Lei Fang

Zhipeng Chen, Yingqian Min, Beichen Zhang et al.

In this report, we present the third technical report on the development of slow-thinking models as part of the STILL project. As the technical pathway becomes clearer, scaling RL training has become a central technique for implementing such reasoning models. We systematically experiment with and document the effects of various factors influencing RL training, conducting experiments on both base models and fine-tuned models. Specifically, we demonstrate that our RL training approach consistently improves the Qwen2.5-32B base models, enhancing both response length and test accuracy. Furthermore, we show that even when a model like DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B has already achieved a high performance level, it can be further refined through RL training, reaching an accuracy of 39.33% on AIME 2024. Beyond RL training, we also explore the use of tool manipulation, finding that it significantly boosts the reasoning performance of large reasoning models. This approach achieves a remarkable accuracy of 86.67% with greedy search on AIME 2024, underscoring its effectiveness in enhancing model capabilities. We release our resources at the STILL project website: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Slow_Thinking_with_LLMs.

Lei Fang, Jian-Guang Lou

We study the problem of quantitative facts extraction for text with percentages. For example, given the sentence "30 percent of Americans like watching football, while 20% prefer to watch NBA.", our goal is to obtain a deep understanding of the percentage numbers ("30 percent" and "20%") by extracting their quantitative facts: part ("like watching football" and "prefer to watch NBA") and whole ("Americans). These quantitative facts can empower new applications like automated infographic generation. We formulate part and whole extraction as a sequence tagging problem. Due to the large gap between part/whole and its corresponding percentage, we introduce skip mechanism in sequence modeling, and achieved improved performance on both our task and the CoNLL-2003 named entity recognition task. Experimental results demonstrate that learning to skip in sequence tagging is promising.

Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Haoyan Liu et al.

Context-dependent semantic parsing has proven to be an important yet challenging task. To leverage the advances in context-independent semantic parsing, we propose to perform follow-up query analysis, aiming to restate context-dependent natural language queries with contextual information. To accomplish the task, we propose STAR, a novel approach with a well-designed two-phase process. It is parser-independent and able to handle multifarious follow-up scenarios in different domains. Experiments on the FollowUp dataset show that STAR outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by a large margin of nearly 8%. The superiority on parsing results verifies the feasibility of follow-up query analysis. We also explore the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset, which is very promising.

Weiwei Cui, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yun Wang et al.

Combining data content with visual embellishments, infographics can effectively deliver messages in an engaging and memorable manner. Various authoring tools have been proposed to facilitate the creation of infographics. However, creating a professional infographic with these authoring tools is still not an easy task, requiring much time and design expertise. Therefore, these tools are generally not attractive to casual users, who are either unwilling to take time to learn the tools or lacking in proper design expertise to create a professional infographic. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach: to automatically generate infographics from natural language statements. We first conducted a preliminary study to explore the design space of infographics. Based on the preliminary study, we built a proof-of-concept system that automatically converts statements about simple proportion-related statistics to a set of infographics with pre-designed styles. Finally, we demonstrated the usability and usefulness of the system through sample results, exhibits, and expert reviews.