Abstract:Generative AI-powered by Large Language Models (LLMs)-is increasingly deployed in industry across healthcare decision support, financial analytics, enterprise retrieval, and conversational automation, where reliability, efficiency, and cost control are critical. In such settings, models must satisfy strict constraints on energy, latency, and hardware utilization-not accuracy alone. Yet prevailing evaluation pipelines remain accuracy-centric, creating a Deployment-Evaluation Gap-the absence of operational and economic criteria in model assessment. To address this gap, we present EDGE-EVAL-a industry-oriented benchmarking framework that evaluates LLMs across their full lifecycle on legacy NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs. Benchmarking LLaMA and Qwen variants across three industrial tasks, we introduce five deployment metrics-Economic Break-Even (Nbreak), Intelligence-Per-Watt (IPW ), System Density (\r{ho}sys), Cold-Start Tax (Ctax), and Quantization Fidelity (Qret)-capturing profitability, energy efficiency, hardware scaling, serverless feasibility, and compression safety. Our results reveal a clear efficiency frontier-models in the <2B parameter class dominate larger baselines across economic and ecological dimensions. LLaMA-3.2-1B (INT4) achieves ROI break-even in 14 requests (median), delivers 3x higher energy-normalized intelligence than 7B models, and exceeds 6,900 tokens/s/GB under 4-bit quantization. We further uncover an efficiency anomaly-while QLoRA reduces memory footprint, it increases adaptation energy by up to 7x for small models-challenging prevailing assumptions about quantization-aware training in edge deployment.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate objects that are absent from the visual input, often because attention during decoding is disproportionately drawn to visually dominant or frequently occurring content. We observe that this inequity in attention allocation is a root cause of object hallucination: when rare, small, or contextually peripheral objects receive insufficient attention, the model fails to ground its generation in the full visual scene. We argue that every object in an image, regardless of its size, frequency or visual salience, deserves equal representational opportunity during decoding. To this end, we propose DOP-OBC, a training-free and architecture-agnostic decoding strategy built on the principle of equitable attention. Two complementary object-aware signals work in tandem: a Dominant Object Penalty (DOP) that softly suppresses attention over-concentration on visually dominant regions, and an Outlier Boost Coefficient (OBC) that amplifies attention toward rare yet confidently detected objects. These signals are injected as per-row logit modulations within the causal attention mask, requiring no weight updates and preserving autoregressive decoding properties. Extensive experiments across image and video MLLMs demonstrate consistent reductions in object hallucination on CHAIR and POPE benchmarks, alongside improvements in GPT-4o assessed captioning quality across correctness, consistency, detail, context and temporal dimensions. DOP-OBC establishes that fairness in attention allocation is not merely a design principle but a practical and effective path toward more faithful multimodal generation.
Abstract:Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the failure to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, leading to behaviors that diverge from human expectations in real-world settings where these dimensions must co-occur. Existing benchmarks, such as SAFETUNEBED (safety-centric), VALUEBENCH (value-centric), and WORLDVIEW-BENCH (culture-centric), primarily evaluate these dimensions in isolation and therefore provide limited insight into their interactions and trade-offs. More recent efforts, including MIB and INTERPRETABILITY BENCHMARK-based on mechanistic interpretability, offer valuable perspectives on model failures; however, they remain insufficient for systematically characterizing cross-dimensional trade-offs. To address these gaps, we introduce MisAlign-Profile, a unified benchmark for measuring misalignment trade-offs inspired by mechanistic profiling. First, we construct MISALIGNTRADE, an English misaligned-aligned dataset across 112 normative domains taxonomies, including 14 safety, 56 value, and 42 cultural domains. In addition to domain labels, each prompt is classified with one of three orthogonal semantic types-object, attribute, or relations misalignment-using Gemma-2-9B-it and expanded via Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 with SimHash-based fingerprinting to avoid deduplication. Each prompt is paired with misaligned and aligned responses through two-stage rejection sampling to ensure quality. Second, we benchmark general-purpose, fine-tuned, and open-weight LLMs on MISALIGNTRADE-revealing 12%-34% misalignment trade-offs across dimensions.
Abstract:Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) arises when model behavior diverges from human expectations and fails to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, which must co-occur in real-world settings to solve a real-world query. Existing misalignment benchmarks-such as INSECURE CODE (safety-centric), VALUEACTIONLENS (value-centric), and CULTURALHERITAGE (culture centric)-rely on evaluating misalignment along individual dimensions, preventing simultaneous evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce Mis-Align Bench, a unified benchmark for analyzing misalignment across safety, value, and cultural dimensions. First we constructs SAVACU, an English misaligned-aligned dataset of 382,424 samples spanning 112 domains (or labels), by reclassifying prompts from the LLM-PROMPT-DATASET via taxonomy into 14 safety domains, 56 value domains, and 42 cultural domains using Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and expanding low-resource domains via Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with SimHash-based fingerprint to avoid deduplication. Furthermore, we pairs prompts with misaligned and aligned responses via two-stage rejection sampling to enforce quality. Second we benchmarks general-purpose, fine-tuned, and open-weight LLMs, enabling systematic evaluation of misalignment under three dimensions. Empirically, single-dimension models achieve high Coverage (upto 97.6%) but incur False Failure Rate >50% and lower Alignment Score (63%-66%) under joint conditions.
Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM) safety is inherently pluralistic, reflecting variations in moral norms, cultural expectations, and demographic contexts. Yet, existing alignment datasets such as ANTHROPIC-HH and DICES rely on demographically narrow annotator pools, overlooking variation in safety perception across communities. Demo-SafetyBench addresses this gap by modeling demographic pluralism directly at the prompt level, decoupling value framing from responses. In Stage I, prompts from DICES are reclassified into 14 safety domains (adapted from BEAVERTAILS) using Mistral 7B-Instruct-v0.3, retaining demographic metadata and expanding low-resource domains via Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with SimHash-based deduplication, yielding 43,050 samples. In Stage II, pluralistic sensitivity is evaluated using LLMs-as-Raters-Gemma-7B, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-2-7B-under zero-shot inference. Balanced thresholds (delta = 0.5, tau = 10) achieve high reliability (ICC = 0.87) and low demographic sensitivity (DS = 0.12), confirming that pluralistic safety evaluation can be both scalable and demographically robust.
Abstract:Clinical Question-Answering (CQA) industry systems are increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their deployment is often guided by the assumption that domain-specific fine-tuning is essential. Although specialised medical LLMs such as BioBERT, BioGPT, and PubMedBERT remain popular, they face practical limitations including narrow coverage, high retraining costs, and limited adaptability. Efforts based on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) have attempted to address these assumptions but continue to reinforce what we term the SPECIALISATION FALLACY-the belief that specialised medical LLMs are inherently superior for CQA. To address this assumption, we introduce MEDASSESS-X, a deployment-industry-oriented CQA framework that applies alignment at inference time rather than through SFT. MEDASSESS-X uses lightweight steering vectors to guide model activations toward medically consistent reasoning without updating model weights or requiring domain-specific retraining. This inference-time alignment layer stabilises CQA performance across both general-purpose and specialised medical LLMs, thereby resolving the SPECIALISATION FALLACY. Empirically, MEDASSESS-X delivers consistent gains across all LLM families, improving Accuracy by up to +6%, Factual Consistency by +7%, and reducing Safety Error Rate by as much as 50%.