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Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

David Heineman, Valentin Hofmann, Ian Magnusson, Yuling Gu, Noah Smith, Hanna Hajishirzi, Kyle Lo, Jesse Dodge

Developing large language models is expensive and often involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we analyze specific properties which make a benchmark more reliable and useful for such decisions, and interventions to design higher-quality evaluation benchmarks. We introduce two key metrics that show differences in current benchmarks: signal, a benchmark’s ability to separate better models from worse models, and noise, a benchmark’s sensitivity to random variability between training steps. We demonstrate that benchmarks with a better signal-to-noise ratio are more reliable when making decisions at small scale, and those with less noise have lower scaling law prediction error. These results suggest that improving signal or noise will lead to more useful benchmarks, so we introduce four interventions designed to directly affect signal or noise. For example, we propose that switching to a metric that has better signal and noise (e.g., perplexity rather than accuracy) leads to better reliability and scaling law error. We also find that filtering noisy benchmarks such that they have better signal-to-noise ratio leads to more reliable evaluations. We also find that averaging the output of a model's checkpoints to reduce noise leads to consistent improvements. We conclude by recommending that those creating new benchmarks, or selecting which existing benchmarks to use, aim for high signal and low noise. We use 30 benchmarks for these experiments, and 465 open-weight language models from 60M to 32B parameters, resulting in a new, publicly available dataset of 50K evaluation benchmark results, totaling 200M instances.

Computer Vision · Everything Else

Penghao Wang, Yiyang He, Xin Lv, Yukai Zhou, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu, Jiayuan Gu

Understanding objects at the level of their constituent parts is fundamental to advancing computer vision, graphics, and robotics. While datasets like PartNet have driven progress in 3D part understanding, their reliance on untextured geometries and expert-dependent annotation limits scalability and usability. We introduce PartNeXt, a next-generation dataset addressing these gaps with over 23000 high-quality, textured 3D models annotated with fine-grained, hierarchical part labels across 50 categories. We benchmark PartNeXt on two tasks: (1) class-agnostic part segmentation, where state-of-the-art methods (e.g., PartField, SAMPart3D) struggle with fine-grained and leaf-level parts, and (2) 3D part-centric question answering, a new benchmark for 3D-LLMs that reveals significant gaps in open-vocabulary part grounding. Additionally, training Point-SAM on PartNeXt yields substantial gains over PartNet, underscoring the dataset’s superior quality and diversity. By combining scalable annotation, texture-aware labels, and multi-task evaluation, PartNeXt opens new avenues for research in structured 3D understanding.

Yuzheng Hu, Fan Wu, Haotian Ye, David Forsyth, James Zou, Nan Jiang, Jiaqi Ma, Han Zhao

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datasets, which is violated in online RL where each experience both updates the policy and shapes future data collection. In this paper, we initiate the study of data attribution for online RL, focusing on the widely used Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We start by establishing a *local* attribution framework, interpreting model checkpoints with respect to the records in the recent training buffer. We design two target functions, capturing agent action and cumulative return respectively, and measure each record's contribution through gradient similarity between its training loss and these targets. We demonstrate the power of this framework through three concrete applications: diagnosis of learning, temporal analysis of behavior formation, and targeted intervention during training. Leveraging this framework, we further propose an algorithm, iterative influence-based filtering (IIF), for online RL training that iteratively performs experience filtering to refine policy updates. Across standard RL benchmarks (classic control, navigation, locomotion) to RLHF for large language models, IIF reduces sample complexity, speeds up training, and achieves higher returns. Together, these results open a new direction for making online RL more interpretable, efficient, and effective.

Data-centric AI · Data-centric AI methods and tools

Yuzheng Hu, Fan Wu, Haotian Ye, David Forsyth, James Zou, Nan Jiang, Jiaqi Ma, Han Zhao

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datasets, which is violated in online RL where each experience both updates the policy and shapes future data collection. In this paper, we initiate the study of data attribution for online RL, focusing on the widely used Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We start by establishing a *local* attribution framework, interpreting model checkpoints with respect to the records in the recent training buffer. We design two target functions, capturing agent action and cumulative return respectively, and measure each record's contribution through gradient similarity between its training loss and these targets. We demonstrate the power of this framework through three concrete applications: diagnosis of learning, temporal analysis of behavior formation, and targeted intervention during training. Leveraging this framework, we further propose an algorithm, iterative influence-based filtering (IIF), for online RL training that iteratively performs experience filtering to refine policy updates. Across standard RL benchmarks (classic control, navigation, locomotion) to RLHF for large language models, IIF reduces sample complexity, speeds up training, and achieves higher returns. Together, these results open a new direction for making online RL more interpretable, efficient, and effective.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Yiwei Yang, Chung Peng Lee, Shangbin Feng, Dora Zhao, Bingbing Wen, Anthony Liu, Yulia Tsvetkov, Bill Howe

Spurious correlations occur when models rely on non-essential features that coincidentally co-vary with target labels, leading to incorrect reasoning under distribution shift. We consider spurious correlations in multi-modal Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on extensive and diverse datasets without explicit task supervision. We develop a benchmark by sourcing GPT-4o errors on real-world visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks, then curating a subset through LVLM-human annotation and synthetic counterfactual evaluation to identify errors caused by spurious correlations. This process yields SpuriVerse, a novel benchmark comprised of 124 distinct types of spurious correlations extracted from real-world datasets, each containing 1 realistic and 10 synthetic VQA samples for a total of 1364 multiple choice questions. We evaluate 15 open and closed-source LVLMs on SpuriVerse, finding that even state-of-the-art closed-source models struggle significantly, achieving at best only 35.0\% accuracy. Fine-tuning on synthetic examples that emphasize the spurious correlation improves performance to 78.4\%, suggesting that training on diverse spurious patterns generalizes to unseen situations: models appear to learn to avoid "shortcuts" and attend to the overall image context.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Jie Ma, NING QU, Zhitao Gao, Xing Rui, Jun Liu, Hongbin Pei, Jiang Xie, Lingyun Song, Pinghui Wang, Jing Tao 等

Knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation seeks to mitigate hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) caused by insufficient or outdated knowledge. However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit the prior knowledge embedded in knowledge graphs (KGs), particularly their structural information and explicit or implicit constraints. The former can enhance the faithfulness of LLMs' reasoning, while the latter can improve the reliability of response generations. Motivated by these, we propose a trustworthy reasoning framework, termed Deliberation over Priors (\texttt{DP}), which sufficiently utilizes the priors contained in KGs. Specifically, \texttt{DP} adopts a progressive knowledge distillation strategy that integrates structural priors into LLMs through a combination of supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization, thereby improving the faithfulness of relation path generation. Furthermore, our framework employs a reasoning-introspection strategy, which guides LLMs to perform refined reasoning verification based on extracted constraint priors, ensuring the reliability of response generation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that \texttt{DP} achieves new state-of-the-art performance, especially a Hit@1 improvement of 13% on the ComplexWebQuestions dataset, and generates highly trustworthy responses. We also conduct various analyses to verify its flexibility and practicality. Code is available at [https://github.com/reml-group/Deliberation-on-Priors](https://github.com/reml-group/Deliberation-on-Priors).

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Ruskin Raj Manku, Yuzhi Tang, Xingjian Shi, Mu Li, Alexander Smola

Text-to-Speech (TTS) benchmarks often fail to capture how well models handle nuanced and semantically complex text. Building on $\textit{EmergentTTS}$, we introduce $\textit{EmergentTTS-Eval}$, a comprehensive benchmark covering six challenging TTS scenarios: emotions, paralinguistics, foreign words, syntactic complexity, complex pronunciation (e.g. URLs, formulas), and questions. Crucially, our framework automates both test-case generation and evaluation, making the benchmark easily extensible. Starting from a small set of human-written seed prompts, we iteratively extend them using LLMs to target specific structural, phonetic and prosodic challenges, resulting in 1,645 diverse test samples. Moreover, we employ a model-as-a-judge approach, using a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) to assess the speech across multiple dimensions such as expressed emotion, prosodic, intonational, and pronunciation accuracy. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary TTS systems, such as 11Labs, Deepgram, and OpenAI's 4o-mini-TTS, on EmergentTTS-Eval, demonstrating its ability to reveal fine-grained performance differences. Results show that the model-as-a-judge approach offers robust TTS assessment and a high correlation with human preferences. We open-source the code and the dataset.

Applications · Climate

Eya Cherif, Arthur Ouaknine, Luke Brown, Phuong Dao, Kyle Kovach, Bing Lu, Daniel Mederer, Hannes Feilhauer, Teja Kattenborn, David Rolnick

Plant traits such as leaf carbon content and leaf mass are essential variables in the study of biodiversity and climate change. However, conventional field sampling cannot feasibly cover trait variation at ecologically meaningful spatial scales. Machine learning represents a valuable solution for plant trait prediction across ecosystems, leveraging hyperspectral data from remote sensing.Nevertheless, trait prediction from hyperspectral data is challenged by label scarcity and substantial domain shifts (\eg across sensors, ecological distributions), requiring robust cross-domain methods.Here, we present GreenHyperSpectra, a pretraining dataset encompassing real-world cross-sensor and cross-ecosystem samples designed to benchmark trait prediction with semi- and self-supervised methods. We adopt an evaluation framework encompassing in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. We successfully leverage GreenHyperSpectra to pretrain label-efficient multi-output regression models that outperform the state-of-the-art supervised baseline. Our empirical analyses demonstrate substantial improvements in learning spectral representations for trait prediction, establishing a comprehensive methodological framework to catalyze research at the intersection of representation learning and plant functional traits assessment. We also share the dataset\footnotemark[1], code and pretrained model objects for this study \href{https://github.com/echerif18/HyspectraSSL}{here}.\footnotetext[1]{GreenHyperSpectra dataset: \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Avatarr05/GreenHyperSpectra}{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Avatarr05/GreenHyperSpectra}}

Data-centric AI · Data-centric AI methods and tools

Yuhao Qing, Boyu Zhu, Mingzhe Du, Zhijiang Guo, Terry Yue Zhuo, Qianru Zhang, Jie Zhang, Heming Cui, Siu Ming Yiu, Dong HUANG 等

Existing code generation benchmarks primarily evaluate functional correctness, with limited attention to code efficiency, and they are often restricted to a single language such as Python. To address this gap, we introduce EffiBench‑X, the first large‑scale multi‑language benchmark specifically designed for robust efficiency evaluation of LLM‑generated code. EffiBench‑X supports Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go, and comprises competitive programming tasks paired with human‑expert solutions as efficiency baselines. Evaluating state‑of‑the‑art LLMs on EffiBench‑X reveals that while models frequently generate functionally correct code, they consistently underperform human experts in efficiency. Even the most efficient LLM‑generated solutions (e.g., Qwen3‑32B) achieve only around 62% of human efficiency on average, with significant language‑specific variation: models tend to perform better in Python, Ruby, and JavaScript than in Java, C++, and Go (e.g., DeepSeek‑R1’s Python code is markedly more efficient than its Java code). These findings highlight the need for research into optimization‑oriented methods to improve the efficiency of LLM‑generated code across diverse languages. The dataset and evaluation infrastructure are publicly available at https://github.com/EffiBench/EffiBench-X.git and https://huggingface.co/datasets/EffiBench/effibench-x.

Optimization · Everything Else

Sota Moriyama, Katsumi Inoue

The use of deep learning to solve fundamental AI problems such as Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has been explored recently to develop robust and scalable reasoning systems. This work advances such neural-based reasoning approaches by developing a new Graph Neural Network (GNN) to differentiably solve (weighted) Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). To this end, we propose SAT-based Graph Attention Networks (SGATs) as novel GNNs that are built on t-norm based attention and message passing mechanisms, and structurally designed to approximate greedy distributed local search. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we develop a local search solver that uses SGATs to continuously solve any given MaxSAT problem. Experiments on (weighted) MaxSAT benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGATs significantly outperform existing neural-based architectures, and achieve state-of-the-art performance among continuous approaches, highlighting the strength of the proposed model.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch Offline

Suzan Ece Ada, Georg Martius, Emre Ugur, Erhan Oztop

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising avenue for training policies from pre-collected datasets when gathering additional interaction data is infeasible. However, existing offline RL methods often assume stationarity or only consider synthetic perturbations at test time—assumptions that often fail in real-world scenarios characterized by abrupt, time-varying offsets. These offsets can lead to partial observability, causing agents to misperceive their true state and degrade performance. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Forecasting in Non-stationary Offline RL (FORL), a framework that unifies (i) conditional diffusion-based candidate state generation, trained without presupposing any specific form of future non-stationarity, and (ii) zero-shot time-series foundation models. FORL targets environments prone to unexpected, potentially non-Markovian offsets, requiring robust agent performance from the onset of each episode. Empirical evaluations on offline RL benchmarks, augmented with real-world time-series data to simulate realistic non-stationarity, demonstrate that FORL consistently improves performance compared to competitive baselines. By integrating zero-shot forecasting with the agent’s experience we aim to bridge the gap between offline RL and the complexity of real-world, non-stationary environments.

Applications · Everything Else

King Yiu Brandon Man, Ghadi Nehme, Md Ferdous Alam, Faez Ahmed

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a time-consuming and complex process, requiring precise, long-horizon user interactions with intricate 3D interfaces. While recent advances in AI-driven user interface (UI) agents show promise, most existing datasets and methods focus on short, low-complexity tasks in mobile or web applications, failing to capture the demands of professional engineering tools. In this work, we introduce VideoCAD, the first attempt to model UI interactions for precision engineering tasks. Specifically, VideoCAD is a large-scale synthetic dataset consisting of over 41K annotated video recordings of CAD operations, generated using an automated framework for collecting high-fidelity UI action data from human-made CAD designs.Compared to existing datasets, VideoCAD offers an order-of-magnitude increase in complexity for real-world engineering UI tasks, with time horizons up to $20\times$ longer than those in other datasets. We show two important downstream applications of VideoCAD:(1) learning UI interactions from professional 3D CAD tools for precision tasks and (2) a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning and video understanding. To learn the UI interactions, we propose VideoCADFormer, a state-of-the-art model for learning CAD interactions directly from video, which outperforms existing behavior cloning baselines. Both VideoCADFormer and the VQA benchmark derived from VideoCAD reveal key challenges in the current state of video-based UI understanding, including the need for precise action grounding, multi-modal and spatial reasoning, and long-horizon dependencies. Dataset and code available at: https://github.com/ghadinehme/VideoCAD.

Data-centric AI · Everything Else

Jingyuan He, Jiongnan Liu, Vishan Oberoi, Bolin Wu, Mahima Jagadeesh Patel, Kangrui Mao, Chuning Shi, I-Ta Lee, Arnold Overwijk, Chenyan Xiong

Recommender systems are among the most impactful AI applications, interacting with billions of users every day, guiding them to relevant products, services, or information tailored to their preferences.However, the research and development of recommender systems are hindered by existing datasets that fail to capture realistic user behaviors and inconsistent evaluation settings that lead to ambiguous conclusions.This paper introduces the \textbf{O}pen \textbf{R}ecommendation \textbf{B}enchmark for Reproducible Research with H\textbf{I}dden \textbf{T}ests (\textbf{ORBIT}), a unified benchmark for consistent and realistic evaluation of recommendation models. ORBIT offers a standardized evaluation framework of public datasets with reproducible splits and transparent settings for its public leaderboard. Additionally, ORBIT introduces a new webpage recommendation task, ClueWeb-Reco, featuring web browsing sequences from 87 million public, high-quality webpages. ClueWeb-Reco is a synthetic dataset derived from real, user-consented, and privacy-guaranteed browsing data. It aligns with modern recommendation scenarios and is reserved as the hidden test part of our leaderboard to challenge recommendation models' generalization ability. ORBIT measures 12 representative recommendation models on its public benchmark and introduces a prompted LLM baseline on the ClueWeb-Reco hidden test.Our benchmark results reflect general improvements of recommender systems on the public datasets, with variable individual performances.The results on the hidden test reveal the limitations of existing approaches in large-scale webpage recommendation and highlight the potential for improvements with LLM integrations.ORBIT benchmark, leaderboard, and codebase are available at \url{https://www.open-reco-bench.ai}.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Weihao Xuan, Junjue Wang, Heli Qi, Zihang Chen, Zhuo Zheng, Yanfei Zhong, Junshi Xia, Naoto YOKOYA

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, but their application to long-term Earth observation analysis remains limited, primarily focusing on single-temporal or bi-temporal imagery. To address this gap, we introduce **DVL-Suite**, a comprehensive framework for analyzing long-term urban dynamics through remote sensing imagery. Our suite comprises 14,871 high-resolution (1.0m) multi-temporal images spanning 42 major cities in the U.S. from 2005 to 2023, organized into two components: **DVL-Bench** and **DVL-Instruct**. The *DVL-Bench* includes six urban understanding tasks, from fundamental change detection (*pixel-level*) to quantitative analyses (*regional-level*) and comprehensive urban narratives (*scene-level*), capturing diverse urban dynamics including expansion/transformation patterns, disaster assessment, and environmental challenges. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal their limitations in long-term temporal understanding and quantitative analysis. These challenges motivate the creation of *DVL-Instruct*, a specialized instruction-tuning dataset designed to enhance models' capabilities in multi-temporal Earth observation. Building upon this dataset, we develop **DVLChat**, a baseline model capable of both image-level question-answering and pixel-level segmentation, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of city dynamics through language interactions. Project: [https://github.com/weihao1115/dynamicvl](https://github.com/weihao1115/dynamicvl).

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Heli Qi, Zhihao Liu, Kunyi Liu, Yuhan Wu, Hongruixuan Chen, JIAN SONG, Junshi Xia, Zhuo Zheng 等

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have made great achievements in Earth vision. However, complex disaster scenes with diverse disaster types, geographic regions, and satellite sensors have posed new challenges for VLM applications. To fill this gap, we curate the first remote sensing vision-language dataset (DisasterM3) for global-scale disaster assessment and response. DisasterM3 includes 26,988 bi-temporal satellite images and 123k instruction pairs across 5 continents, with three characteristics: **1) Multi-hazard**: DisasterM3 involves 36 historical disaster events with significant impacts, which are categorized into 10 common natural and man-made disasters. **2) Multi-sensor**: Extreme weather during disasters often hinders optical sensor imaging, making it necessary to combine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for post-disaster scenes. **3) Multi-task**: Based on real-world scenarios, DisasterM3 includes 9 disaster-related visual perception and reasoning tasks, harnessing the full potential of VLM's reasoning ability with progressing from disaster-bearing body recognition to structural damage assessment and object relational reasoning, culminating in the generation of long-form disaster reports. We extensively evaluated 14 generic and remote sensing VLMs on our benchmark, revealing that state-of-the-art models struggle with the disaster tasks, largely due to the lack of a disaster-specific corpus, cross-sensor gap, and damage object counting insensitivity. Focusing on these issues, we fine-tune four VLMs using our dataset and achieve stable improvements (up to 10.4\%$\uparrow$QA, 2.1$\uparrow$Report, 40.8\%$\uparrow$Referring Seg.) with robust cross-sensor and cross-disaster generalization capabilities. Project: https://github.com/Junjue-Wang/DisasterM3.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch Offline

Carlo Alfano, Silvia Sapora, Jakob Foerster, Patrick Rebeschini, Yee Whye Teh

Evaluating preference optimization (PO) algorithms on LLM alignment is a challenging task that presents prohibitive costs, noise, and several variables like model size and hyper-parameters. In this work, we show that it is possible to gain insights on the efficacy of PO algorithm on much simpler benchmarks. We design a diagnostic suite of MuJoCo tasks and datasets, which we use to systematically evaluate PO algorithms, establishing a more controlled and cheaper benchmark. We then propose a novel family of PO algorithms based on mirror descent, which we call Mirror Preference Optimization (MPO). Through evolutionary strategies, we search this class to discover algorithms specialized to specific properties of preference datasets, such as mixed-quality or noisy data. We demonstrate that our discovered PO algorithms outperform all known algorithms in the targeted MuJoCo settings. Finally, based on the insights gained from our MuJoCo experiments, we design a novel PO algorithm that significantly outperforms existing baselines in an LLM alignment task.

Applications · Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Rachapun Rotrattanadumrong, Carlo De Donno

Oligonucleotide therapeutics offer great potential to address previously undruggable targets and enable personalized medicine. However, their progress is often hindered by insufficient safety and efficacy profiles. Predictive modeling and machine learning could significantly accelerate oligonucleotide drug discovery by identifying suboptimal compounds early on, but their application in this area lags behind other modalities. A key obstacle to the adoption of machine learning in the field is the scarcity of readily accessible and standardized datasets for model development, as data are often scattered across diverse experiments with inconsistent molecular representations. To overcome this challenge, we introduce OligoGym, a curated collection of standardized, machine learning-ready datasets encompassing various oligonucleotide therapeutic modalities and endpoints. We used OligoGym to benchmark diverse classical and deep learning methods, establishing performance baselines for each dataset across different featurization techniques, model configurations, and splitting strategies. Our work represents a crucial first step in creating a more unified framework for oligonucleotide therapeutic dataset generation and model training.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Xianzhe Fan, Xuhui Zhou, Chuanyang Jin, Kolby Nottingham, Hao Zhu, Maarten Sap

Humans continuously infer the states, goals, and behaviors of others by perceiving their surroundings in dynamic, real-world social interactions. However, most Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks only evaluate static, text-based scenarios, which have a significant gap compared to real interactions. We propose the SoMi-ToM benchmark, designed to evaluate multi-perspective ToM in embodied multi-agent complex social interactions. This benchmark is based on rich multimodal interaction data generated by the interaction environment SoMi, covering diverse crafting goals and social relationships. Our framework supports multi-level evaluation: (1) first-person evaluation provides multimodal (visual, dialogue, action, etc.) input from a first-person perspective during a task for real-time state inference, (2) third-person evaluation provides complete third-person perspective video and text records after a task for goal and behavior inference. This evaluation method allows for a more comprehensive examination of a model's ToM capabilities from both the subjective immediate experience and the objective global observation. We constructed a challenging dataset containing 35 third-person perspective videos, 363 first-person perspective images, and 1225 expert-annotated multiple-choice questions (three options). On this dataset, we systematically evaluated the performance of human subjects and several state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs). The results show that LVLMs perform significantly worse than humans on SoMi-ToM: the average accuracy gap between humans and models is 40.1% in first-person evaluation and 26.4% in third-person evaluation. This indicates that future LVLMs need to further improve their ToM capabilities in embodied, complex social interactions.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Zhenyuan Chen, Chenxi Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Feng Zhang

Remote sensing is critical for disaster monitoring, yet existing datasets lack temporal image pairs and detailed textual annotations. While single-snapshot imagery dominates current resources, it fails to capture dynamic disaster impacts over time. To address this gap, we introduce the Remote Sensing Change Caption (RSCC) dataset, a large-scale benchmark comprising 62,351 pre-/post-disaster image pairs (spanning earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and more) paired with rich, human-like change captions. By bridging the temporal and semantic divide in remote sensing data, RSCC enables robust training and evaluation of vision-language models for disaster-aware bi-temporal understanding. Our results highlight RSCC’s ability to facilitate detailed disaster-related analysis, paving the way for more accurate, interpretable, and scalable vision-language applications in remote sensing. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Bili-Sakura/RSCC.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Qingyue Zhang, Haohao Fu, Guanbo Huang, Yaoyuan Liang, Chang Chu, Tianren Peng, Yanru Wu, Qi Li, Yang Li, Shao-Lun Huang

Multi-source transfer learning provides an effective solution to data scarcity in real-world supervised learning scenarios by leveraging multiple source tasks. In this field, existing works typically use all available samples from sources in training, which constrains their training efficiency and may lead to suboptimal results. To address this, we propose a theoretical framework that answers the question: what is the optimal quantity of source samples needed from each source task to jointly train the target model? Specifically, we introduce a generalization error measure based on K-L divergence, and minimize it based on high-dimensional statistical analysis to determine the optimal transfer quantity for each source task. Additionally, we develop an architecture-agnostic and data-efficient algorithm OTQMS to implement our theoretical results for target model training in multi-source transfer learning. Experimental studies on diverse architectures and two real-world benchmark datasets show that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and data efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zqy0126/OTQMS.