Kaiyuan Chen

ByteDance Seed, Jiaze Chen, Tiantian Fan et al. · bytedance

We introduce Seed1.5-Thinking, capable of reasoning through thinking before responding, resulting in improved performance on a wide range of benchmarks. Seed1.5-Thinking achieves 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces and 77.3 on GPQA, demonstrating excellent reasoning abilities in STEM and coding. Beyond reasoning tasks, the method demonstrates notable generalization across diverse domains. For instance, it surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability. Compared to other state-of-the-art reasoning models, Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters. As part of our effort to assess generalized reasoning, we develop two internal benchmarks, BeyondAIME and Codeforces, both of which will be publicly released to support future research. Model trial link: https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark.

Andrew Goldberg, Kavish Kondap, Tianshuang Qiu et al.

Generative AI systems have shown impressive capabilities in creating text, code, and images. Inspired by the rich history of research in industrial ''Design for Assembly'', we introduce a novel problem: Generative Design-for-Robot-Assembly (GDfRA). The task is to generate an assembly based on a natural language prompt (e.g., ''giraffe'') and an image of available physical components, such as 3D-printed blocks. The output is an assembly, a spatial arrangement of these components, and instructions for a robot to build this assembly. The output must 1) resemble the requested object and 2) be reliably assembled by a 6 DoF robot arm with a suction gripper. We then present Blox-Net, a GDfRA system that combines generative vision language models with well-established methods in computer vision, simulation, perturbation analysis, motion planning, and physical robot experimentation to solve a class of GDfRA problems with minimal human supervision. Blox-Net achieved a Top-1 accuracy of 63.5% in the ''recognizability'' of its designed assemblies (eg, resembling giraffe as judged by a VLM). These designs, after automated perturbation redesign, were reliably assembled by a robot, achieving near-perfect success across 10 consecutive assembly iterations with human intervention only during reset prior to assembly. Surprisingly, this entire design process from textual word (''giraffe'') to reliable physical assembly is performed with zero human intervention.

Yuhan Suo, Runqi Chai, Kaiyuan Chen et al.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the risks of data tampering and malicious information injection have intensified, making efficient threat detection in large-scale distributed sensor networks a pressing challenge. To address the decline in malicious information detection efficiency as network scale expands, this paper investigates a robust set partitioning strategy and, on this basis, develops a distributed attack detection framework with theoretical guarantees. Specifically, we introduce a gain mutual influence metric to characterize the inter-subset interference arising during gain updates, thereby revealing the fundamental reason for the performance gap between distributed and centralized algorithms. Building on this insight, the set partitioning strategy based on Grassmann distance is proposed, which significantly reduces the computational cost of gain updates while maintaining detection performance, and ensures that the distributed setting under subset partitioning preserves the same theoretical performance bound as the baseline algorithm. Unlike conventional clustering methods, the proposed set partitioning strategy leverages the intrinsic observational features of sensors for robust partitioning, thereby enhancing resilience to noise and interference. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method limits the performance gap between distributed and centralized detection to no more than 1.648$\%$, while the computational cost decreases at an order of $O(1/m)$ with the number of subsets $m$. Therefore, the proposed algorithm effectively reduces computational overhead while preserving detection accuracy, offering a practical low-cost and highly reliable security detection solution for edge nodes in large-scale IoT systems.

Kaiyuan Chen, Qimin Wu, Taiyu Hou et al.

The capacity of AI agents to effectively handle tasks of increasing duration and complexity continues to grow, demonstrating exceptional performance in coding, deep research, and complex problem-solving evaluations. However, in daily scenarios, the perception of these advanced AI capabilities among general users remains limited. We argue that current evaluations prioritize increasing task difficulty without sufficiently addressing the diversity of agentic tasks necessary to cover the daily work, life, and learning activities of a broad demographic. To address this, we propose AgentIF-OneDay, aimed at determining whether general users can utilize natural language instructions and AI agents to complete a diverse array of daily tasks. These tasks require not only solving problems through dialogue but also understanding various attachment types and delivering tangible file-based results. The benchmark is structured around three user-centric categories: Open Workflow Execution, which assesses adherence to explicit and complex workflows; Latent Instruction, which requires agents to infer implicit instructions from attachments; and Iterative Refinement, which involves modifying or expanding upon ongoing work. We employ instance-level rubrics and a refined evaluation pipeline that aligns LLM-based verification with human judgment, achieving an 80.1% agreement rate using Gemini-3-Pro. AgentIF-OneDay comprises 104 tasks covering 767 scoring points. We benchmarked four leading general AI agents and found that agent products built based on APIs and ChatGPT agents based on agent RL remain in the first tier simultaneously. Leading LLM APIs and open-source models have internalized agentic capabilities, enabling AI application teams to develop cutting-edge Agent products.

Kaiyuan Chen, Guangmin Zheng, Jin Wang et al.

Existing self-evolution methods overlook the influence of fine-grained reasoning steps, which leads to the reasoner-verifier gap. The computational inefficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) process supervision further exacerbates the difficulty in mitigating the gap. Motivated by the Error-Related Negativity (ERN), which the reasoner can localize error following incorrect decisions, guiding rapid adjustments, we propose a Self-Adaptive Process Optimization (SAPO) method for self-improvement in Small Language Models (SLMs). SAPO adaptively and efficiently introduces process supervision signals by actively minimizing the reasoner-verifier gap rather than relying on inefficient MC estimations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most existing self-evolution methods on two challenging task types: mathematics and code. Additionally, to further investigate SAPO's impact on verifier performance, this work introduces two new benchmarks for process reward models in both mathematical and coding tasks.

Kaiyuan Chen, Yuhan Suo, Shaowei Cui et al.

This paper addresses the problem of trajectory optimization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) performing time-sensitive medical deliveries in urban environments. Specifically, we consider a single UAV with 3 degree-of-freedom dynamics tasked with delivering blood packages to multiple hospitals, each with a predefined time window and priority. Mission objectives are encoded using Signal Temporal Logic (STL), enabling the formal specification of spatial-temporal constraints. To ensure safety, city buildings are modeled as 3D convex obstacles, and obstacle avoidance is handled through a Convex Feasible Set (CFS) method. The entire planning problem-combining UAV dynamics, STL satisfaction, and collision avoidance-is formulated as a convex optimization problem that ensures tractability and can be solved efficiently using standard convex programming techniques. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method generates dynamically feasible, collision-free trajectories that satisfy temporal mission goals, providing a scalable and reliable approach for autonomous UAV-based medical logistics.

Seed, Baisheng Li, Banggu Wu et al.

We introduce Virtual Width Networks (VWN), a framework that delivers the benefits of wider representations without incurring the quadratic cost of increasing the hidden size. VWN decouples representational width from backbone width, expanding the embedding space while keeping backbone compute nearly constant. In our large-scale experiment, an 8-times expansion accelerates optimization by over 2 times for next-token and 3 times for next-2-token prediction. The advantage amplifies over training as both the loss gap grows and the convergence-speedup ratio increases, showing that VWN is not only token-efficient but also increasingly effective with scale. Moreover, we identify an approximately log-linear scaling relation between virtual width and loss reduction, offering an initial empirical basis and motivation for exploring virtual-width scaling as a new dimension of large-model efficiency.

Shuo Xing, Zezhou Sun, Shuangyu Xie et al.

In this paper, we introduce MapBench-the first dataset specifically designed for human-readable, pixel-based map-based outdoor navigation, curated from complex path finding scenarios. MapBench comprises over 1600 pixel space map path finding problems from 100 diverse maps. In MapBench, LVLMs generate language-based navigation instructions given a map image and a query with beginning and end landmarks. For each map, MapBench provides Map Space Scene Graph (MSSG) as an indexing data structure to convert between natural language and evaluate LVLM-generated results. We demonstrate that MapBench significantly challenges state-of-the-art LVLMs both zero-shot prompting and a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) augmented reasoning framework that decomposes map navigation into sequential cognitive processes. Our evaluation of both open-source and closed-source LVLMs underscores the substantial difficulty posed by MapBench, revealing critical limitations in their spatial reasoning and structured decision-making capabilities. We release all the code and dataset in https://github.com/taco-group/MapBench.

Kaiyuan Chen, Letian Fu, David Huang et al.

Recent results suggest that very large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations can be used to train transformer-based models that have the potential to generalize to new scenes, robots, and tasks. However, curating, distributing, and loading large datasets of robot trajectories, which typically consist of video, textual, and numerical modalities - including streams from multiple cameras - remains challenging. We propose Robo-DM, an efficient open-source cloud-based data management toolkit for collecting, sharing, and learning with robot data. With Robo-DM, robot datasets are stored in a self-contained format with Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML). Robo-DM can significantly reduce the size of robot trajectory data, transfer costs, and data load time during training. Compared to the RLDS format used in OXE datasets, Robo-DM's compression saves space by up to 70x (lossy) and 3.5x (lossless). Robo-DM also accelerates data retrieval by load-balancing video decoding with memory-mapped decoding caches. Compared to LeRobot, a framework that also uses lossy video compression, Robo-DM is up to 50x faster when decoding sequentially. We physically evaluate a model trained by Robo-DM with lossy compression, a pick-and-place task, and In-Context Robot Transformer. Robo-DM uses 75x compression of the original dataset and does not suffer reduction in downstream task accuracy.

Kaiyuan Chen, Yixin Ren, Yang Liu et al.

We introduce xbench, a dynamic, profession-aligned evaluation suite designed to bridge the gap between AI agent capabilities and real-world productivity. While existing benchmarks often focus on isolated technical skills, they may not accurately reflect the economic value agents deliver in professional settings. To address this, xbench targets commercially significant domains with evaluation tasks defined by industry professionals. Our framework creates metrics that strongly correlate with productivity value, enables prediction of Technology-Market Fit (TMF), and facilitates tracking of product capabilities over time. As our initial implementations, we present two benchmarks: Recruitment and Marketing. For Recruitment, we collect 50 tasks from real-world headhunting business scenarios to evaluate agents' abilities in company mapping, information retrieval, and talent sourcing. For Marketing, we assess agents' ability to match influencers with advertiser needs, evaluating their performance across 50 advertiser requirements using a curated pool of 836 candidate influencers. We present initial evaluation results for leading contemporary agents, establishing a baseline for these professional domains. Our continuously updated evalsets and evaluations are available at https://xbench.org.

Kaiyuan Chen, Shuangyu Xie, Zehan Ma et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm - using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot trajectory, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries - images with textural multiple-choice questions - based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We curate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions covering 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning.

Qianyu Yang, Yang Liu, Jiaqi Li et al.

As language models (LMs) evolve from chat assistants to long-horizon agents capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, existing benchmarks remain largely confined to structured or exam-style tasks that fall short of real-world professional demands. To this end, we introduce \$OneMillion-Bench \$OneMillion-Bench, a benchmark of 400 expert-curated tasks spanning Law, Finance, Industry, Healthcare, and Natural Science, built to evaluate agents across economically consequential scenarios. Unlike prior work, the benchmark requires retrieving authoritative sources, resolving conflicting evidence, applying domain-specific rules, and making constraint decisions, where correctness depends as much on the reasoning process as the final answer. We adopt a rubric-based evaluation protocol scoring factual accuracy, logical coherence, practical feasibility, and professional compliance, focused on expert-level problems to ensure meaningful differentiation across agents. Together, \$OneMillion-Bench provides a unified testbed for assessing agentic reliability, professional depth, and practical readiness in domain-intensive scenarios.

Chengyin Xu, Kaiyuan Chen, Xiao Li et al.

The escalating scale and cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) training necessitate accurate pre-training prediction of downstream task performance for efficient resource allocation. This is challenged by: 1) the emergence phenomenon, where metrics become meaningful only after extensive training, hindering prediction by smaller models; and 2) uneven task difficulty and inconsistent performance scaling patterns, leading to high metric variability. Current prediction methods lack accuracy and reliability. We propose a Clustering-On-Difficulty (COD) framework for downstream performance prediction. The COD framework clusters tasks by their difficulty scaling features, thereby establishing a more stable and predictable support subset through the exclusion of tasks exhibiting non-emergent behavior or irregular scaling. We adopt a performance scaling law to predict cluster-wise performance with theoretical support. Predictable subset performance acts as an intermediate predictor for the full evaluation set. We further derive a mapping function to accurately extrapolate the performance of the subset to the full set. Applied to an LLM with 70B parameters, COD achieved a 1.36% average prediction error across eight key LLM benchmarks, offering actionable insights for resource allocation and training monitoring of LLMs pretraining.

Kaiyuan Chen, Jin Wang, Xuejie Zhang

Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLMs being overly confident with limited supervision signals, thus limiting their abilities. Therefore, this study enables SLMs to learn to reason from self-iterative feedback. By combining odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative signals generated by themselves. Additionally, we introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. Compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), our method improves the performance of Gemma-2B by 12.43 (Acc) on GSM8K and 3.95 (Pass@1) on MBPP. Furthermore, the proposed method also demonstrated superior out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval.

Kaiyuan Chen, Xingzhuo Guo, Yu Zhang et al.

Predictive Coding (PC) is a theoretical framework in cognitive science suggesting that the human brain processes cognition through spatiotemporal prediction of the visual world. Existing studies have developed spatiotemporal prediction neural networks based on the PC theory, emulating its two core mechanisms: Correcting predictions from residuals and hierarchical learning. However, these models do not show the enhancement of prediction skills on real-world forecasting tasks and ignore the Precision Weighting mechanism of PC theory. The precision weighting mechanism posits that the brain allocates more attention to signals with lower precision, contributing to the cognitive ability of human brains. This work introduces the Cognitive Diffusion Probabilistic Models (CogDPM), which demonstrate the connection between diffusion probabilistic models and PC theory. CogDPM features a precision estimation method based on the hierarchical sampling capabilities of diffusion models and weight the guidance with precision weights estimated by the inherent property of diffusion models. We experimentally show that the precision weights effectively estimate the data predictability. We apply CogDPM to real-world prediction tasks using the United Kindom precipitation and ERA surface wind datasets. Our results demonstrate that CogDPM outperforms both existing domain-specific operational models and general deep prediction models by providing more proficient forecasting.

Kaiyuan Chen, Kush Hari, Trinity Chung et al.

Cloud robotics enables robots to offload complex computational tasks to cloud servers for performance and ease of management. However, cloud compute can be costly, cloud services can suffer occasional downtime, and connectivity between the robot and cloud can be prone to variations in network Quality-of-Service (QoS). We present FogROS2-FT (Fault Tolerant) to mitigate these issues by introducing a multi-cloud extension that automatically replicates independent stateless robotic services, routes requests to these replicas, and directs the first response back. With replication, robots can still benefit from cloud computations even when a cloud service provider is down or there is low QoS. Additionally, many cloud computing providers offer low-cost spot computing instances that may shutdown unpredictably. Normally, these low-cost instances would be inappropriate for cloud robotics, but the fault tolerance nature of FogROS2-FT allows them to be used reliably. We demonstrate FogROS2-FT fault tolerance capabilities in 3 cloud-robotics scenarios in simulation (visual object detection, semantic segmentation, motion planning) and 1 physical robot experiment (scan-pick-and-place). Running on the same hardware specification, FogROS2-FT achieves motion planning with up to 2.2x cost reduction and up to a 5.53x reduction on 99 Percentile (P99) long-tail latency. FogROS2-FT reduces the P99 long-tail latency of object detection and semantic segmentation by 2.0x and 2.1x, respectively, under network slowdown and resource contention.