Yihao Liang

Yihao Liang, Ze Wang, Hao Chen et al.

Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel generation but suffer from a fundamental static-to-dynamic misalignment: Training optimizes local transitions under fixed schedules, whereas efficient inference requires adaptive "long-jump" refinements through unseen states. Our goal is to enable highly parallel decoding for DLMs with low number of function evaluations while preserving generation quality. To achieve this, we propose CD4LM, a framework that decouples training from inference via Discrete-Space Consistency Distillation (DSCD) and Confidence-Adaptive Decoding (CAD). Unlike standard objectives, DSCD trains a student to be trajectory-invariant, mapping diverse noisy states directly to the clean distribution. This intrinsic robustness enables CAD to dynamically allocate compute resources based on token confidence, aggressively skipping steps without the quality collapse typical of heuristic acceleration. On GSM8K, CD4LM matches the LLaDA baseline with a 5.18x wall-clock speedup; across code and math benchmarks, it strictly dominates the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, achieving a 3.62x mean speedup while improving average accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/yihao-liang/CDLM

Hongfei Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Chenfei Liao et al.

Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.

Margarita Belova, Yuval Kansal, Yihao Liang et al. · princeton

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is undergoing rapid transformations that threaten its sustainability. As models transition from research prototypes to high-traffic products, the energetic burden has shifted from one-time training to recurring, unbounded inference. This is exacerbated by reasoning models that inflate compute costs by orders of magnitude per query. The prevailing pursuit of artificial general intelligence through scaling of monolithic models is colliding with hard physical constraints: grid failures, water consumption, and diminishing returns on data scaling. This trajectory yields models with impressive factual recall but struggles in domains requiring in-depth reasoning, possibly due to insufficient abstractions in training data. Current large language models (LLMs) exhibit genuine reasoning depth only in domains like mathematics and coding, where rigorous, pre-existing abstractions provide structural grounding. In other fields, the current approach fails to generalize well. We propose an alternative trajectory based on domain-specific superintelligence (DSS). We argue for first constructing explicit symbolic abstractions (knowledge graphs, ontologies, and formal logic) to underpin synthetic curricula enabling small language models to master domain-specific reasoning without the model collapse problem typical of LLM-based synthetic data methods. Rather than a single generalist giant model, we envision "societies of DSS models": dynamic ecosystems where orchestration agents route tasks to distinct DSS back-ends. This paradigm shift decouples capability from size, enabling intelligence to migrate from energy-intensive data centers to secure, on-device experts. By aligning algorithmic progress with physical constraints, DSS societies move generative AI from an environmental liability to a sustainable force for economic empowerment.

Yihao Liang, Niraj K. Jha

Distilling vision-language models into faster hybrid architectures, such as 3:1 Mamba-2/attention mixes, is now standard practice for making inference efficient. Aggregate benchmarks suggest that this works but they hide selective failures. When we distill Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct into a 3:1 Mamba-2/attention hybrid, student model stays within 2 points of the teacher across visual reasoning benchmarks like MMStar, MMBench, and MMMU-Pro, while dropping 13 points on optical-character-recognition and document tasks. The student can still understand the scene but loses the fine-grained text needed to answer. We localize much of the failure to a specific kind of position. In a high-resolution image, most patches are sky, wall, or smooth texture, while a small fraction carries text, edges, object boundaries, or other local details. In a token-level diagnostic, the top 10% highest-density patches have 3.6$\times$ larger residual drift than the bottom 10% lowest-density patches and 3.5$\times$ larger teacher-masking answer contribution. Uniform weighting devotes many loss terms to low-information background patches, whereas sparse answer-bearing patches receive no special protection. The required intervention is minimal: we replace uniform residual alignment with density-weighted residual alignment, using patch self-dissimilarity as a training-free proxy for position importance. We call this HEED. Compared with normal end-to-end distillation, HEED increases performance by 8.7 points on OCRBench v2 and 5.13 points on a 10-benchmark average. The gain is realized on different teacher models and hybrid architectures. After standard post-training, the student reaches teacher-level performance on the 10-benchmark average with a 4.12$\times$ throughput and a 68% memory saving at 128k context, with no additional parameters and no inference-time cost.

Long Phan, Alice Gatti, Ziwen Han et al. · amazon-science, apple-ml

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Qiguang Chen, Mingda Yang, Libo Qin et al.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

Qiguang Chen, Jinhao Liu, Libo Qin et al.

Understanding how information is dynamically accumulated and transformed in human reasoning has long challenged cognitive psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Existing accounts, from classical logic to probabilistic models, illuminate aspects of output or individual modelling, but do not offer a unified, quantitative description of general human reasoning dynamics. To solve this, we introduce Information Flow Tracking (IF-Track), that uses large language models (LLMs) as probabilistic encoder to quantify information entropy and gain at each reasoning step. Through fine-grained analyses across diverse tasks, our method is the first successfully models the universal landscape of human reasoning behaviors within a single metric space. We show that IF-Track captures essential reasoning features, identifies systematic error patterns, and characterizes individual differences. Applied to discussion of advanced psychological theory, we first reconcile single- versus dual-process theories in IF-Track and discover the alignment of artificial and human cognition and how LLMs reshaping human reasoning process. This approach establishes a quantitative bridge between theory and measurement, offering mechanistic insights into the architecture of reasoning.

Pengxiang Gao, Yihao Liang, Yanzhi Song et al.

Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) aims to categorize closely related subclasses, a task complicated by minimal inter-class differences and significant intra-class variance. Existing methods often rely on additional annotations for image classification, overlooking the valuable information embedded in Tree Hierarchies that depict hierarchical label relationships. To leverage this knowledge to improve classification accuracy and consistency, we propose a novel Cross-Hierarchical Bidirectional Consistency Learning (CHBC) framework. The CHBC framework extracts discriminative features across various hierarchies using a specially designed module to decompose and enhance attention masks and features. We employ bidirectional consistency loss to regulate the classification outcomes across different hierarchies, ensuring label prediction consistency and reducing misclassification. Experiments on three widely used FGVC datasets validate the effectiveness of the CHBC framework. Ablation studies further investigate the application strategies of feature enhancement and consistency constraints, underscoring the significant contributions of the proposed modules.