Hugging Face Daily Papers

Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:42:37 +0000

Authors: Mingxuan Xia, Haobo Wang, Yixuan Li, Zewei Yu, Jindong Wang, Junbo Zhao, Runze Wu

Upvotes: 1

Summary: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. Due to the inherent uncertainty within LLMs, they often produce incorrect labels for difficult samples, severely compromising the data quality for downstream applications. Motivated by ambiguity aversion in human behaviors, we propose a novel candidate annotation paradigm wherein large language models are encouraged to output all possible labels when incurring uncertainty. To ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks, we develop a teacher-student framework CanDist that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM). We further provide a rigorous justification demonstrating that distilling candidate annotations from the teacher LLM offers superior theoretical guarantees compared to directly using single annotations. Extensive experiments across six text classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/MingxuanXia/CanDist.

DeepVideo-R1: Video Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Difficulty-aware Regressive GRPO

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 06:15:54 +0000

Authors: Jinyoung Park, Jeehye Na, Jinyoung Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Upvotes: 6

Summary: Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In particular, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown impressive success by employing a PPO-style reinforcement algorithm with group-based normalized rewards. However, the application of GRPO to Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) has been less studied. In this paper, we explore GRPO for video LLMs and identify two primary issues that impede its effective learning: (1) reliance on safeguards, and (2) the vanishing advantage problem. To mitigate these challenges, we propose DeepVideo-R1, a video large language model trained with our proposed Reg-GRPO (Regressive GRPO) and difficulty-aware data augmentation strategy. Reg-GRPO reformulates the GRPO objective as a regression task, directly predicting the advantage in GRPO. This design eliminates the need for safeguards like clipping and min functions, thereby facilitating more direct policy guidance by aligning the model with the advantage values. We also design the difficulty-aware data augmentation strategy that dynamically augments training samples at solvable difficulty levels, fostering diverse and informative reward signals. Our comprehensive experiments show that DeepVideo-R1 significantly improves video reasoning performance across multiple video reasoning benchmarks.

Infinity Instruct: Scaling Instruction Selection and Synthesis to Enhance Language Models

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 06:37:15 +0000

Authors: Jijie Li, Li Du, Hanyu Zhao, Bo-wen Zhang, Liangdong Wang, Boyan Gao, Guang Liu, Yonghua Lin

Upvotes: 1

Summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in real-world applications, yet existing open-source instruction datasets often concentrate on narrow domains, such as mathematics or coding, limiting generalization and widening the gap with proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we introduce Infinity-Instruct, a high-quality instruction dataset designed to enhance both foundational and chat capabilities of LLMs through a two-phase pipeline. In Phase 1, we curate 7.4M high-quality foundational instructions (InfInstruct-F-7.4M) from over 100M samples using hybrid data selection techniques. In Phase 2, we synthesize 1.5M high-quality chat instructions (InfInstruct-G-1.5M) through a two-stage process involving instruction selection, evolution, and diagnostic filtering. We empirically evaluate Infinity-Instruct by fine-tuning several open-source models, including Mistral, LLaMA, Qwen, and Yi, and observe substantial performance gains across both foundational and instruction following benchmarks, consistently surpassing official instruction-tuned counterparts. Notably, InfInstruct-LLaMA3.1-70B outperforms GPT-4-0314 by 8.6\% on instruction following tasks while achieving comparable foundational performance. These results underscore the synergy between foundational and chat training and offer new insights into holistic LLM development. Our datasethttps://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/Infinity-Instruct and codeshttps://gitee.com/li-touch/infinity-instruct have been publicly released.

Detecting Harmful Memes with Decoupled Understanding and Guided CoT Reasoning

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:10:45 +0000

Authors: Fengjun Pan, Anh Tuan Luu, Xiaobao Wu

Upvotes: 3

Summary: Detecting harmful memes is essential for maintaining the integrity of online environments. However, current approaches often struggle with resource efficiency, flexibility, or explainability, limiting their practical deployment in content moderation systems. To address these challenges, we introduce U-CoT+, a novel framework for harmful meme detection. Instead of relying solely on prompting or fine-tuning multimodal models, we first develop a high-fidelity meme-to-text pipeline that converts visual memes into detail-preserving textual descriptions. This design decouples meme interpretation from meme classification, thus avoiding immediate reasoning over complex raw visual content and enabling resource-efficient harmful meme detection with general large language models (LLMs). Building on these textual descriptions, we further incorporate targeted, interpretable human-crafted guidelines to guide models' reasoning under zero-shot CoT prompting. As such, this framework allows for easy adaptation to different harmfulness detection criteria across platforms, regions, and over time, offering high flexibility and explainability. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework, highlighting its potential for explainable and low-resource harmful meme detection using small-scale LLMs. Codes and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HMC-AF2B/README.md.

Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:00:33 +0000

Authors: Liyan Xu, Zhenlin Su, Mo Yu, Jiangnan Li, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou

Upvotes: 3

Summary: This work focuses on an observed limitation of text encoders: embeddings may not be able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within the semantics, resulting in failed dense retrieval on even simple cases. To examine such behaviors, we first introduce a new evaluation dataset in Chinese, named CapRetrieval, whose passages are image captions, and queries are phrases inquiring entities or events in various forms. Zero-shot evaluation suggests that encoders may fail on these fine-grained matching, regardless of training sources or model sizes. Aiming for enhancement, we proceed to finetune encoders with our proposed data generation strategies, which obtains the best performance on CapRetrieval. Within this process, we further identify an issue of granularity dilemma, a challenge for embeddings to express fine-grained salience while aligning with overall semantics. Our dataset, code and models in this work are publicly released at https://github.com/lxucs/CapRetrieval.

Inherently Faithful Attention Maps for Vision Transformers

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:41:22 +0000

Authors: Ananthu Aniraj, Cassio F. Dantas, Dino Ienco, Diego Marcos

Upvotes: 1

Summary: We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

SwS: Self-aware Weakness-driven Problem Synthesis in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:02:00 +0000

Authors: Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Yeyun Gong, Yang Wang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Ying Nian Wu, Weizhu Chen

Upvotes: 8

Summary: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem solving. A prerequisite for the scalability of RLVR is a high-quality problem set with precise and verifiable answers. However, the scarcity of well-crafted human-labeled math problems and limited-verification answers in existing distillation-oriented synthetic datasets limit their effectiveness in RL. Additionally, most problem synthesis strategies indiscriminately expand the problem set without considering the model's capabilities, leading to low efficiency in generating useful questions. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a Self-aware Weakness-driven problem Synthesis framework (SwS) that systematically identifies model deficiencies and leverages them for problem augmentation. Specifically, we define weaknesses as questions that the model consistently fails to learn through its iterative sampling during RL training. We then extract the core concepts from these failure cases and synthesize new problems to strengthen the model's weak areas in subsequent augmented training, enabling it to focus on and gradually overcome its weaknesses. Without relying on external knowledge distillation, our framework enables robust generalization byempowering the model to self-identify and address its weaknesses in RL, yielding average performance gains of 10.0% and 7.7% on 7B and 32B models across eight mainstream reasoning benchmarks.

A Self-Refining Framework for Enhancing ASR Using TTS-Synthesized Data

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:30:32 +0000

Authors: Cheng Kang Chou, Chan-Jan Hsu, Ho-Lam Chung, Liang-Hsuan Tseng, Hsi-Chun Cheng, Yu-Kuan Fu, Kuan Po Huang, Hung-Yi Lee

Upvotes: 1

Summary: We propose a self-refining framework that enhances ASR performance with only unlabeled datasets. The process starts with an existing ASR model generating pseudo-labels on unannotated speech, which are then used to train a high-fidelity text-to-speech (TTS) system. Then, synthesized speech text pairs are bootstrapped into the original ASR system, completing the closed-loop self-improvement cycle. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the framework on Taiwanese Mandarin speech. Leveraging 6,000 hours of unlabeled speech, a moderate amount of text data, and synthetic content from the AI models, we adapt Whisper-large-v2 into a specialized model, Twister. Twister reduces error rates by up to 20% on Mandarin and 50% on Mandarin-English code-switching benchmarks compared to Whisper. Results highlight the framework as a compelling alternative to pseudo-labeling self-distillation approaches and provides a practical pathway for improving ASR performance in low-resource or domain-specific settings.

AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:57:30 +0000

Authors: Polina Kirichenko, Mark Ibrahim, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Samuel J. Bell

Upvotes: 2

Summary: For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or fundamentally unanswerable, require LLMs to reason about uncertainty and selectively abstain -- i.e., refuse to answer definitively. However, abstention remains understudied, without a systematic evaluation framework for modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce AbstentionBench, a large-scale benchmark for holistically evaluating abstention across 20 diverse datasets, including questions with unknown answers, underspecification, false premises, subjective interpretations, and outdated information. Evaluating 20 frontier LLMs reveals abstention is an unsolved problem, and one where scaling models is of little use. While recent reasoning LLMs have shown impressive results in complex problem solving, surprisingly, we find that reasoning fine-tuning degrades abstention (by 24% on average), even for math and science domains on which reasoning models are explicitly trained. We find that while a carefully crafted system prompt can boost abstention in practice, it does not resolve models' fundamental inability to reason about uncertainty. We release AbstentionBench to foster research into advancing LLM reliability.

JAFAR: Jack up Any Feature at Any Resolution

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:53:12 +0000

Authors: Paul Couairon, Loick Chambon, Louis Serrano, Jean-Emmanuel Haugeard, Matthieu Cord, Nicolas Thome

Upvotes: 3

Summary: Foundation Vision Encoders have become essential for a wide range of dense vision tasks. However, their low-resolution spatial feature outputs necessitate feature upsampling to produce the high-resolution modalities required for downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce JAFAR, a lightweight and flexible feature upsampler that enhances the spatial resolution of visual features from any Foundation Vision Encoder to an arbitrary target resolution. JAFAR employs an attention-based module designed to promote semantic alignment between high-resolution queries, derived from low-level image features, and semantically enriched low-resolution keys, using Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) modulation. Notably, despite the absence of high-resolution supervision, we demonstrate that learning at low upsampling ratios and resolutions generalizes remarkably well to significantly higher output scales. Extensive experiments show that JAFAR effectively recovers fine-grained spatial details and consistently outperforms existing feature upsampling methods across a diverse set of downstream tasks. Project page at https://jafar-upsampler.github.io

SkillBlender: Towards Versatile Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Skill Blending

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 03:24:26 +0000

Authors: Yuxuan Kuang, Haoran Geng, Amine Elhafsi, Tan-Dzung Do, Pieter Abbeel, Jitendra Malik, Marco Pavone, Yue Wang

Upvotes: 4

Summary: Humanoid robots hold significant potential in accomplishing daily tasks across diverse environments thanks to their flexibility and human-like morphology. Recent works have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control and loco-manipulation leveraging optimal control or reinforcement learning. However, these methods require tedious task-specific tuning for each task to achieve satisfactory behaviors, limiting their versatility and scalability to diverse tasks in daily scenarios. To that end, we introduce SkillBlender, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for versatile humanoid loco-manipulation. SkillBlender first pretrains goal-conditioned task-agnostic primitive skills, and then dynamically blends these skills to accomplish complex loco-manipulation tasks with minimal task-specific reward engineering. We also introduce SkillBench, a parallel, cross-embodiment, and diverse simulated benchmark containing three embodiments, four primitive skills, and eight challenging loco-manipulation tasks, accompanied by a set of scientific evaluation metrics balancing accuracy and feasibility. Extensive simulated experiments show that our method significantly outperforms all baselines, while naturally regularizing behaviors to avoid reward hacking, resulting in more accurate and feasible movements for diverse loco-manipulation tasks in our daily scenarios. Our code and benchmark will be open-sourced to the community to facilitate future research. Project page: https://usc-gvl.github.io/SkillBlender-web/.

A High-Quality Dataset and Reliable Evaluation for Interleaved Image-Text Generation

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 06:21:20 +0000

Authors: Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Yifan Chang, Sizhuo Zhou, Shenglin Zhang, Yu Dai, Kaipeng Zhang

Upvotes: 4

Summary: Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have significantly improved multimodal understanding and generation. However, these models still struggle to generate tightly interleaved image-text outputs, primarily due to the limited scale, quality and instructional richness of current training datasets. To address this, we introduce InterSyn, a large-scale multimodal dataset constructed using our Self-Evaluation with Iterative Refinement (SEIR) method. InterSyn features multi-turn, instruction-driven dialogues with tightly interleaved imagetext responses, providing rich object diversity and rigorous automated quality refinement, making it well-suited for training next-generation instruction-following LMMs. Furthermore, to address the lack of reliable evaluation tools capable of assessing interleaved multimodal outputs, we introduce SynJudge, an automatic evaluation model designed to quantitatively assess multimodal outputs along four dimensions: text content, image content, image quality, and image-text synergy. Experimental studies show that the SEIR method leads to substantially higher dataset quality compared to an otherwise identical process without refinement. Moreover, LMMs trained on InterSyn achieve uniform performance gains across all evaluation metrics, confirming InterSyn's utility for advancing multimodal systems.

Effective Red-Teaming of Policy-Adherent Agents

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:59:47 +0000

Authors: Itay Nakash, George Kour, Koren Lazar, Matan Vetzler, Guy Uziel, Ateret Anaby-Tavor

Upvotes: 32

Summary: Task-oriented LLM-based agents are increasingly used in domains with strict policies, such as refund eligibility or cancellation rules. The challenge lies in ensuring that the agent consistently adheres to these rules and policies, appropriately refusing any request that would violate them, while still maintaining a helpful and natural interaction. This calls for the development of tailored design and evaluation methodologies to ensure agent resilience against malicious user behavior. We propose a novel threat model that focuses on adversarial users aiming to exploit policy-adherent agents for personal benefit. To address this, we present CRAFT, a multi-agent red-teaming system that leverages policy-aware persuasive strategies to undermine a policy-adherent agent in a customer-service scenario, outperforming conventional jailbreak methods such as DAN prompts, emotional manipulation, and coercive. Building upon the existing tau-bench benchmark, we introduce tau-break, a complementary benchmark designed to rigorously assess the agent's robustness against manipulative user behavior. Finally, we evaluate several straightforward yet effective defense strategies. While these measures provide some protection, they fall short, highlighting the need for stronger, research-driven safeguards to protect policy-adherent agents from adversarial attacks

Reward Models Enable Scalable Code Verification by Trading Accuracy for Throughput

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:58:21 +0000

Authors: Gabriel Orlanski, Nicholas Roberts, Aws Albarghouthi, Frederic Sala

Upvotes: 1

Summary: The standard paradigm for solving coding tasks via large language models (LLMs) is to generate-then-rank programs, where the latter step uses a verifier in the ranking process. The growing consensus is that a comprehensive verifier (e.g., a full test suite) should be prioritized over an outcome reward model (ORM) whenever possible, with little consideration given to the trade-offs involved. We aim to challenge this assumption by systematically exploring the tradeoff between speed and accuracy. We find that ORMs play a crucial role in scaling verification through trading accuracy for speed, even when a comprehensive verifier is available. Their value becomes especially apparent when used in a generate-prune-then-rank approach, where a faster but less accurate verifier removes incorrect solutions prior to ranking -- leading to a system that is 11.65x faster while only being 8.33% less accurate than the full test suite. We analyze the generate-prune-then-rank approach and show that it works by filtering out incorrect but highly ranked solutions. These findings enable the design of scalable and accurate program ranking systems.

LoRA-Edit: Controllable First-Frame-Guided Video Editing via Mask-Aware LoRA Fine-Tuning

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:03:55 +0000

Authors: Chenjian Gao, Lihe Ding, Xin Cai, Zhanpeng Huang, Zibin Wang, Tianfan Xue

Upvotes: 1

Summary: Video editing using diffusion models has achieved remarkable results in generating high-quality edits for videos. However, current methods often rely on large-scale pretraining, limiting flexibility for specific edits. First-frame-guided editing provides control over the first frame, but lacks flexibility over subsequent frames. To address this, we propose a mask-based LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) tuning method that adapts pretrained Image-to-Video (I2V) models for flexible video editing. Our approach preserves background regions while enabling controllable edits propagation. This solution offers efficient and adaptable video editing without altering the model architecture. To better steer this process, we incorporate additional references, such as alternate viewpoints or representative scene states, which serve as visual anchors for how content should unfold. We address the control challenge using a mask-driven LoRA tuning strategy that adapts a pre-trained image-to-video model to the editing context. The model must learn from two distinct sources: the input video provides spatial structure and motion cues, while reference images offer appearance guidance. A spatial mask enables region-specific learning by dynamically modulating what the model attends to, ensuring that each area draws from the appropriate source. Experimental results show our method achieves superior video editing performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

ViCrit: A Verifiable Reinforcement Learning Proxy Task for Visual Perception in VLMs

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 19:16:54 +0000

Authors: Xiyao Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Chao Feng, Yongyuan Liang, Yuhang Zhou, Xiaoyu Liu, Ziyi Zang, Ming Li, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin, Linjie Li, Furong Huang, Lijuan Wang

Upvotes: 13

Summary: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great effectiveness for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using tasks that are challenging yet easily verifiable, such as math reasoning or code generation. However, extending this success to visual perception in vision-language models (VLMs) has been impeded by the scarcity of vision-centric tasks that are simultaneously challenging and unambiguously verifiable. To this end, we introduce ViCrit (Visual Caption Hallucination Critic), an RL proxy task that trains VLMs to localize a subtle, synthetic visual hallucination injected into paragraphs of human-written image captions. Starting from a 200-word captions, we inject a single, subtle visual description error-altering a few words on objects, attributes, counts, or spatial relations-and task the model to pinpoint the corrupted span given the image and the modified caption. This formulation preserves the full perceptual difficulty while providing a binary, exact-match reward that is easy to compute and unambiguous. Models trained with the ViCrit Task exhibit substantial gains across a variety of VL benchmarks. Crucially, the improvements transfer beyond natural-image training data to abstract image reasoning and visual math, showing promises of learning to perceive rather than barely memorizing seen objects. To facilitate evaluation, we further introduce ViCrit-Bench, a category-balanced diagnostic benchmark that systematically probes perception errors across diverse image domains and error types. Together, our results demonstrate that fine-grained hallucination criticism is an effective and generalizable objective for enhancing visual perception in VLMs.

Mirage-1: Augmenting and Updating GUI Agent with Hierarchical Multimodal Skills

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 06:21:19 +0000

Authors: Yuquan Xie, Zaijing Li, Rui Shao, Gongwei Chen, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie

Upvotes: 1

Summary: Recent efforts to leverage the Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) as GUI agents have yielded promising outcomes. However, these agents still struggle with long-horizon tasks in online environments, primarily due to insufficient knowledge and the inherent gap between offline and online domains. In this paper, inspired by how humans generalize knowledge in open-ended environments, we propose a Hierarchical Multimodal Skills (HMS) module to tackle the issue of insufficient knowledge. It progressively abstracts trajectories into execution skills, core skills, and ultimately meta-skills, providing a hierarchical knowledge structure for long-horizon task planning. To bridge the domain gap, we propose the Skill-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Search (SA-MCTS) algorithm, which efficiently leverages skills acquired in offline environments to reduce the action search space during online tree exploration. Building on HMS, we propose Mirage-1, a multimodal, cross-platform, plug-and-play GUI agent. To validate the performance of Mirage-1 in real-world long-horizon scenarios, we constructed a new benchmark, AndroidLH. Experimental results show that Mirage-1 outperforms previous agents by 32\%, 19\%, 15\%, and 79\% on AndroidWorld, MobileMiniWob++, Mind2Web-Live, and AndroidLH, respectively. Project page: https://cybertronagent.github.io/Mirage-1.github.io/

The Diffusion Duality

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:55:35 +0000

Authors: Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Justin Deschenaux, Aaron Gokaslan, Guanghan Wang, Justin Chiu, Volodymyr Kuleshov

Upvotes: 26

Summary: Uniform-state discrete diffusion models hold the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent ability to self-correct. However, they are typically outperformed by autoregressive models and masked diffusion models. In this work, we narrow this performance gap by leveraging a key insight: Uniform-state diffusion processes naturally emerge from an underlying Gaussian diffusion. Our method, Duo, transfers powerful techniques from Gaussian diffusion to improve both training and sampling. First, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy guided by the Gaussian process, doubling training speed by reducing variance. Models trained with curriculum learning surpass autoregressive models in zero-shot perplexity on 3 of 7 benchmarks. Second, we present Discrete Consistency Distillation, which adapts consistency distillation from the continuous to the discrete setting. This algorithm unlocks few-step generation in diffusion language models by accelerating sampling by two orders of magnitude. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: http://s-sahoo.github.io/duo

Learning a Continue-Thinking Token for Enhanced Test-Time Scaling

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:28:54 +0000

Authors: Liran Ringel, Elad Tolochinsky, Yaniv Romano

Upvotes: 3

Summary: Test-time scaling has emerged as an effective approach for improving language model performance by utilizing additional compute at inference time. Recent studies have shown that overriding end-of-thinking tokens (e.g., replacing "" with "Wait") can extend reasoning steps and improve accuracy. In this work, we explore whether a dedicated continue-thinking token can be learned to trigger extended reasoning. We augment a distilled version of DeepSeek-R1 with a single learned "<|continue-thinking|>" token, training only its embedding via reinforcement learning while keeping the model weights frozen. Our experiments show that this learned token achieves improved accuracy on standard math benchmarks compared to both the baseline model and a test-time scaling approach that uses a fixed token (e.g., "Wait") for budget forcing. In particular, we observe that in cases where the fixed-token approach enhances the base model's accuracy, our method achieves a markedly greater improvement. For example, on the GSM8K benchmark, the fixed-token approach yields a 1.3% absolute improvement in accuracy, whereas our learned-token method achieves a 4.2% improvement over the base model that does not use budget forcing.

Med-PRM: Medical Reasoning Models with Stepwise, Guideline-verified Process Rewards

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 05:36:30 +0000

Authors: Jaehoon Yun, Jiwoong Sohn, Jungwoo Park, Hyunjae Kim, Xiangru Tang, Yanjun Shao, Yonghoe Koo, Minhyeok Ko, Qingyu Chen, Mark Gerstein, Michael Moor, Jaewoo Kang

Upvotes: 3

Summary: Large language models have shown promise in clinical decision making, but current approaches struggle to localize and correct errors at specific steps of the reasoning process. This limitation is critical in medicine, where identifying and addressing reasoning errors is essential for accurate diagnosis and effective patient care. We introduce Med-PRM, a process reward modeling framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to verify each reasoning step against established medical knowledge bases. By verifying intermediate reasoning steps with evidence retrieved from clinical guidelines and literature, our model can precisely assess the reasoning quality in a fine-grained manner. Evaluations on five medical QA benchmarks and two open-ended diagnostic tasks demonstrate that Med-PRM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improving the performance of base models by up to 13.50% using Med-PRM. Moreover, we demonstrate the generality of Med-PRM by integrating it in a plug-and-play fashion with strong policy models such as Meerkat, achieving over 80\% accuracy on MedQA for the first time using small-scale models of 8 billion parameters. Our code and data are available at: https://med-prm.github.io/

Configurable Preference Tuning with Rubric-Guided Synthetic Data

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:17:38 +0000

Authors: Víctor Gallego

Upvotes: 1

Summary: Models of human feedback for AI alignment, such as those underpinning Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), often bake in a singular, static set of preferences, limiting adaptability. This paper challenges the assumption of monolithic preferences by introducing Configurable Preference Tuning (CPT), a novel framework for endowing language models with the ability to dynamically adjust their behavior based on explicit, human-interpretable directives. CPT leverages synthetically generated preference data, conditioned on system prompts derived from structured, fine-grained rubrics that define desired attributes like writing style. By fine-tuning with these rubric-guided preferences, the LLM learns to modulate its outputs at inference time in response to the system prompt, without retraining. This approach not only offers fine-grained control but also provides a mechanism for modeling more nuanced and context-dependent human feedback. Several experimental artifacts, such as training code, generated datasets and fine-tuned models are released at https://github.com/vicgalle/configurable-preference-tuning

Beyond Homogeneous Attention: Memory-Efficient LLMs via Fourier-Approximated KV Cache

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 15:35:54 +0000

Authors: Xiaoran Liu, Siyang He, Qiqi Wang, Ruixiao Li, Yuerong Song, Zhigeng Liu, Linlin Li, Qun Liu, Zengfeng Huang, Qipeng Guo, Ziwei He, Xipeng Qiu

Upvotes: 6

Summary: Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing accuracy or introducing computational overhead. We propose FourierAttention, a training-free framework that exploits the heterogeneous roles of transformer head dimensions: lower dimensions prioritize local context, while upper ones capture long-range dependencies. By projecting the long-context-insensitive dimensions onto orthogonal Fourier bases, FourierAttention approximates their temporal evolution with fixed-length spectral coefficients. Evaluations on LLaMA models show that FourierAttention achieves the best long-context accuracy on LongBench and Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH). Besides, a custom Triton kernel, FlashFourierAttention, is designed to optimize memory via streamlined read-write operations, enabling efficient deployment without performance compromise.

Aligned Novel View Image and Geometry Synthesis via Cross-modal Attention Instillation

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:19:00 +0000

Authors: Min-Seop Kwak, Junho Kim, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han, Taekyoung Kim, Seungryong Kim, Jin-Hwa Kim

Upvotes: 28

Summary: We introduce a diffusion-based framework that performs aligned novel view image and geometry generation via a warping-and-inpainting methodology. Unlike prior methods that require dense posed images or pose-embedded generative models limited to in-domain views, our method leverages off-the-shelf geometry predictors to predict partial geometries viewed from reference images, and formulates novel-view synthesis as an inpainting task for both image and geometry. To ensure accurate alignment between generated images and geometry, we propose cross-modal attention distillation, where attention maps from the image diffusion branch are injected into a parallel geometry diffusion branch during both training and inference. This multi-task approach achieves synergistic effects, facilitating geometrically robust image synthesis as well as well-defined geometry prediction. We further introduce proximity-based mesh conditioning to integrate depth and normal cues, interpolating between point cloud and filtering erroneously predicted geometry from influencing the generation process. Empirically, our method achieves high-fidelity extrapolative view synthesis on both image and geometry across a range of unseen scenes, delivers competitive reconstruction quality under interpolation settings, and produces geometrically aligned colored point clouds for comprehensive 3D completion. Project page is available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/MoAI.

LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming?

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:29:09 +0000

Authors: Zihan Zheng, Zerui Cheng, Zeyu Shen, Shang Zhou, Kaiyuan Liu, Hansen He, Dongruixuan Li, Stanley Wei, Hangyi Hao, Jianzhu Yao, Peiyao Sheng, Zixuan Wang, Wenhao Chai, Aleksandra Korolova, Peter Henderson, Sanjeev Arora, Pramod Viswanath, Jingbo Shang, Saining Xie

Upvotes: 11

Summary: Recent reports claim that large language models (LLMs) now outperform elite humans in competitive programming. Drawing on knowledge from a group of medalists in international algorithmic contests, we revisit this claim, examining how LLMs differ from human experts and where limitations still remain. We introduce LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI that are continuously updated to reduce the likelihood of data contamination. A team of Olympiad medalists annotates every problem for algorithmic categories and conducts a line-by-line analysis of failed model-generated submissions. Using this new data and benchmark, we find that frontier models still have significant limitations: without external tools, the best model achieves only 53% pass@1 on medium-difficulty problems and 0% on hard problems, domains where expert humans still excel. We also find that LLMs succeed at implementation-heavy problems but struggle with nuanced algorithmic reasoning and complex case analysis, often generating confidently incorrect justifications. High performance appears largely driven by implementation precision and tool augmentation, not superior reasoning. LiveCodeBench Pro thus highlights the significant gap to human grandmaster levels, while offering fine-grained diagnostics to steer future improvements in code-centric LLM reasoning.

Feedback Friction: LLMs Struggle to Fully Incorporate External Feedback

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:31:51 +0000

Authors: Dongwei Jiang, Alvin Zhang, Andrew Wang, Nicholas Andrews, Daniel Khashabi

Upvotes: 7

Summary: Recent studies have shown LLMs possess some ability to improve their responses when given external feedback. However, it remains unclear how effectively and thoroughly these models can incorporate extrinsic feedback. In an ideal scenario, if LLMs receive near-perfect and complete feedback, we would expect them to fully integrate the feedback and change their incorrect answers to correct ones. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLMs' ability to incorporate feedback by designing a controlled experimental environment. For each problem, a solver model attempts a solution, then a feedback generator with access to near-complete ground-truth answers produces targeted feedback, after which the solver tries again. We evaluate this pipeline across a diverse range of tasks, including math reasoning, knowledge reasoning, scientific reasoning, and general multi-domain evaluations with state-of-the-art language models including Claude 3.7 (with and without extended thinking). Surprisingly, even under these near-ideal conditions, solver models consistently show resistance to feedback, a limitation that we term FEEDBACK FRICTION. To mitigate this limitation, we experiment with sampling-based strategies like progressive temperature increases and explicit rejection of previously attempted incorrect answers, which yield improvements but still fail to help models achieve target performance. We also perform a rigorous exploration of potential causes of FEEDBACK FRICTION, ruling out factors such as model overconfidence and data familiarity. We hope that highlighting this issue in LLMs and ruling out several apparent causes will help future research in self-improvement.

pLSTM: parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 17:51:37 +0000

Authors: Korbinian Pöppel, Richard Freinschlag, Thomas Schmied, Wei Lin, Sepp Hochreiter

Upvotes: 5

Summary: Modern recurrent architectures, such as xLSTM and Mamba, have recently challenged the Transformer in language modeling. However, their structure constrains their applicability to sequences only or requires processing multi-dimensional data structures, such as images or molecular graphs, in a pre-defined sequential order. In contrast, Multi-Dimensional RNNs (MDRNNs) are well suited for data with a higher level structure, like 2D grids, trees, and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). In this work, we extend the notion of multi-dimensionality to linear RNNs. We introduce parallelizable Linear Source Transition Mark networks (pLSTMs) using Source, Transition, and Mark gates that act on the line graph of a general DAG. This enables parallelization in analogy to parallel associative scans and the chunkwise-recurrent form of sequential linear RNNs, but for DAGs. For regular grids (1D and 2D), like images, this scheme can be efficiently implemented using einsum operations, concatenations, and padding in logarithmic time. pLSTMs tackle the vanishing/exploding activation/gradient problem for long distances in DAGs via two distinct modes: a directed propagation mode (P-mode) and a diffusive distribution mode (D-mode). To showcase the long-range capabilities of pLSTM, we introduce arrow-pointing extrapolation as a synthetic computer vision task that contains long-distance directional information. We demonstrate that pLSTMs generalize well to larger image sizes, whereas Transformers struggle to extrapolate. On established molecular graph and computer vision benchmarks, pLSTMs also show strong performance. Code and Datasets are available at: https://github.com/ml-jku/plstm_experiments.