Yue Xiang

King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evaluated on various benchmarks, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and reasoning. However, many of these benchmarks include overly simple or uninformative samples, complicating the effective distinction of different MLLMs' performance. Furthermore, evaluating models across numerous benchmarks incurs a significant computational burden. To address these issues, we propose LIME (Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation), a refined and efficient benchmark curated through a semi-automated pipeline. This pipeline filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that necessitate image-based understanding. Our experiments indicate that LIME reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77%, while also providing a more effective means of distinguishing the capabilities of different models. Notably, we find that traditional automatic metrics, such as CIDEr, are inadequate for assessing MLLMs' captioning performance; excluding the caption task score yields a more accurate reflection of overall model performance. All code and data are available at https://github.com/kangreen0210/LIME.

Yue Xiang, Bo Jiang, Haifeng Dai

The degradation process of lithium-ion batteries is intricately linked to their entire lifecycle as power sources and energy storage devices, encompassing aspects such as performance delivery and cycling utilization. Consequently, the accurate and expedient estimation or prediction of the aging state of lithium-ion batteries has garnered extensive attention. Nonetheless, prevailing research predominantly concentrates on either aging estimation or prediction, neglecting the dynamic fusion of both facets. This paper proposes a hybrid model for capacity aging estimation and prediction based on deep learning, wherein salient features highly pertinent to aging are extracted from charge and discharge relaxation processes. By amalgamating historical capacity decay data, the model dynamically furnishes estimations of the present capacity and forecasts of future capacity for lithium-ion batteries. Our approach is validated against a novel dataset involving charge and discharge cycles at varying rates. Specifically, under a charging condition of 0.25C, a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.29% is achieved. This outcome underscores the model's adeptness in harnessing relaxation processes commonly encountered in the real world and synergizing with historical capacity records within battery management systems (BMS), thereby affording estimations and prognostications of capacity decline with heightened precision.

Yue Xiang, Shenghong Gu, Dongtao Cao

We apply the variational autoencoder (VAE) to the LAMOST-K2 low-resolution spectra to detect the magnetic activity of the stars in the K2 field. After the training on the spectra of the selected inactive stars, the VAE model can efficiently generate the synthetic reference templates needed by the spectral subtraction procedure, without knowing any stellar parameters. Then we detect the peculiar spectral features, such as chromospheric emissions, strong nebular emissions and lithium absorptions, in our sample. We measure the emissions of the chromospheric activity indicators, H$α$ and Ca II infrared triplet (IRT) lines, to quantify the stellar magnetic activity. The excess emissions of H$α$ and Ca II IRT lines of the active stars are correlated well to the rotational periods and the amplitudes of light curves derived from the K2 photometry. We degrade the LAMOST spectra to simulate the slitless spectra of the China Space Station Telescope (CSST) and apply the VAE to the simulated data. For cool active stars, we reveal a good agreement between the equivalent widths (EWs) of H$α$ line derived from the spectra with two resolutions. The result indicates the ability of identifying the magnetically active stars in the future CSST survey, which will deliver an unprecedented large database of low-resolution spectra as well as simultaneous multi-band photometry of stars.

Qi Jia, Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng et al.

We introduce SimulBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) across a diverse collection of creative simulation scenarios, such as acting as a Linux terminal or playing text games with users. While these simulation tasks serve as effective measures of an LLM's general intelligence, they are seldom incorporated into existing benchmarks. A major challenge is to develop an evaluation framework for testing different LLMs fairly while preserving the multi-round interactive nature of simulation tasks between users and AI. To tackle this issue, we suggest using a fixed LLM as a user agent to engage with an LLM to collect dialogues first under different tasks. Then, challenging dialogue scripts are extracted for evaluating different target LLMs. To facilitate automatic assessment on \DataName{}, GPT-4 is employed as the evaluator, tasked with reviewing the quality of the final response generated by the target LLMs given multi-turn dialogue scripts. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that these simulation tasks continue to pose a significant challenge with their unique natures and show the gap between proprietary models and the most advanced open LLMs. For example, GPT-4-turbo outperforms LLaMA-3-70b-Chat on 18.55\% more cases.

Yuetai Li, Xiang Yue, Zhangchen Xu et al. · uw

Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap: small models ($\leq$3B parameters) do not consistently benefit from long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning or distillation from larger models. Instead, they perform better when fine-tuned on shorter, simpler reasoning chains that better align with their intrinsic learning capacity. To address this, we propose Mix Distillation, a simple yet effective strategy that balances reasoning complexity by combining long and short CoT examples or reasoning from both larger and smaller models. Our experiments demonstrate that Mix Distillation significantly improves small model reasoning performance compared to training on either data alone. These findings highlight the limitations of direct strong model distillation and underscore the importance of adapting reasoning complexity for effective reasoning capability transfer.

Yubo Wang, Xiang Yue, Wenhu Chen

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to train language models to imitate annotated responses for given instructions. In this paper, we propose Critique Fine-Tuning (CFT), a method more effective than SFT for reasoning tasks. Instead of simply imitating correct responses, CFT trains models to critique noisy responses, inspired by human learning processes that emphasize critical thinking, deeper analysis, and nuanced understanding - traits often overlooked by standard SFT. To validate the effectiveness of CFT, we construct multiple critique datasets (e.g., WebInstruct, MetaMath, NuminaMath), where GPT-4o serves as the teacher to generate critiques in the form of ([query; noisy response], critique). Experiments on these datasets demonstrate that CFT consistently outperforms SFT by 4-10% across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and is effective across different base models including Qwen2.5, Qwen2.5-Math, and DeepSeek-Math. Notably, our model Qwen2.5-Math-CFT only requires 1 hour of training on 8 x H100 over the 50K examples, yet matches or outperforms strong competitors like Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct on most benchmarks, which use over 2M samples. Moreover, it matches the performance of SimpleRL, which is a DeepSeek-r1 replication trained with 140 x more compute. Experiments on IF_Eval and MT-Bench further demonstrate that CFT can significantly enhance the model's general generation and instruction-following capabilities, outperforming the Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct by a large margin. Ablation studies show that CFT is robust to noisy response sources and teacher critique models. These findings highlight that CFT offers a more effective alternative to advance the reasoning of language models.

Wang Yang, Xiang Yue, Vipin Chaudhary et al.

Recent advances leverage post-training to enhance model reasoning performance, which typically requires costly training pipelines and still suffers from inefficient, overly lengthy outputs. We introduce Speculative Thinking, a training-free framework that enables large reasoning models to guide smaller ones during inference at the reasoning level, distinct from speculative decoding, which operates at the token level. Our approach is based on two observations: (1) reasoning-supportive tokens such as "wait" frequently appear after structural delimiters like "\n\n", serving as signals for reflection or continuation; and (2) larger models exhibit stronger control over reflective behavior, reducing unnecessary backtracking while improving reasoning quality. By strategically delegating reflective steps to a more capable model, our method significantly boosts the reasoning accuracy of reasoning models while shortening their output. With the assistance of the 32B reasoning model, the 1.5B model's accuracy on MATH500 increases from 83.2% to 89.4%, marking a substantial improvement of 6.2%. Simultaneously, the average output length is reduced from 5439 tokens to 4583 tokens, representing a 15.7% decrease. Moreover, when applied to a non-reasoning model (Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct), our framework boosts its accuracy from 74.0% to 81.8% on the same benchmark, achieving a relative improvement of 7.8%.

Yubo Wang, Xueguang Ma, Ge Zhang et al.

In the age of large-scale language models, benchmarks like the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have been pivotal in pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve in language comprehension and reasoning across diverse domains. However, as models continue to improve, their performance on these benchmarks has begun to plateau, making it increasingly difficult to discern differences in model capabilities. This paper introduces MMLU-Pro, an enhanced dataset designed to extend the mostly knowledge-driven MMLU benchmark by integrating more challenging, reasoning-focused questions and expanding the choice set from four to ten options. Additionally, MMLU-Pro eliminates the trivial and noisy questions in MMLU. Our experimental results show that MMLU-Pro not only raises the challenge, causing a significant drop in accuracy by 16% to 33% compared to MMLU but also demonstrates greater stability under varying prompts. With 24 different prompt styles tested, the sensitivity of model scores to prompt variations decreased from 4-5% in MMLU to just 2% in MMLU-Pro. Additionally, we found that models utilizing Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning achieved better performance on MMLU-Pro compared to direct answering, which is in stark contrast to the findings on the original MMLU, indicating that MMLU-Pro includes more complex reasoning questions. Our assessments confirm that MMLU-Pro is a more discriminative benchmark to better track progress in the field.