Ruifeng Yuan

Ruifeng Yuan, Zili Wang, Ziqiang Cao et al.

Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarization. It aims to generate a concise highlight for a given query. Different from text summarization, query-focused summarization has long been plagued by the problem of lacking high-quality large-scale datasets. In this paper, we investigate the idea that whether we can integrate and transfer the knowledge of text summarization and question answering to assist the few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Here, we propose prefix-merging, a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Drawn inspiration from prefix-tuning, we are allowed to integrate the task knowledge from text summarization and question answering into a properly designed prefix and apply the merged prefix to query-focused summarization. With only a small amount of trainable parameters, prefix-merging outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. We further discuss the influence of different prefix designs and propose a visualized explanation for how prefix-merging works.

Shichao Sun, Ruifeng Yuan, Wenjie Li et al.

Unsupervised extractive summarization aims to extract salient sentences from a document as the summary without labeled data. Recent literatures mostly research how to leverage sentence similarity to rank sentences in the order of salience. However, sentence similarity estimation using pre-trained language models mostly takes little account of document-level information and has a weak correlation with sentence salience ranking. In this paper, we proposed two novel strategies to improve sentence similarity estimation for unsupervised extractive summarization. We use contrastive learning to optimize a document-level objective that sentences from the same document are more similar than those from different documents. Moreover, we use mutual learning to enhance the relationship between sentence similarity estimation and sentence salience ranking, where an extra signal amplifier is used to refine the pivotal information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies.

Zilin Lu, Ruifeng Yuan, Weiwei Cao et al.

Radiologists highly desire fully automated AI for radiology report generation (R2G), yet existing approaches fall short in clinical utility. Reinforcement learning (RL) holds potential to address these shortcomings, but its adoption in this task remains underexplored. In this paper, we revisit RL in terms of data efficiency and optimization effectiveness for R2G tasks. First, we explore the impact of data quantity and quality on the performance of RL in medical contexts, revealing that data quality plays a more critical role than quantity. To this end, we propose a diagnostic diversity-based data sampling strategy that enables comparable performance with fewer samples. Second, we observe that the majority of tokens in radiology reports are template-like and diagnostically uninformative, whereas the low frequency of clinically critical tokens heightens the risk of being overlooked during optimization. To tackle this, we introduce Diagnostic Token-weighted Policy Optimization (DiTPO), which directly optimizes for clinical accuracy by using a diagnostic F1 score as the reward signal. Unlike standard RL approaches that treat all tokens equally, DiTPO explicitly models the varying importance of different tokens through rule- or gradient-based mechanisms to prioritize clinically relevant content. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-CXR, IU-Xray, and CheXpert Plus datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while requiring substantially fewer training samples in RL. Notably, on MIMIC-CXR, our framework attains an F1 score of 0.516 using only 20% of the RL training samples.

LASA Team, Weiwen Xu, Hou Pong Chan et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding common visual elements, largely due to their large-scale datasets and advanced training strategies. However, their effectiveness in medical applications remains limited due to the inherent discrepancies between data and tasks in medical scenarios and those in the general domain. Concretely, existing medical MLLMs face the following critical limitations: (1) limited coverage of medical knowledge beyond imaging, (2) heightened susceptibility to hallucinations due to suboptimal data curation processes, (3) lack of reasoning capabilities tailored for complex medical scenarios. To address these challenges, we first propose a comprehensive data curation procedure that (1) efficiently acquires rich medical knowledge data not only from medical imaging but also from extensive medical texts and general-domain data; and (2) synthesizes accurate medical captions, visual question answering (VQA), and reasoning samples. As a result, we build a multimodal dataset enriched with extensive medical knowledge. Building on the curated data, we introduce our medical-specialized MLLM: Lingshu. Lingshu undergoes multi-stage training to embed medical expertise and enhance its task-solving capabilities progressively. Besides, we preliminarily explore the potential of applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards paradigm to enhance Lingshu's medical reasoning ability. Additionally, we develop MedEvalKit, a unified evaluation framework that consolidates leading multimodal and textual medical benchmarks for standardized, fair, and efficient model assessment. We evaluate the performance of Lingshu on three fundamental medical tasks, multimodal QA, text-based QA, and medical report generation. The results show that Lingshu consistently outperforms the existing open-source multimodal models on most tasks ...

Shichao Sun, Junlong Li, Weizhe Yuan et al.

Critique, as a natural language description for assessing the quality of model-generated content, has played a vital role in the training, evaluation, and refinement of LLMs. However, a systematic method to evaluate the quality of critique is lacking. In this paper, we pioneer the critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which builds specific quantification criteria. To achieve a reliable evaluation outcome, we propose Atomic Information Units (AIUs), which describe the critique in a more fine-grained manner. MetaCritique aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. Moreover, MetaCritique delivers a natural language rationale for the intricate reasoning within each judgment. Lastly, we construct a meta-evaluation dataset covering 4 tasks across 16 public datasets involving human-written and LLM-generated critiques. Experiments demonstrate that MetaCritique can achieve near-human performance. Our study can facilitate future research in LLM critiques based on our following observations and released resources: (1) superior critiques judged by MetaCritique can lead to better refinements, indicating that it can potentially enhance the alignment of existing LLMs; (2) the leaderboard of critique models reveals that open-source critique models commonly suffer from factuality issues; (3) relevant code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MetaCritique to support deeper exploration; (4) an API at PyPI with the usage documentation in Appendix C allows users to assess the critique conveniently.

Dongjie Yang, Ruifeng Yuan, Yuantao Fan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained the impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written data of high quality, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the model hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterance to enable high customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely RefGPT-Fact and RefGPT-Code. RefGPT-Fact is a dataset with 100k multi-turn dialogues based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code has 76k multi-turn dialogues covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/mutonix/RefGPT.

Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, J. K. Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems. While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an "open cookbook" for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.

Ruifeng Yuan, Wanxing Chang, Weiwei Cao et al.

The evaluation of generated reports remains a critical challenge in Computed Tomography (CT) report generation, due to the large volume of text, the diversity and complexity of findings, and the presence of fine-grained, disease-oriented attributes. Conventional evaluation metrics offer only coarse measures of lexical overlap or entity matching and fail to reflect the granular diagnostic accuracy required for clinical use. To address this gap, we propose CT-FineBench, a benchmark built from CT-RATE and Merlin to evaluate the fine-grained factual consistency of CT reports, constructed from CT-RATE and Merlin. Our benchmark is constructed through a meticulous, Question-Answering (QA) based process: first, we identify and structure key, finding-specific clinical attributes (like location, size, margin). Second, we systematically transform these attributes into a QA dataset, where questions probe for specific clinical details grounded in gold-standard reports. The evaluation protocol for CT-FineBench involves using this QA dataset to query a machine-generated report and scoring the correctness of the answers. This allows for a comprehensive, interpretable, and clinically-relevant assessment, moving beyond superficial lexical overlap to pinpoint specific clinical errors. Experiments show that CT-FineBench correlates better with expert clinical assessment and is substantially more sensitive to fine-grained factual errors than prior metrics.

Ruifeng Yuan, Shichao Sun, Yongqi Li et al.

With the rapid development of large language models, AI assistants like ChatGPT have become increasingly integrated into people's works and lives but are limited in personalized services. In this paper, we present a plug-and-play framework that could facilitate personalized large language model assistants with evolving conditional memory. The personalized assistant focuses on intelligently preserving the knowledge and experience from the history dialogue with the user, which can be applied to future tailored responses that better align with the user's preferences. Generally, the assistant generates a set of records from the dialogue dialogue, stores them in a memory bank, and retrieves related memory to improve the quality of the response. For the crucial memory design, we explore different ways of constructing the memory and propose a new memorizing mechanism named conditional memory. We also investigate the retrieval and usage of memory in the generation process. We build the first benchmark to evaluate personalized assistants' ability from three aspects. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our method.

Yang Xiao, Jiashuo Wang, Ruifeng Yuan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling approaches, particularly when fine-tuned with chain-of-thought (CoT) data distilled from more powerful large reasoning models (LRMs). However, these reasoning chains often contain verbose elements that mirror human problem-solving, categorized as progressive reasoning (the essential solution development path) and functional elements (verification processes, alternative solution approaches, and error corrections). While progressive reasoning is crucial, the functional elements significantly increase computational demands during test-time inference. We introduce PIR (Perplexity-based Importance Refinement), a principled framework that quantitatively evaluates the importance of each reasoning step based on its impact on answer prediction confidence. PIR systematically identifies and selectively prunes only low-importance functional steps while preserving progressive reasoning components, creating optimized training data that maintains the integrity of the core solution path while reducing verbosity. Models fine-tuned on PIR-optimized data exhibit superior test-time scaling properties, generating more concise reasoning chains while achieving improved accuracy (+0.9\% to +6.6\%) with significantly reduced token usage (-3\% to -41\%) across challenging reasoning benchmarks (AIME, AMC, and GPQA Diamond). Our approach demonstrates strong generalizability across different model sizes, data sources, and token budgets, offering a practical solution for deploying reasoning-capable LLMs in scenarios where efficient test-time scaling, response time, and computational efficiency are valuable constraints.

Ruifeng Yuan, Chenghao Xiao, Sicong Leng et al.

Reinforcement learning has proven its effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Recent research efforts have progressively extended this paradigm to multimodal reasoning tasks. Due to the inherent complexity and diversity of multimodal tasks, especially in semantic content and problem formulations, existing models often exhibit unstable performance across various domains and difficulty levels. To address these limitations, we propose VL-Cogito, an advanced multimodal reasoning model trained via a novel multi-stage Progressive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (PCuRL) framework. PCuRL systematically guides the model through tasks of gradually increasing difficulty, substantially improving its reasoning abilities across diverse multimodal contexts. The framework introduces two key innovations: (1) an online difficulty soft weighting mechanism, dynamically adjusting training difficulty across successive RL training stages; and (2) a dynamic length reward mechanism, which encourages the model to adaptively regulate its reasoning path length according to task complexity, thus balancing reasoning efficiency with correctness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VL-Cogito consistently matches or surpasses existing reasoning-oriented models across mainstream multimodal benchmarks spanning mathematics, science, logic, and general understanding, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Ruifeng Yuan et al.

Generative retrieval reformulates retrieval as an autoregressive generation task, where large language models (LLMs) generate target documents directly from a query. As a novel paradigm, the mechanisms that underpin its performance and scalability remain largely unexplored. We systematically investigate training and inference scaling laws in generative retrieval, exploring how model size, training data scale, and inference-time compute jointly influence performance. We propose a novel evaluation metric inspired by contrastive entropy and generation loss, providing a continuous performance signal that enables robust comparisons across diverse generative retrieval methods. Our experiments show that n-gram-based methods align strongly with training and inference scaling laws. We find that increasing model size, training data scale, and inference-time compute all contribute to improved performance, highlighting the complementary roles of these factors in enhancing generative retrieval. Across these settings, LLaMA models consistently outperform T5 models, suggesting a particular advantage for larger decoder-only models in generative retrieval. Our findings underscore that model sizes, data availability, and inference computation interact to unlock the full potential of generative retrieval, offering new insights for designing and optimizing future systems.

Dongjie Cheng, Ruifeng Yuan, Yongqi Li et al.

Real-world perception and interaction are inherently multimodal, encompassing not only language but also vision and speech, which motivates the development of "Omni" MLLMs that support both multimodal inputs and multimodal outputs. While a sequence of omni MLLMs has emerged, most existing systems still rely on additional expert components to achieve multimodal generation, limiting the simplicity of unified training and inference. Autoregressive (AR) modeling, with a single token stream, a single next-token objective, and a single decoder, is an elegant and scalable foundation in the text domain. Motivated by this, we present AR-Omni, a unified any-to-any model in the autoregressive paradigm without any expert decoders. AR-Omni supports autoregressive text and image generation, as well as streaming speech generation, all under a single Transformer decoder. We further address three practical issues in unified AR modeling: modality imbalance via task-aware loss reweighting, visual fidelity via a lightweight token-level perceptual alignment loss for image tokens, and stability-creativity trade-offs via a finite-state decoding mechanism. Empirically, AR-Omni achieves strong quality across three modalities while remaining real-time, achieving a 0.88 real-time factor for speech generation.

Shichao Sun, Ruifeng Yuan, Ziqiang Cao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

Ruifeng Yuan, Zili Wang, Wenjie Li

Most current extractive summarization models generate summaries by selecting salient sentences. However, one of the problems with sentence-level extractive summarization is that there exists a gap between the human-written gold summary and the oracle sentence labels. In this paper, we propose to extract fact-level semantic units for better extractive summarization. We also introduce a hierarchical structure, which incorporates the multi-level of granularities of the textual information into the model. In addition, we incorporate our model with BERT using a hierarchical graph mask. This allows us to combine BERT's ability in natural language understanding and the structural information without increasing the scale of the model. Experiments on the CNN/DaliyMail dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.

Ruifeng Yuan, Chengwen Zhong

An implicit multiscale method with multiple macroscopic prediction for steady state solutions of gas flow in all flow regimes is presented. The method is based on the finite volume discrete velocity method (DVM) framework. At the cell interface a multiscale flux with a construction similar to discrete unified gas-kinetic scheme (DUGKS) is adopted. The idea of the macroscopic variable prediction is further developed and a multiple prediction structure is formed. A prediction scheme is constructed to give a predicted macroscopic variable based on the macroscopic residual, and the convergence is accelerated greatly in the continuum flow regime. Test cases show the present method is one order of magnitude faster than the previous implicit multiscale scheme in the continuum flow regime.