Dasol Choi


2026

Current vision-language benchmarks predominantly feature well-structured questions with clear, explicit prompts. However, real user queries are often informal and underspecified. Users naturally leave much unsaid, relying on images to convey context. We introduce HAERAE-Vision, a benchmark of 653 real-world visual questions from Korean online communities (0.76% survival from 86K candidates), each paired with an explicit rewrite, yielding 1,306 query variants in total. Evaluating 39 VLMs, we find that even state-of-the-art models (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieve under 50% on the original queries. Crucially, query explicitation alone yields 8 to 22 point improvements, with smaller models benefiting most. We further show that even with web search, under-specified queries underperform explicit queries without search, revealing that current retrieval cannot compensate for what users leave unsaid. Our findings demonstrate that a substantial portion of VLM difficulty stem from natural query under-specification instead of model capability, highlighting a critical gap between benchmark evaluation and real-world deployment.
As large language models are deployed in high-stakes enterprise applications, from healthcare to finance, ensuring adherence to organization-specific policies has become essential. Yet existing safety evaluations focus exclusively on universal harms. We present COMPASS (Company/Organization Policy Alignment Assessment), the first systematic framework for evaluating whether LLMs comply with organizational allowlist and denylist policies. We apply COMPASS to eight diverse industry scenarios, generating and validating 5,920 queries that test both routine compliance and adversarial robustness through strategically designed edge cases. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art models, we uncover a fundamental asymmetry: models reliably handle legitimate requests (>95% accuracy) but catastrophically fail at enforcing prohibitions, refusing only 13–40% of adversarial denylist violations. These results demonstrate that current LLMs lack the robustness required for policy-critical deployments, establishing COMPASS as an essential evaluation framework for organizational AI safety.

2025

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, despite their strong reasoning capabilities in high-resource languages (e.g., English and Chinese), a significant performance gap persists in other languages. To investigate this gap in Korean, we introduce HRM8K, a benchmark comprising 8,011 English-Korean parallel bilingual math problems. Through systematic analysis of model behaviors, we identify a key finding: these performance disparities stem primarily from difficulties in comprehending non-English inputs, rather than limitations in reasoning capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose UST(Understand, Solve, and Translate), a method that strategically uses English as an anchor for reasoning and solution generation. By fine-tuning the model on 130k synthetically generated data points, method achieves a 10.91% improvement on the HRM8K benchmark and reduces the multilingual performance gap from 11.6%% to 0.7%%. Additionally, we show that improvements from method generalize effectively to different Korean domains, demonstrating that capabilities acquired from machine-verifiable content can be generalized to other areas. We publicly release the benchmark, training dataset, and models.
Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have underscored the crucial role of high-quality datasets in building large language models (LLMs). However, while extensive resources and analyses exist for English, the landscape for East Asian languages, particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), remains fragmented and underexplored, despite these languages serving over 1.6 billion speakers. To address this gap, we investigate the HuggingFace ecosystem from a cross-linguistic perspective, focusing on how cultural norms, research environments, and institutional practices shape dataset availability and quality. Drawing on more than 3,300 datasets, we employ quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how these factors drive distinct creation and curation patterns across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean NLP communities. Our findings highlight the large-scale and often institution-driven nature of Chinese datasets, grassroots community-led development in Korean NLP, and an entertainment and subculture-focused emphasis on Japanese collections. By uncovering these patterns, we reveal practical strategies for enhancing dataset documentation, licensing clarity, and cross-lingual resource sharing, guiding more effective and culturally attuned LLM development in East Asia. We conclude by discussing best practices for future dataset curation and collaboration, aiming to strengthen resource development across all three languages.