Position: AI Leaderboards Are Underserving the Global South: A Case Study from India
Sourav BanerjeeSaikat Saha
Aug 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
This position paper argues that AI leaderboards are structurally ill-suited to serving the Global South because they lack independent governance, conflict-of-interest policies, and mechanisms for metric evolution. The barrier is not missing data; high-quality regional benchmarks already exist: IndicSUPERB, MILU, and LAHAJA for India; IrokoBench for Africa; AlGhafa for Arabic. The barrier is institutional design. Global leaderboards do not include these benchmarks, and no governance mechanism compels them to do so. Commercial pressure corrects leaderboard failures when paying customers in the Global North are affected. The Global South lacks equivalent leverage. Without governance, failures affecting Hindi, Swahili, or Arabic speakers persist indefinitely as documented but unaddressed gaps. Using India as a case study (1.4 billion people, 22 scheduled languages, high-quality benchmarks, but no trusted aggregation), we report findings from a consultation with 58 AI practitioners showing consistent preference for formal governance and disclosure-based conflict management. The solution is not more data but better institutions: regional leaderboards with independent governance from the start.
Investigating how experienced developers use agents in building software, including their motivations, strategies, task suitability, and sentiments finds that while experienced developers value agents as a productivity boost, they retain their agency in software design and implementation out of insistence on fundamental software quality attributes.
This systematic review evaluates 55 studies from 2017 to 2023 on the application of machine learning techniques to ASD, highlighting key challenges and opportunities, particularly the need for models that can integrate complex data to improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes.
Rafael Muñoz-Terol, Jesús Peral, Sandra Amador et al.· Heliyon· 4 citations· ⚡1
This paper identifies two different routes through which models can acquire geometrically separable features: they can learn them from complementary co-occurrence signals in general language data, including text-number co-occurrence and cross-number interaction, or from multi-token addition problems.
This work explores image generation using flow matching using flow matching and proposes an iterative process that can be integrated into virtually any generative modeling technique, thereby enhancing the performance and robustness of image synthesis systems.
Eldad Haber, Shadab Ahamed, Md Shahriar Rahim Siddiqui et al.· SIAM Journal on Scientific C...· 3 citations
This work presents AutoOR, a scalable synthetic data generation and reinforcement learning pipeline that trains LLMs to autoformulate optimization problems specified in natural language across linear, mixed-integer, and non-linear categories and introduces a curriculum RL strategy that bootstraps from limited initial training data to make this class tractable for post-training.
S. Motwani, Chuan Du, A. Petrov et al.· 2 citations
A benchmark built on the Speech Accessibility Project (SAP) dataset is introduced that tests whether diagnosis labels, clinician-derived speech ratings, and progressively richer clinical descriptions improve transcription accuracy for dysarthric speech, finding that current models do not meaningfully use this context.
P. Moure, Niclas Pokel, Bilal Bounajma et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
