LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has not been matched by their evaluation in low-resource languages, especially Southeast Asian languages like Lao. To fill this gap, we introduce LaoBench, the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark dataset dedicated to assessing LLMs' comprehensive language understanding and reasoning abilities in Lao. LaoBench comprises over 17,000 carefully curated samples spanning three core dimensions: knowledge application, K12 foundational education, and bilingual translation among Lao, Chinese, and English. The dataset is divided into open-source and closed-source subsets, with the closed-source portion enabling black-box evaluation on an official platform to ensure fairness and data security. Our data construction pipeline integrates expert human curation with automated agent-assisted verification, ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural relevance, and educational value. Benchmarking multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on LaoBench reveals that current models still face significant challenges in mastering Lao across diverse tasks. We hope LaoBench will catalyze further research and development of AI technologies for underrepresented Southeast Asian languages.

Adaptively Re-weighting Multi-Loss Untrained Transformer for Sparse-View Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction

Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) has been proven useful in diagnosis, but how to shorten scanning time with lower radiation dosage and how to efficiently reconstruct 3D image remain as the main issues for clinical practice. The recent development of tomographic image reconstruction on sparse-view measurements employs deep neural networks in a supervised way to tackle such issues, whereas the success of model training requires quantity and quality of the given paired measurements/images. We propose a novel untrained Transformer to fit the CBCT inverse solver without training data. It is mainly comprised of an untrained 3D Transformer of billions of network weights and a multi-level loss function with variable weights. Unlike conventional deep neural networks (DNNs), there is no requirement of training steps in our approach. Upon observing the hardship of optimising Transformer, the variable weights within the loss function are designed to automatically update together with the iteration process, ultimately stabilising its optimisation. We evaluate the proposed approach on two publicly available datasets: SPARE and Walnut. The results show a significant performance improvement on image quality metrics with streak artefact reduction in the visualisation. We also provide a clinical report by an experienced radiologist to assess our reconstructed images in a diagnosis point of view. The source code and the optimised models are available from the corresponding author on request at the moment.