Pengzhan Li

Yuzhuang Xu, Xu Han, Yuxuan Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance but incur high deployment costs, motivating extremely low-bit but lossy quantization. Existing quantization algorithms mainly focus on improving the numerical accuracy of forward computation to eliminate performance degradation. In this paper, we show that extremely quantized LLMs suffer from systematic smoothness degradation beyond numerical precision loss. Through a smoothness proxy, we observe that such degradation becomes increasingly severe as the quantization bit-width decreases. Furthermore, based on sequence neighborhood modeling, we find that quantized models exhibit a rapid reduction of effective token candidates within the prediction neighborhood, which directly leads to a sparser decoding tree and degraded generation quality. To validate it, we introduce a simple smoothness-preserving principle in both post-training quantization and quantization-aware training, and demonstrate that preserving smoothness brings additional gains beyond numerical accuracy. The core goal of this paper is to highlight smoothness preservation as an important design consideration for future extreme quantization methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xuyuzhuang11/FINE.

Xuan Dong, Huanyang Zheng, Tianhao Niu et al.

Scientific research follows multi-turn, multi-step workflows that require proactively searching the literature, consulting figures and tables, and integrating evidence across papers to align experimental settings and support reproducible conclusions. This joint capability is not systematically assessed in existing benchmarks, which largely under-evaluate proactive search, multi-evidence integration and sustained evidence use over time. In this work, we introduce EpiBench, an episodic multi-turn multimodal benchmark that instantiates short research workflows. Given a research task, agents must navigate across papers over multiple turns, align evidence from figures and tables, and use the accumulated evidence in the memory to answer objective questions that require cross paper comparisons and multi-figure integration. EpiBench introduces a process-level evaluation framework for fine-grained testing and diagnosis of research agents. Our experiments show that even the leading model achieves an accuracy of only 29.23% on the hard split, indicating substantial room for improvement in multi-turn, multi-evidence research workflows, providing an evaluation platform for verifiable and reproducible research agents.