Daily Paper Cast

🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV Authors: Jay Zhangjie Wu, Yuxuan Zhang, Haithem Turki, Xuanchi Ren, Jun Gao, Mike Zheng Shou, Sanja Fidler, Zan Gojcic, Huan Ling Title: Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions with Single-Step Diffusion Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01774v1 Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have revolutionized 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis task. However, achieving photorealistic rendering from extreme novel viewpoints remains challenging, as artifacts persist across representations. In this work, we introduce Difix3D+, a novel pipeline designed to enhance 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis through single-step diffusion models. At the core of our approach is Difix, a single-step image diffusion model trained to enhance and remove artifacts in rendered novel views caused by underconstrained regions of the 3D representation. Difix serves two critical roles in our pipeline. First, it is used during the reconstruction phase to clean up pseudo-training views that are rendered from the reconstruction and then distilled back into 3D. This greatly enhances underconstrained regions and improves the overall 3D representation quality. More importantly, Difix also acts as a neural enhancer during inference, effectively removing residual artifacts arising from imperfect 3D supervision and the limited capacity of current reconstruction models. Difix3D+ is a general solution, a single model compatible with both NeRF and 3DGS representations, and it achieves an average 2$\times$ improvement in FID score over baselines while maintaining 3D consistency.

🤗 Upvotes: 27 | cs.AI Authors: Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun Title: DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20730v1 Abstract: Designing solutions for complex engineering challenges is crucial in human production activities. However, previous research in the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) field has not sufficiently addressed tasks related to the design of complex engineering solutions. To fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, SolutionBench, to evaluate a system's ability to generate complete and feasible solutions for engineering problems with multiple complex constraints. To further advance the design of complex engineering solutions, we propose a novel system, SolutionRAG, that leverages the tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SolutionRAG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications.

🤗 Upvotes: 27 | cs.CL, I.2.7 Authors: Silei Xu, Wenhao Xie, Lingxiao Zhao, Pengcheng He Title: Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18600v1 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving complex reasoning tasks through mechanisms like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which emphasizes verbose, step-by-step reasoning. However, humans typically employ a more efficient strategy: drafting concise intermediate thoughts that capture only essential information. In this work, we propose Chain of Draft (CoD), a novel paradigm inspired by human cognitive processes, where LLMs generate minimalistic yet informative intermediate reasoning outputs while solving tasks. By reducing verbosity and focusing on critical insights, CoD matches or surpasses CoT in accuracy while using as little as only 7.6% of the tokens, significantly reducing cost and latency across various reasoning tasks.

🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Arnav Kumar Jain, Gonzalo Gonzalez-Pumariega, Wayne Chen, Alexander M Rush, Wenting Zhao, Sanjiban Choudhury Title: Multi-Turn Code Generation Through Single-Step Rewards Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20380v1 Abstract: We address the problem of code generation from multi-turn execution feedback. Existing methods either generate code without feedback or use complex, hierarchical reinforcement learning to optimize multi-turn rewards. We propose a simple yet scalable approach, $\mu$Code, that solves multi-turn code generation using only single-step rewards. Our key insight is that code generation is a one-step recoverable MDP, where the correct code can be recovered from any intermediate code state in a single turn. $\mu$Code iteratively trains both a generator to provide code solutions conditioned on multi-turn execution feedback and a verifier to score the newly generated code. Experimental evaluations show that our approach achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines. We provide analysis of the design choices of the reward models and policy, and show the efficacy of $\mu$Code at utilizing the execution feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/muCode.

🤗 Upvotes: 51 | cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Wei Xiong, Hanning Zhang, Chenlu Ye, Lichang Chen, Nan Jiang, Tong Zhang Title: Self-rewarding correction for mathematical reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19613v1 Abstract: We study self-rewarding reasoning large language models (LLMs), which can simultaneously generate step-by-step reasoning and evaluate the correctness of their outputs during the inference time-without external feedback. This integrated approach allows a single model to independently guide its reasoning process, offering computational advantages for model deployment. We particularly focus on the representative task of self-correction, where models autonomously detect errors in their responses, revise outputs, and decide when to terminate iterative refinement loops. To enable this, we propose a two-staged algorithmic framework for constructing self-rewarding reasoning models using only self-generated data. In the first stage, we employ sequential rejection sampling to synthesize long chain-of-thought trajectories that incorporate both self-rewarding and self-correction mechanisms. Fine-tuning models on these curated data allows them to learn the patterns of self-rewarding and self-correction. In the second stage, we further enhance the models' ability to assess response accuracy and refine outputs through reinforcement learning with rule-based signals. Experiments with Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 demonstrate that our approach surpasses intrinsic self-correction capabilities and achieves performance comparable to systems that rely on external reward models.

🤗 Upvotes: 44 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Jiazhen Pan, Che Liu, Junde Wu, Fenglin Liu, Jiayuan Zhu, Hongwei Bran Li, Chen Chen, Cheng Ouyang, Daniel Rueckert Title: MedVLM-R1: Incentivizing Medical Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) via Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19634v1 Abstract: Reasoning is a critical frontier for advancing medical image analysis, where transparency and trustworthiness play a central role in both clinician trust and regulatory approval. Although Medical Visual Language Models (VLMs) show promise for radiological tasks, most existing VLMs merely produce final answers without revealing the underlying reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce MedVLM-R1, a medical VLM that explicitly generates natural language reasoning to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. Instead of relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often suffers from overfitting to training distributions and fails to foster genuine reasoning, MedVLM-R1 employs a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the model to discover human-interpretable reasoning paths without using any reasoning references. Despite limited training data (600 visual question answering samples) and model parameters (2B), MedVLM-R1 boosts accuracy from 55.11% to 78.22% across MRI, CT, and X-ray benchmarks, outperforming larger models trained on over a million samples. It also demonstrates robust domain generalization under out-of-distribution tasks. By unifying medical image analysis with explicit reasoning, MedVLM-R1 marks a pivotal step toward trustworthy and interpretable AI in clinical practice.

🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.LG Authors: Zhongyang Li, Ziyue Li, Tianyi Zhou Title: R2-T2: Re-Routing in Test-Time for Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20395v1 Abstract: In large multimodal models (LMMs), the perception of non-language modalities (e.g., visual representations) is usually not on par with the large language models (LLMs)' powerful reasoning capabilities, deterring LMMs' performance on challenging downstream tasks. This weakness has been recently mitigated by replacing the vision encoder with a mixture-of-experts (MoE), which provides rich, multi-granularity, and diverse representations required by diverse downstream tasks. The performance of multimodal MoE largely depends on its router, which reweights and mixes the representations of different experts for each input. However, we find that the end-to-end trained router does not always produce the optimal routing weights for every test sample. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel and efficient method "Re-Routing in Test-Time(R2-T2) that locally optimizes the vector of routing weights in test-time by moving it toward those vectors of the correctly predicted samples in a neighborhood of the test sample. We propose three R2-T2 strategies with different optimization objectives and neighbor-search spaces. R2-T2 consistently and greatly improves state-of-the-art LMMs' performance on challenging benchmarks of diverse tasks, without training any base-model parameters.

🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.CL Authors: Ning Shang, Li Lyna Zhang, Siyuan Wang, Gaokai Zhang, Gilsinia Lopez, Fan Yang, Weizhu Chen, Mao Yang Title: LongRoPE2: Near-Lossless LLM Context Window Scaling Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20082v1 Abstract: LongRoPE2 is a novel approach that extends the effective context window of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to the target length, while preserving the performance on the original shorter context window. This is achieved by three contributions: (1) a hypothesis that insufficient training in higher RoPE dimensions contributes to the persistent out-of-distribution (OOD) issues observed in existing methods; (2) an effective RoPE rescaling algorithm that adopts evolutionary search guided by "needle-driven" perplexity to address the insufficient training problem; (3) a mixed context window training approach that fine-tunes model weights to adopt rescaled RoPE for long-context sequences while preserving the short-context performance with the original RoPE. Extensive experiments on LLaMA3-8B and Phi3-mini-3.8B across various benchmarks validate the hypothesis and demonstrate the effectiveness of LongRoPE2. Remarkably, LongRoPE2 extends LLaMA3-8B to achieve a 128K effective context length while retaining over 98.5% of short-context performance, using only 10B tokens -- 80x fewer than Meta's approach, which fails to reach the target effective context length. Code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/LongRoPE.

🤗 Upvotes: 19 | cs.CL Authors: Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong Title: FINEREASON: Evaluating and Improving LLMs' Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20238v1 Abstract: Many challenging reasoning tasks require not just rapid, intuitive responses, but a more deliberate, multi-step approach. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights an important shift from the "System 1" way of quick reactions to the "System 2" style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. However, current benchmarks heavily rely on the final-answer accuracy, leaving much of a model's intermediate reasoning steps unexamined. This fails to assess the model's ability to reflect and rectify mistakes within the reasoning process. To bridge this gap, we introduce FINEREASON, a logic-puzzle benchmark for fine-grained evaluation of LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Each puzzle can be decomposed into atomic steps, making it ideal for rigorous validation of intermediate correctness. Building on this, we introduce two tasks: state checking, and state transition, for a comprehensive evaluation of how models assess the current situation and plan the next move. To support broader research, we also provide a puzzle training set aimed at enhancing performance on general mathematical tasks. We show that models trained on our state checking and transition data demonstrate gains in math reasoning by up to 5.1% on GSM8K.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SE Authors: Chenlong Wang, Zhaoyang Chu, Zhengxiang Cheng, Xuyi Yang, Kaiyue Qiu, Yao Wan, Zhou Zhao, Xuanhua Shi, Dongping Chen Title: CODESYNC: Synchronizing Large Language Models with Dynamic Code Evolution at Scale Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16645v1 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance in software engineering yet face challenges in adapting to continually evolving code knowledge, particularly regarding the frequent updates of third-party library APIs. This limitation, stemming from static pre-training datasets, often results in non-executable code or implementations with suboptimal safety and efficiency. To this end, this paper introduces CODESYNC, a data engine for identifying outdated code patterns and collecting real-time code knowledge updates from Python third-party libraries. Building upon CODESYNC, we develop CODESYNCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to stay synchronized with code evolution, which covers real-world updates for 220 APIs from six Python libraries. Our benchmark offers 3,300 test cases across three evaluation tasks and an update-aware instruction tuning dataset consisting of 2,200 training samples. Extensive experiments on 14 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that they struggle with dynamic code evolution, even with the support of advanced knowledge updating methods (e.g., DPO, ORPO, and SimPO). We believe that our benchmark can offer a strong foundation for the development of more effective methods for real-time code knowledge updating in the future. The experimental code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucky-voyage/Code-Sync.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Chuofan Ma, Yi Jiang, Junfeng Wu, Jihan Yang, Xin Yu, Zehuan Yuan, Bingyue Peng, Xiaojuan Qi Title: UniTok: A Unified Tokenizer for Visual Generation and Understanding Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20321v1 Abstract: The representation disparity between visual generation and understanding imposes a critical gap in integrating these capabilities into a single framework. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniTok, a discrete visual tokenizer that encodes fine-grained details for generation while also capturing high-level semantics for understanding. Despite recent studies have shown that these objectives could induce loss conflicts in training, we reveal that the underlying bottleneck stems from limited representational capacity of discrete tokens. We address this by introducing multi-codebook quantization, which divides vector quantization with several independent sub-codebooks to expand the latent feature space, while avoiding training instability caused by overlarge codebooks. Our method significantly raises the upper limit of unified discrete tokenizers to match or even surpass domain-specific continuous tokenizers. For instance, UniTok achieves a remarkable rFID of 0.38 (versus 0.87 for SD-VAE) and a zero-shot accuracy of 78.6% (versus 76.2% for CLIP) on ImageNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniTok.

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Lola Le Breton, Quentin Fournier, Mariam El Mezouar, Sarath Chandar Title: NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19587v1 Abstract: Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.

🤗 Upvotes: 9 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Chenghua Huang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Zhixu Li, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang Title: Lean and Mean: Decoupled Value Policy Optimization with Global Value Guidance Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16944v1 Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. It requires joint training of an actor and critic with a pretrained, fixed reward model for guidance. This approach increases computational complexity and instability due to actor-critic interdependence. Additionally, PPO lacks access to true environment rewards in LLM tasks, limiting its adaptability. Under such conditions, pretraining a value model or a reward model becomes equivalent, as both provide fixed supervisory signals without new ground-truth feedback. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{Decoupled Value Policy Optimization (DVPO)}, a lean framework that replaces traditional reward modeling with a pretrained \emph{global value model (GVM)}. The GVM is conditioned on policy trajectories and predicts token-level return-to-go estimates. By decoupling value model from policy training (via frozen GVM-driven RL objectives), DVPO eliminates actor-critic interdependence, reducing GPU memory usage by 40\% and training time by 35\% compared to conventional RLHF. Experiments across benchmarks show DVPO outperforms efficient RLHF methods (e.g., DPO) while matching state-of-the-art PPO in performance.

🤗 Upvotes: 9 | cs.CV, cs.CL Authors: Liang Chen, Shuai Bai, Wenhao Chai, Weichu Xie, Haozhe Zhao, Leon Vinci, Junyang Lin, Baobao Chang Title: Multimodal Representation Alignment for Image Generation: Text-Image Interleaved Control Is Easier Than You Think Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20172v1 Abstract: The field of advanced text-to-image generation is witnessing the emergence of unified frameworks that integrate powerful text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, with Diffusion Transformer backbones. Although there have been efforts to control output images with additional conditions, like canny and depth map, a comprehensive framework for arbitrary text-image interleaved control is still lacking. This gap is especially evident when attempting to merge concepts or visual elements from multiple images in the generation process. To mitigate the gap, we conducted preliminary experiments showing that large multimodal models (LMMs) offer an effective shared representation space, where image and text can be well-aligned to serve as a condition for external diffusion models. Based on this discovery, we propose Dream Engine, an efficient and unified framework designed for arbitrary text-image interleaved control in image generation models. Building on powerful text-to-image models like SD3.5, we replace the original text-only encoders by incorporating versatile multimodal information encoders such as QwenVL. Our approach utilizes a two-stage training paradigm, consisting of joint text-image alignment and multimodal interleaved instruction tuning. Our experiments demonstrate that this training method is effective, achieving a 0.69 overall score on the GenEval benchmark, and matching the performance of state-of-the-art text-to-image models like SD3.5 and FLUX.

🤗 Upvotes: 49 | cs.CV Authors: Alexander Groshev, Anastasiia Iashchenko, Pavel Paramonov, Denis Dimitrov, Andrey Kuznetsov Title: GHOST 2.0: generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18417v3 Abstract: While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state of the art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-forever/ghost-2.0

🤗 Upvotes: 47 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Kanana LLM Team, Yunju Bak, Hojin Lee, Minho Ryu, Jiyeon Ham, Seungjae Jung, Daniel Wontae Nam, Taegyeong Eo, Donghun Lee, Doohae Jung, Boseop Kim, Nayeon Kim, Jaesun Park, Hyunho Kim, Hyunwoong Ko, Changmin Lee, Kyoung-Woon On, Seulye Baeg, Junrae Cho, Sunghee Jung, Jieun Kang, EungGyun Kim, Eunhwa Kim, Byeongil Ko, Daniel Lee, Minchul Lee, Miok Lee, Shinbok Lee, Gaeun Seo Title: Kanana: Compute-efficient Bilingual Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18934v2 Abstract: We introduce Kanana, a series of bilingual language models that demonstrate exceeding performance in Korean and competitive performance in English. The computational cost of Kanana is significantly lower than that of state-of-the-art models of similar size. The report details the techniques employed during pre-training to achieve compute-efficient yet competitive models, including high quality data filtering, staged pre-training, depth up-scaling, and pruning and distillation. Furthermore, the report outlines the methodologies utilized during the post-training of the Kanana models, encompassing supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization, aimed at enhancing their capability for seamless interaction with users. Lastly, the report elaborates on plausible approaches used for language model adaptation to specific scenarios, such as embedding, retrieval augmented generation, and function calling. The Kanana model series spans from 2.1B to 32.5B parameters with 2.1B models (base, instruct, embedding) publicly released to promote research on Korean language models.

🤗 Upvotes: 32 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.MM Authors: Max Ku, Thomas Chong, Jonathan Leung, Krish Shah, Alvin Yu, Wenhu Chen Title: TheoremExplainAgent: Towards Multimodal Explanations for LLM Theorem Understanding Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19400v1 Abstract: Understanding domain-specific theorems often requires more than just text-based reasoning; effective communication through structured visual explanations is crucial for deeper comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in text-based theorem reasoning, their ability to generate coherent and pedagogically meaningful visual explanations remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce TheoremExplainAgent, an agentic approach for generating long-form theorem explanation videos (over 5 minutes) using Manim animations. To systematically evaluate multimodal theorem explanations, we propose TheoremExplainBench, a benchmark covering 240 theorems across multiple STEM disciplines, along with 5 automated evaluation metrics. Our results reveal that agentic planning is essential for generating detailed long-form videos, and the o3-mini agent achieves a success rate of 93.8% and an overall score of 0.77. However, our quantitative and qualitative studies show that most of the videos produced exhibit minor issues with visual element layout. Furthermore, multimodal explanations expose deeper reasoning flaws that text-based explanations fail to reveal, highlighting the importance of multimodal explanations.

🤗 Upvotes: 27 | cs.CL Authors: Xueqing Peng, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Efstathia Soufleri, Polydoros Giannouris, Ruoyu Xiang, Yan Wang, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou Title: Plutus: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Low-Resource Greek Finance Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18772v1 Abstract: Despite Greece's pivotal role in the global economy, large language models (LLMs) remain underexplored for Greek financial context due to the linguistic complexity of Greek and the scarcity of domain-specific datasets. Previous efforts in multilingual financial natural language processing (NLP) have exposed considerable performance disparities, yet no dedicated Greek financial benchmarks or Greek-specific financial LLMs have been developed until now. To bridge this gap, we introduce Plutus-ben, the first Greek Financial Evaluation Benchmark, and Plutus-8B, the pioneering Greek Financial LLM, fine-tuned with Greek domain-specific data. Plutus-ben addresses five core financial NLP tasks in Greek: numeric and textual named entity recognition, question answering, abstractive summarization, and topic classification, thereby facilitating systematic and reproducible LLM assessments. To underpin these tasks, we present three novel, high-quality Greek financial datasets, thoroughly annotated by expert native Greek speakers, augmented by two existing resources. Our comprehensive evaluation of 22 LLMs on Plutus-ben reveals that Greek financial NLP remains challenging due to linguistic complexity, domain-specific terminology, and financial reasoning gaps. These findings underscore the limitations of cross-lingual transfer, the necessity for financial expertise in Greek-trained models, and the challenges of adapting financial LLMs to Greek text. We release Plutus-ben, Plutus-8B, and all associated datasets publicly to promote reproducible research and advance Greek financial NLP, fostering broader multilingual inclusivity in finance.

🤗 Upvotes: 19 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Tushar Aggarwal, Kumar Tanmay, Ayush Agrawal, Kumar Ayush, Hamid Palangi, Paul Pu Liang Title: Language Models' Factuality Depends on the Language of Inquiry Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17955v1 Abstract: Multilingual language models (LMs) are expected to recall factual knowledge consistently across languages, yet they often fail to transfer knowledge between languages even when they possess the correct information in one of the languages. For example, we find that an LM may correctly identify Rashed Al Shashai as being from Saudi Arabia when asked in Arabic, but consistently fails to do so when asked in English or Swahili. To systematically investigate this limitation, we introduce a benchmark of 10,000 country-related facts across 13 languages and propose three novel metrics: Factual Recall Score, Knowledge Transferability Score, and Cross-Lingual Factual Knowledge Transferability Score-to quantify factual recall and knowledge transferability in LMs across different languages. Our results reveal fundamental weaknesses in today's state-of-the-art LMs, particularly in cross-lingual generalization where models fail to transfer knowledge effectively across different languages, leading to inconsistent performance sensitive to the language used. Our findings emphasize the need for LMs to recognize language-specific factual reliability and leverage the most trustworthy information across languages. We release our benchmark and evaluation framework to drive future research in multilingual knowledge transfer.

🤗 Upvotes: 16 | cs.CL Authors: Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Weixun Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Ge Zhang, Zhongyuan Peng, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng Title: Can Large Language Models Detect Errors in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19361v2 Abstract: Recently, o1-like models have drawn significant attention, where these models produce the long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning steps to improve the reasoning abilities of existing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, to understand the qualities of these long CoTs and measure the critique abilities of existing LLMs on these long CoTs, we introduce the DeltaBench, including the generated long CoTs from different o1-like models (e.g., QwQ, DeepSeek-R1) for different reasoning tasks (e.g., Math, Code, General Reasoning), to measure the ability to detect errors in long CoT reasoning. Based on DeltaBench, we first perform fine-grained analysis of the generated long CoTs to discover the effectiveness and efficiency of different o1-like models. Then, we conduct extensive evaluations of existing process reward models (PRMs) and critic models to detect the errors of each annotated process, which aims to investigate the boundaries and limitations of existing PRMs and critic models. Finally, we hope that DeltaBench could guide developers to better understand the long CoT reasoning abilities of their models.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.LG, physics.soc-ph, q-bio.OT Authors: Juraj Gottweis, Wei-Hung Weng, Alexander Daryin, Tao Tu, Anil Palepu, Petar Sirkovic, Artiom Myaskovsky, Felix Weissenberger, Keran Rong, Ryutaro Tanno, Khaled Saab, Dan Popovici, Jacob Blum, Fan Zhang, Katherine Chou, Avinatan Hassidim, Burak Gokturk, Amin Vahdat, Pushmeet Kohli, Yossi Matias, Andrew Carroll, Kavita Kulkarni, Nenad Tomasev, Yuan Guan, Vikram Dhillon, Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, Byron Lee, Tiago R D Costa, José R Penadés, Gary Peltz, Yunhan Xu, Annalisa Pawlosky, Alan Karthikesalingam, Vivek Natarajan Title: Towards an AI co-scientist Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18864v1 Abstract: Scientific discovery relies on scientists generating novel hypotheses that undergo rigorous experimental validation. To augment this process, we introduce an AI co-scientist, a multi-agent system built on Gemini 2.0. The AI co-scientist is intended to help uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and aligned to scientist-provided research objectives and guidance. The system's design incorporates a generate, debate, and evolve approach to hypothesis generation, inspired by the scientific method and accelerated by scaling test-time compute. Key contributions include: (1) a multi-agent architecture with an asynchronous task execution framework for flexible compute scaling; (2) a tournament evolution process for self-improving hypotheses generation. Automated evaluations show continued benefits of test-time compute, improving hypothesis quality. While general purpose, we focus development and validation in three biomedical areas: drug repurposing, novel target discovery, and explaining mechanisms of bacterial evolution and anti-microbial resistance. For drug repurposing, the system proposes candidates with promising validation findings, including candidates for acute myeloid leukemia that show tumor inhibition in vitro at clinically applicable concentrations. For novel target discovery, the AI co-scientist proposed new epigenetic targets for liver fibrosis, validated by anti-fibrotic activity and liver cell regeneration in human hepatic organoids. Finally, the AI co-scientist recapitulated unpublished experimental results via a parallel in silico discovery of a novel gene transfer mechanism in bacterial evolution. These results, detailed in separate, co-timed reports, demonstrate the potential to augment biomedical and scientific discovery and usher an era of AI empowered scientists.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Hao Peng, Yunjia Qi, Xiaozhi Wang, Zijun Yao, Bin Xu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li Title: Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19328v1 Abstract: Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propose agentic reward modeling, a reward system that combines reward models with verifiable correctness signals from different aspects to provide reliable rewards. We empirically implement a reward agent, named RewardAgent, that combines human preference rewards with two verifiable signals: factuality and instruction following, to provide more reliable rewards. We conduct comprehensive experiments on existing reward model benchmarks and inference time best-of-n searches on real-world downstream tasks. RewardAgent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models, demonstrating its effectiveness. We further construct training preference pairs using RewardAgent and train an LLM with the DPO objective, achieving superior performance on various NLP benchmarks compared to conventional reward models. Our codes are publicly released to facilitate further research (https://github.com/THU-KEG/Agentic-Reward-Modeling).

🤗 Upvotes: 13 | cs.LG, cs.SE Authors: Shiven Sinha, Shashwat Goel, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Jonas Geiping, Matthias Bethge, Ameya Prabhu Title: Can Language Models Falsify? Evaluating Algorithmic Reasoning with Counterexample Creation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19414v1 Abstract: There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability - creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only <9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs' ability to falsify incorrect solutions - a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.IR, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Orion Weller, Kathryn Ricci, Eugene Yang, Andrew Yates, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme Title: Rank1: Test-Time Compute for Reranking in Information Retrieval Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18418v1 Abstract: We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation in order to rapidly improve the performance of a smaller model. We gather and open-source a dataset of more than 600,000 examples of R1 reasoning traces from queries and passages in MS MARCO. Models trained on this dataset show: (1) state-of-the-art performance on advanced reasoning and instruction following datasets; (2) work remarkably well out of distribution due to the ability to respond to user-input prompts; and (3) have explainable reasoning chains that can be given to users or RAG-based systems. Further, we demonstrate that quantized versions of these models retain strong performance while using less compute/memory. Overall, Rank1 shows that test-time compute allows for a fundamentally new type of explainable and performant reranker model for search.

🤗 Upvotes: 122 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Deepak Nathani, Lovish Madaan, Nicholas Roberts, Nikolay Bashlykov, Ajay Menon, Vincent Moens, Amar Budhiraja, Despoina Magka, Vladislav Vorotilov, Gaurav Chaurasia, Dieuwke Hupkes, Ricardo Silveira Cabral, Tatiana Shavrina, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, William Yang Wang, Roberta Raileanu Title: MLGym: A New Framework and Benchmark for Advancing AI Research Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14499v1 Abstract: We introduce Meta MLGym and MLGym-Bench, a new framework and benchmark for evaluating and developing LLM agents on AI research tasks. This is the first Gym environment for machine learning (ML) tasks, enabling research on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for training such agents. MLGym-bench consists of 13 diverse and open-ended AI research tasks from diverse domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and game theory. Solving these tasks requires real-world AI research skills such as generating new ideas and hypotheses, creating and processing data, implementing ML methods, training models, running experiments, analyzing the results, and iterating through this process to improve on a given task. We evaluate a number of frontier large language models (LLMs) on our benchmarks such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Llama-3.1 405B, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Our MLGym framework makes it easy to add new tasks, integrate and evaluate models or agents, generate synthetic data at scale, as well as develop new learning algorithms for training agents on AI research tasks. We find that current frontier models can improve on the given baselines, usually by finding better hyperparameters, but do not generate novel hypotheses, algorithms, architectures, or substantial improvements. We open-source our framework and benchmark to facilitate future research in advancing the AI research capabilities of LLM agents.

🤗 Upvotes: 82 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Michael Tschannen, Alexey Gritsenko, Xiao Wang, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Talfan Evans, Lucas Beyer, Ye Xia, Basil Mustafa, Olivier Hénaff, Jeremiah Harmsen, Andreas Steiner, Xiaohua Zhai Title: SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14786v1 Abstract: We introduce SigLIP 2, a family of new multilingual vision-language encoders that build on the success of the original SigLIP. In this second iteration, we extend the original image-text training objective with several prior, independently developed techniques into a unified recipe -- this includes captioning-based pretraining, self-supervised losses (self-distillation, masked prediction) and online data curation. With these changes, SigLIP 2 models outperform their SigLIP counterparts at all model scales in core capabilities, including zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer performance when extracting visual representations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Furthermore, the new training recipe leads to significant improvements on localization and dense prediction tasks. We also train variants which support multiple resolutions and preserve the input's native aspect ratio. Finally, we train on a more diverse data-mixture that includes de-biasing techniques, leading to much better multilingual understanding and improved fairness. To allow users to trade off inference cost with performance, we release model checkpoints at four sizes: ViT-B (86M), L (303M), So400m (400M), and g (1B).

🤗 Upvotes: 81 | cs.CL Authors: M-A-P Team, Xinrun Du, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Bingli Wang, Tianyu Zheng, Kang Zhu, Minghao Liu, Yiming Liang, Xiaolong Jin, Zhenlin Wei, Chujie Zheng, Kaixing Deng, Shuyue Guo, Shian Jia, Sichao Jiang, Yiyan Liao, Rui Li, Qinrui Li, Sirun Li, Yizhi Li, Yunwen Li, Dehua Ma, Yuansheng Ni, Haoran Que, Qiyao Wang, Zhoufutu Wen, Siwei Wu, Tianshun Xing, Ming Xu, Zhenzhu Yang, Zekun Moore Wang, Junting Zhou, Yuelin Bai, Xingyuan Bu, Chenglin Cai, Liang Chen, Yifan Chen, Chengtuo Cheng, Tianhao Cheng, Keyi Ding, Siming Huang, Yun Huang, Yaoru Li, Yizhe Li, Zhaoqun Li, Tianhao Liang, Chengdong Lin, Hongquan Lin, Yinghao Ma, Zhongyuan Peng, Zifan Peng, Qige Qi, Shi Qiu, Xingwei Qu, Yizhou Tan, Zili Wang, Chenqing Wang, Hao Wang, Yiya Wang, Yubo Wang, Jiajun Xu, Kexin Yang, Ruibin Yuan, Yuanhao Yue, Tianyang Zhan, Chun Zhang, Jingyang Zhang, Xiyue Zhang, Xingjian Zhang, Yue Zhang, Yongchi Zhao, Xiangyu Zheng, Chenghua Zhong, Yang Gao, Zhoujun Li, Dayiheng Liu, Qian Liu, Tianyu Liu, Shiwen Ni, Junran Peng, Yujia Qin, Wenbo Su, Guoyin Wang, Shi Wang, Jian Yang, Min Yang, Meng Cao, Xiang Yue, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiaheng Liu, Qunshu Lin, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang Title: SuperGPQA: Scaling LLM Evaluation across 285 Graduate Disciplines Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14739v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs in many of these specialized fields-particularly in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented disciplines-remain inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we present SuperGPQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities across 285 disciplines. Our benchmark employs a novel Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism to eliminate trivial or ambiguous questions through iterative refinement based on both LLM responses and expert feedback. Our experimental results reveal significant room for improvement in the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse knowledge domains (e.g., the reasoning-focused model DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy of 61.82% on SuperGPQA), highlighting the considerable gap between current model capabilities and artificial general intelligence. Additionally, we present comprehensive insights from our management of a large-scale annotation process, involving over 80 expert annotators and an interactive Human-LLM collaborative system, offering valuable methodological guidance for future research initiatives of comparable scope.

🤗 Upvotes: 51 | cs.CL Authors: Sergey Pletenev, Maria Marina, Daniil Moskovskiy, Vasily Konovalov, Pavel Braslavski, Alexander Panchenko, Mikhail Salnikov Title: How Much Knowledge Can You Pack into a LoRA Adapter without Harming LLM? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14502v1 Abstract: The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on many tasks is greatly limited by the knowledge learned during pre-training and stored in the model's parameters. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular and efficient training technique for updating or domain-specific adaptation of LLMs. In this study, we investigate how new facts can be incorporated into the LLM using LoRA without compromising the previously learned knowledge. We fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-instruct using LoRA with varying amounts of new knowledge. Our experiments have shown that the best results are obtained when the training data contains a mixture of known and new facts. However, this approach is still potentially harmful because the model's performance on external question-answering benchmarks declines after such fine-tuning. When the training data is biased towards certain entities, the model tends to regress to few overrepresented answers. In addition, we found that the model becomes more confident and refuses to provide an answer in only few cases. These findings highlight the potential pitfalls of LoRA-based LLM updates and underscore the importance of training data composition and tuning parameters to balance new knowledge integration and general model capabilities.

🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Dacheng Li, Shiyi Cao, Chengkun Cao, Xiuyu Li, Shangyin Tan, Kurt Keutzer, Jiarong Xing, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica Title: S*: Test Time Scaling for Code Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14382v1 Abstract: Increasing test-time compute for LLMs shows promise across domains but remains underexplored in code generation, despite extensive study in math. In this paper, we propose S*, the first hybrid test-time scaling framework that substantially improves the coverage and selection accuracy of generated code. S* extends the existing parallel scaling paradigm with sequential scaling to push performance boundaries. It further leverages a novel selection mechanism that adaptively generates distinguishing inputs for pairwise comparison, combined with execution-grounded information to robustly identify correct solutions. We evaluate across 12 Large Language Models and Large Reasoning Model and show: (1) S* consistently improves performance across model families and sizes, enabling a 3B model to outperform GPT-4o-mini; (2) S* enables non-reasoning models to surpass reasoning models - GPT-4o-mini with S* outperforms o1-preview by 3.7% on LiveCodeBench; (3) S* further boosts state-of-the-art reasoning models - DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B with S* achieves 85.7% on LiveCodeBench, approaching o1 (high) at 88.5%. Code will be available under https://github.com/NovaSky-AI/SkyThought.

🤗 Upvotes: 24 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Tian Xie, Zitian Gao, Qingnan Ren, Haoming Luo, Yuqian Hong, Bryan Dai, Joey Zhou, Kai Qiu, Zhirong Wu, Chong Luo Title: Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14768v1 Abstract: Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in large reasoning models. To analyze reasoning dynamics, we use synthetic logic puzzles as training data due to their controllable complexity and straightforward answer verification. We make some key technical contributions that lead to effective and stable RL training: a system prompt that emphasizes the thinking and answering process, a stringent format reward function that penalizes outputs for taking shortcuts, and a straightforward training recipe that achieves stable convergence. Our 7B model develops advanced reasoning skills-such as reflection, verification, and summarization-that are absent from the logic corpus. Remarkably, after training on just 5K logic problems, it demonstrates generalization abilities to the challenging math benchmarks AIME and AMC.

🤗 Upvotes: 22 | quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.IT, cs.LG, math.IT Authors: Austin Yubo He, Zi-Wen Liu Title: Discovering highly efficient low-weight quantum error-correcting codes with reinforcement learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14372v1 Abstract: The realization of scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing is expected to hinge on quantum error-correcting codes. In the quest for more efficient quantum fault tolerance, a critical code parameter is the weight of measurements that extract information about errors to enable error correction: as higher measurement weights require higher implementation costs and introduce more errors, it is important in code design to optimize measurement weight. This underlies the surging interest in quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, the study of which has primarily focused on the asymptotic (large-code-limit) properties. In this work, we introduce a versatile and computationally efficient approach to stabilizer code weight reduction based on reinforcement learning (RL), which produces new low-weight codes that substantially outperform the state of the art in practically relevant parameter regimes, extending significantly beyond previously accessible small distances. For example, our approach demonstrates savings in physical qubit overhead compared to existing results by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude for weight 6 codes and brings the overhead into a feasible range for near-future experiments. We also investigate the interplay between code parameters using our RL framework, offering new insights into the potential efficiency and power of practically viable coding strategies. Overall, our results demonstrate how RL can effectively advance the crucial yet challenging problem of quantum code discovery and thereby facilitate a faster path to the practical implementation of fault-tolerant quantum technologies.

🤗 Upvotes: 20 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Shangqing Tu, Yucheng Wang, Daniel Zhang-Li, Yushi Bai, Jifan Yu, Yuhao Wu, Lei Hou, Huiqin Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li Title: LongWriter-V: Enabling Ultra-Long and High-Fidelity Generation in Vision-Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14834v1 Abstract: Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can process inputs with context lengths up to 128k visual and text tokens, yet they struggle to generate coherent outputs beyond 1,000 words. We find that the primary limitation is the absence of long output examples during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). To tackle this issue, we introduce LongWriter-V-22k, a SFT dataset comprising 22,158 examples, each with multiple input images, an instruction, and corresponding outputs ranging from 0 to 10,000 words. Moreover, to achieve long outputs that maintain high-fidelity to the input images, we employ Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to the SFT model. Given the high cost of collecting human feedback for lengthy outputs (e.g., 3,000 words), we propose IterDPO, which breaks long outputs into segments and uses iterative corrections to form preference pairs with the original outputs. Additionally, we develop MMLongBench-Write, a benchmark featuring six tasks to evaluate the long-generation capabilities of VLMs. Our 7B parameter model, trained with LongWriter-V-22k and IterDPO, achieves impressive performance on this benchmark, outperforming larger proprietary models like GPT-4o. Code and data: https://github.com/THU-KEG/LongWriter-V

🤗 Upvotes: 18 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Yein Park, Chanwoong Yoon, Jungwoo Park, Minbyul Jeong, Jaewoo Kang Title: Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14258v1 Abstract: While the ability of language models to elicit facts has been widely investigated, how they handle temporally changing facts remains underexplored. We discover Temporal Heads, specific attention heads primarily responsible for processing temporal knowledge through circuit analysis. We confirm that these heads are present across multiple models, though their specific locations may vary, and their responses differ depending on the type of knowledge and its corresponding years. Disabling these heads degrades the model's ability to recall time-specific knowledge while maintaining its general capabilities without compromising time-invariant and question-answering performances. Moreover, the heads are activated not only numeric conditions ("In 2004") but also textual aliases ("In the year ..."), indicating that they encode a temporal dimension beyond simple numerical representation. Furthermore, we expand the potential of our findings by demonstrating how temporal knowledge can be edited by adjusting the values of these heads.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Ruotian Ma, Peisong Wang, Cheng Liu, Xingyan Liu, Jiaqi Chen, Bang Zhang, Xin Zhou, Nan Du, Jia Li Title: S$^2$R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12853v1 Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of LLM test-time scaling. However, existing approaches to incentivize LLMs' deep thinking abilities generally require large-scale data or significant training efforts. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how to improve the thinking abilities of less powerful base models. In this work, we introduce S$^2$R, an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. Specifically, we first initialize LLMs with iterative self-verification and self-correction behaviors through supervised fine-tuning on carefully curated data. The self-verification and self-correction skills are then further strengthened by both outcome-level and process-level reinforcement learning, with minimized resource requirements, enabling the model to adaptively refine its reasoning process during inference. Our results demonstrate that, with only 3.1k self-verifying and self-correcting behavior initialization samples, Qwen2.5-math-7B achieves an accuracy improvement from 51.0\% to 81.6\%, outperforming models trained on an equivalent amount of long-CoT distilled data. Extensive experiments and analysis based on three base models across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks validate the effectiveness of S$^2$R. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/NineAbyss/S2R.

🤗 Upvotes: 97 | cs.CV, cs.CL Authors: Shuai Bai, Keqin Chen, Xuejing Liu, Jialin Wang, Wenbin Ge, Sibo Song, Kai Dang, Peng Wang, Shijie Wang, Jun Tang, Humen Zhong, Yuanzhi Zhu, Mingkun Yang, Zhaohai Li, Jianqiang Wan, Pengfei Wang, Wei Ding, Zheren Fu, Yiheng Xu, Jiabo Ye, Xi Zhang, Tianbao Xie, Zesen Cheng, Hang Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Haiyang Xu, Junyang Lin Title: Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13923v1 Abstract: We introduce Qwen2.5-VL, the latest flagship model of Qwen vision-language series, which demonstrates significant advancements in both foundational capabilities and innovative functionalities. Qwen2.5-VL achieves a major leap forward in understanding and interacting with the world through enhanced visual recognition, precise object localization, robust document parsing, and long-video comprehension. A standout feature of Qwen2.5-VL is its ability to localize objects using bounding boxes or points accurately. It provides robust structured data extraction from invoices, forms, and tables, as well as detailed analysis of charts, diagrams, and layouts. To handle complex inputs, Qwen2.5-VL introduces dynamic resolution processing and absolute time encoding, enabling it to process images of varying sizes and videos of extended durations (up to hours) with second-level event localization. This allows the model to natively perceive spatial scales and temporal dynamics without relying on traditional normalization techniques. By training a native dynamic-resolution Vision Transformer (ViT) from scratch and incorporating Window Attention, we reduce computational overhead while maintaining native resolution. As a result, Qwen2.5-VL excels not only in static image and document understanding but also as an interactive visual agent capable of reasoning, tool usage, and task execution in real-world scenarios such as operating computers and mobile devices. Qwen2.5-VL is available in three sizes, addressing diverse use cases from edge AI to high-performance computing. The flagship Qwen2.5-VL-72B model matches state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, particularly excelling in document and diagram understanding. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL maintains robust linguistic performance, preserving the core language competencies of the Qwen2.5 LLM.

🤗 Upvotes: 31 | cs.CV, cs.RO Authors: Hao Gao, Shaoyu Chen, Bo Jiang, Bencheng Liao, Yiang Shi, Xiaoyang Guo, Yuechuan Pu, Haoran Yin, Xiangyu Li, Xinbang Zhang, Ying Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Qian Zhang, Xinggang Wang Title: RAD: Training an End-to-End Driving Policy via Large-Scale 3DGS-based Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13144v1 Abstract: Existing end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) algorithms typically follow the Imitation Learning (IL) paradigm, which faces challenges such as causal confusion and the open-loop gap. In this work, we establish a 3DGS-based closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. By leveraging 3DGS techniques, we construct a photorealistic digital replica of the real physical world, enabling the AD policy to extensively explore the state space and learn to handle out-of-distribution scenarios through large-scale trial and error. To enhance safety, we design specialized rewards that guide the policy to effectively respond to safety-critical events and understand real-world causal relationships. For better alignment with human driving behavior, IL is incorporated into RL training as a regularization term. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation benchmark consisting of diverse, previously unseen 3DGS environments. Compared to IL-based methods, RAD achieves stronger performance in most closed-loop metrics, especially 3x lower collision rate. Abundant closed-loop results are presented at https://hgao-cv.github.io/RAD.

🤗 Upvotes: 28 | cs.SD, cs.AI Authors: Zihan Liu, Shuangrui Ding, Zhixiong Zhang, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang Title: SongGen: A Single Stage Auto-regressive Transformer for Text-to-Song Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13128v1 Abstract: Text-to-song generation, the task of creating vocals and accompaniment from textual inputs, poses significant challenges due to domain complexity and data scarcity. Existing approaches often employ multi-stage generation procedures, resulting in cumbersome training and inference pipelines. In this paper, we propose SongGen, a fully open-source, single-stage auto-regressive transformer designed for controllable song generation. The proposed model facilitates fine-grained control over diverse musical attributes, including lyrics and textual descriptions of instrumentation, genre, mood, and timbre, while also offering an optional three-second reference clip for voice cloning. Within a unified auto-regressive framework, SongGen supports two output modes: mixed mode, which generates a mixture of vocals and accompaniment directly, and dual-track mode, which synthesizes them separately for greater flexibility in downstream applications. We explore diverse token pattern strategies for each mode, leading to notable improvements and valuable insights. Furthermore, we design an automated data preprocessing pipeline with effective quality control. To foster community engagement and future research, we will release our model weights, training code, annotated data, and preprocessing pipeline. The generated samples are showcased on our project page at https://liuzh-19.github.io/SongGen/ , and the code will be available at https://github.com/LiuZH-19/SongGen .

🤗 Upvotes: 22 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Jusen Du, Weigao Sun, Disen Lan, Jiaxi Hu, Yu Cheng Title: MoM: Linear Sequence Modeling with Mixture-of-Memories Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13685v1 Abstract: Linear sequence modeling methods, such as linear attention, state space modeling, and linear RNNs, offer significant efficiency improvements by reducing the complexity of training and inference. However, these methods typically compress the entire input sequence into a single fixed-size memory state, which leads to suboptimal performance on recall-intensive downstream tasks. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, particularly the brain's ability to maintain robust long-term memory while mitigating "memory interference", we introduce a novel architecture called Mixture-of-Memories (MoM). MoM utilizes multiple independent memory states, with a router network directing input tokens to specific memory states. This approach greatly enhances the overall memory capacity while minimizing memory interference. As a result, MoM performs exceptionally well on recall-intensive tasks, surpassing existing linear sequence modeling techniques. Despite incorporating multiple memory states, the computation of each memory state remains linear in complexity, allowing MoM to retain the linear-complexity advantage during training, while constant-complexity during inference. Our experimental results show that MoM significantly outperforms current linear sequence models on downstream language tasks, particularly recall-intensive tasks, and even achieves performance comparable to Transformer models. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/MoM and is also released as a part of https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.

🤗 Upvotes: 22 | cs.CL Authors: William Jurayj, Jeffrey Cheng, Benjamin Van Durme Title: Is That Your Final Answer? Test-Time Scaling Improves Selective Question Answering Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13962v1 Abstract: Scaling the test-time compute of large language models has demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning benchmarks. However, existing evaluations of test-time scaling make the strong assumption that a reasoning system should always give an answer to any question provided. This overlooks concerns about whether a model is confident in its answer, and whether it is appropriate to always provide a response. To address these concerns, we extract confidence scores during reasoning for thresholding model responses. We find that increasing compute budget at inference time not only helps models answer more questions correctly, but also increases confidence in correct responses. We then extend the current paradigm of zero-risk responses during evaluation by considering settings with non-zero levels of response risk, and suggest a recipe for reporting evaluations under these settings.

🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.CL Authors: Shi Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Chenyan Xiong Title: Craw4LLM: Efficient Web Crawling for LLM Pretraining Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13347v1 Abstract: Web crawl is a main source of large language models' (LLMs) pretraining data, but the majority of crawled web pages are discarded in pretraining due to low data quality. This paper presents Crawl4LLM, an efficient web crawling method that explores the web graph based on the preference of LLM pretraining. Specifically, it leverages the influence of a webpage in LLM pretraining as the priority score of the web crawler's scheduler, replacing the standard graph connectivity based priority. Our experiments on a web graph containing 900 million webpages from a commercial search engine's index demonstrate the efficiency of Crawl4LLM in obtaining high-quality pretraining data. With just 21% URLs crawled, LLMs pretrained on Crawl4LLM data reach the same downstream performances of previous crawls, significantly reducing the crawling waste and alleviating the burdens on websites. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/Crawl4LLM.

🤗 Upvotes: 19 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Guanzheng Chen, Xin Li, Michael Qizhe Shieh, Lidong Bing Title: LongPO: Long Context Self-Evolution of Large Language Models through Short-to-Long Preference Optimization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13922v2 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities through pretraining and alignment. However, superior short-context LLMs may underperform in long-context scenarios due to insufficient long-context alignment. This alignment process remains challenging due to the impracticality of human annotation for extended contexts and the difficulty in balancing short- and long-context performance. To address these challenges, we introduce LongPO, that enables short-context LLMs to self-evolve to excel on long-context tasks by internally transferring short-context capabilities. LongPO harnesses LLMs to learn from self-generated short-to-long preference data, comprising paired responses generated for identical instructions with long-context inputs and their compressed short-context counterparts, respectively. This preference reveals capabilities and potentials of LLMs cultivated during short-context alignment that may be diminished in under-aligned long-context scenarios. Additionally, LongPO incorporates a short-to-long KL constraint to mitigate short-context performance decline during long-context alignment. When applied to Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 from 128K to 512K context lengths, LongPO fully retains short-context performance and largely outperforms naive SFT and DPO in both long- and short-context tasks. Specifically, LongPO-trained models can achieve results on long-context benchmarks comparable to, or even surpassing, those of superior LLMs (e.g., GPT-4-128K) that involve extensive long-context annotation and larger parameter scales. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/LongPO.

🤗 Upvotes: 17 | cs.AI Authors: Yuetai Li, Xiang Yue, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Radha Poovendran Title: Small Models Struggle to Learn from Strong Reasoners Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12143v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap: small models ($\leq$3B parameters) do not consistently benefit from long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning or distillation from larger models. Instead, they perform better when fine-tuned on shorter, simpler reasoning chains that better align with their intrinsic learning capacity. To address this, we propose Mix Distillation, a simple yet effective strategy that balances reasoning complexity by combining long and short CoT examples or reasoning from both larger and smaller models. Our experiments demonstrate that Mix Distillation significantly improves small model reasoning performance compared to training on either data alone. These findings highlight the limitations of direct strong model distillation and underscore the importance of adapting reasoning complexity for effective reasoning capability transfer.

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DC Authors: Michael Luo, Xiaoxiang Shi, Colin Cai, Tianjun Zhang, Justin Wong, Yichuan Wang, Chi Wang, Yanping Huang, Zhifeng Chen, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica Title: Autellix: An Efficient Serving Engine for LLM Agents as General Programs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13965v1 Abstract: Large language model (LLM) applications are evolving beyond simple chatbots into dynamic, general-purpose agentic programs, which scale LLM calls and output tokens to help AI agents reason, explore, and solve complex tasks. However, existing LLM serving systems ignore dependencies between programs and calls, missing significant opportunities for optimization. Our analysis reveals that programs submitted to LLM serving engines experience long cumulative wait times, primarily due to head-of-line blocking at both the individual LLM request and the program. To address this, we introduce Autellix, an LLM serving system that treats programs as first-class citizens to minimize their end-to-end latencies. Autellix intercepts LLM calls submitted by programs, enriching schedulers with program-level context. We propose two scheduling algorithms-for single-threaded and distributed programs-that preempt and prioritize LLM calls based on their programs' previously completed calls. Our evaluation demonstrates that across diverse LLMs and agentic workloads, Autellix improves throughput of programs by 4-15x at the same latency compared to state-of-the-art systems, such as vLLM.

🤗 Upvotes: 10 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.IT, math.IT Authors: Yucheng Shi, Tianze Yang, Canyu Chen, Quanzheng Li, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu Title: SearchRAG: Can Search Engines Be Helpful for LLM-based Medical Question Answering? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13233v1 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in general domains but often struggle with tasks requiring specialized knowledge. Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques typically retrieve external information from static knowledge bases, which can be outdated or incomplete, missing fine-grained clinical details essential for accurate medical question answering. In this work, we propose SearchRAG, a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by leveraging real-time search engines. Our method employs synthetic query generation to convert complex medical questions into search-engine-friendly queries and utilizes uncertainty-based knowledge selection to filter and incorporate the most relevant and informative medical knowledge into the LLM's input. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves response accuracy in medical question answering tasks, particularly for complex questions requiring detailed and up-to-date knowledge.

🤗 Upvotes: 65 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SD Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Zhiheng Liu, Fan Bu, Ruiyu Zhang, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li Title: Soundwave: Less is More for Speech-Text Alignment in LLMs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12900v1 Abstract: Existing end-to-end speech large language models (LLMs) usually rely on large-scale annotated data for training, while data-efficient training has not been discussed in depth. We focus on two fundamental problems between speech and text: the representation space gap and sequence length inconsistency. We propose Soundwave, which utilizes an efficient training strategy and a novel architecture to address these issues. Results show that Soundwave outperforms the advanced Qwen2-Audio in speech translation and AIR-Bench speech tasks, using only one-fiftieth of the training data. Further analysis shows that Soundwave still retains its intelligence during conversation. The project is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Soundwave.

🤗 Upvotes: 51 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Yuri Kuratov, Mikhail Arkhipov, Aydar Bulatov, Mikhail Burtsev Title: Cramming 1568 Tokens into a Single Vector and Back Again: Exploring the Limits of Embedding Space Capacity Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13063v1 Abstract: A range of recent works addresses the problem of compression of sequence of tokens into a shorter sequence of real-valued vectors to be used as inputs instead of token embeddings or key-value cache. These approaches allow to reduce the amount of compute in existing language models. Despite relying on powerful models as encoders, the maximum attainable lossless compression ratio is typically not higher than x10. This fact is highly intriguing because, in theory, the maximum information capacity of large real-valued vectors is far beyond the presented rates even for 16-bit precision and a modest vector size. In this work, we explore the limits of compression by replacing the encoder with a per-sample optimization procedure. We show that vectors with compression ratios up to x1500 exist, which highlights two orders of magnitude gap between existing and practically attainable solutions. Furthermore, we empirically show that the compression limits are determined not by the length of the input but by the amount of uncertainty to be reduced, namely, the cross-entropy loss on this sequence without any conditioning. The obtained limits highlight the substantial gap between the theoretical capacity of input embeddings and their practical utilization, suggesting significant room for optimization in model design.

🤗 Upvotes: 44 | cs.LG Authors: Jaehyeong Jo, Sung Ju Hwang Title: Continuous Diffusion Model for Language Modeling Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11564v1 Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in modeling discrete categorical data. Yet diffusion models that directly work on discrete data space do not fully exploit the power of iterative refinement, as the signals are lost during the transition between discrete states. Existing continuous diffusion models for discrete data have limited performance compared to discrete approaches, and the unclear link between them restricts the development of diffusion models for discrete data. In this work, we propose a continuous diffusion model for language modeling that incorporates the geometry of the underlying categorical distribution. We establish a connection between the discrete diffusion and continuous flow on the statistical manifold, and building on the analogy, we introduce a simple design for the diffusion process that generalizes previous discrete diffusion models. We further propose a simulation-free training framework based on radial symmetry and a simple technique to address the high dimensionality of the manifold. Comprehensive experiments on language modeling benchmarks and other modalities show that our method outperforms existing discrete diffusion models and approaches the performance of autoregressive models. Codes available at \href{https://github.com/harryjo97/RDLM}{https://github.com/harryjo97/RDLM}.

🤗 Upvotes: 42 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Lijie Liu, Tianxiang Ma, Bingchuan Li, Zhuowei Chen, Jiawei Liu, Qian He, Xinglong Wu Title: Phantom: Subject-consistent video generation via cross-modal alignment Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11079v1 Abstract: The continuous development of foundational models for video generation is evolving into various applications, with subject-consistent video generation still in the exploratory stage. We refer to this as Subject-to-Video, which extracts subject elements from reference images and generates subject-consistent video through textual instructions. We believe that the essence of subject-to-video lies in balancing the dual-modal prompts of text and image, thereby deeply and simultaneously aligning both text and visual content. To this end, we propose Phantom, a unified video generation framework for both single and multi-subject references. Building on existing text-to-video and image-to-video architectures, we redesign the joint text-image injection model and drive it to learn cross-modal alignment via text-image-video triplet data. In particular, we emphasize subject consistency in human generation, covering existing ID-preserving video generation while offering enhanced advantages. The project homepage is here https://phantom-video.github.io/Phantom/.

🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Feng Luo, Rui Yang, Hao Sun, Chunyuan Deng, Jiarui Yao, Jingyan Shen, Huan Zhang, Hanjie Chen Title: Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13131v1 Abstract: Understanding human preferences is crucial for improving foundation models and building personalized AI systems. However, preferences are inherently diverse and complex, making it difficult for traditional reward models to capture their full range. While fine-grained preference data can help, collecting it is expensive and hard to scale. In this paper, we introduce Decomposed Reward Models (DRMs), a novel approach that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without requiring fine-grained annotations. Our key insight is to represent human preferences as vectors and analyze them using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). By constructing a dataset of embedding differences between preferred and rejected responses, DRMs identify orthogonal basis vectors that capture distinct aspects of preference. These decomposed rewards can be flexibly combined to align with different user needs, offering an interpretable and scalable alternative to traditional reward models. We demonstrate that DRMs effectively extract meaningful preference dimensions (e.g., helpfulness, safety, humor) and adapt to new users without additional training. Our results highlight DRMs as a powerful framework for personalized and interpretable LLM alignment.

🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG, cs.RO Authors: Jianwei Yang, Reuben Tan, Qianhui Wu, Ruijie Zheng, Baolin Peng, Yongyuan Liang, Yu Gu, Mu Cai, Seonghyeon Ye, Joel Jang, Yuquan Deng, Lars Liden, Jianfeng Gao Title: Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13130v1 Abstract: We present Magma, a foundation model that serves multimodal AI agentic tasks in both the digital and physical worlds. Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that it not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial-temporal intelligence) and complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. To endow the agentic capabilities, Magma is pretrained on large amounts of heterogeneous datasets spanning from images, videos to robotics data, where the actionable visual objects (e.g., clickable buttons in GUI) in images are labeled by Set-of-Mark (SoM) for action grounding, and the object movements (e.g., the trace of human hands or robotic arms) in videos are labeled by Trace-of-Mark (ToM) for action planning. Extensive experiments show that SoM and ToM reach great synergy and facilitate the acquisition of spatial-temporal intelligence for our Magma model, which is fundamental to a wide range of tasks as shown in Fig.1. In particular, Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are specifically tailored to these tasks. On image and video-related multimodal tasks, Magma also compares favorably to popular large multimodal models that are trained on much larger datasets. We make our model and code public for reproducibility at https://microsoft.github.io/Magma.