMOS) based subjective tests that the highest and lowest bound of refined data is perceptually better than the original data.

Recent reasoning-first models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have spurred a resurgence of interest in RLVR. Nevertheless, advances are dominated by mathematics (e.g., AIME), with competitive-programming code generation underexplored and data curation receiving less attention than RL algorithm design. We investigate how to construct RLVR datasets (i.e., RL prompts) and present practical training techniques that yield strong performance on competitive-programming code generation. Our pipeline begins with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) distilled from strong open-source models, augmented with general-purpose and reasoning-intensive data. RL then follows a two-stage process with executable, testcase-driven rewards: first, training on a large, uniformly distributed set of competitive-programming problems using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with 8 rollouts per prompt and a relatively short response-generation window (e.g., 32k during SFT and 24k in this stage) to expand entropy and mitigate repetition and truncation; second, we perform Pre-GRPO: updating on a small, high-quality set of challenging problems with a large rollout budget (64 rollouts per prompt) under a hard-focus curriculum that continuously retains the most difficult instances throughout training. We implement our method on Qwen2.5-32B and evaluate on LeetCode and Codeforces weekly contests to avoid data leakage. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale and is comparable to leading systems such as DeepSeek v3.1 and Doubao-1.5-Thinking. We also examine scaling trends and observe strong RL scaling on an internal large-scale MoE model. Our study distills concise best practices for data curation, entropy expansion, and curriculum design in RLVR for competitive-programming code generation.

Text-to-video generation has surged in interest since Sora, yet open-source models still face a data bottleneck: there is no large, high-quality, easily obtainable video-text corpus. Existing public datasets typically require manual YouTube crawling, which yields low usable volume due to link rot and access limits, and raises licensing uncertainty. This work addresses this challenge by introducing ViMix-14M, a curated multi-source video-text dataset of around 14 million pairs that provides crawl-free, download-ready access and long-form, high-quality captions tightly aligned to video. ViMix-14M is built by merging diverse open video sources, followed by unified de-duplication and quality filtering, and a multi-granularity, ground-truth-guided re-captioning pipeline that refines descriptions to better match actions, scenes, and temporal structure. We evaluate the dataset by multimodal retrieval, text-to-video generation, and video question answering tasks, observing consistent improvements over counterpart datasets. We hope this work can help removing the key barrier to training and fine-tuning open-source video foundation models, and provide insights of building high-quality and generalizable video-text datasets.

The performance of automatic code documentation generation models depends critically on the quality of the training data used for supervision. However, most existing code documentation datasets are constructed through large scale scraping of public repositories with limited quality control. As a result, they often contain noisy documentation, extensive duplication, and increasing contamination from AI generated content. These issues weaken the supervision signal available to learning-based models and complicate evaluation. We introduce Code2Doc, a quality-first curated dataset for function-level code documentation generation. Code2Doc consists of 13,358 high-quality function-documentation pairs extracted from widely used open-source repositories spanning five programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, and C++. The dataset is constructed using a four-stage curation pipeline that enforces documentation completeness and clarity, filters functions based on structural and complexity criteria, removes exact and near-duplicate code, and identifies documentation likely to be AI generated. Starting from 52,069 extracted candidates, only 25.6% satisfy all quality constraints. We provide a detailed analysis of the resulting dataset, which achieves a mean documentation quality score of 6.93 out of 10. Overall, 86.9% of samples contain explicit type annotations, and only 2.9% are flagged as potentially AI generated. Baseline experiments show that fine-tuning a large language model on Code2Doc yields relative improvements of 29.47% in BLEU and 24.04% in ROUGE-L over zero shot performance, despite the modest dataset size. We release both the dataset and the full curation pipeline to support reproducible research on automatic code documentation generation.

Large language models (LLMs) have raised hopes for automated end-to-end fact-checking, but prior studies report mixed results. As mainstream chatbots increasingly ship with reasoning capabilities and web search tools -- and millions of users already rely on them for verification -- rigorous evaluation is urgent. We evaluate 15 recent LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on more than 6,000 claims fact-checked by PolitiFact, comparing standard models with reasoning- and web-search variants. Standard models perform poorly, reasoning offers minimal benefits, and web search provides only moderate gains, despite fact-checks being available on the web. In contrast, a curated RAG system using PolitiFact summaries improved macro F1 by 233% on average across model variants. These findings suggest that giving models access to curated high-quality context is a promising path for automated fact-checking.

Partially class-disjoint data (PCDD), a common yet under-explored data formation where each client contributes a part of classes (instead of all classes) of samples, severely challenges the performance of federated algorithms. Without full classes, the local objective will contradict the global objective, yielding the angle collapse problem for locally missing classes and the space waste problem for locally existing classes. As far as we know, none of the existing methods can intrinsically mitigate PCDD challenges to achieve holistic improvement in the bilateral views (both global view and local view) of federated learning. To address this dilemma, we are inspired by the strong generalization of simplex Equiangular Tight Frame~(ETF) on the imbalanced data, and propose a novel approach called FedGELA where the classifier is globally fixed as a simplex ETF while locally adapted to the personal distributions. Globally, FedGELA provides fair and equal discrimination for all classes and avoids inaccurate updates of the classifier, while locally it utilizes the space of locally missing classes for locally existing classes. We conduct extensive experiments on a range of datasets to demonstrate that our FedGELA achieves promising performance~(averaged improvement of 3.9% to FedAvg and 1.5% to best baselines) and provide both local and global convergence guarantees. Source code is available at:https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedGELA.git.

The development of robust, multilingual speaker recognition systems is hindered by a lack of large-scale, publicly available and multilingual datasets, particularly for the read-speech style crucial for applications like anti-spoofing. To address this gap, we introduce the TidyVoice dataset derived from the Mozilla Common Voice corpus after mitigating its inherent speaker heterogeneity within the provided client IDs. TidyVoice currently contains training and test data from over 212,000 monolingual speakers (Tidy-M) and around 4,500 multilingual speakers (Tidy-X) from which we derive two distinct conditions. The Tidy-M condition contains target and non-target trials from monolingual speakers across 81 languages. The Tidy-X condition contains target and non-target trials from multilingual speakers in both same- and cross-language trials. We employ two architectures of ResNet models, achieving a 0.35% EER by fine-tuning on our comprehensive Tidy-M partition. Moreover, we show that this fine-tuning enhances the model's generalization, improving performance on unseen conversational interview data from the CANDOR corpus. The complete dataset, evaluation trials, and our models are publicly released to provide a new resource for the community.

Command-line interfaces (CLIs) provide structured textual environments for system administration. Explorations have been performed using pre-trained language models (PLMs) to simulate these environments for safe interaction in high-risk environments. However, their use has been constrained to frozen, large parameter models like GPT. For smaller architectures to reach a similar level of believability, a rich dataset of CLI interactions is required. Existing public datasets focus on mapping natural-language tasks to commands, omitting crucial execution data such as exit codes, outputs, and environmental side effects, limiting their usability for behavioral modeling. We introduce a Shell Input -Output Environment (ShIOEnv), which casts command construction as a Markov Decision Process whose state is the partially built sequence and whose actions append arguments. After each action, ShIOEnv executes the candidate and returns its exit status, output, and progress toward a minimal-length behavioral objective. Due to the intractable nature of the combinatorial argument state-action space, we derive a context-free grammar from man pages to mask invalid arguments from being emitted. We explore random and proximal-policy optimization (PPO)-optimized sampling of unrestricted and grammar-masked action spaces to produce four exploration strategies. We observed that grammar masking and PPO significantly improve sample efficiency to produce a higher quality dataset (maximizing the number of arguments while minimizing redundancies). Policy-generated datasets of shell input-output behavior pairs are used to fine-tune CodeT5, where we observe 85% improvements in BLEU-4 when constraining the action space to grammar productions with an additional 26% improvement when applying PPO. The ShIOEnv environment and curated command behavior datasets are released for use in future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with agentic web search capabilities show strong potential for tasks requiring real-time information access and complex fact retrieval, yet evaluating such systems remains challenging. We introduce \bench, a rigorous and regularly updated benchmark designed to assess the agentic web search abilities of LLMs. \bench automatically generates fresh question-answer pairs from recent news articles, ensuring that questions require information beyond an LLM's training data and enabling clear separation between internal knowledge and search capability. The benchmark features intentionally difficult questions requiring multi-hop search queries, page visits, and reasoning, making it well-suited for evaluating agentic search behavior. Our automated data curation and question generation pipeline enables frequent benchmark updates and supports construction of a large-scale training dataset for agentic web search models, addressing the scarcity of such data in the research community. To ensure reliable evaluation, we include a subset of human-verified samples in the test set. We evaluate a broad range of systems using \bench, including commercial and open-weight LLMs as well as LLM-based web search APIs. The leaderboard, datasets, and code are publicly available at livenewsbench.com.

Data analysis has become an indispensable part of scientific research. To discover the latent knowledge and insights hidden within massive datasets, we need to perform deep exploratory analysis to realize their full value. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems, more and more researchers are making use of these technologies for insight discovery. However, there are few benchmarks for evaluating insight discovery capabilities. As one of the most comprehensive existing frameworks, InsightBench also suffers from many critical flaws: format inconsistencies, poorly conceived objectives, and redundant insights. These issues may significantly affect the quality of data and the evaluation of agents. To address these issues, we thoroughly investigate shortcomings in InsightBench and propose essential criteria for a high-quality insight benchmark. Regarding this, we develop a data-curation pipeline to construct a new dataset named InsightEval. We further introduce a novel metric to measure the exploratory performance of agents. Through extensive experiments on InsightEval, we highlight prevailing challenges in automated insight discovery and raise some key findings to guide future research in this promising direction.

Multilinguality is a core capability for modern foundation models, yet training high-quality multilingual models remains challenging due to uneven data availability across languages. A further challenge is the performance interference that can arise from joint multilingual training, commonly referred to as the "curse of multilinguality". We study multilingual data curation across thirteen languages and find that many reported regressions are not inherent to multilingual scaling but instead stem from correctable deficiencies in data quality and composition rather than fundamental capacity limits. In controlled bilingual experiments, improving data quality for any single language benefits others: curating English improves non-English performance in 12 of 13 languages, while curating non-English yields reciprocal improvements in English. Bespoke per-language curation produces substantially larger within-language improvements. Extending these findings to large-scale general-purpose training mixtures, we show that curated multilingual allocations comprising under 8% of total tokens remain remarkably effective. We operationalize this approach within an effort that produced a 20T-token pretraining corpus derived entirely from public sources. Models with 3B and 8B parameters trained on a 1T-token random subset achieve competitive multilingual accuracy with 4-10x fewer training FLOPs than strong public baselines, establishing a new Pareto frontier in multilingual performance versus compute. Moreover, these benefits extend to frontier model scale: the 20T-token corpus served as part of the pretraining dataset for Trinity Large (400B/A13B), which exhibits strong multilingual performance relative to its training FLOPs. These results show that targeted, per-language data curation mitigates multilingual interference and enables compute-efficient multilingual scaling.

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to handle streaming tasks, yet they often remain one-off problem solvers that fail to learn from past interactions. Reusable skills distilled from experience provide a natural substrate for self-evolution, where high-quality skill curation serves as the key bottleneck. Existing approaches either rely on manual skill curation, prescribe heuristic skill operations, or train for short-horizon skill operations. However, they still struggle to learn complex long-term curation policies from indirect and delayed feedback. To tackle this challenge, we propose SkillOS, an experience-driven RL training recipe for learning skill curation in self-evolving agents. SkillOS pairs a frozen agent executor that retrieves and applies skills with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo from accumulated experience. To provide learning signals for curation, we design composite rewards and train on grouped task streams based on skill-relevant task dependencies, where earlier trajectories update the SkillRepo, and later related tasks evaluate these updates. Across multi-turn agentic tasks and single-turn reasoning tasks, SkillOS consistently outperforms memory-free and strong memory-based baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, with the learned skill curator generalizing across different executor backbones and task domains. Further analyses show that the learned curator produces more targeted skill use, while the skills in SkillRepo evolve into more richly structured Markdown files that encode higher-level meta-skills over time.

Following the recent achievement of gold-medal performance on the IMO by frontier LLMs, the community is searching for the next meaningful and challenging target for measuring LLM reasoning. Whereas olympiad-style problems measure step-by-step reasoning alone, research-level problems use such reasoning to advance the frontier of mathematical knowledge itself, emerging as a compelling alternative. Yet research-level math benchmarks remain scarce because such problems are difficult to source (e.g., Riemann Bench and FrontierMath-Tier 4 contain 25 and 50 problems, respectively). To support reliable evaluation of next-generation frontier models, we introduce Soohak, a 439-problem benchmark newly authored from scratch by 64 mathematicians. Soohak comprises two subsets. On the Challenge subset, frontier models including Gemini-3-Pro, GPT-5, and Claude-Opus-4.5 reach 30.4%, 26.4%, and 10.4% respectively, leaving substantial headroom, while leading open-weight models such as Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, and Kimi-2.5 remain below 15%. Notably, beyond standard problem solving, Soohak introduces a refusal subset that probes a capability intrinsic to research mathematics: recognizing ill-posed problems and pausing rather than producing confident but unjustified answers. On this subset, no model exceeds 50%, identifying refusal as a new optimization target that current models do not directly address. To prevent contamination, the dataset will be publicly released in late 2026, with model evaluations available upon request in the interim.

We study whether demonstration-curation metrics that detect defective training episodes also improve the downstream behavior-cloning policy that trains on the curated data. On a contact-rich LIBERO pick-and-place benchmark with a controlled structural defect (early gripper release during the carry phase), we find that the two quantities are sharply decoupled. The metric with the highest defect-detection AUROC (0.804) produces the worst curated policy (13.3% task success), while a metric with a substantially lower AUROC (0.638) produces a policy that nearly matches the oracle trained on ground-truth clean data (90.0% vs. 93.3%). We further show that five of the seven metrics we evaluate exploit episode length as a trivial proxy for the defect label, a confound that inflates reported AUROCs to near-perfect values and disappears once episode length is controlled. Across all conditions, the contaminated baseline succeeds on only 3.3% of rollouts, and the two best curation methods close this to within 3 percentage points of the 93.3% oracle ceiling. Our results argue that curation methods should be evaluated by the policy they produce, not the defects they flag, and that any curation benchmark must control for episode length before reporting detection accuracy. We release the testbed, all metric implementations, and the evaluation pipeline.

Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

Blockchain technology has revolutionized media consumption and distribution in the digital age, allowing creators, consumers, and regulators to participate in a decentralized, fair, and engaging media environment. Epistral, an innovative media network that leverages blockchain technology, aims to be the world's first anti-mimetic media curation and consumption network, addressing the core challenges facing today's digital media landscape: unfair treatment of creators and manipulative consumer algorithms, and the complex task of effective regulation. This paper delves into the conceptualization, design, and potential impact of epistral and explores how it embodies McLuhan's and Girard's theories within the realm of blockchain technology and draws from Hayden's critique of democratic representation. The paper analyzes the challenges and opportunities presented by this new network, providing a broader discourse on the future of media consumption, distribution, and regulation.

A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it silently switches off the curator. We make this precise with a corrupted-reward analysis and, isolating the causal channel by injecting corruption on top of a deterministic reward, a behavioral study on a reference-free report-writing testbed with a code-generation cross-check. Symmetric noise leaves retirement intact, but false-pass bias (failures slipping through as passes) disables contribution-based retirement past a sharp threshold that no amount of data can cross. Separating genuine retirement from cap-eviction churn shows this mechanism failure is universal, holding across domains and failure rates and sparing only near-zero-false-pass, verifier-like graders. The downstream outcome, though, is regime-dependent: eval quality degrades only where the same corruption also starves skill synthesis, and otherwise holds steady, so the disabled curator is silent, surfacing in no aggregate metric. The contribution is a behavioral safety result, not a performance one. A cheap defect-injection audit then tells an operator, before deployment, which side of the threshold their judge occupies.

Inconsistent annotations in training corpora, particularly within preference learning datasets, pose challenges in developing advanced language models. These inconsistencies often arise from variability among annotators and inherent multi-dimensional nature of the preferences. To address these issues, we introduce a self-curation method that preprocesses annotated datasets by leveraging proxy models trained directly on them. Our method enhances preference learning by automatically detecting and selecting consistent annotations. We validate the proposed approach through extensive instruction-following tasks, demonstrating performance improvements of up to 33\% across various learning algorithms and proxy capabilities. This work offers a straightforward and reliable solution to address preference inconsistencies without relying on heuristics, serving as an initial step toward the development of more advanced preference learning methodologies. Code is available at https://github.com/Self-Curation/ .

CHILDES is a large-scale child speech corpus containing long-form recordings of naturalistic child-adult interactions, making it a valuable resource for studying child speech and language development. However, utterance-level timestamps provided in this corpus are often noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with the audio. As a result, utterances cannot always be reliably localized within long recordings, which limits the direct use of these data for training and evaluating speech models. In this work, we propose BEACON (Boundary Estimation via Alignment CONsensus), an ensemble timestamp-curation framework that refines utterance-level timestamps by aggregating knowledge from multiple off-the-shelf ASR models. Specifically, each model's word-level timestamp predictions are first aligned to provided human transcripts, and the final utterance time boundaries are determined by a consensus voting strategy. The framework is corpus-agnostic and applies to any long-form recording paired with a trusted transcript whose timestamps are unreliable or missing, offering a general recipe for timestamp curation. Leveraging this pipeline, we curate and release a 413-hour general-purpose child-speech dataset with corrected utterance-level timestamps, together with a 283-hour quality-controlled subset for ASR training. Fine-tuning on this subset yields up to an average 19.5% relative WER reduction on four out-of-domain child-speech benchmarks.

Imitation learning advances robot capabilities by enabling the acquisition of diverse behaviors from human demonstrations. However, large-scale datasets used for policy training often introduce substantial variability in quality, which can negatively impact performance. As a result, automatically curating datasets by filtering low-quality samples to improve quality becomes essential. Existing robotic curation approaches rely on costly manual annotations and perform curation at a coarse granularity, such as the dataset or trajectory level, failing to account for the quality of individual state-action pairs. To address this, we introduce SCIZOR, a self-supervised data curation framework that filters out low-quality state-action pairs to improve the performance of imitation learning policies. SCIZOR targets two complementary sources of low-quality data: suboptimal data, which hinders learning with undesirable actions, and redundant data, which dilutes training with repetitive patterns. SCIZOR leverages a self-supervised task progress predictor for suboptimal data to remove samples lacking task progression, and a deduplication module operating on joint state-action representation for samples with redundant patterns. Empirically, we show that SCIZOR enables imitation learning policies to achieve higher performance with less data, yielding an average improvement of 15.4% across multiple benchmarks. More information is available at: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/SCIZOR/

Large language models and multilingual machine translation (MT) systems increasingly drive access to information, yet many languages of the tribal communities remain effectively invisible in these technologies. This invisibility exacerbates existing structural inequities in education, governance, and digital participation. We present AdiBhashaa, a community-driven initiative that constructs the first open parallel corpora and baseline MT systems for four major Indian tribal languages-Bhili, Mundari, Gondi, and Santali. This work combines participatory data creation with native speakers, human-in-the-loop validation, and systematic evaluation of both encoder-decoder MT models and large language models. In addition to reporting technical findings, we articulate how AdiBhashaa illustrates a possible model for more equitable AI research: it centers local expertise, builds capacity among early-career researchers from marginalized communities, and foregrounds human validation in the development of language technologies.

Pathology vision-language models are advancing rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain focused on human tissue, particularly oncology, leaving non-human pathology largely unaddressed. This gap is especially important in toxicologic pathology, where microscopic tissue examination of laboratory animals is a core component of preclinical drug safety assessment. To address it, we introduce VIPER, the first expert-curated benchmark for vision-language model evaluation in toxicologic pathology. VIPER contains 1,251 questions associated with 419 H&E-stained rat histology images across seven organ systems, covering multiple-choice, KPrim, and free-text formats. All questions were curated and validated by board-certified veterinary pathologists. In total, we benchmarked 16 models, including two newly introduced veterinary-pathology models, seven human pathology-specialized models, and seven general-purpose frontier models. The results identify a substantial domain gap between veterinary and human pathology, expose the risk of over-diagnosis of normal tissue in frontier models, and show that domain-specific training remains critical for visually grounded predictions. VIPER data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/viper.

Training large language models (LLMs) to write register-transfer level (RTL) requires large corpora of paired specifications and code, and such data is scarce enough that most public corpora are now synthesized. Synthesis provides scale but not correctness, and in two widely used RTL datasets only 24.4% and 53.5% of pairs pass generated functional tests. This raises the question of how much of such a corpus to keep and which part of it. Correctness alone is a poor answer. A pair that misbehaves in one corner case still shows valid syntax and interface conventions, and complex sequential designs are both harder to generate and harder to validate, so filtering by correctness leaves a corpus of short and simple modules. Correctness is also hard to obtain, since behavior leaves little trace on the surface in RTL, and validating an entire corpus only sorts pairs into passed and failed. We present RTLCurator, which learns a behavior-aware compatibility prior by contrasting each specification with implementations that fail simulation, and calibrates it to a new corpus using a small number of validated pairs. It then constructs the retained subset by balancing alignment, representation coverage, and RTL structural richness. On CodeV and RTLCoder, keeping 80% of the corpus this way improves on training with the full corpus across all reported metrics while validating only 10% of the pool, whereas ranking by the score alone falls below random selection and filtering the whole pool by simulation does no better.

Instruction-following machine translation (IF-MT) requires respecting prompt-level rules on terminology, formatting, and register. Rule compliance typically trades off against translation quality, a tension that general-purpose IF data augmentation methods do not address. We propose Reference-Grounded Data Curation, a two-phase pipeline that extracts every supervised constraint from a reference translation that already satisfies it, ensuring feasibility by construction. Phase 1 applies Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) scoring to retain the hardest-but-learnable instances from an English-Thai parallel pool. Phase 2 extracts constraints from each reference target and keeps only generations satisfying every constraint, yielding the 1.97M-record Grounded dataset. We fine-tune open-weight bases on Grounded to produce ChindaMT, a Thai-English translation family at 4B, 2B, and 0.8B parameters. Under length-controlled pairwise judging, ChindaMT outperforms or matches every same-size baseline at every tier on both plain translation and under explicit rules, reaching up to a 68.4% win rate against the strongest baseline. The recipe transfers cleanly across Qwen generations. We release model weights, the Grounded dataset, and evaluation suites.

Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted data or behaviors from a trained model without retraining from scratch. Yet most evaluations assume that the examples to forget are already known. In realistic language-model deployments, a requester may ask a model to stop reproducing a song or book without knowing which spans, documents, quotations, or near-duplicates in a trillion-token corpus support that behavior. We study this missing upstream problem, forget set curation: mapping a suppression request to the data passed to an unlearning algorithm. We introduce CleanSlate, a benchmark for verbatim output suppression over songs and books, with model-specific extraction profiles, content-grounded QA, and capability-retention evaluations. CleanSlate exposes two failure modes. Natural lexical and exact-substring curators often yield forget sets that lead to weak suppression. An evaluation-aware curator suppresses requested continuations almost completely, but causes collateral regression on non-requested content and model-dependent capability loss. These results show that practical unlearning is not only an optimization problem once a forget set is given: the data chosen for forgetting determines both what can be unlearnt and what else is damaged.

A video benchmark should reward the capability it claims to measure, yet models can exploit answer options, question text, or partial visual evidence. We introduce the attack pyramid, five levels of shortcut attacks with increasing access to each item, and audit 115 video benchmarks with it. On 35 benchmarks, attackers that never see a frame approach full-video accuracy. On 51 benchmarks with temporal probes, shuffled frames keep a median 96% of full-video accuracy. Near-duplicate questions make up at least half the items in 63 benchmarks. We screen 505,518 question-answer pairs from 112 of them into an audited pool. Agents turn evaluation requests into specifications, and a deterministic selector with a red-team gate composes reproducible benchmarks. We release Video-Index, the 210 hardest verified items under these attacks in each of four capability groups, 840 items from 76 sources. With the same fixed input, Claude Opus 5 outscores every open-source model by over 37 percentage points, and agent tools add about 20 more, yet all systems leave room to improve efficiency and accuracy. Blog: https://www.enxinsong.com/blog/video-index/ GitHub: https://github.com/Espere-1119-Song/Video-Index Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Video-Index/Video-Index

For small merchant businesses (SMBs) whose catalogs fit within a long-context LLM, full-catalog prompting offers a compelling alternative to multi-stage retrieval designed primarily for large marketplaces with millions of items. However, fitting the full catalog into the context window does not ensure that the model can use it effectively, since LLMs do not exploit long contexts uniformly. We therefore study in-context catalog search through two complementary questions: (1) how to curate and present catalogs to the LLM, and (2) how to adapt the LLM for product selection on curated contexts. We propose RPTune, an end-to-end framework that couples learned catalog curation with LLM post-training using automatically generated, catalog-grounded supervision. An encoder-reorganizer curator orders and prunes products guided by downstream LLM feedback, while the resulting curated catalogs in turn improve the effectiveness of LLM post-training with a context-relative reward. We evaluate RPTune on 7 real merchants spanning distinct retail verticals, using 100 complex conversational queries per merchant. RPTune consistently improves search accuracy across both proprietary and open-weight LLMs, with context curation yielding gains of up to 31.4 percentage points and post-training adding a further 10.3 points on average.

The performance of imitation learning policies often hinges on the datasets with which they are trained. Consequently, investment in data collection for robotics has grown across both industrial and academic labs. However, despite the marked increase in the quantity of demonstrations collected, little work has sought to assess the quality of said data despite mounting evidence of its importance in other areas such as vision and language. In this work, we take a critical step towards addressing the data quality in robotics. Given a dataset of demonstrations, we aim to estimate the relative quality of individual demonstrations in terms of both action diversity and predictability. To do so, we estimate the average contribution of a trajectory towards the mutual information between states and actions in the entire dataset, which captures both the entropy of the marginal action distribution and the state-conditioned action entropy. Though commonly used mutual information estimators require vast amounts of data often beyond the scale available in robotics, we introduce a novel technique based on k-nearest neighbor estimates of mutual information on top of simple VAE embeddings of states and actions. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach is able to partition demonstration datasets by quality according to human expert scores across a diverse set of benchmarks spanning simulation and real world environments. Moreover, training policies based on data filtered by our method leads to a 5-10% improvement in RoboMimic and better performance on real ALOHA and Franka setups.

Shared embedding spaces are widely used for multimodal search and data curation. In practice, two problems often limit how well this works. First, embeddings can reflect modality more than meaning, so examples cluster by input type even when the underlying content matches. Second, the paired supervision used to train these spaces is often noisy. When we blend many heterogeneous, human-labeled datasets, these issues reinforce each other and degrade cross-modal retrieval. We present a framework that improves alignment by acting on both the training pairs and the embedding model. Symmetric Nucleus Subsampling (SNS) refines training pairs by trimming raw inputs and annotations to the portions that best support each other. Expert Embedding Engine (EEE) combines complementary embedding experts using a learned projection network, together with a bias-aware objective that reduces modality-driven separation in the embedding space. We demonstrate that this approach collapses the modality gap by over 90% on average vs base embedding experts and is a strong data curator, with datablends from our method outperforming stratified sampling and traditional curation baselines in downstream model performance.

Predictive models in biomedicine depend on structured assay data locked in the text, tables, and supplements of primary publications. This bottleneck is especially acute in targeted protein degradation (TPD), where each assay record must combine compound identity, degradation target, recruiter, assay context, and endpoint values reported across sections, tables, and supplementary files. Inconsistent compound identifiers and incomplete or implicit assay context further demand domain-specific logic that generic LLM pipelines do not provide. Existing molecular glue and PROTAC databases are manually curated and often lack the experimental context required for downstream modeling. We formulate TPD database extraction as a domain-specific curation task and present an expert-in-the-loop LLM workflow, evaluated through a triangular comparison among LLM predictions, standardized baseline records, and expert-annotated ground truth. A lightweight cross-validated prompt-refinement module adapts extraction instructions from scarce expert annotations. With only seven annotated molecular glue publications, the workflow achieved record-level F_1 = 0.98 and transferred to PROTACs by terminology substitution alone, maintaining record-level F_1 > 0.93. Applied at scale, it expanded molecular glue and PROTAC databases by 81% and 92% records, respectively, with 92% and 82.5% of newly recovered records validated as correct upon expert review. The workflow also recovered kinetic and assay-context information essential for cross-study potency comparison and condition-aware degradation modeling. We release the workflow, prompts, evaluation code, and extracted datasets as resources for TPD data curation and AI-assisted scientific curation more broadly.

Deep learning has accelerated automated atomic model building from cryo-EM maps, yet progress remains limited by the lack of large, high-quality datasets and standardized evaluation benchmarks. We address this gap by introducing CryoAtlas, a rigorously curated dataset and unified benchmark for density-guided atomic model building of protein chains. By integrating and filtering EMDB and PDB entries (up to March 2026), CryoAtlas provides 17,809 map-model-sequence entries, including a curated 16,657-entry training split. From this resource, we construct a 618-target benchmark with a shared evaluation protocol that jointly assesses structural accuracy, model-to-map fit, and stereochemical validity. Using this framework, we benchmark state-of-the-art learning-based methods against Phenix and AlphaFold3, comprehensively analyzing the impact of map resolution, sequence length, protein category and sequence identity on modeling accuracy. As a case study, retraining the ModelAngelo CNN component on CryoAtlas improves performance on the benchmark. CryoAtlas provides an open, reproducible foundation for future cryo-EM atomic model building research. Project details and resource release updates are available at https://oulling.github.io/cryoatlas/.

The advancement of multimodal learning is heavily constrained by the scarcity and high annotation cost of high-quality instruction data. While raw videos offer an abundant and dynamic source of visual knowledge, transforming them into precise instruction data remains highly challenging. To bridge this gap, we present VidUEU-Agent, an automated pipeline that synthesizes instruction data from raw videos for multimodal understanding, editing, and unified tasks. VidUEU-Agent follows a four-stage pipeline: it performs global perception to filter low-quality shots, mines keyframes and multimodal signals, constructs metadata and routes the metadata to synthesize instruction samples. More importantly, our agent framework can autonomously iterate the data distribution based on downstream training results, thereby optimizing data quality, balance, and training effectiveness. Scaling this pipeline, we construct VidUEU-100K, a large-scale dataset of 100K training samples spanning multiple domains and tasks, providing a robust foundation for developing comprehensive multimodal capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning baseline models on VidUEU-100K yields significant and consistent performance gains across diverse representative benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of our proposed agent framework and dataset.

Self-Driving Chemical Laboratories (SDCLs) are moving chemical experimentation toward embodied automation, where machines must perceive laboratory scenes, reason about experimental states, and act under physical, procedural, and safety constraints. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as embodied brains for such systems, existing laboratory benchmarks mainly focus on safety, anomaly detection, or general scientific understanding, leaving their execution-oriented embodied capabilities underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BEAKER, a Benchmark for evaluating Embodied Actionability, Knowledge, Experimentation, and Reasoning in SDCLs. BEAKER contains 1,000 expert-curated question-answer samples across 11 image and video task types, covering key judgments required for chemical laboratory execution, including affordance grounding, trajectory planning, equipment, state, and safety recognition, apparatus setup, operation and step reasoning, and temporal procedure reasoning. All questions and annotations are manually created and reviewed by chemistry and embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts, without AI-assisted generation or annotation. We evaluate 28 general-purpose, science-oriented, chemistry-specialized, and embodied MLLMs in an offline, single-turn setting. Results show that current models can follow coarse experimental procedures in videos, but still struggle to ground actions into operable regions and feasible trajectories, to recognize fine-grained laboratory apparatus, states, and safety norms, and to order steps in mid-length procedures. BEAKER thus reveals a clear gap between coarse procedural understanding and the precise, action-grounded perception required for laboratory execution, providing a diagnostic benchmark for future MLLMs in SDCLs.

Synthetic text generation offers a promising approach to alleviating data scarcity in low-resource languages. However, its effectiveness is inherently limited for languages that are scarcely represented, or entirely absent, in an LLM's pretraining data. At the same time, many such languages have human-curated vocabularies that provide rich lexical and semantic information, often accompanied by grammatical information such as part-of-speech labels. In this work, we ask whether LLMs can leverage these resources to generate coherent text in extremely low-resource and unseen languages. We introduce a framework that combines human-curated vocabularies with a small number of human-written exemplars that provide syntactic signals, while sampling candidate words according to a Zipfian distribution. Across languages with varying levels of resource availability, we evaluate the generated text using lexical diversity, off-target ratio, and human judgments of fluency. Our results show that reasoning-enabled LLMs can generate fluent text even in extremely low-resource languages, with particularly strong results at the sentence level and promising performance at the paragraph level. Our findings highlight a practical pathway for bootstrapping synthetic data in low-resource languages, expanding the amount of usable text even when existing digital resources are extremely limited. Our source code is available at https://github.com/michaelsinanta/vocab2text.

Pre-training code language models relies on massive code corpora usually streamed over the internet. However, researchers rarely need a multi-terabyte archive in its entirety; instead, their workflow centers on curated subsets: selecting well-documented files, filtering out repetitive boilerplate, auditing for benchmark contamination, or retrieving specific code patterns. Yet, because modern corpora are typically published as file pointers and basic attributes rather than source text, no general structural layer exists to select which files to download: curating a subset requires downloading and parsing millions of files first just to discard most of them. We present SWHForest, an open-source framework and public dataset that provides this missing structural layer for any pointer-based corpus without redistributing source code. A single pass over the archive parses each file into an AST and immediately discards the source text, keeping only its structural summary. Queried locally or exposed by archive providers as a server-side filtering API, SWHForest selects matching files first (via SQL or index intersection) and downloads only surviving candidates. Across the ten largest languages of Stack-Edu (52.1M unique files, 341M definitions), SWHForest answers curation queries in milliseconds while cutting downloads by 46-72%, reducing live structural searches from hours of per-language streaming to seconds or minutes.

Natural language processing (NLP) has made significant progress for well-resourced languages such as English but lagged behind for low-resource languages like Setswana. This paper addresses this gap by presenting PuoBERTa, a customised masked language model trained specifically for Setswana. We cover how we collected, curated, and prepared diverse monolingual texts to generate a high-quality corpus for PuoBERTa's training. Building upon previous efforts in creating monolingual resources for Setswana, we evaluated PuoBERTa across several NLP tasks, including part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition (NER), and news categorisation. Additionally, we introduced a new Setswana news categorisation dataset and provided the initial benchmarks using PuoBERTa. Our work demonstrates the efficacy of PuoBERTa in fostering NLP capabilities for understudied languages like Setswana and paves the way for future research directions.

Introduction: The scientific publishing landscape is expanding rapidly, creating challenges for researchers to stay up-to-date with the evolution of the literature. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a potent approach to automating knowledge extraction from this vast amount of publications and preprints. Tasks such as Named-Entity Recognition (NER) and Named-Entity Linking (NEL), in conjunction with context-dependent semantic interpretation, offer promising and complementary approaches to extracting structured information and revealing key concepts. Results: We present the SourceData-NLP dataset produced through the routine curation of papers during the publication process. A unique feature of this dataset is its emphasis on the annotation of bioentities in figure legends. We annotate eight classes of biomedical entities (small molecules, gene products, subcellular components, cell lines, cell types, tissues, organisms, and diseases), their role in the experimental design, and the nature of the experimental method as an additional class. SourceData-NLP contains more than 620,000 annotated biomedical entities, curated from 18,689 figures in 3,223 papers in molecular and cell biology. We illustrate the dataset's usefulness by assessing BioLinkBERT and PubmedBERT, two transformers-based models, fine-tuned on the SourceData-NLP dataset for NER. We also introduce a novel context-dependent semantic task that infers whether an entity is the target of a controlled intervention or the object of measurement. Conclusions: SourceData-NLP's scale highlights the value of integrating curation into publishing. Models trained with SourceData-NLP will furthermore enable the development of tools able to extract causal hypotheses from the literature and assemble them into knowledge graphs.

This paper proposes a novel framework for digital curation of Web corpora in order to provide robust estimation of their parameters, such as their composition and the lexicon. In recent years language models pre-trained on large corpora emerged as clear winners in numerous NLP tasks, but no proper analysis of the corpora which led to their success has been conducted. The paper presents a procedure for robust frequency estimation, which helps in establishing the core lexicon for a given corpus, as well as a procedure for estimating the corpus composition via unsupervised topic models and via supervised genre classification of Web pages. The results of the digital curation study applied to several Web-derived corpora demonstrate their considerable differences. First, this concerns different frequency bursts which impact the core lexicon obtained from each corpus. Second, this concerns the kinds of texts they contain. For example, OpenWebText contains considerably more topical news and political argumentation in comparison to ukWac or Wikipedia. The tools and the results of analysis have been released.

This paper demonstrates how the limitations of pre-trained models and open evaluation datasets factor into assessing the performance of binary semantic similarity classification tasks. As (1) end-user-facing documentation around the curation of these datasets and pre-trained model training regimes is often not easily accessible and (2) given the lower friction and higher demand to quickly deploy such systems in real-world contexts, our study reinforces prior work showing performance disparities across datasets, embedding techniques and distance metrics, while highlighting the importance of understanding how data is collected, curated and analyzed in semantic similarity classification.

LLMOps incur significant costs due to hardware requirements, hindering their widespread accessibility. Additionally, a lack of transparency in model training methods and data contributes to the majority of models being non-reproducible. To tackle these challenges, the LLM Efficiency Challenge was introduced at NeurIPS Workshop, aiming to adapt foundation models on a diverse set of tasks via fine-tuning on a single GPU (RTX 4090 or A100 with 40GB) within a 24-hour timeframe. In this system description paper, we introduce Birbal, our Mistral-7B based winning model, fine-tuned on a single RTX 4090 for 16 hours. Birbal's success lies in curating high-quality instructions covering diverse tasks, resulting in a 35% performance improvement over second-best Qwen-14B based submission.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are trained for thousands of GPU hours on carefully curated web datasets. In recent times, data curation has gained prominence with several works developing strategies to retain 'high-quality' subsets of 'raw' scraped data. For instance, the LAION public dataset retained only 10% of the total crawled data. However, these strategies are typically developed agnostic of the available compute for training. In this paper, we first demonstrate that making filtering decisions independent of training compute is often suboptimal: the limited high-quality data rapidly loses its utility when repeated, eventually requiring the inclusion of 'unseen' but 'lower-quality' data. To address this quality-quantity tradeoff (QQT), we introduce neural scaling laws that account for the non-homogeneous nature of web data, an angle ignored in existing literature. Our scaling laws (i) characterize the differing 'utility' of various quality subsets of web data; (ii) account for how utility diminishes for a data point at its 'nth' repetition; and (iii) formulate the mutual interaction of various data pools when combined, enabling the estimation of model performance on a combination of multiple data pools without ever jointly training on them. Our key message is that data curation cannot be agnostic of the total compute that a model will be trained for. Our scaling laws allow us to curate the best possible pool for achieving top performance on Datacomp at various compute budgets, carving out a pareto-frontier for data curation. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/scaling_laws_data_filtering.

We introduce LlavaGuard, a family of VLM-based safeguard models, offering a versatile framework for evaluating the safety compliance of visual content. Specifically, we designed LlavaGuard for dataset annotation and generative model safeguarding. To this end, we collected and annotated a high-quality visual dataset incorporating a broad safety taxonomy, which we use to tune VLMs on context-aware safety risks. As a key innovation, LlavaGuard's new responses contain comprehensive information, including a safety rating, the violated safety categories, and an in-depth rationale. Further, our introduced customizable taxonomy categories enable the context-specific alignment of LlavaGuard to various scenarios. Our experiments highlight the capabilities of LlavaGuard in complex and real-world applications. We provide checkpoints ranging from 7B to 34B parameters demonstrating state-of-the-art performance, with even the smallest models outperforming baselines like GPT-4. We make our dataset and model weights publicly available and invite further research to address the diverse needs of communities and contexts.

Since language models (LMs) now outperform average humans on many challenging tasks, it has become increasingly difficult to develop challenging, high-quality, and realistic evaluations. We address this issue by examining LMs' capabilities to generate code for solving real scientific research problems. Incorporating input from scientists and AI researchers in 16 diverse natural science sub-fields, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science, we created a scientist-curated coding benchmark, SciCode. The problems in SciCode naturally factorize into multiple subproblems, each involving knowledge recall, reasoning, and code synthesis. In total, SciCode contains 338 subproblems decomposed from 80 challenging main problems. It offers optional descriptions specifying useful scientific background information and scientist-annotated gold-standard solutions and test cases for evaluation. Claude3.5-Sonnet, the best-performing model among those tested, can solve only 4.6% of the problems in the most realistic setting. We believe that SciCode demonstrates both contemporary LMs' progress towards becoming helpful scientific assistants and sheds light on the development and evaluation of scientific AI in the future.

The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism. However, unlike standard preference optimization, the generative model does not have access to the reward function or negative samples needed for pairwise comparisons. Moreover, our study doesn't require access to the density function, only to samples. We prove that, if the data is curated according to a reward model, then the expected reward of the iterative retraining procedure is maximized. We further provide theoretical results on the stability of the retraining loop when using a positive fraction of real data at each step. Finally, we conduct illustrative experiments on both synthetic datasets and on CIFAR10 showing that such a procedure amplifies biases of the reward model.

Large Language Models still struggle in challenging scenarios that leverage structured data, complex reasoning, or tool usage. In this paper, we propose Source2Synth: a new method that can be used for teaching LLMs new skills without relying on costly human annotations. Source2Synth takes as input a custom data source and produces synthetic data points with intermediate reasoning steps grounded in real-world sources. Source2Synth improves the dataset quality by discarding low-quality generations based on their answerability. We demonstrate the generality of this approach by applying it to two challenging domains: we test reasoning abilities in multi-hop question answering (MHQA), and tool usage in tabular question answering (TQA). Our method improves performance by 25.51% for TQA on WikiSQL and 22.57% for MHQA on HotPotQA compared to the fine-tuned baselines.

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

Scaling data quantity is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet recent findings show that data quality can significantly boost performance and training efficiency. We introduce a German-language dataset curation pipeline that combines heuristic and model-based filtering techniques with synthetic data generation. We use our pipeline to create Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb, a large-scale German pre-training dataset which draws from: (1) Common Crawl web data, (2) FineWeb2, and (3) synthetically-generated data conditioned on actual, organic web data. We evaluate our dataset by pre-training both a 1B Llama-style model and an 8B tokenizer-free hierarchical autoregressive transformer (HAT). A comparison on German-language benchmarks, including MMMLU, shows significant performance gains of Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb over FineWeb2 alone. This advantage holds at the 8B scale even when FineWeb2 is enriched by human-curated high-quality data sources such as Wikipedia. Our findings support the growing body of evidence that model-based data curation and synthetic data generation can significantly enhance LLM pre-training datasets.