6.1CLSep 18, 2024
Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Minimal Training CostsWang Xu, Shuo Wang, Weilin Zhao et al. · tsinghua
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to improve human efficiency through conversational interactions. Conventional LLM-powered dialogue systems, operating on a turn-based paradigm, preclude real-time interaction during response generation. To address this limitation, researchers have proposed duplex models. These models can dynamically adapt to user input, facilitating real-time interactive feedback. However, these methods typically require substantial computational resources to acquire the ability. To reduce overhead, this paper presents a new duplex decoding approach that enhances LLMs with duplex ability, requiring minimal additional training. Specifically, our method employs parallel decoding of queries and responses in conversations, effectively implementing a channel-division-multiplexing decoding strategy. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method significantly enhances the naturalness and human-likeness of user-AI interactions with minimal training costs.
ReactXT: Understanding Molecular "Reaction-ship" via Reaction-Contextualized Molecule-Text PretrainingZhiyuan Liu, Yaorui Shi, An Zhang et al.
Molecule-text modeling, which aims to facilitate molecule-relevant tasks with a textual interface and textual knowledge, is an emerging research direction. Beyond single molecules, studying reaction-text modeling holds promise for helping the synthesis of new materials and drugs. However, previous works mostly neglect reaction-text modeling: they primarily focus on modeling individual molecule-text pairs or learning chemical reactions without texts in context. Additionally, one key task of reaction-text modeling -- experimental procedure prediction -- is less explored due to the absence of an open-source dataset. The task is to predict step-by-step actions of conducting chemical experiments and is crucial to automating chemical synthesis. To resolve the challenges above, we propose a new pretraining method, ReactXT, for reaction-text modeling, and a new dataset, OpenExp, for experimental procedure prediction. Specifically, ReactXT features three types of input contexts to incrementally pretrain LMs. Each of the three input contexts corresponds to a pretraining task to improve the text-based understanding of either reactions or single molecules. ReactXT demonstrates consistent improvements in experimental procedure prediction and molecule captioning and offers competitive results in retrosynthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/syr-cn/ReactXT.
13.0CLMay 25, 2025
The Overthinker's DIET: Cutting Token Calories with DIfficulty-AwarE TrainingWeize Chen, Jiarui Yuan, Tailin Jin et al. · tsinghua
Recent large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning but often over-think, generating excessively long responses that hinder efficiency. We introduce DIET ( DIfficulty-AwarE Training), a framework that systematically cuts these "token calories" by integrating on-the-fly problem difficulty into the reinforcement learning (RL) process. DIET dynamically adapts token compression strategies by modulating token penalty strength and conditioning target lengths on estimated task difficulty, to optimize the performance-efficiency trade-off. We also theoretically analyze the pitfalls of naive reward weighting in group-normalized RL algorithms like GRPO, and propose Advantage Weighting technique, which enables stable and effective implementation of these difficulty-aware objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that DIET significantly reduces token counts while simultaneously improving reasoning performance. Beyond raw token reduction, we show two crucial benefits largely overlooked by prior work: (1) DIET leads to superior inference scaling. By maintaining high per-sample quality with fewer tokens, it enables better scaling performance via majority voting with more samples under fixed computational budgets, an area where other methods falter. (2) DIET enhances the natural positive correlation between response length and problem difficulty, ensuring verbosity is appropriately allocated, unlike many existing compression methods that disrupt this relationship. Our analyses provide a principled and effective framework for developing more efficient, practical, and high-performing LLMs.