Stefan Krsteski
Author directory2026
Messier: A High-Resolution Corpus for Cross-Benchmark Agent Evaluation
Stefan Krsteski | Charlotte Meyer | Guillaume Allegre | Tony O’Halloran | Alexandre Sallinen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Stefan Krsteski | Charlotte Meyer | Guillaume Allegre | Tony O’Halloran | Alexandre Sallinen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Comprehensively evaluating AI agents across interactive environments is difficult due to fragmented tasks, scaffolds, verifiers, and scoring rules. Unfortunately, existing efforts to unify these evaluations are limited in scale and domain, making costly reruns necessary and leaving available data incomparable. We introduce MESSIER, a unified corpus of 957,611 records spanning 30 benchmarks, 745 agents, 11,891 tasks, and 74,263 verifiers. MESSIER combines public evaluation results with new runs on six underrepresented professional and scientific benchmarks, standardizing their heterogeneous components into a common schema. Using this corpus, we show that frontier progress is uneven across benchmark groups, with function-calling evaluations largely saturated, programming improving fastest, and enterprise workflows remaining most challenging. Counterfactual rescoring further shows that strict all-pass scoring in multi-verifier tasks can alter agent rankings. Finally, we derive capability scores from our corpus that correlate with Epoch’s Evaluation Capability Index rankings at Spearman ρ = 0.84. The scores can also be estimated for subsets defined by domain, occupation, action space, or verifier type. In essence, MESSIER is a reusable resource for studying agent performance at scale, and a basis for designing better evaluations.
Valid Survey Simulations with Limited Human Data: The Roles of Prompting, Fine-Tuning, and Rectification
Stefan Krsteski | Giuseppe Russo | Serina Chang | Robert West | Kristina Gligorić
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Stefan Krsteski | Giuseppe Russo | Serina Chang | Robert West | Kristina Gligorić
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Surveys provide valuable insights into public opinion and behavior, but their execution is costly and slow. Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as a scalable, low-cost substitute for human respondents, but their outputs are often biased and yield invalid estimates. We study the interplay between synthesis methods that use LLMs to generate survey responses and rectification methods that debias population estimates, and explore how human responses are best allocated between them. Using two panel surveys with questions on nutrition, politics, and economics, we find that synthesis alone introduces substantial bias (24–86%), whereas combining it with rectification reduces bias below 5% and increases effective sample size by up to 14%. Overall, we challenge the common practice of using all human responses for fine-tuning, showing that under a fixed budget, allocating most to rectification results in far more effective estimation.
2025
Towards Open Foundation Language Model and Corpus for Macedonian: A Low-Resource Language
Stefan Krsteski | Borjan Sazdov | Matea Tashkovska | Branislav Gerazov | Hristijan Gjoreski
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)
Stefan Krsteski | Borjan Sazdov | Matea Tashkovska | Branislav Gerazov | Hristijan Gjoreski
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)
The increase in technological adoption worldwide comes with demands for novel tools to be used by the general population. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great opportunity in this respect, but their capabilities remain limited for low-resource languages, restricting applications in countries where such languages are spoken. We create several resources to facilitate the adoption of LLMs and to support research advancements for Macedonian. We collect the largest Macedonian corpus to date, consisting of 40GB of textual data and totaling 3.5B words. To support conversational applications, we collect a 106k-instance instruction dataset, carefully built to be culturally grounded. For evaluation, we construct a Macedonian evaluation suite covering seven benchmarks. Finally, we train domestic-yak, a state-of-the-art 8B-parameter model, on our curated datasets and evaluate it against eight baseline models using the newly constructed benchmark suite. Our model outperforms all existing models in the 8B parameter range across all benchmarks, and achieves performance comparable to models up to 10× larger. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis with native speakers reveals that our model is preferred over larger counterparts, receiving higher ratings for grammatical correctness and cultural appropriateness. All datasets, code, and model weights are openly released, setting a foundation for advancing LLMs in similarly underrepresented languages. These resources are publicly available at https://github.com/LVSTCK for source code, and at https://huggingface.co/LVSTCK for pretrained model weights and data.