Batch-of-Thought: Cross-Instance Learning for Enhanced LLM ReasoningXuan Yang, Furong Jia, Roy Xie et al.
Current Large Language Model reasoning systems process queries independently, discarding valuable cross-instance signals such as shared reasoning patterns and consistency constraints. We introduce Batch-of-Thought (BoT), a training-free method that processes related queries jointly to enable cross-instance learning. By performing comparative analysis across batches, BoT identifies high-quality reasoning templates, detects errors through consistency checks, and amortizes computational costs. We instantiate BoT within a multi-agent reflection architecture (BoT-R), where a Reflector performs joint evaluation to unlock mutual information gain unavailable in isolated processing. Experiments across three model families and six benchmarks demonstrate that BoT-R consistently improves accuracy and confidence calibration while reducing inference costs by up to 61%. Our theoretical and experimental analysis reveals when and why batch-aware reasoning benefits LLM systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanyang19/BoT
Training-free CryoET Tomogram SegmentationYizhou Zhao, Hengwei Bian, Michael Mu et al.
Cryogenic Electron Tomography (CryoET) is a useful imaging technology in structural biology that is hindered by its need for manual annotations, especially in particle picking. Recent works have endeavored to remedy this issue with few-shot learning or contrastive learning techniques. However, supervised training is still inevitable for them. We instead choose to leverage the power of existing 2D foundation models and present a novel, training-free framework, CryoSAM. In addition to prompt-based single-particle instance segmentation, our approach can automatically search for similar features, facilitating full tomogram semantic segmentation with only one prompt. CryoSAM is composed of two major parts: 1) a prompt-based 3D segmentation system that uses prompts to complete single-particle instance segmentation recursively with Cross-Plane Self-Prompting, and 2) a Hierarchical Feature Matching mechanism that efficiently matches relevant features with extracted tomogram features. They collaborate to enable the segmentation of all particles of one category with just one particle-specific prompt. Our experiments show that CryoSAM outperforms existing works by a significant margin and requires even fewer annotations in particle picking. Further visualizations demonstrate its ability when dealing with full tomogram segmentation for various subcellular structures. Our code is available at: https://github.com/xulabs/aitom
SynesLM: A Unified Approach for Audio-visual Speech Recognition and Translation via Language Model and Synthetic DataYichen Lu, Jiaqi Song, Xuankai Chang et al.
In this work, we present SynesLM, an unified model which can perform three multimodal language understanding tasks: audio-visual automatic speech recognition(AV-ASR) and visual-aided speech/machine translation(VST/VMT). Unlike previous research that focused on lip motion as visual cues for speech signals, our work explores more general visual information within entire frames, such as objects and actions. Additionally, we use synthetic image data to enhance the correlation between image and speech data. We benchmark SynesLM against the How2 dataset, demonstrating performance on par with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models dedicated to AV-ASR while maintaining our multitasking framework. Remarkably, for zero-shot AV-ASR, SynesLM achieved SOTA performance by lowering the Word Error Rate (WER) from 43.4% to 39.4% on the VisSpeech Dataset. Furthermore, our results in VST and VMT outperform the previous results, improving the BLEU score to 43.5 from 37.2 for VST, and to 54.8 from 54.4 for VMT.
Bridging the Gap: A Unified Video Comprehension Framework for Moment Retrieval and Highlight DetectionYicheng Xiao, Zhuoyan Luo, Yong Liu et al.
Video Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD) have attracted significant attention due to the growing demand for video analysis. Recent approaches treat MR and HD as similar video grounding problems and address them together with transformer-based architecture. However, we observe that the emphasis of MR and HD differs, with one necessitating the perception of local relationships and the other prioritizing the understanding of global contexts. Consequently, the lack of task-specific design will inevitably lead to limitations in associating the intrinsic specialty of two tasks. To tackle the issue, we propose a Unified Video COMprehension framework (UVCOM) to bridge the gap and jointly solve MR and HD effectively. By performing progressive integration on intra and inter-modality across multi-granularity, UVCOM achieves the comprehensive understanding in processing a video. Moreover, we present multi-aspect contrastive learning to consolidate the local relation modeling and global knowledge accumulation via well aligned multi-modal space. Extensive experiments on QVHighlights, Charades-STA, TACoS , YouTube Highlights and TVSum datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of UVCOM which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a remarkable margin.