Binxing Jiao

Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xiaolong Huang et al. · microsoft-research

This paper presents E5, a family of state-of-the-art text embeddings that transfer well to a wide range of tasks. The model is trained in a contrastive manner with weak supervision signals from our curated large-scale text pair dataset (called CCPairs). E5 can be readily used as a general-purpose embedding model for any tasks requiring a single-vector representation of texts such as retrieval, clustering, and classification, achieving strong performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We conduct extensive evaluations on 56 datasets from the BEIR and MTEB benchmarks. For zero-shot settings, E5 is the first model that outperforms the strong BM25 baseline on the BEIR retrieval benchmark without using any labeled data. When fine-tuned, E5 obtains the best results on the MTEB benchmark, beating existing embedding models with 40x more parameters.

Tianyu Chen, Hangbo Bao, Shaohan Huang et al. · microsoft-research

As more and more pre-trained language models adopt on-cloud deployment, the privacy issues grow quickly, mainly for the exposure of plain-text user data (e.g., search history, medical record, bank account). Privacy-preserving inference of transformer models is on the demand of cloud service users. To protect privacy, it is an attractive choice to compute only with ciphertext in homomorphic encryption (HE). However, enabling pre-trained models inference on ciphertext data is difficult due to the complex computations in transformer blocks, which are not supported by current HE tools yet. In this work, we introduce $\textit{THE-X}$, an approximation approach for transformers, which enables privacy-preserving inference of pre-trained models developed by popular frameworks. $\textit{THE-X}$ proposes a workflow to deal with complex computation in transformer networks, including all the non-polynomial functions like GELU, softmax, and LayerNorm. Experiments reveal our proposed $\textit{THE-X}$ can enable transformer inference on encrypted data for different downstream tasks, all with negligible performance drop but enjoying the theory-guaranteed privacy-preserving advantage.

Nan Yang, Tao Ge, Liang Wang et al. · microsoft-research

We propose LLMA, an LLM accelerator to losslessly speed up Large Language Model (LLM) inference with references. LLMA is motivated by the observation that there are abundant identical text spans between the decoding result by an LLM and the reference that is available in many real world scenarios (e.g., retrieved documents). LLMA first selects a text span from the reference and copies its tokens to the decoder and then efficiently checks the tokens' appropriateness as the decoding result in parallel within one decoding step. The improved computational parallelism allows LLMA to achieve over 2x speed-up for LLMs with identical generation results as greedy decoding in many practical generation scenarios where significant overlap between in-context reference and outputs exists (e.g., search engines and multi-turn conversations).

Tianyu Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yuan Xie et al. · microsoft-research

The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model is powerful for large-scale pre-training and has achieved promising results due to its model capacity. However, with trillions of parameters, MoE is hard to be deployed on cloud or mobile environment. The inference of MoE requires expert parallelism, which is not hardware-friendly and communication expensive. Especially for resource-limited downstream tasks, such sparse structure has to sacrifice a lot of computing efficiency for limited performance gains. In this work, we observe most experts contribute scarcely little to the MoE fine-tuning and inference. We further propose a general method to progressively drop the non-professional experts for the target downstream task, which preserves the benefits of MoE while reducing the MoE model into one single-expert dense model. Our experiments reveal that the fine-tuned single-expert model could preserve 99.3% benefits from MoE across six different types of tasks while enjoying 2x inference speed with free communication cost.

Qiushi Zhu, Long Zhou, Ziqiang Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

Although speech is a simple and effective way for humans to communicate with the outside world, a more realistic speech interaction contains multimodal information, e.g., vision, text. How to design a unified framework to integrate different modal information and leverage different resources (e.g., visual-audio pairs, audio-text pairs, unlabeled speech, and unlabeled text) to facilitate speech representation learning was not well explored. In this paper, we propose a unified cross-modal representation learning framework VATLM (Visual-Audio-Text Language Model). The proposed VATLM employs a unified backbone network to model the modality-independent information and utilizes three simple modality-dependent modules to preprocess visual, speech, and text inputs. In order to integrate these three modalities into one shared semantic space, VATLM is optimized with a masked prediction task of unified tokens, given by our proposed unified tokenizer. We evaluate the pre-trained VATLM on audio-visual related downstream tasks, including audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), visual speech recognition (VSR) tasks. Results show that the proposed VATLM outperforms previous the state-of-the-art models, such as audio-visual pre-trained AV-HuBERT model, and analysis also demonstrates that VATLM is capable of aligning different modalities into the same space. To facilitate future research, we release the code and pre-trained models at https://aka.ms/vatlm.

Yucheng Zhou, Tao Shen, Xiubo Geng et al. · microsoft-research

A ranker plays an indispensable role in the de facto 'retrieval & rerank' pipeline, but its training still lags behind -- learning from moderate negatives or/and serving as an auxiliary module for a retriever. In this work, we first identify two major barriers to a robust ranker, i.e., inherent label noises caused by a well-trained retriever and non-ideal negatives sampled for a high-capable ranker. Thereby, we propose multiple retrievers as negative generators improve the ranker's robustness, where i) involving extensive out-of-distribution label noises renders the ranker against each noise distribution, and ii) diverse hard negatives from a joint distribution are relatively close to the ranker's negative distribution, leading to more challenging thus effective training. To evaluate our robust ranker (dubbed R$^2$anker), we conduct experiments in various settings on the popular passage retrieval benchmark, including BM25-reranking, full-ranking, retriever distillation, etc. The empirical results verify the new state-of-the-art effectiveness of our model.

Kai Zhang, Chongyang Tao, Tao Shen et al. · microsoft-research

Retrieval models based on dense representations in semantic space have become an indispensable branch for first-stage retrieval. These retrievers benefit from surging advances in representation learning towards compressive global sequence-level embeddings. However, they are prone to overlook local salient phrases and entity mentions in texts, which usually play pivot roles in first-stage retrieval. To mitigate this weakness, we propose to make a dense retriever align a well-performing lexicon-aware representation model. The alignment is achieved by weakened knowledge distillations to enlighten the retriever via two aspects -- 1) a lexicon-augmented contrastive objective to challenge the dense encoder and 2) a pair-wise rank-consistent regularization to make dense model's behavior incline to the other. We evaluate our model on three public benchmarks, which shows that with a comparable lexicon-aware retriever as the teacher, our proposed dense one can bring consistent and significant improvements, and even outdo its teacher. In addition, we found our improvement on the dense retriever is complementary to the standard ranker distillation, which can further lift state-of-the-art performance.

Chongyang Tao, Chang Liu, Tao Shen et al. · microsoft-research

To improve the performance of the dual-encoder retriever, one effective approach is knowledge distillation from the cross-encoder ranker. Existing works construct the candidate passages following the supervised learning setting where a query is paired with a positive passage and a batch of negatives. However, through empirical observation, we find that even the hard negatives from advanced methods are still too trivial for the teacher to distinguish, preventing the teacher from transferring abundant dark knowledge to the student through its soft label. To alleviate this issue, we propose ADAM, a knowledge distillation framework that can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with Adaptive Dark exAMples. Different from previous works that only rely on one positive and hard negatives as candidate passages, we create dark examples that all have moderate relevance to the query through mixing-up and masking in discrete space. Furthermore, as the quality of knowledge held in different training instances varies as measured by the teacher's confidence score, we propose a self-paced distillation strategy that adaptively concentrates on a subset of high-quality instances to conduct our dark-example-based knowledge distillation to help the student learn better. We conduct experiments on two widely-used benchmarks and verify the effectiveness of our method.

Jingwei Yi, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu et al. · tencent-ai

Query-aware webpage snippet extraction is widely used in search engines to help users better understand the content of the returned webpages before clicking. Although important, it is very rarely studied. In this paper, we propose an effective query-aware webpage snippet extraction method named DeepQSE, aiming to select a few sentences which can best summarize the webpage content in the context of input query. DeepQSE first learns query-aware sentence representations for each sentence to capture the fine-grained relevance between query and sentence, and then learns document-aware query-sentence relevance representations for snippet extraction. Since the query and each sentence are jointly modeled in DeepQSE, its online inference may be slow. Thus, we further propose an efficient version of DeepQSE, named Efficient-DeepQSE, which can significantly improve the inference speed of DeepQSE without affecting its performance. The core idea of Efficient-DeepQSE is to decompose the query-aware snippet extraction task into two stages, i.e., a coarse-grained candidate sentence selection stage where sentence representations can be cached, and a fine-grained relevance modeling stage. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Ailin Huang, Ang Li, Aobo Kong et al.

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Shiyu Liu, Yucheng Han, Peng Xing et al. · tsinghua

In recent years, image editing models have witnessed remarkable and rapid development. The recent unveiling of cutting-edge multimodal models such as GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash has introduced highly promising image editing capabilities. These models demonstrate an impressive aptitude for fulfilling a vast majority of user-driven editing requirements, marking a significant advancement in the field of image manipulation. However, there is still a large gap between the open-source algorithm with these closed-source models. Thus, in this paper, we aim to release a state-of-the-art image editing model, called Step1X-Edit, which can provide comparable performance against the closed-source models like GPT-4o and Gemini2 Flash. More specifically, we adopt the Multimodal LLM to process the reference image and the user's editing instruction. A latent embedding has been extracted and integrated with a diffusion image decoder to obtain the target image. To train the model, we build a data generation pipeline to produce a high-quality dataset. For evaluation, we develop the GEdit-Bench, a novel benchmark rooted in real-world user instructions. Experimental results on GEdit-Bench demonstrate that Step1X-Edit outperforms existing open-source baselines by a substantial margin and approaches the performance of leading proprietary models, thereby making significant contributions to the field of image editing.

Chen Hu, Haikuo Du, Heng Wang et al.

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

Haoyang Huang, Guoqing Ma, Nan Duan et al.

We present Step-Video-TI2V, a state-of-the-art text-driven image-to-video generation model with 30B parameters, capable of generating videos up to 102 frames based on both text and image inputs. We build Step-Video-TI2V-Eval as a new benchmark for the text-driven image-to-video task and compare Step-Video-TI2V with open-source and commercial TI2V engines using this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Step-Video-TI2V in the image-to-video generation task. Both Step-Video-TI2V and Step-Video-TI2V-Eval are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-TI2V.

Jiaye Lin, Yifu Guo, Yuzhen Han et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have recently shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning and tool use via multi-step interactions with their environments. While these agents have the potential to tackle complicated tasks, their problem-solving process, i.e., agents' interaction trajectory leading to task completion, remains underexploited. These trajectories contain rich feedback that can navigate agents toward the right directions for solving problems correctly. Although prevailing approaches, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), can effectively balance exploration and exploitation, they ignore the interdependence among various trajectories and lack the diversity of search spaces, which leads to redundant reasoning and suboptimal outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose SE-Agent, a Self-Evolution framework that enables Agents to optimize their reasoning processes iteratively. Our approach revisits and enhances former pilot trajectories through three key operations: revision, recombination, and refinement. This evolutionary mechanism enables two critical advantages: (1) it expands the search space beyond local optima by intelligently exploring diverse solution paths guided by previous trajectories, and (2) it leverages cross-trajectory inspiration to efficiently enhance performance while mitigating the impact of suboptimal reasoning paths. Through these mechanisms, SE-Agent achieves continuous self-evolution that incrementally improves reasoning quality. We evaluate SE-Agent on SWE-bench Verified to resolve real-world GitHub issues. Experimental results across five strong LLMs show that integrating SE-Agent delivers up to 55% relative improvement, achieving state-of-the-art performance among all open-source agents on SWE-bench Verified. Our code and demonstration materials are publicly available at https://github.com/JARVIS-Xs/SE-Agent.

Yeqin Zhang, Yizheng Zhao, Chen Hu et al.

Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this purpose. However, most of the LLMs are inherently causal and optimized for next-token prediction, making them suboptimal for producing holistic representations. To address this, recent studies introduced pretext tasks to adapt LLMs for text representation. Most of these tasks, however, rely on token-level prediction objectives, such as the masked next-token prediction (MNTP) used in LLM2Vec. In this work, we explore the untapped potential of context compression as a pretext task for unsupervised adaptation of LLMs. During compression pre-training, the model learns to generate compact memory tokens, which substitute the whole context for downstream sequence prediction. Experiments demonstrate that a well-designed compression objective can significantly enhance LLM-based text representations, outperforming models trained with token-level pretext tasks. Further improvements through contrastive learning produce a strong representation model (LLM2Comp) that outperforms contemporary LLM-based text encoders on a wide range of tasks while being more sample-efficient, requiring significantly less training data. Code is available at https://github.com/longtaizi13579/LLM2Comp.

StepFun, Bin Wang, Bojun Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

Ailin Huang, Bingxin Li, Bruce Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.

Wenjun Peng, Jingwei Yi, Fangzhao Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in both text understanding and generation. Companies have begun to offer Embedding as a Service (EaaS) based on these LLMs, which can benefit various natural language processing (NLP) tasks for customers. However, previous studies have shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which can cause significant losses for the owners of LLMs, as training these models is extremely expensive. To protect the copyright of LLMs for EaaS, we propose an Embedding Watermark method called EmbMarker that implants backdoors on embeddings. Our method selects a group of moderate-frequency words from a general text corpus to form a trigger set, then selects a target embedding as the watermark, and inserts it into the embeddings of texts containing trigger words as the backdoor. The weight of insertion is proportional to the number of trigger words included in the text. This allows the watermark backdoor to be effectively transferred to EaaS-stealer's model for copyright verification while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings' utility. Our extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method can effectively protect the copyright of EaaS models without compromising service quality.