Yankai Lin

Yujia Qin, Jiajie Zhang, Yankai Lin et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Current pre-trained language models (PLM) are typically trained with static data, ignoring that in real-world scenarios, streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. This requires PLMs to integrate the information from all the sources in a lifelong manner. Although this goal could be achieved by exhaustive pre-training on all the existing data, such a process is known to be computationally expensive. To this end, we propose ELLE, aiming at efficient lifelong pre-training for emerging data. Specifically, ELLE consists of (1) function preserved model expansion, which flexibly expands an existing PLM's width and depth to improve the efficiency of knowledge acquisition; and (2) pre-trained domain prompts, which disentangle the versatile knowledge learned during pre-training and stimulate the proper knowledge for downstream tasks. We experiment ELLE with streaming data from 5 domains on BERT and GPT. The results show the superiority of ELLE over various lifelong learning baselines in both pre-training efficiency and downstream performances. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/ELLE.

Jinyi Hu, Yuan Yao, Chongyi Wang et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Recently there has been a significant surge in multimodal learning in terms of both image-to-text and text-to-image generation. However, the success is typically limited to English, leaving other languages largely behind. Building a competitive counterpart in other languages is highly challenging due to the low-resource nature of non-English multimodal data (i.e., lack of large-scale, high-quality image-text data). In this work, we propose MPM, an effective training paradigm for training large multimodal models in non-English languages. MPM demonstrates that Multilingual language models can Pivot zero-shot Multimodal learning across languages. Specifically, based on a strong multilingual large language model, multimodal models pretrained on English-only image-text data can well generalize to other languages in a (quasi)-zero-shot manner, even surpassing models trained on image-text data in native languages. Taking Chinese as a practice of MPM, we build large multimodal models VisCPM in image-to-text and text-to-image generation, which achieve state-of-the-art (open-source) performance in Chinese. To facilitate future research, we open-source codes and model weights at https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.git.

Yujia Qin, Shihao Liang, Yining Ye et al.

Despite the advancements of open-source large language models (LLMs), e.g., LLaMA, they remain significantly limited in tool-use capabilities, i.e., using external tools (APIs) to fulfill human instructions. The reason is that current instruction tuning largely focuses on basic language tasks but ignores the tool-use domain. This is in contrast to the excellent tool-use capabilities of state-of-the-art (SOTA) closed-source LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT. To bridge this gap, we introduce ToolLLM, a general tool-use framework encompassing data construction, model training, and evaluation. We first present ToolBench, an instruction-tuning dataset for tool use, which is constructed automatically using ChatGPT. Specifically, the construction can be divided into three stages: (i) API collection: we collect 16,464 real-world RESTful APIs spanning 49 categories from RapidAPI Hub; (ii) instruction generation: we prompt ChatGPT to generate diverse instructions involving these APIs, covering both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios; (iii) solution path annotation: we use ChatGPT to search for a valid solution path (chain of API calls) for each instruction. To enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, we develop a novel depth-first search-based decision tree algorithm. It enables LLMs to evaluate multiple reasoning traces and expand the search space. Moreover, to evaluate the tool-use capabilities of LLMs, we develop an automatic evaluator: ToolEval. Based on ToolBench, we fine-tune LLaMA to obtain an LLM ToolLLaMA, and equip it with a neural API retriever to recommend appropriate APIs for each instruction. Experiments show that ToolLLaMA demonstrates a remarkable ability to execute complex instructions and generalize to unseen APIs, and exhibits comparable performance to ChatGPT. Our ToolLLaMA also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization ability in an out-of-distribution tool-use dataset: APIBench.

Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

The diverse relationships among real-world events, including coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are fundamental to understanding natural languages. However, two drawbacks of existing datasets limit event relation extraction (ERE) tasks: (1) Small scale. Due to the annotation complexity, the data scale of existing datasets is limited, which cannot well train and evaluate data-hungry models. (2) Absence of unified annotation. Different types of event relations naturally interact with each other, but existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. To address these issues, we construct a unified large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset MAVEN-ERE with improved annotation schemes. It contains 103,193 event coreference chains, 1,216,217 temporal relations, 57,992 causal relations, and 15,841 subevent relations, which is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. Experiments show that ERE on MAVEN-ERE is quite challenging, and considering relation interactions with joint learning can improve performances. The dataset and source codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-ERE.

Yining Ye, Xin Cong, Shizuo Tian et al. · tencent-ai

From ancient water wheels to robotic process automation (RPA), automation technology has evolved throughout history to liberate human beings from arduous tasks. Yet, RPA struggles with tasks needing human-like intelligence, especially in elaborate design of workflow construction and dynamic decision-making in workflow execution. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged human-like intelligence, this paper introduces Agentic Process Automation (APA), a groundbreaking automation paradigm using LLM-based agents for advanced automation by offloading the human labor to agents associated with construction and execution. We then instantiate ProAgent, an LLM-based agent designed to craft workflows from human instructions and make intricate decisions by coordinating specialized agents. Empirical experiments are conducted to detail its construction and execution procedure of workflow, showcasing the feasibility of APA, unveiling the possibility of a new paradigm of automation driven by agents. Our code is public at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ProAgent.

Lei Wang, Chen Ma, Xueyang Feng et al.

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Ning Ding et al. · tencent-ai

Learning from human feedback has become a pivot technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, acquiring vast and premium human feedback is bottlenecked by time, labor, and human capability, resulting in small sizes or limited topics of current datasets. This further hinders feedback learning as well as alignment research within the open-source community. To address this issue, we explore how to go beyond human feedback and collect high-quality \textit{AI feedback} automatically for a scalable alternative. Specifically, we identify \textbf{scale and diversity} as the key factors for feedback data to take effect. Accordingly, we first broaden instructions and responses in both amount and breadth to encompass a wider range of user-assistant interactions. Then, we meticulously apply a series of techniques to mitigate annotation biases for more reliable AI feedback. We finally present \textsc{UltraFeedback}, a large-scale, high-quality, and diversified AI feedback dataset, which contains over 1 million GPT-4 feedback for 250k user-assistant conversations from various aspects. Built upon \textsc{UltraFeedback}, we align a LLaMA-based model by best-of-$n$ sampling and reinforcement learning, demonstrating its exceptional performance on chat benchmarks. Our work validates the effectiveness of scaled AI feedback data in constructing strong open-source chat language models, serving as a solid foundation for future feedback learning research. Our data and models are available at https://github.com/thunlp/UltraFeedback.

Yusheng Su, Chi-Min Chan, Jiali Cheng et al. · tsinghua

Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can effectively drive extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs) by training only minimal parameters. Different PET methods utilize different manually designed tunable modules. In small PLMs, there are usually noticeable performance differences among PET methods. Nevertheless, as the model scale increases, the performance differences become marginal. Hence, we hypothesize that model scaling mitigates the impact of design differences on PET methods. To investigate this hypothesis, we introduce a more flexible PET method called Arbitrary PET (APET) method. The APET method is compatible with a tunable module, which consists of any number of parameters distributed in arbitrary positions. Then, we utilize it and conduct experiments on 11 NLP tasks across 3 representative PLMs. Our investigations reveal that model scaling (1) mitigates the effects of the positions of tunable parameters on performance, and (2) enables tuning methods to achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning by optimizing fewer tunable parameters. Intriguingly, we also observe that tuning methods optimize the similar number of tunable parameters to exceed random guess performance on different tasks. We collectively discuss this phenomenon and the two aforementioned findings from an optimization perspective to understand the underlying mechanisms. These conclusions enhance our understanding of the impact of model scaling on PET and assist in designing more effective and efficient PET methods for PLMs of different scales. The source code can be obtained from this GitHub repository: \url{https://github.com/yushengsu-thu/PET_Scaling}.

Lean Wang, Wenkai Yang, Deli Chen et al. · pku, tsinghua

As large language models (LLMs) generate texts with increasing fluency and realism, there is a growing need to identify the source of texts to prevent the abuse of LLMs. Text watermarking techniques have proven reliable in distinguishing whether a text is generated by LLMs by injecting hidden patterns. However, we argue that existing LLM watermarking methods are encoding-inefficient and cannot flexibly meet the diverse information encoding needs (such as encoding model version, generation time, user id, etc.). In this work, we conduct the first systematic study on the topic of Codable Text Watermarking for LLMs (CTWL) that allows text watermarks to carry multi-bit customizable information. First of all, we study the taxonomy of LLM watermarking technologies and give a mathematical formulation for CTWL. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive evaluation system for CTWL: (1) watermarking success rate, (2) robustness against various corruptions, (3) coding rate of payload information, (4) encoding and decoding efficiency, (5) impacts on the quality of the generated text. To meet the requirements of these non-Pareto-improving metrics, we follow the most prominent vocabulary partition-based watermarking direction, and devise an advanced CTWL method named Balance-Marking. The core idea of our method is to use a proxy language model to split the vocabulary into probability-balanced parts, thereby effectively maintaining the quality of the watermarked text. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/codable-watermarking-for-llm.

Lan Jiang, Hao Zhou, Yankai Lin et al. · tencent-ai

Even though the large-scale language models have achieved excellent performances, they suffer from various adversarial attacks. A large body of defense methods has been proposed. However, they are still limited due to redundant attack search spaces and the inability to defend against various types of attacks. In this work, we present a novel fine-tuning approach called \textbf{RO}bust \textbf{SE}letive fine-tuning (\textbf{ROSE}) to address this issue. ROSE conducts selective updates when adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks, filtering out invaluable and unrobust updates of parameters. Specifically, we propose two strategies: the first-order and second-order ROSE for selecting target robust parameters. The experimental results show that ROSE achieves significant improvements in adversarial robustness on various downstream NLP tasks, and the ensemble method even surpasses both variants above. Furthermore, ROSE can be easily incorporated into existing fine-tuning methods to improve their adversarial robustness further. The empirical analysis confirms that ROSE eliminates unrobust spurious updates during fine-tuning, leading to solutions corresponding to flatter and wider optima than the conventional method. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiangllan/ROSE}.

Yujia Qin, Shengding Hu, Yankai Lin et al. · tsinghua

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 18 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. In general, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

Zichun Yu, Tianyu Gao, Zhengyan Zhang et al. · princeton, tencent-ai

Prompting, which casts downstream applications as language modeling tasks, has shown to be sample efficient compared to standard fine-tuning with pre-trained models. However, one pitfall of prompting is the need of manually-designed patterns, whose outcome can be unintuitive and requires large validation sets to tune. To tackle the challenge, we propose AutoSeq, a fully automatic prompting method: (1) We adopt natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models, enabling free-form generation and larger label search space; (2) We propose label sequences -- phrases with indefinite lengths to verbalize the labels -- which eliminate the need of manual templates and are more expressive than single label words; (3) We use beam search to automatically generate a large amount of label sequence candidates and propose contrastive re-ranking to get the best combinations. AutoSeq significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods, such as soft prompt tuning, adapter tuning, and automatic search on single label words; the generated label sequences are even better than curated manual ones on a variety of tasks. Our method reveals the potential of sequence-to-sequence models in few-shot learning and sheds light on a path to generic and automatic prompting. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/Seq2Seq-Prompt.

Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan et al. · tsinghua

Understanding events in texts is a core objective of natural language understanding, which requires detecting event occurrences, extracting event arguments, and analyzing inter-event relationships. However, due to the annotation challenges brought by task complexity, a large-scale dataset covering the full process of event understanding has long been absent. In this paper, we introduce MAVEN-Arg, which augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations, making the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction. As an EAE benchmark, MAVEN-Arg offers three main advantages: (1) a comprehensive schema covering 162 event types and 612 argument roles, all with expert-written definitions and examples; (2) a large data scale, containing 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation; (3) the exhaustive annotation supporting all task variants of EAE, which annotates both entity and non-entity event arguments in document level. Experiments indicate that MAVEN-Arg is quite challenging for both fine-tuned EAE models and proprietary large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate the benefits of an all-in-one dataset, we preliminarily explore a potential application, future event prediction, with LLMs. MAVEN-Arg and codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-Argument.

Shengding Hu, Xin Liu, Xu Han et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

The scientific scale-up of large language models (LLMs) necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their scaling properties. However, the existing literature on the scaling properties only yields an incomplete answer: optimization loss decreases predictably as the model size increases, in line with established scaling law; yet no scaling law for task has been established and the task performances are far from predictable during scaling. Task performances typically show minor gains on small models until they improve dramatically once models exceed a size threshold, exemplifying the ``emergent abilities''. In this study, we discover that small models, although they exhibit minor performance, demonstrate critical and consistent task performance improvements that are not captured by conventional evaluation strategies due to insufficient measurement resolution. To measure such improvements, we introduce PassUntil, an evaluation strategy with theoretically infinite resolution, through massive sampling in the decoding phase. With PassUntil, we conduct a quantitative investigation into the scaling law of task performance. The investigation contains two parts. Firstly, a strict task scaling law that is not conventionally known to exist, is identified, enhancing the predictability of task performances. Remarkably, we are able to predict the performance of the 2.4B model on code generation with merely 0.05\% deviation before training starts, which is the first systematic attempt to verify predictable scaling proposed by GPT-4's report. Secondly, we are able to study emergent abilities quantitatively. We identify a kind of accelerated emergence whose scaling curve cannot be fitted by standard scaling law function and has a increasing speed. We then examine two hypothesis and imply that the ``multiple circuits hypothesis'' might be responsible for the accelerated emergence.

Yujia Qin, Cheng Qian, Jing Yi et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. Although plenty of works have studied how to effectively and efficiently adapt PLMs to high-performance minima, little is known about the connection of various minima reached under different adaptation configurations. In this paper, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. We conduct empirical analyses to investigate three questions: (1) how could hyperparameters, specific tuning methods, and training data affect PLM's mode connectivity? (2) How does mode connectivity change during pre-training? (3) How does the PLM's task knowledge change along the path connecting two minima? In general, exploring the mode connectivity of PLMs conduces to understanding the geometric connection of different minima, which may help us fathom the inner workings of PLM downstream adaptation.

Pei Ke, Hao Zhou, Yankai Lin et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Existing reference-free metrics have obvious limitations for evaluating controlled text generation models. Unsupervised metrics can only provide a task-agnostic evaluation result which correlates weakly with human judgments, whereas supervised ones may overfit task-specific data with poor generalization ability to other datasets. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised reference-free metric called CTRLEval, which evaluates controlled text generation from different aspects by formulating each aspect into multiple text infilling tasks. On top of these tasks, the metric assembles the generation probabilities from a pre-trained language model without any model training. Experimental results show that our metric has higher correlations with human judgments than other baselines, while obtaining better generalization of evaluating generated texts from different models and with different qualities.

Sha Yuan, Hanyu Zhao, Shuai Zhao et al. · bytedance, pku

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang et al.

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. To make the CPT approach more traceable, this paper presents a technical report for continually pre-training Llama-3 (8B), which significantly enhances the Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of the backbone model. To enhance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, we design specific data mixture and curriculum strategies by utilizing existing datasets and synthesizing high-quality datasets. Specifically, we synthesize multidisciplinary scientific question and answer (QA) pairs based on related web pages, and subsequently incorporate these synthetic data to improve the scientific reasoning ability of Llama-3. We refer to the model after CPT as Llama-3-SynE (Synthetic data Enhanced Llama-3). We also present the tuning experiments with a relatively small model -- TinyLlama, and employ the derived findings to train the backbone model. Extensive experiments on a number of evaluation benchmarks show that our approach can largely improve the performance of the backbone models, including both the general abilities (+8.81 on C-Eval and +6.31 on CMMLU) and the scientific reasoning abilities (+12.00 on MATH and +4.13 on SciEval), without hurting the original capacities. Our model, data, and codes are available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/Llama-3-SynE.

Jingwen Chen, Wenkai Yang, Shengda Fan et al.

Experience internalization converts contextual experience from past interactions into reusable parametric capability, offering a promising path toward continual learning in large language models (LLMs). While prior work has predominantly focused on single-iteration transfer, we discover that under multi-iteration experience learning, existing methods suffer from a progressive capability collapse rather than compounding improvement. We systematically examine this failure through three vital dimensions of experience internalization: (1) Experience Granularity: We find that principle-level experience is more durable than instance-level experience, as it effectively abstracts transferable strategies away from trajectory-specific details. (2) Experience Injection Pattern: Our analysis reveals that step-wise injection significantly outperforms global injection by aligning experience with intermediate decision states, a property that is critical for long-horizon tool use. (3) Internalization Regime: We demonstrate that off-policy context-distillation on high-quality teacher trajectories provides a substantially more stable training signal than on-policy context-distillation, which is inherently limited by local corrections on student-induced flawed states. Together, these insights yield a simple yet robust recipe for stable and sustainable experience internalization, providing concrete guidance for engineering self-evolving and continually learning LLMs.

Lei Wang, Jingsen Zhang, Hao Yang et al.

Simulating high quality user behavior data has always been a fundamental problem in human-centered applications, where the major difficulty originates from the intricate mechanism of human decision process. Recently, substantial evidences have suggested that by learning huge amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) can achieve human-like intelligence. We believe these models can provide significant opportunities to more believable user behavior simulation. To inspire such direction, we propose an LLM-based agent framework and design a sandbox environment to simulate real user behaviors. Based on extensive experiments, we find that the simulated behaviors of our method are very close to the ones of real humans. Concerning potential applications, we simulate and study two social phenomenons including (1) information cocoons and (2) user conformity behaviors. This research provides novel simulation paradigms for human-centered applications.

Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Chenyang Song et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

Jing Yi, Weize Chen, Yujia Qin et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Delta tuning (DET, also known as parameter-efficient tuning) is deemed as the new paradigm for using pre-trained language models (PLMs). Up to now, various DETs with distinct design elements have been proposed, achieving performance on par with fine-tuning. However, the mechanisms behind the above success are still under-explored, especially the connections among various DETs. To fathom the mystery, we hypothesize that the adaptations of different DETs could all be reparameterized as low-dimensional optimizations in a unified optimization subspace, which could be found by jointly decomposing independent solutions of different DETs. Then we explore the connections among different DETs by conducting optimization within the subspace. In experiments, we find that, for a certain DET, conducting optimization simply in the subspace could achieve comparable performance to its original space, and the found solution in the subspace could be transferred to another DET and achieve non-trivial performance. We also visualize the performance landscape of the subspace and find that there exists a substantial region where different DETs all perform well. Finally, we extend our analysis and show the strong connections between fine-tuning and DETs.

Chaojun Xiao, Yuqi Luo, Wenbin Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable results on NLP tasks but at the expense of huge parameter sizes and the consequent computational costs. In this paper, we propose Variator, a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins. Compression plugins are designed to reduce the sequence length via compressing multiple hidden vectors into one and trained with original PLMs frozen. Different from traditional model acceleration methods, which compress PLMs to smaller sizes, Variator offers two distinct advantages: (1) In real-world applications, the plug-and-play nature of our compression plugins enables dynamic selection of different compression plugins with varying acceleration ratios based on the current workload. (2) The compression plugin comprises a few compact neural network layers with minimal parameters, significantly saving storage and memory overhead, particularly in scenarios with a growing number of tasks. We validate the effectiveness of Variator on seven datasets. Experimental results show that Variator can save 53% computational costs using only 0.9% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2%. Moreover, when the model scales to billions of parameters, Variator matches the strong performance of uncompressed PLMs.

Lei Li, Yankai Lin, Xuancheng Ren et al. · pku, tencent-ai

Investigating better ways to reuse the released pre-trained language models (PLMs) can significantly reduce the computational cost and the potential environmental side-effects. This paper explores a novel PLM reuse paradigm, Knowledge Integration (KI). Without human annotations available, KI aims to merge the knowledge from different teacher-PLMs, each of which specializes in a different classification problem, into a versatile student model. To achieve this, we first derive the correlation between virtual golden supervision and teacher predictions. We then design a Model Uncertainty--aware Knowledge Integration (MUKI) framework to recover the golden supervision for the student. Specifically, MUKI adopts Monte-Carlo Dropout to estimate model uncertainty for the supervision integration. An instance-wise re-weighting mechanism based on the margin of uncertainty scores is further incorporated, to deal with the potential conflicting supervision from teachers. Experimental results demonstrate that MUKI achieves substantial improvements over baselines on benchmark datasets. Further analysis shows that MUKI can generalize well for merging teacher models with heterogeneous architectures, and even teachers major in cross-lingual datasets.

Ryuichi Takanobu, Hao Zhou, Yankai Lin et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

How to build and use dialogue data efficiently, and how to deploy models in different domains at scale can be two critical issues in building a task-oriented dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a novel manual-guided dialogue scheme to alleviate these problems, where the agent learns the tasks from both dialogue and manuals. The manual is an unstructured textual document that guides the agent in interacting with users and the database during the conversation. Our proposed scheme reduces the dependence of dialogue models on fine-grained domain ontology, and makes them more flexible to adapt to various domains. We then contribute a fully-annotated multi-domain dataset MagDial to support our scheme. It introduces three dialogue modeling subtasks: instruction matching, argument filling, and response generation. Modeling these subtasks is consistent with the human agent's behavior patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the manual-guided dialogue scheme improves data efficiency and domain scalability in building dialogue systems. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for promoting future research.

Weize Chen, Xiaoyue Xu, Xu Han et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Parameter-shared pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as a successful approach in resource-constrained environments, enabling substantial reductions in model storage and memory costs without significant performance compromise. However, it is important to note that parameter sharing does not alleviate computational burdens associated with inference, thus impeding its practicality in situations characterized by limited stringent latency requirements or computational resources. Building upon neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), we introduce a straightforward technique to enhance the inference efficiency of parameter-shared PLMs. Additionally, we propose a simple pre-training technique that leads to fully or partially shared models capable of achieving even greater inference acceleration. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both autoregressive and autoencoding PLMs, providing novel insights into more efficient utilization of parameter-shared models in resource-constrained settings.

Yining Ye, Xin Cong, Shizuo Tian et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advancements and have attracted significant efforts to develop LLMs into agents capable of executing intricate multi-step decision-making tasks beyond traditional NLP applications. Existing approaches to LLM-based decision-making predominantly build upon the manually-designed external performance metrics to guide the decision-making process. However, reliance on the external performance metrics as prior is problematic in real-world scenarios, where such prior may be unavailable, flawed, or even erroneous. For genuine autonomous decision making, it is imperative for the agent to develop its rationality from its posterior experiences to judge decisions independently. Central to the development of rationality is the construction of an internalized utility judgment, capable of assigning numerical utilities to each decision. This paper proposes RadAgent (Rational Decision-Making Agent), which fosters the development of its rationality through an iterative framework involving Experience Exploration and Utility Learning. Within this framework, Elo-based Utility Construction is devised to assign Elo scores to individual decision steps to judge their utilities via pairwise comparisons. Consequently, these Elo scores guide the decision-making process to derive optimal outcomes. Experimental results on the ToolBench dataset demonstrate RadAgent's superiority over baselines, achieving over 10% improvement in Pass Rate on diverse tasks. It offers higher-quality solutions and reduces costs (ChatGPT API calls), highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency.

Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Zhipeng Chen et al.

Large language models~(LLMs) have greatly advanced the frontiers of artificial intelligence, attaining remarkable improvement in model capacity. To assess the model performance, a typical approach is to construct evaluation benchmarks for measuring the ability level of LLMs in different aspects. Despite that a number of high-quality benchmarks have been released, the concerns about the appropriate use of these benchmarks and the fair comparison of different models are increasingly growing. Considering these concerns, in this paper, we discuss the potential risk and impact of inappropriately using evaluation benchmarks and misleadingly interpreting the evaluation results. Specially, we focus on a special issue that would lead to inappropriate evaluation, \ie \emph{benchmark leakage}, referring that the data related to evaluation sets is occasionally used for model training. This phenomenon now becomes more common since pre-training data is often prepared ahead of model test. We conduct extensive experiments to study the effect of benchmark leverage, and find that it can dramatically boost the evaluation results, which would finally lead to an unreliable assessment of model performance. To improve the use of existing evaluation benchmarks, we finally present several guidelines for both LLM developers and benchmark maintainers. We hope this work can draw attention to appropriate training and evaluation of LLMs.

Shengda Fan, Xuyan Ye, Yupeng Huo et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions. Unlike mathematical reasoning where errors are often rectifiable via backtracking, tool-use failures frequently induce irreversible side effects, making accurate step-level verification critical. However, existing process-level benchmarks are predominantly confined to closed-world mathematical domains, failing to capture the dynamic and open-ended nature of tool execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentProcessBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating step-level effectiveness in realistic, tool-augmented trajectories. The benchmark comprises 1,000 diverse trajectories and 8,509 human-labeled step annotations with 89.1% inter-annotator agreement. It features a ternary labeling scheme to capture exploration and an error propagation rule to reduce labeling ambiguity. Extensive experiments reveal key insights: (1) weaker policy models exhibit inflated ratios of correct steps due to early termination; (2) distinguishing neutral and erroneous actions remains a significant challenge for current models; and (3) process-derived signals provide complementary value to outcome supervision, significantly enhancing test-time scaling. We hope AgentProcessBench can foster future research in reward models and pave the way toward general agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/RUCBM/AgentProcessBench.

Xin Lv, Yankai Lin, Zijun Yao et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Knowledge graphs, as the cornerstone of many AI applications, usually face serious incompleteness problems. In recent years, there have been many efforts to study automatic knowledge graph completion (KGC), most of which use existing knowledge to infer new knowledge. However, in our experiments, we find that not all relations can be obtained by inference, which constrains the performance of existing models. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new model based on information retrieval and reading comprehension, namely IR4KGC. Specifically, we pre-train a knowledge-based information retrieval module that can retrieve documents related to the triples to be completed. Then, the retrieved documents are handed over to the reading comprehension module to generate the predicted answers. In experiments, we find that our model can well solve relations that cannot be inferred from existing knowledge, and achieve good results on KGC datasets.

Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Guangxiang Zhao et al.

Federated Learning has become a widely-used framework which allows learning a global model on decentralized local datasets under the condition of protecting local data privacy. However, federated learning faces severe optimization difficulty when training samples are not independently and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.). In this paper, we point out that the client sampling practice plays a decisive role in the aforementioned optimization difficulty. We find that the negative client sampling will cause the merged data distribution of currently sampled clients heavily inconsistent with that of all available clients, and further make the aggregated gradient unreliable. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning rate adaptation mechanism to adaptively adjust the server learning rate for the aggregated gradient in each round, according to the consistency between the merged data distribution of currently sampled clients and that of all available clients. Specifically, we make theoretical deductions to find a meaningful and robust indicator that is positively related to the optimal server learning rate and can effectively reflect the merged data distribution of sampled clients, and we utilize it for the server learning rate adaptation. Extensive experiments on multiple image and text classification tasks validate the great effectiveness of our method.

Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Jie Zhou et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible performance in completing various real-world tasks. The current paradigm of knowledge learning for LLMs is mainly based on learning from examples, in which LLMs learn the internal rule implicitly from a certain number of supervised examples. However, this learning paradigm may not well learn those complicated rules, especially when the training examples are limited. We are inspired that humans can learn the new tasks or knowledge in another way by learning from rules. That is, humans can learn new tasks or grasp new knowledge quickly and generalize well given only a detailed rule and a few optional examples. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to explore the feasibility of this new learning paradigm, which targets on encoding rule-based knowledge into LLMs. We further propose rule distillation, which first uses the strong in-context abilities of LLMs to extract the knowledge from the textual rules, and then explicitly encode the knowledge into the parameters of LLMs by learning from the above in-context signals produced inside the model. Our experiments show that making LLMs learn from rules by our method is much more efficient than example-based learning in both the sample size and generalization ability. Warning: This paper may contain examples with offensive content.

Qingyang Zhong, Jifan Yu, Zheyuan Zhang et al.

Adaptive learning aims to stimulate and meet the needs of individual learners, which requires sophisticated system-level coordination of diverse tasks, including modeling learning resources, estimating student states, and making personalized recommendations. Existing deep learning methods have achieved great success over statistical models; however, they still lack generalization for diverse tasks and suffer from insufficient capacity since they are composed of highly-coupled task-specific architectures and rely on small-scale, coarse-grained recommendation scenarios. To realize the idea of general adaptive systems proposed in pedagogical theory, with the emerging pre-training techniques in NLP, we try to conduct a practical exploration on applying pre-training to adaptive learning, to propose a unified framework based on data observation and learning style analysis, properly leveraging heterogeneous learning elements. Through a series of downstream tasks of Learning Recommendation, Learning Resource Evaluation, Knowledge Tracing, and Dropout Prediction, we find that course structures, text, and knowledge are helpful for modeling and inherently coherent to student non-sequential learning behaviors and that indirectly relevant information included in the pre-training foundation can be shared across downstream tasks to facilitate effectiveness. We finally build a simplified systematic application of adaptive learning and reflect on the insights brought back to pedagogy. The source code and dataset will be released.

Shengda Fan, Xuyan Ye, Yankai Lin

Self-play with large language models has emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving self-improving artificial intelligence. However, existing self-play frameworks often suffer from optimization instability, due to (i) non-stationary objectives induced by solver-dependent reward feedback for the Questioner, and (ii) bootstrapping errors from self-generated pseudo-labels used to supervise the Solver. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce DARC (Decoupled Asymmetric Reasoning Curriculum), a two-stage framework that stabilizes the self-evolution process. First, we train the Questioner to synthesize difficulty-calibrated questions, conditioned on explicit difficulty levels and external corpora. Second, we train the Solver with an asymmetric self-distillation mechanism, where a document-augmented teacher generates high-quality pseudo-labels to supervise the student Solver that lacks document access. Empirical results demonstrate that DARC is model-agnostic, yielding an average improvement of 10.9 points across nine reasoning benchmarks and three backbone models. Moreover, DARC consistently outperforms all baselines and approaches the performance of fully supervised models without relying on human annotations. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCBM/DARC.

Wentong Chen, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang et al.

With the continuous advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), intelligent agents are becoming increasingly vital. However, these agents often fail in environments governed by implicit rules--hidden constraints that cannot be observed directly and must be inferred through interaction. This causes agents to fall into repetitive trial-and-error loops, ultimately leading to task failure. To address this challenge, we propose Test-Time Exploration (TTExplore), a framework where a thinker component analyzes interaction history to infer these implicit rules and guide an actor. Effective exploration in this setting critically depends on the reasoning ability of the thinker. However, evaluating deep reasoning trajectories is inherently unstable and difficult, which poses a major obstacle to effective training. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel and stable reinforcement learning pipeline. The core idea is to use accurate task-level scores as indirect rewards to bypass the difficulty of evaluating intermediate reasoning, and to retain only a single thinking node per trajectory to alleviate reward sparsity. Using this pipeline, we train a specialized 7B model, Exp-Thinker. Experiments on five text-based embodied tasks show that TTExplore equipped with Exp-Thinker improves baseline agent performance by an average of $14$-$19$ points, demonstrating the effectiveness of explicitly reasoning about implicit rules.

Lifan Yuan, Ganqu Cui, Hanbin Wang et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

We introduce Eurus, a suite of large language models (LLMs) optimized for reasoning. Finetuned from Mistral-7B and CodeLlama-70B, Eurus models achieve state-of-the-art results among open-source models on a diverse set of benchmarks covering mathematics, code generation, and logical reasoning problems. Notably, Eurus-70B beats GPT-3.5 Turbo in reasoning through a comprehensive benchmarking across 12 tests covering five tasks, and achieves a 33.3% pass@1 accuracy on LeetCode and 32.6% on TheoremQA, two challenging benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing open-source models by margins more than 13.3%. The strong performance of Eurus can be primarily attributed to UltraInteract, our newly-curated large-scale, high-quality alignment dataset specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks. UltraInteract can be used in both supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. For each instruction, it includes a preference tree consisting of (1) reasoning chains with diverse planning strategies in a unified format, (2) multi-turn interaction trajectories with the environment and the critique, and (3) pairwise data to facilitate preference learning. UltraInteract allows us to conduct an in-depth exploration of preference learning for reasoning tasks. Our investigation reveals that some well-established preference learning algorithms may be less suitable for reasoning tasks compared to their effectiveness in general conversations. Inspired by this, we derive a novel reward modeling objective which, together with UltraInteract, leads to a strong reward model.

Cheng Yin, Yankai Lin, Wang Xu et al.

Enabling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to "think before acting" via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a promising path to overcoming the data-hungry nature of end-to-end robot policies. However, progress is stalled by a fundamental conflict: existing models use a single autoregressive decoder for both sequential CoT reasoning and high-dimensional, parallelizable robot actions. This architectural mismatch degrades motor control and fails to forge a strong causal link between thought and action. We introduce DeepThinkVLA, which resolves this conflict through a tightly integrated architecture and training strategy. Architecturally, our hybrid-attention decoder generates sequential CoT with causal attention and then switches to bidirectional attention for fast, parallel decoding of action vectors. This design is complemented by a two-stage training pipeline: we first use Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to teach the model foundational reasoning, then apply Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-success rewards to causally align the full reasoning-action sequence with desired outcomes. This synergy leads to state-of-the-art performance, achieving a 97.0% success rate on the LIBERO benchmark. Our ablations confirm the design's effectiveness: the hybrid architecture alone outperforms standard decoders by 15.5%, and the final RL stage provides a crucial 2% boost to secure top performance.

Chaojun Xiao, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han et al. · tencent-ai

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a cornerstone in real-world applications with lengthy streaming inputs (e.g., LLM-driven agents). However, existing LLMs, pre-trained on sequences with a restricted maximum length, cannot process longer sequences due to the out-of-domain and distraction issues. Common solutions often involve continual pre-training on longer sequences, which will introduce expensive computational overhead and uncontrollable change in model capabilities. In this paper, we unveil the intrinsic capacity of LLMs for understanding extremely long sequences without any fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce a training-free memory-based method, InfLLM. Specifically, InfLLM stores distant contexts into additional memory units and employs an efficient mechanism to lookup token-relevant units for attention computation. Thereby, InfLLM allows LLMs to efficiently process long sequences with a limited context window and well capture long-distance dependencies. Without any training, InfLLM enables LLMs that are pre-trained on sequences consisting of a few thousand tokens to achieve comparable performance with competitive baselines that continually train these LLMs on long sequences. Even when the sequence length is scaled to $1,024$K, InfLLM still effectively captures long-distance dependencies. Our code can be found in \url{https://github.com/thunlp/InfLLM}.

Junbo Cui, Bokai Xu, Chongyi Wang et al.

Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has brought AI capabilities from static offline data processing to real-time streaming interaction, yet they still remain far from human-level multimodal interaction. The key bottlenecks are no longer modality coverage or latency alone, but the interaction paradigm itself. First, perception and response are still separated into alternating phases, preventing models from incorporating new inputs for timely adjustment during generation. Second, most current models remain reactive, responding only to explicit user requests instead of acting proactively in the evolving multimodal environment. We present MiniCPM-o 4.5, our latest effort towards human-like multimodal interaction, which mitigates these gaps by real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction. It can see, listen, and speak simultaneously in real-time, while also exhibiting proactive behaviors such as issuing reminders or comments based on its continuous understanding of the live scene. The key technique behind MiniCPM-o 4.5 is Omni-Flow, a unified streaming framework that aligns omni-modal inputs and outputs along a shared temporal axis. This formulation converts conventional turn-based interaction into a full-duplex, time-aligned process, enabling simultaneous perception and response and allowing proactive behavior to arise within the same framework. With a total of 9B parameters, MiniCPM-o 4.5 approaches Gemini 2.5 Flash in vision-language capabilities, delivering state-of-the-art open-source performance at its scale. It also surpasses Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B in omni-modal understanding and delivers better speech generation, with significantly higher computation efficiency. Driven by its efficient architecture design and inference optimization, the model can perform real-time full-duplex omni-modal interaction on edge devices with less than 12GB RAM cost.

Qinyu Luo, Yining Ye, Shihao Liang et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

Generative models have demonstrated considerable potential in software engineering, particularly in tasks such as code generation and debugging. However, their utilization in the domain of code documentation generation remains underexplored. To this end, we introduce RepoAgent, a large language model powered open-source framework aimed at proactively generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation. Through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we have validated the effectiveness of our approach, showing that RepoAgent excels in generating high-quality repository-level documentation. The code and results are publicly accessible at https://github.com/OpenBMB/RepoAgent.

Runchu Tian, Yining Ye, Yujia Qin et al. · tencent-ai

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capability. However, as another critical component of programming proficiency, the debugging capability of LLMs remains relatively unexplored. Previous evaluations of LLMs' debugging ability are significantly limited by the risk of data leakage, the scale of the dataset, and the variety of tested bugs. To overcome these deficiencies, we introduce `DebugBench', an LLM debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 instances. It covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. To construct DebugBench, we collect code snippets from the LeetCode community, implant bugs into source data with GPT-4, and assure rigorous quality checks. We evaluate two commercial and four open-source models in a zero-shot scenario. We find that (1) while closed-source models exhibit inferior debugging performance compared to humans, open-source models relatively lower pass rate scores; (2) the complexity of debugging notably fluctuates depending on the bug category; (3) incorporating runtime feedback has a clear impact on debugging performance which is not always helpful. As an extension, we also compare LLM debugging and code generation, revealing a strong correlation between them for closed-source models. These findings will benefit the development of LLMs in debugging.

Xueyang Feng, Zhi-Yuan Chen, Yujia Qin et al.

In recent developments within the research community, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating fully autonomous agents has garnered significant interest. Despite this, LLM-based agents frequently demonstrate notable shortcomings in adjusting to dynamic environments and fully grasping human needs. In this work, we introduce the problem of LLM-based human-agent collaboration for complex task-solving, exploring their synergistic potential. In addition, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Human-Agent Collaboration method, ReHAC. This approach includes a policy model designed to determine the most opportune stages for human intervention within the task-solving process. We construct a human-agent collaboration dataset to train this policy model in an offline reinforcement learning environment. Our validation tests confirm the model's effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the synergistic efforts of humans and LLM-based agents significantly improve performance in complex tasks, primarily through well-planned, limited human intervention. Datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/XueyangFeng/ReHAC.

Kaiyi Zhang, Wei Wu, Yankai Lin

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central technique for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Despite its effectiveness, how response-level rewards translate into token-level probability changes remains poorly understood. We introduce a discriminator view of RLVR updates, showing that the policy-gradient update direction implicitly acts as a linear discriminator over token-gradient vectors and thereby determines which token probabilities are increased or decreased during learning. Under standard sequence-level RLVR, this discriminator is constructed from positive- and negative-side centroids formed by advantage-weighted averaging of token-gradient vectors. However, such centroid construction can be dominated by shared high-frequency patterns, such as formatting tokens, diluting sparse yet discriminative directions that better distinguish high-reward responses from low-reward ones. To address this limitation, we propose $\textbf{DelTA}$, a discriminative token credit assignment method that estimates token coefficients to amplify side-specific token-gradient directions and downweight shared or weakly discriminative ones. These coefficients reweight a self-normalized RLVR surrogate, making the effective side-wise centroids more contrastive and thereby reshaping the RLVR update direction. On seven mathematical benchmarks, DelTA outperforms the strongest same-scale baselines by 3.26 and 2.62 average points on Qwen3-8B-Base and Qwen3-14B-Base, respectively. Additional results on code generation, a different backbone, and out-of-domain evaluations further demonstrate the generalization ability of DelTA.

Yubo Wang, Juntian Zhang, Yichen Wu et al.

While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning (DWAL). Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a "Forest-before-Trees" cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.

Yaxi Lu, Shenzhi Yang, Cheng Qian et al. · tsinghua

Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable abilities in solving complex tasks. However, most agent systems remain reactive, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios requiring foresight and autonomous decision-making. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of developing proactive agents capable of anticipating and initiating tasks without explicit human instructions. We propose a novel data-driven approach for this problem. Firstly, we collect real-world human activities to generate proactive task predictions. These predictions are then labeled by human annotators as either accepted or rejected. The labeled data is used to train a reward model that simulates human judgment and serves as an automatic evaluator of the proactiveness of LLM agents. Building on this, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline to create a diverse dataset, ProactiveBench, containing 6,790 events. Finally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning models with the proposed ProactiveBench can significantly elicit the proactiveness of LLM agents. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-Score of 66.47% in proactively offering assistance, outperforming all open-source and close-source models. These results highlight the potential of our method in creating more proactive and effective agent systems, paving the way for future advancements in human-agent collaboration.

MiniCPM Team, Chaojun Xiao, Yuxuan Li et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

This paper introduces MiniCPM4, a highly efficient large language model (LLM) designed explicitly for end-side devices. We achieve this efficiency through systematic innovation in four key dimensions: model architecture, training data, training algorithms, and inference systems. Specifically, in terms of model architecture, we propose InfLLM v2, a trainable sparse attention mechanism that accelerates both prefilling and decoding phases for long-context processing. Regarding training data, we propose UltraClean, an efficient and accurate pre-training data filtering and generation strategy, and UltraChat v2, a comprehensive supervised fine-tuning dataset. These datasets enable satisfactory model performance to be achieved using just 8 trillion training tokens. Regarding training algorithms, we propose ModelTunnel v2 for efficient pre-training strategy search, and improve existing post-training methods by introducing chunk-wise rollout for load-balanced reinforcement learning and data-efficient tenary LLM, BitCPM. Regarding inference systems, we propose CPM.cu that integrates sparse attention, model quantization, and speculative sampling to achieve efficient prefilling and decoding. To meet diverse on-device requirements, MiniCPM4 is available in two versions, with 0.5B and 8B parameters, respectively. Furthermore, we construct a hybrid reasoning model, MiniCPM4.1, which can be used in both deep reasoning mode and non-reasoning mode. Evaluation results demonstrate that MiniCPM4 and MiniCPM4.1 outperform similar-sized open-source models across benchmarks, with the 8B variants showing significant speed improvements on long sequence understanding and generation.

Shengda Fan, Xin Cong, Yuepeng Fu et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

Yishan Li, Wentong Chen, Yukun Yan et al.

Generating deep research reports requires large-scale information acquisition and the synthesis of insight-driven analysis, posing a significant challenge for current language models. Most existing approaches follow a plan-then-write paradigm, whose performance heavily depends on the quality of the initial outline. However, constructing a comprehensive outline itself demands strong reasoning ability, causing current deep research systems to rely almost exclusively on closed-source or online large models. This reliance raises practical barriers to deployment and introduces safety and privacy concerns for user-authored data. In this work, we present AgentCPM-Report, a lightweight yet high-performing local solution composed of a framework that mirrors the human writing process and an 8B-parameter deep research agent. Our framework uses a Writing As Reasoning Policy (WARP), which enables models to dynamically revise outlines during report generation. Under this policy, the agent alternates between Evidence-Based Drafting and Reasoning-Driven Deepening, jointly supporting information acquisition, knowledge refinement, and iterative outline evolution. To effectively equip small models with this capability, we introduce a Multi-Stage Agentic Training strategy, consisting of cold-start, atomic skill RL, and holistic pipeline RL. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearch Gym demonstrate that AgentCPM-Report outperforms leading closed-source systems, with substantial gains in Insight.

Haotian Chen, Xin Cong, Shengda Fan et al.

While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown remarkable potential for solving complex tasks, existing systems remain heavily reliant on large-scale models, leaving the capabilities of edge-scale models largely underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic study on training agentic models at the 4B-parameter scale. We identify three primary bottlenecks hindering the performance of edge-scale models: catastrophic forgetting during Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), sensitivity to reward signal noise during Reinforcement Learning (RL), and reasoning degradation caused by redundant information in long-context scenarios. To address the issues, we propose AgentCPM-Explore, a compact 4B agent model with high knowledge density and strong exploration capability. We introduce a holistic training framework featuring parameter-space model fusion, reward signal denoising, and contextual information refinement. Through deep exploration, AgentCPM-Explore achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among 4B-class models, matches or surpasses 8B-class SOTA models on four benchmarks, and even outperforms larger-scale models such as Claude-4.5-Sonnet or DeepSeek-v3.2 in five benchmarks. Notably, AgentCPM-Explore achieves 97.09% accuracy on GAIA text-based tasks under pass@64. These results provide compelling evidence that the bottleneck for edge-scale models is not their inherent capability ceiling, but rather their inference stability. Based on our well-established training framework, AgentCPM-Explore effectively unlocks the significant, yet previously underestimated, potential of edge-scale models.

Wenkai Yang, Weijie Liu, Ruobing Xie et al.

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model. Then, we propose the Generalized On-Policy Distillation (G-OPD) framework, which extends the standard OPD objective by introducing a flexible reference model and a reward scaling factor that controls the relative weight of the reward term against the KL regularization. Through comprehensive experiments on math reasoning and code generation tasks, we derive two novel insights: (1) Setting the reward scaling factor to be greater than 1 (i.e., reward extrapolation), which we term ExOPD, consistently improves over standard OPD across a range of teacher-student size pairings. In particular, in the setting where we merge the knowledge from different domain experts, obtained by applying domain-specific RL to the same student model, back into the original student, ExOPD enables the student to even surpass the teacher's performance boundary and outperform the domain teachers. (2) Building on ExOPD, we further find that in the strong-to-weak distillation setting (i.e., distilling a smaller student from a larger teacher), performing reward correction by choosing the reference model as the teacher's base model before RL yields a more accurate reward signal and further improves distillation performance. However, this choice assumes access to the teacher's pre-RL variant and incurs more computational overhead. We hope our work offers new insights for future research on OPD.