arXiv subjects

Jan Christian Blaise Cruz

Publications and source records attributed to Jan Christian Blaise Cruz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

HyperBrowseComp: A Multilingual and Multimodal Stress Test for Web-Browsing Agents

We introduce HyperBrowseComp, a multilingual and multimodal browsing benchmark comprising 423 manually authored and human-validated questions across 13 languages, written by native or highly proficient speakers. Questions are designed to be extremely challenging. Each question targets a concise, publicly verifiable answer whose discovery requires locating obscure evidence, following multi-step clue chains, or inspecting heterogeneous sources such as videos, scanned documents, images, or maps. Easier questions are filtered out by evaluating them with models without internet access to reduce the likelihood that they can be answered with parametric knowledge alone. We evaluate several models using provider-native search and a shared external retrieval harness under a common agent protocol. To contextualize model performance and effort, we also conduct a human evaluation on a sample of the questions. HyperBrowseComp provides a challenging testbed for persistent information seeking across languages and evidence modalities, with difficulty arising from discovering and connecting evidence on the open web.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Sense Representations Are Inducible Interfaces

Sense representations (explicit, per-token meaning decompositions) are useful for disambiguation, steering, and cross-lingual alignment, but existing approaches require models to be pretrained with sense structure baked in. We introduce ACROS, which induces an explicit sense pathway into a frozen pretrained decoder LM through a gated residual addition. On SmolLM2-360M, ACROS preserves base LM quality while supporting three uses of the same induced variables: zero-shot word-sense disambiguation (64.95 F1 on Raganato ALL, competitive with the WordNet first-sense heuristic), low-KL lexical steering across 5,161 CoInCo cases where a simple non-oracle proxy recovers about 90% of positive shifts, and SENSIA cross-lingual adaptation to four languages (mean R@1 0.988, target FLORES PPL 7.94). ACROS makes sense representations an inducible interface for ordinary pretrained LMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

LLM Olympiad: Why Model Evaluation Needs a Sealed Exam

Benchmarks and leaderboards are how NLP most often communicates progress, but in the LLM era they are increasingly easy to misread. Scores can reflect benchmark-chasing, hidden evaluation choices, or accidental exposure to test content -- not just broad capability. Closed benchmarks delay some of these issues, but reduce transparency and make it harder for the community to learn from results. We argue for a complementary practice: an Olympiad-style evaluation event where problems are sealed until evaluation, submissions are frozen in advance, and all entries run through one standardized harness. After scoring, the full task set and evaluation code are released so results can be reproduced and audited. This design aims to make strong performance harder to ``manufacture'' and easier to trust.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Idea First, Code Later: Disentangling Problem Solving from Code Generation in Evaluating LLMs for Competitive Programming

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly succeed on competitive programming problems, yet existing evaluations conflate algorithmic reasoning with code-level implementation. We argue that competitive programming is fundamentally a problem-solving task and propose centering natural-language editorials in both solution generation and evaluation. Generating an editorial prior to code improves solve rates for some LLMs, with substantially larger gains when using expertly written gold editorials. However, even with gold editorials, models continue to struggle with implementation, while the gap between generated and gold editorials reveals a persistent problem-solving bottleneck in specifying correct and complete algorithms. Beyond pass/fail metrics, we diagnose reasoning errors by comparing model-generated editorials to gold standards using expert annotations and validate an LLM-as-a-judge protocol for scalable evaluation. We introduce a dataset of 83 ICPC-style problems with gold editorials and full test suites, and evaluate 19 LLMs, arguing that future benchmarks should explicitly separate problem solving from implementation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Multilinguality as Sense Adaptation

We approach multilinguality as sense adaptation: aligning latent meaning representations across languages rather than relying solely on shared parameters and scale. In this paper, we introduce SENse-based Symmetric Interlingual Alignment (SENSIA), which adapts a Backpack language model from one language to another by explicitly aligning sense-level mixtures and contextual representations on parallel data, while jointly training a target-language language modeling loss to preserve fluency. Across benchmarks on four typologically diverse languages, SENSIA generally outperforms comparable multilingual alignment methods and achieves competitive accuracy against monolingual from-scratch baselines while using 2-4x less target-language data. Analyses of learned sense geometry indicate that local sense topology and global structure relative to English are largely preserved, and ablations show that the method is robust in terms of design and scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural context in multimodal translation. We introduce CaMMT, a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate five Vision Language Models (VLMs) in text-only and text+image settings. Through automatic and human evaluations, we find that visual context generally improves translation quality, especially in handling Culturally-Specific Items (CSIs), disambiguation, and correct gender marking. By releasing CaMMT, our objective is to support broader efforts to build and evaluate multimodal translation systems that are better aligned with cultural nuance and regional variations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MOMENTS: A Comprehensive Multimodal Benchmark for Theory of Mind

Understanding Theory of Mind is essential for building socially intelligent multimodal agents capable of perceiving and interpreting human behavior. We introduce MoMentS (Multimodal Mental States), a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the ToM capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) through realistic, narrative-rich scenarios presented in short films. MoMentS includes over 2,300 multiple-choice questions spanning seven distinct ToM categories. The benchmark features long video context windows and realistic social interactions that provide deeper insight into characters' mental states. We evaluate several MLLMs and find that although vision generally improves performance, models still struggle to integrate it effectively. For audio, models that process dialogues as audio do not consistently outperform transcript-based inputs. Our findings highlight the need to improve multimodal integration and point to open challenges that must be addressed to advance AI's social understanding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FilBench: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Filipino?

Despite the impressive performance of LLMs on English-based tasks, little is known about their capabilities in specific languages such as Filipino. In this work, we address this gap by introducing FilBench, a Filipino-centric benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities in Filipino, Tagalog, and Cebuano. We carefully curate the tasks in FilBench to reflect the priorities and trends of NLP research in the Philippines such as Cultural Knowledge, Classical NLP, Reading Comprehension, and Generation. By evaluating 27 state-of-the-art LLMs on FilBench, we find that several LLMs suffer from reading comprehension and translation capabilities. Our results indicate that FilBench is challenging, with the best model, GPT-4o, achieving only a score of 72.23%. Moreover, we also find that models trained specifically for Southeast Asian languages tend to underperform on FilBench, with the highest-performing model, SEA-LION v3 70B, achieving only a score of 61.07%. Our work demonstrates the value of curating language-specific LLM benchmarks to aid in driving progress on Filipino NLP and increasing the inclusion of Philippine languages in LLM development.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Datasheets Aren't Enough: DataRubrics for Automated Quality Metrics and Accountability

High-quality datasets are fundamental to training and evaluating machine learning models, yet their creation-especially with accurate human annotations-remains a significant challenge. Many dataset paper submissions lack originality, diversity, or rigorous quality control, and these shortcomings are often overlooked during peer review. Submissions also frequently omit essential details about dataset construction and properties. While existing tools such as datasheets aim to promote transparency, they are largely descriptive and do not provide standardized, measurable methods for evaluating data quality. Similarly, metadata requirements at conferences promote accountability but are inconsistently enforced. To address these limitations, this position paper advocates for the integration of systematic, rubric-based evaluation metrics into the dataset review process-particularly as submission volumes continue to grow. We also explore scalable, cost-effective methods for synthetic data generation, including dedicated tools and LLM-as-a-judge approaches, to support more efficient evaluation. As a call to action, we introduce DataRubrics, a structured framework for assessing the quality of both human- and model-generated datasets. Leveraging recent advances in LLM-based evaluation, DataRubrics offers a reproducible, scalable, and actionable solution for dataset quality assessment, enabling both authors and reviewers to uphold higher standards in data-centric research. We also release code to support reproducibility of LLM-based evaluations at https://github.com/datarubrics/datarubrics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside a training dataset (1 million instances). Our findings show that while VLMs perform better with correct location context, they struggle with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. To support future research, we release a knowledge base with annotated food entries and images along with the VQA data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Extracting General-use Transformers for Low-resource Languages via Knowledge Distillation

In this paper, we propose the use of simple knowledge distillation to produce smaller and more efficient single-language transformers from Massively Multilingual Transformers (MMTs) to alleviate tradeoffs associated with the use of such in low-resource settings. Using Tagalog as a case study, we show that these smaller single-language models perform on-par with strong baselines in a variety of benchmark tasks in a much more efficient manner. Furthermore, we investigate additional steps during the distillation process that improves the soft-supervision of the target language, and provide a number of analyses and ablations to show the efficacy of the proposed method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 30 countries on four continents, covering 31 languages with 13 scripts, providing a total of 10k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Thank You, Stingray: Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Sense

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence, but concerns arise regarding their reliability beyond English. This study addresses the gap in cross-lingual semantic evaluation by introducing a novel benchmark for cross-lingual sense disambiguation, StingrayBench. In this paper, we demonstrate using false friends -- words that are orthographically similar but have completely different meanings in two languages -- as a possible approach to pinpoint the limitation of cross-lingual sense disambiguation in LLMs. We collect false friends in four language pairs, namely Indonesian-Malay, Indonesian-Tagalog, Chinese-Japanese, and English-German; and challenge LLMs to distinguish the use of them in context. In our analysis of various models, we observe they tend to be biased toward higher-resource languages. We also propose new metrics for quantifying the cross-lingual sense bias and comprehension based on our benchmark. Our work contributes to developing more diverse and inclusive language modeling, promoting fairer access for the wider multilingual community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Samsung R&D Institute Philippines at WMT 2023

In this paper, we describe the constrained MT systems submitted by Samsung R&D Institute Philippines to the WMT 2023 General Translation Task for two directions: en$\rightarrow$he and he$\rightarrow$en. Our systems comprise of Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models that are trained with a mix of best practices: comprehensive data preprocessing pipelines, synthetic backtranslated data, and the use of noisy channel reranking during online decoding. Our models perform comparably to, and sometimes outperform, strong baseline unconstrained systems such as mBART50 M2M and NLLB 200 MoE despite having significantly fewer parameters on two public benchmarks: FLORES-200 and NTREX-128.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great capabilities in a wide range of tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance through zero-shot or few-shot prompting methods. While there have been extensive studies on their abilities in monolingual tasks, the investigation of their potential in the context of code-switching (CSW), the practice of alternating languages within an utterance, remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of various multilingual LLMs, benchmarking their performance across four tasks: sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification. Our results indicate that despite multilingual LLMs exhibiting promising outcomes in certain tasks using zero or few-shot prompting, they still underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. We argue that current "multilingualism" in LLMs does not inherently imply proficiency with code-switching texts, calling for future research to bridge this discrepancy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Towards Automatic Construction of Filipino WordNet: Word Sense Induction and Synset Induction Using Sentence Embeddings

Wordnets are indispensable tools for various natural language processing applications. Unfortunately, wordnets get outdated, and producing or updating wordnets can be slow and costly in terms of time and resources. This problem intensifies for low-resource languages. This study proposes a method for word sense induction and synset induction using only two linguistic resources, namely, an unlabeled corpus and a sentence embeddings-based language model. The resulting sense inventory and synonym sets can be used in automatically creating a wordnet. We applied this method on a corpus of Filipino text. The sense inventory and synsets were evaluated by matching them with the sense inventory of the machine translated Princeton WordNet, as well as comparing the synsets to the Filipino WordNet. This study empirically shows that the 30% of the induced word senses are valid and 40% of the induced synsets are valid in which 20% are novel synsets.

cs.CL↗