Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent’s flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

Despite progress in language model (LM) capabilities, evaluations have thus far focused on models' performance on tasks that humans have previously solved, including in programming (SWE-Bench) and mathematics (FrontierMath). We therefore propose testing models' ability to design and implement algorithms in an open-ended benchmark: We task LMs with writing code that efficiently solves computationally challenging problems in computer science, physics, and mathematics. Our AlgoTune benchmark consists of 120 tasks collected from domain experts and a framework for validating and timing LM-synthesized solution code, which is compared to reference implementations from popular open-source packages.In addition, we develop a baseline LM agent, AlgoTuner, and evaluate its performance across a suite of frontier models.AlgoTuner achieves an average 1.58x speedup against reference solvers, including methods from packages such as SciPy, scikit-learn and CVXPY.However, we find that current models fail to discover algorithmic innovations, instead preferring surface-level optimizations. We hope that AlgoTune catalyzes the development of LM agents exhibiting creative problem solving beyond state-of-the-art human performance.

Entropy minimization (EM) is frequently used to increase the accuracy of classification models when they're faced with new data at test time. EM is a self-supervised learning method that optimizes classifiers to assign even higher probabilities to their top predicted classes. In this paper, we analyze why EM works when adapting a model for a few steps and why it eventually fails after adapting for many steps. We show that, at first, EM causes the model to embed test images close to training images, thereby increasing model accuracy. After many steps of optimization, EM makes the model embed test images far away from the embeddings of training images, which results in a degradation of accuracy. Building upon our insights, we present a method for solving a practical problem: estimating a model's accuracy on a given arbitrary dataset without having access to its labels. Our method estimates accuracy by looking at how the embeddings of input images change as the model is optimized to minimize entropy. Experiments on 23 challenging datasets show that our method sets the SoTA with a mean absolute error of 5.75%, an improvement of 29.62% over the previous SoTA on this task. Our code is available at: https://github.com/oripress/EntropyEnigma

Thousands of new scientific papers are published each month. Such information overload complicates researcher efforts to stay current with the state-of-the-art as well as to verify and correctly attribute claims. We pose the following research question: Given a text excerpt referencing a paper, could an LM act as a research assistant to correctly identify the referenced paper? We advance efforts to answer this question by building a benchmark that evaluates the abilities of LMs in citation attribution. Our benchmark, CiteME, consists of text excerpts from recent machine learning papers, each referencing a single other paper. CiteME use reveals a large gap between frontier LMs and human performance, with LMs achieving only 4.2-18.5% accuracy and humans 69.7%. We close this gap by introducing CiteAgent, an autonomous system built on the GPT-4o LM that can also search and read papers, which achieves an accuracy of 35.3% on CiteME. Overall, CiteME serves as a challenging testbed for open-ended claim attribution, driving the research community towards a future where any claim made by an LM can be automatically verified and discarded if found to be incorrect.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) allows to update pre-trained models to changing data distributions at deployment time. While early work tested these algorithms for individual fixed distribution shifts, recent work proposed and applied methods for continual adaptation over long timescales. To examine the reported progress in the field, we propose the Continually Changing Corruptions (CCC) benchmark to measure asymptotic performance of TTA techniques. We find that eventually all but one state-of-the-art methods collapse and perform worse than a non-adapting model, including models specifically proposed to be robust to performance collapse. In addition, we introduce a simple baseline, "RDumb", that periodically resets the model to its pretrained state. RDumb performs better or on par with the previously proposed state-of-the-art in all considered benchmarks. Our results show that previous TTA approaches are neither effective at regularizing adaptation to avoid collapse nor able to outperform a simplistic resetting strategy.

Since 2014 transfer learning has become the key driver for the improvement of spatial saliency prediction—however, with stagnant progress in the last 3-5 years. We conduct a large-scale transfer learning study which tests different ImageNet backbones, always using the same read out architecture and learning protocol adopted from DeepGaze II. By replacing the VGG19 backbone of DeepGaze II with ResNet50 features we improve the performance on saliency prediction from 78% to 85%. However, as we continue to test better ImageNet models as backbones—such as EfficientNetB5—we observe no additional improvement on saliency prediction. By analyzing the backbones further, we find that generalization to other datasets differs substantially, with models being consistently overconfident in their fixation predictions. We show that by combining multiple backbones in a principled manner a good confidence calibration on unseen datasets can be achieved. This new model "DeepGaze IIE" yields a significant leap in benchmark performance in and out-of-domain with a 15 percent point improvement over DeepGaze II to 93% on MIT1003, marking a new state of the art on the MIT/Tuebingen Saliency Benchmark in all available metrics (AUC: 88.3%, sAUC: 79.4%, CC: 82.4%).