{"id":1162410,"date":"2026-02-17T17:03:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T01:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1162410"},"modified":"2026-02-17T17:03:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T01:03:17","slug":"trustgen-a-platform-of-dynamic-benchmarking-on-the-trustworthiness-of-generative-foundation-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/trustgen-a-platform-of-dynamic-benchmarking-on-the-trustworthiness-of-generative-foundation-models\/","title":{"rendered":"TrustGen: A Platform of Dynamic Benchmarking on the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Generative foundation models (GenFMs), such as large language models and text-to-image systems, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various downstream applications. As they are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications, assessing their trustworthiness has become both a critical necessity and a substantial challenge. Existing evaluation efforts are fragmented, rapidly outdated, and often lack extensibility across modalities. This raises a fundamental question: how can we systematically, reliably, and continuously assess the trustworthiness of rapidly advancing GenFMs across diverse modalities and use cases? To address these gaps, we introduce TrustGen, a dynamic and modular benchmarking system designed to systematically evaluate the trustworthiness of GenFMs across text-to-image, large language, and vision-language modalities. TrustGen standardizes trust evaluation through a unified taxonomy of over 25 fine-grained dimensions\u2014including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics\u2014while supporting dynamic data generation and adaptive evaluation through three core modules: Metadata Curator, Test Case Builder, and Contextual Variator. Taking TrustGen into action to evaluate the trustworthiness of 39 models reveals four key insights. (1) State-of-the-art GenFMs achieve promising overall trust performance, yet significant limitations remain in specific dimensions such as hallucination resistance, fairness, and privacy preservation. (2) Contrary to prevailing assumptions, open-source models now rival and occasionally surpass proprietary systems in trustworthiness metrics. (3) The trust gap among top-performing models is narrowing, likely due to increased industry convergence on best practices. (4) Trustworthiness is not an isolated property; it interacts complexly with other behaviors, such as helpfulness and ethical decision-making. TrustGen is a transformative step toward standardized, scalable, and actionable trustworthiness evaluation, supporting dynamic assessments across diverse modalities and trust dimensions that evolve alongside the generative AI landscape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Generative foundation models (GenFMs), such as large language models and text-to-image systems, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various downstream applications. As they are increasingly deployed in high-stakes applications, assessing their trustworthiness has become both a critical necessity and a substantial challenge. Existing evaluation efforts are fragmented, rapidly outdated, and often lack extensibility across modalities. 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