Xiaotian Han

Jingfeng Yang, Hongye Jin, Ruixiang Tang et al. · amazon-science

This paper presents a comprehensive and practical guide for practitioners and end-users working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in their downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We provide discussions and insights into the usage of LLMs from the perspectives of models, data, and downstream tasks. Firstly, we offer an introduction and brief summary of current GPT- and BERT-style LLMs. Then, we discuss the influence of pre-training data, training data, and test data. Most importantly, we provide a detailed discussion about the use and non-use cases of large language models for various natural language processing tasks, such as knowledge-intensive tasks, traditional natural language understanding tasks, natural language generation tasks, emergent abilities, and considerations for specific tasks.We present various use cases and non-use cases to illustrate the practical applications and limitations of LLMs in real-world scenarios. We also try to understand the importance of data and the specific challenges associated with each NLP task. Furthermore, we explore the impact of spurious biases on LLMs and delve into other essential considerations, such as efficiency, cost, and latency, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of deploying LLMs in practice. This comprehensive guide aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable insights and best practices for working with LLMs, thereby enabling the successful implementation of these models in a wide range of NLP tasks. A curated list of practical guide resources of LLMs, regularly updated, can be found at \url{https://github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide}.

Xiaotian Han, Tong Zhao, Yozen Liu et al.

Training graph neural networks (GNNs) on large graphs is complex and extremely time consuming. This is attributed to overheads caused by sparse matrix multiplication, which are sidestepped when training multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) with only node features. MLPs, by ignoring graph context, are simple and faster for graph data, however they usually sacrifice prediction accuracy, limiting their applications for graph data. We observe that for most message passing-based GNNs, we can trivially derive an analog MLP (we call this a PeerMLP) with an equivalent weight space, by setting the trainable parameters with the same shapes, making us curious about \textbf{\emph{how do GNNs using weights from a fully trained PeerMLP perform?}} Surprisingly, we find that GNNs initialized with such weights significantly outperform their PeerMLPs, motivating us to use PeerMLP training as a precursor, initialization step to GNN training. To this end, we propose an embarrassingly simple, yet hugely effective initialization method for GNN training acceleration, called MLPInit. Our extensive experiments on multiple large-scale graph datasets with diverse GNN architectures validate that MLPInit can accelerate the training of GNNs (up to 33X speedup on OGB-Products) and often improve prediction performance (e.g., up to $7.97\%$ improvement for GraphSAGE across $7$ datasets for node classification, and up to $17.81\%$ improvement across $4$ datasets for link prediction on metric Hits@10). The code is available at \href{https://github.com/snap-research/MLPInit-for-GNNs}.

Xiaotian Han, Yiren Jian, Xuefeng Hu et al.

Pre-training on large-scale, high-quality datasets is crucial for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in specialized domains such as mathematics. Despite the recognized importance, the Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) field currently lacks a comprehensive open-source pre-training dataset specifically designed for mathematical reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce InfiMM-WebMath-40B, a high-quality dataset of interleaved image-text documents. It comprises 24 million web pages, 85 million associated image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens, all meticulously extracted and filtered from CommonCrawl. We provide a detailed overview of our data collection and processing pipeline. To demonstrate the robustness of InfiMM-WebMath-40B, we conducted evaluations in both text-only and multimodal settings. Our evaluations on text-only benchmarks show that, despite utilizing only 40 billion tokens, our dataset significantly enhances the performance of our 1.3B model, delivering results comparable to DeepSeekMath-1.3B, which uses 120 billion tokens for the same model size. Nevertheless, with the introduction of our multi-modal math pre-training dataset, our models set a new state-of-the-art among open-source models on multi-modal math benchmarks such as MathVerse and We-Math. We release our data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Infi-MM/InfiMM-WebMath-40B.

Xiaotian Han, Jianfeng Chi, Yu Chen et al.

This paper introduces the Fair Fairness Benchmark (\textsf{FFB}), a benchmarking framework for in-processing group fairness methods. Ensuring fairness in machine learning is important for ethical compliance. However, there exist challenges in comparing and developing fairness methods due to inconsistencies in experimental settings, lack of accessible algorithmic implementations, and limited extensibility of current fairness packages and tools. To address these issues, we introduce an open-source standardized benchmark for evaluating in-processing group fairness methods and provide a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art methods to ensure different notions of group fairness. This work offers the following key contributions: the provision of flexible, extensible, minimalistic, and research-oriented open-source code; the establishment of unified fairness method benchmarking pipelines; and extensive benchmarking, which yields key insights from $\mathbf{45,079}$ experiments, $\mathbf{14,428}$ GPU hours. We believe that our work will significantly facilitate the growth and development of the fairness research community.

Zhimeng Jiang, Xiaotian Han, Hongye Jin et al.

Fairness in machine learning has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The fairness methods improving algorithmic fairness for in-distribution data may not perform well under distribution shifts. In this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate the inherent connection between distribution shift, data perturbation, and model weight perturbation. Subsequently, we analyze the sufficient conditions to guarantee fairness (i.e., low demographic parity) for the target dataset, including fairness for the source dataset, and low prediction difference between the source and target datasets for each sensitive attribute group. Motivated by these sufficient conditions, we propose robust fairness regularization (RFR) by considering the worst case within the model weight perturbation ball for each sensitive attribute group. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed RFR algorithm on synthetic and real distribution shifts across various datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RFR achieves better fairness-accuracy trade-off performance compared with several baselines. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/RFR_NeurIPS23}.

Wang Yang, Debargha Ganguly, Xinpeng Li et al.

Hybrid reasoning language models are commonly controlled through high-level Think/No-think instructions to regulate reasoning behavior, yet we found that such mode switching is largely driven by a small set of trigger tokens rather than the instructions themselves. Through attention analysis and controlled prompting experiments, we show that a leading ``Okay'' token induces reasoning behavior, while the newline pattern following ``</think>'' suppresses it. Based on this observation, we propose Mid-Think, a simple training-free prompting format that combines these triggers to achieve intermediate-budget reasoning, consistently outperforming fixed-token and prompt-based baselines in terms of the accuracy-length trade-off. Furthermore, applying Mid-Think to RL training after SFT reduces training time by approximately 15% while improving final performance of Qwen3-8B on AIME from 69.8% to 72.4% and on GPQA from 58.5% to 61.1%, demonstrating its effectiveness for both inference-time control and RL-based reasoning training.

Hengrui Gu, Xiaotian Han, Kaixiong Zhou

Multi-turn user-facing agents must infer user intent from incomplete requests, collect missing information through dialogue and tools, and execute valid actions. A training trajectory records this process as an interleaved sequence of user messages, agent responses, tool calls, etc. Synthesizing sufficiently complex trajectory has become a central route to train agents: existing pipelines often increase difficulty by composing multiple user requests into longer tasks, producing write-intensive trajectories that train sequential execution. We argue that a single write decision can itself be difficult when the agent must gather and compare substantial read-tool evidence before its arguments become identifiable, a challenge that write-intensive data alone cannot address. Guided by this insight, we propose WRIT (\uline{W}rite-\uline{R}ead \uline{I}ntensive \uline{T}rajectory Synthesis), a pipeline for synthesizing multi-turn agent training trajectories along two complexity axes: the number of write decisions in a task and the evidence burden of each individual decision. WRIT first generates write-intensive and read-heavy tasks. It then diversifies user behavior instructions to reflect realistic conversational variation, and finally simulates agent-user interactions in an executable environment to produce complete training trajectories. The resulting data trains agents not only for longer task execution, but also for robust, evidence-grounded decision making under high information load. With only 2K synthesized trajectories, a 4B model trained on WRIT outperforms GPT-5.1 no-think on $τ^2$-bench and substantially reduces inference-time token usage, showing that compact SFT data can convert part of expensive test-time reasoning into efficient agent behavior.

Xiaotian Han, Zhimeng Jiang, Hongye Jin et al.

Demographic parity is the most widely recognized measure of group fairness in machine learning, which ensures equal treatment of different demographic groups. Numerous works aim to achieve demographic parity by pursuing the commonly used metric $ΔDP$. Unfortunately, in this paper, we reveal that the fairness metric $ΔDP$ can not precisely measure the violation of demographic parity, because it inherently has the following drawbacks: i) zero-value $ΔDP$ does not guarantee zero violation of demographic parity, ii) $ΔDP$ values can vary with different classification thresholds. To this end, we propose two new fairness metrics, Area Between Probability density function Curves (ABPC) and Area Between Cumulative density function Curves (ABCC), to precisely measure the violation of demographic parity at the distribution level. The new fairness metrics directly measure the difference between the distributions of the prediction probability for different demographic groups. Thus our proposed new metrics enjoy: i) zero-value ABCC/ABPC guarantees zero violation of demographic parity; ii) ABCC/ABPC guarantees demographic parity while the classification thresholds are adjusted. We further re-evaluate the existing fair models with our proposed fairness metrics and observe different fairness behaviors of those models under the new metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/ahxt/new_metric_for_demographic_parity

Ruixiang Tang, Xiaotian Han, Xiaoqian Jiang et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of highly potent models like OpenAI's ChatGPT. These models have exhibited exceptional performance in a variety of tasks, such as question answering, essay composition, and code generation. However, their effectiveness in the healthcare sector remains uncertain. In this study, we seek to investigate the potential of ChatGPT to aid in clinical text mining by examining its ability to extract structured information from unstructured healthcare texts, with a focus on biological named entity recognition and relation extraction. However, our preliminary results indicate that employing ChatGPT directly for these tasks resulted in poor performance and raised privacy concerns associated with uploading patients' information to the ChatGPT API. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new training paradigm that involves generating a vast quantity of high-quality synthetic data with labels utilizing ChatGPT and fine-tuning a local model for the downstream task. Our method has resulted in significant improvements in the performance of downstream tasks, improving the F1-score from 23.37% to 63.99% for the named entity recognition task and from 75.86% to 83.59% for the relation extraction task. Furthermore, generating data using ChatGPT can significantly reduce the time and effort required for data collection and labeling, as well as mitigate data privacy concerns. In summary, the proposed framework presents a promising solution to enhance the applicability of LLM models to clinical text mining.

Yicheng Wang, Xiaotian Han, Chia-Yuan Chang et al.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are revolutionizing science and engineering practice by bringing together the power of deep learning to bear on scientific computation. In forward modeling problems, PINNs are meshless partial differential equation (PDE) solvers that can handle irregular, high-dimensional physical domains. Naturally, the neural architecture hyperparameters have a large impact on the efficiency and accuracy of the PINN solver. However, this remains an open and challenging problem because of the large search space and the difficulty of identifying a proper search objective for PDEs. Here, we propose Auto-PINN, the first systematic, automated hyperparameter optimization approach for PINNs, which employs Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to PINN design. Auto-PINN avoids manually or exhaustively searching the hyperparameter space associated with PINNs. A comprehensive set of pre-experiments using standard PDE benchmarks allows us to probe the structure-performance relationship in PINNs. We find that the different hyperparameters can be decoupled, and that the training loss function of PINNs is a good search objective. Comparison experiments with baseline methods demonstrate that Auto-PINN produces neural architectures with superior stability and accuracy over alternative baselines.

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Hongye Jin, Xiaotian Han, Jingfeng Yang et al.

The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges, this paper introduces a novel, simple, and effective method named ``\growlength'' to accelerate the pretraining process of LLMs. Our method progressively increases the training length throughout the pretraining phase, thereby mitigating computational costs and enhancing efficiency. For instance, it begins with a sequence length of 128 and progressively extends to 4096. This approach enables models to process a larger number of tokens within limited time frames, potentially boosting their performance. In other words, the efficiency gain is derived from training with shorter sequences optimizing the utilization of resources. Our extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs have revealed that models trained using our method not only converge more swiftly but also exhibit superior performance metrics compared to those trained with existing methods. Furthermore, our method for LLMs pretraining acceleration does not require any additional engineering efforts, making it a practical solution in the realm of LLMs.

Hongye Jin, Xiaotian Han, Jingfeng Yang et al.

It is well known that LLMs cannot generalize well to long contexts whose lengths are larger than the training sequence length. This poses challenges when employing LLMs for processing long input sequences during inference. In this work, we argue that LLMs themselves have inherent capabilities to handle long contexts without fine-tuning. To achieve this goal, we propose SelfExtend to extend the context window of LLMs by constructing bi-level attention information: the grouped attention and the neighbor attention. The grouped attention captures the dependencies among tokens that are far apart, while neighbor attention captures dependencies among adjacent tokens within a specified range. The two-level attentions are computed based on the original model's self-attention mechanism during inference. With minor code modification, our SelfExtend can effortlessly extend existing LLMs' context window without any fine-tuning. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and the results show that our SelfExtend can effectively extend existing LLMs' context window length. The code can be found at \url{https://github.com/datamllab/LongLM}.

Xiaotian Han, Hanqing Zeng, Yu Chen et al.

This paper investigates the relationship between graph convolution and Mixup techniques. Graph convolution in a graph neural network involves aggregating features from neighboring samples to learn representative features for a specific node or sample. On the other hand, Mixup is a data augmentation technique that generates new examples by averaging features and one-hot labels from multiple samples. One commonality between these techniques is their utilization of information from multiple samples to derive feature representation. This study aims to explore whether a connection exists between these two approaches. Our investigation reveals that, under two mild conditions, graph convolution can be viewed as a specialized form of Mixup that is applied during both the training and testing phases. The two conditions are: 1) \textit{Homophily Relabel} - assigning the target node's label to all its neighbors, and 2) \textit{Test-Time Mixup} - Mixup the feature during the test time. We establish this equivalence mathematically by demonstrating that graph convolution networks (GCN) and simplified graph convolution (SGC) can be expressed as a form of Mixup. We also empirically verify the equivalence by training an MLP using the two conditions to achieve comparable performance.

Chia-Yuan Chang, Yu-Neng Chuang, Kwei-Herng Lai et al.

Despite the impressive prediction ability, machine learning models show discrimination towards certain demographics and suffer from unfair prediction behaviors. To alleviate the discrimination, extensive studies focus on eliminating the unequal distribution of sensitive attributes via multiple approaches. However, due to privacy concerns, sensitive attributes are often either unavailable or missing in real-world scenarios. Therefore, several existing works alleviate the bias without sensitive attributes. Those studies face challenges, either in inaccurate predictions of sensitive attributes or the need to mitigate unequal distribution of manually defined non-sensitive attributes related to bias. The latter requires strong assumptions about the correlation between sensitive and non-sensitive attributes. As data distribution and task goals vary, the strong assumption on non-sensitive attributes may not be valid and require domain expertise. In this work, we propose an assumption-free framework to detect the related attributes automatically by modeling feature interaction for bias mitigation. The proposed framework aims to mitigate the unfair impact of identified biased feature interactions. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can significantly alleviate unfair prediction behaviors by considering biased feature interactions.

Xiaotian Han, Quanzeng You, Yongfei Liu et al.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. These models not only excel in traditional vision-language tasks but also demonstrate impressive performance in contemporary multi-modal benchmarks. Although many of these benchmarks attempt to holistically evaluate MLLMs, they typically concentrate on basic reasoning tasks, often yielding only simple yes/no or multi-choice responses. These methods naturally lead to confusion and difficulties in conclusively determining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. To mitigate this issue, we manually curate a benchmark dataset specifically designed for MLLMs, with a focus on complex reasoning tasks. Our benchmark comprises three key reasoning categories: deductive, abductive, and analogical reasoning. The queries in our dataset are intentionally constructed to engage the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in the process of generating answers. For a fair comparison across various MLLMs, we incorporate intermediate reasoning steps into our evaluation criteria. In instances where an MLLM is unable to produce a definitive answer, its reasoning ability is evaluated by requesting intermediate reasoning steps. If these steps align with our manual annotations, appropriate scores are assigned. This evaluation scheme resembles methods commonly used in human assessments, such as exams or assignments, and represents what we consider a more effective assessment technique compared with existing benchmarks. We evaluate a selection of representative MLLMs using this rigorously developed open-ended multi-step elaborate reasoning benchmark, designed to challenge and accurately measure their reasoning capabilities. The code and data will be released at https://infimm.github.io/InfiMM-Eval/

Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Congkai Xie et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have powered Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, showing promise in automating tasks on computing devices. Recent works have begun exploring reasoning in GUI tasks with encouraging results. However, many current approaches rely on manually designed reasoning templates, which may result in reasoning that is not sufficiently robust and adaptive for complex GUI environments. Meanwhile, some existing agents continue to operate as Reactive Actors, relying primarily on implicit reasoning that may lack sufficient depth for GUI tasks demanding planning and error recovery. We argue that advancing these agents requires a shift from reactive acting towards acting based on deliberate reasoning. To facilitate this transformation, we introduce InfiGUI-R1, an MLLM-based GUI agent developed through our Actor2Reasoner framework, a reasoning-centric, two-stage training approach designed to progressively evolve agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners. The first stage, Reasoning Injection, focuses on establishing a basic reasoner. We employ Spatial Reasoning Distillation to transfer cross-modal spatial reasoning capabilities from teacher models to MLLMs through trajectories with explicit reasoning steps, enabling models to integrate GUI visual-spatial information with logical reasoning before action generation. The second stage, Deliberation Enhancement, refines the basic reasoner into a deliberative one using Reinforcement Learning. This stage introduces two approaches: Sub-goal Guidance, which rewards models for generating accurate intermediate sub-goals, and Error Recovery Scenario Construction, which creates failure-and-recovery training scenarios from identified prone-to-error steps. Experimental results show InfiGUI-R1 achieves strong performance in GUI grounding and trajectory tasks. Resources at https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUI-R1.

Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents, powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), have shown great potential for task automation on computing devices such as computers and mobile phones. However, existing agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. We introduce \textit{InfiGUIAgent}, an MLLM-based GUI Agent trained with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline. Stage 1 enhances fundamental skills such as GUI understanding and grounding, while Stage 2 integrates hierarchical reasoning and expectation-reflection reasoning skills using synthesized data to enable native reasoning abilities of the agents. \textit{InfiGUIAgent} achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. Resources are available at \url{https://github.com/Reallm-Labs/InfiGUIAgent}.

Yuang Ai, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang et al.

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

Zhimeng Jiang, Xiaotian Han, Chao Fan et al.

There has been significant progress in improving the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) through enhancements in graph data, model architecture design, and training strategies. For fairness in graphs, recent studies achieve fair representations and predictions through either graph data pre-processing (e.g., node feature masking, and topology rewiring) or fair training strategies (e.g., regularization, adversarial debiasing, and fair contrastive learning). How to achieve fairness in graphs from the model architecture perspective is less explored. More importantly, GNNs exhibit worse fairness performance compared to multilayer perception since their model architecture (i.e., neighbor aggregation) amplifies biases. To this end, we aim to achieve fairness via a new GNN architecture. We propose \textsf{F}air \textsf{M}essage \textsf{P}assing (FMP) designed within a unified optimization framework for GNNs. Notably, FMP \textit{explicitly} renders sensitive attribute usage in \textit{forward propagation} for node classification task using cross-entropy loss without data pre-processing. In FMP, the aggregation is first adopted to utilize neighbors' information and then the bias mitigation step explicitly pushes demographic group node presentation centers together. In this way, FMP scheme can aggregate useful information from neighbors and mitigate bias to achieve better fairness and prediction tradeoff performance. Experiments on node classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed FMP outperforms several baselines in terms of fairness and accuracy on three real-world datasets. The code is available in {\url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/FMP}}.

Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Xiaotian Han et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancements recently. Nevertheless, challenges persist in the accurate recognition and comprehension of intricate details within high-resolution images. Despite being indispensable for the development of robust MLLMs, this area remains underinvestigated. To tackle this challenge, our work introduces InfiMM-HD, a novel architecture specifically designed for processing images of different resolutions with low computational overhead. This innovation facilitates the enlargement of MLLMs to higher-resolution capabilities. InfiMM-HD incorporates a cross-attention module and visual windows to reduce computation costs. By integrating this architectural design with a four-stage training pipeline, our model attains improved visual perception efficiently and cost-effectively. Empirical study underscores the robustness and effectiveness of InfiMM-HD, opening new avenues for exploration in related areas. Codes and models can be found at https://huggingface.co/Infi-MM/infimm-hd

Yicheng Wang, Xiaotian Han, Leisheng Yu et al.

Parkinson's disease (PD), a neurodegenerative disorder, often manifests as speech and voice dysfunction. While utilizing voice data for PD detection has great potential in clinical applications, the widely used deep learning models currently have fairness issues regarding different ages of onset. These deep models perform well for the elderly group (age $>$ 55) but are less accurate for the young group (age $\leq$ 55). Through our investigation, the discrepancy between the elderly and the young arises due to 1) an imbalanced dataset and 2) the milder symptoms often seen in early-onset patients. However, traditional debiasing methods are impractical as they typically impair the prediction accuracy for the majority group while minimizing the discrepancy. To address this issue, we present a new debiasing method using GradCAM-based feature masking combined with ensemble models, ensuring that neither fairness nor accuracy is compromised. Specifically, the GradCAM-based feature masking selectively obscures age-related features in the input voice data while preserving essential information for PD detection. The ensemble models further improve the prediction accuracy for the minority (young group). Our approach effectively improves detection accuracy for early-onset patients without sacrificing performance for the elderly group. Additionally, we propose a two-step detection strategy for the young group, offering a practical risk assessment for potential early-onset PD patients.

Yuhang Liu, Zeyu Liu, Shuanghe Zhu et al.

The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has propelled the development of autonomous agents that operate on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using pure visual input. A fundamental challenge is robustly grounding natural language instructions. This requires a precise spatial alignment, which accurately locates the coordinates of each element, and, more critically, a correct semantic alignment, which matches the instructions to the functionally appropriate UI element. Although Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be effective at improving spatial alignment for these MLLMs, we find that inefficient exploration bottlenecks semantic alignment, which prevent models from learning difficult semantic associations. To address this exploration problem, we present Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimization (AEPO), a new policy optimization framework. AEPO employs a multi-answer generation strategy to enforce broader exploration, which is then guided by a theoretically grounded Adaptive Exploration Reward (AER) function derived from first principles of efficiency eta=U/C. Our AEPO-trained models, InfiGUI-G1-3B and InfiGUI-G1-7B, establish new state-of-the-art results across multiple challenging GUI grounding benchmarks, achieving significant relative improvements of up to 9.0% against the naive RLVR baseline on benchmarks designed to test generalization and semantic understanding. Resources are available at https://github.com/InfiXAI/InfiGUI-G1.

Runjia Zeng, Guangyan Sun, Qifan Wang et al.

Considering deep neural networks as manifold mappers, the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm can be interpreted as a two-stage process: pretrain establishes a broad knowledge base, and fine-tune adjusts the model parameters to activate specific neural pathways to align with the target manifold. Although prior fine-tuning approaches demonstrate success, their rigid parameter space limits their ability to dynamically activate appropriate neural pathways, rendering them ill-equipped to adapt flexibly to the diverse and evolving data distributions. In light of this view, we propose a novel approach, Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning (MEPT), as an effective and efficient manifold-mapping framework. MEPT leverages the Mixture of Experts architecture by integrating multiple prompt experts to adaptively learn diverse and non-stationary data distributions. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MEPT outperforms several state-of-the-art parameter efficient baselines on SuperGLUE, achieving notable improvements in mean accuracy (e.g., 1.94%) while significantly reducing activated prompts by 79.25%. The effectiveness of MEPT is further supported by theoretical insights from manifold learning and validated through neural activation pathway visualization results. Our code is avaliable at https://runjia.tech/emnlp_mept/.

Yao Fu, Xianxuan Long, Runchao Li et al.

Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing memory and computation costs. While quantized LLMs often maintain performance on perplexity and zero-shot tasks, their impact on truthfulness-whether generating truthful or deceptive responses-remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce TruthfulnessEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the truthfulness of quantized LLMs across three dimensions: (1) Truthfulness on Logical Reasoning; (2) Truthfulness on Common Sense; and (3) Truthfulness on Imitative Falsehoods. Using this framework, we examine mainstream quantization techniques (ranging from 4-bit to extreme 2-bit) across several open-source LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that while quantized models retain internally truthful representations, they are more susceptible to producing false outputs under misleading prompts. To probe this vulnerability, we test 15 rephrased variants of "honest", "neutral" and "deceptive" prompts and observe that "deceptive" prompts can override truth-consistent behavior, whereas "honest" and "neutral" prompts maintain stable outputs. Further, we reveal that quantized models "know" the truth internally yet still produce false outputs when guided by "deceptive" prompts via layer-wise probing and PCA visualizations. Our findings provide insights into future designs of quantization-aware alignment and truthfulness interventions.

Xiaotian Han, Kaixiong Zhou, Ting-Hsiang Wang et al.

In social network, a person located at the periphery region (marginal node) is likely to be treated unfairly when compared with the persons at the center. While existing fairness works on graphs mainly focus on protecting sensitive attributes (e.g., age and gender), the fairness incurred by the graph structure should also be given attention. On the other hand, the information aggregation mechanism of graph neural networks amplifies such structure unfairness, as marginal nodes are often far away from other nodes. In this paper, we focus on novel fairness incurred by the graph structure on graph neural networks, named \emph{structure fairness}. Specifically, we first analyzed multiple graphs and observed that marginal nodes in graphs have a worse performance of downstream tasks than others in graph neural networks. Motivated by the observation, we propose \textbf{S}tructural \textbf{Fair} \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etwork (SFairGNN), which combines neighborhood expansion based structure debiasing with hop-aware attentive information aggregation to achieve structure fairness. Our experiments show \SFairGNN can significantly improve structure fairness while maintaining overall performance in the downstream tasks.

Yiqi Wang, Wentao Chen, Xiaotian Han et al.

Strong Artificial Intelligence (Strong AI) or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with abstract reasoning ability is the goal of next-generation AI. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), along with the emerging field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks and applications. Particularly, various MLLMs, each with distinct model architectures, training data, and training stages, have been evaluated across a broad range of MLLM benchmarks. These studies have, to varying degrees, revealed different aspects of the current capabilities of MLLMs. However, the reasoning abilities of MLLMs have not been systematically investigated. In this survey, we comprehensively review the existing evaluation protocols of multimodal reasoning, categorize and illustrate the frontiers of MLLMs, introduce recent trends in applications of MLLMs on reasoning-intensive tasks, and finally discuss current practices and future directions. We believe our survey establishes a solid base and sheds light on this important topic, multimodal reasoning.

Phat Thanh Dang, Saahil Thoppay, Wang Yang et al.

Large language models suffer issues when operated on long contexts that are larger than their training context length due to the standard position encoding for tokens in the attention layer. Tokens a long distance apart will rarely have an effect on each other and long prompts yield unexpected results. To solve this problem, we propose SELF (Self-Extend the Context Length With Logistic Growth Function): a solution of grouping consecutive tokens at varying group sizes using a logistic capacity equation combined with a constant group size at smaller relative distances. Our model had an increase in performance of up to 12% compared to the LongLM extension method in LEval (specifically on the Qwen model). On summarization related tasks in LongBench, our model performed up to 6.4% better than LongLM (specifically on the Llama-2-7b model). On reading comprehension tasks from LEval, our model performed up to 5.4% better than the LongLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/alexeipc/SELF-LLM.

Xiaotian Han, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou et al.

Deep neural networks are prone to various bias issues, jeopardizing their applications for high-stake decision-making. Existing fairness methods typically offer a fixed accuracy-fairness trade-off, since the weight of the well-trained model is a fixed point (fairness-optimum) in the weight space. Nevertheless, more flexible accuracy-fairness trade-offs at inference time are practically desired since: 1) stakes of the same downstream task can vary for different individuals, and 2) different regions have diverse laws or regularization for fairness. If using the previous fairness methods, we have to train multiple models, each offering a specific level of accuracy-fairness trade-off. This is often computationally expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to deploy, making it less practical for real-world applications. To address this problem, we propose You Only Debias Once (YODO) to achieve in-situ flexible accuracy-fairness trade-offs at inference time, using a single model that trained only once. Instead of pursuing one individual fixed point (fairness-optimum) in the weight space, we aim to find a "line" in the weight space that connects the accuracy-optimum and fairness-optimum points using a single model. Points (models) on this line implement varying levels of accuracy-fairness trade-offs. At inference time, by manually selecting the specific position of the learned "line", our proposed method can achieve arbitrary accuracy-fairness trade-offs for different end-users and scenarios. Experimental results on tabular and image datasets show that YODO achieves flexible trade-offs between model accuracy and fairness, at ultra-low overheads. For example, if we need $100$ levels of trade-off on the \acse dataset, YODO takes $3.53$ seconds while training $100$ fixed models consumes $425$ seconds. The code is available at https://github.com/ahxt/yodo.

Mohsen Hariri, Alan Luo, Weicong Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer inference-time memory bottlenecks dominated by the attention Key-Value (KV) cache, which scales with model size and context length. While KV-cache quantization alleviates this cost, bit allocation between keys and values is often tuned heuristically, lacking theoretical grounding and generalizability. This paper proposes two theorems that anchor mixed-precision KV quantization in the intrinsic geometry of Transformer models. First, key projections systematically have larger spectral and Frobenius norms than value matrices, implying higher information density along the key path. Second, for any given memory budget, prioritizing precision for keys over values strictly reduces quantization error and better preserves accuracy. Empirical evaluations across various prominent LLMs and benchmarks show that key-favored allocations (e.g., 4-bit keys, 2-bit values) retain up to 98.3\% accuracy compared to uniform allocations (e.g., 4-bit for both), while conserving memory. These results transform bit allocation from ad hoc tuning into a theoretically grounded, geometry-driven design principle for efficient LLM inference. Source code is available at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/spectral-kv.

Yao Fu, Yin Yu, Xiaotian Han et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has become a widely adopted approach for compressing large language models (LLMs) to reduce computational costs and memory footprints. However, the availability of complex teacher models is a prerequisite for running most KD pipelines. Thus, the traditional KD procedure can be unachievable or budget-unfriendly, particularly when relying on commercial LLMs like GPT4. In this regard, Self-distillation (SelfD) emerges as an advisable alternative, enabling student models to learn without teachers' guidance. Nonetheless, existing SelfD approaches for LMs often involve architectural modifications, assuming the models are open-source, which may not always be practical. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic and task-agnostic method named dynamic SelfD from the previous minibatch (DynSDPB), which realizes current iterations' distillation from the last ones' generated logits. Additionally, to address prediction inaccuracies during the early iterations, we dynamically adjust the distillation influence and temperature values to enhance the adaptability of fine-tuning. Furthermore, DynSDPB is a novel fine-tuning policy that facilitates the seamless integration of existing self-correction and self-training techniques for small language models (SLMs) because they all require updating SLMs' parameters. We demonstrate the superior performance of DynSDPB on both encoder-only LMs (e.g., BERT model families) and decoder-only LMs (e.g., LLaMA model families), validating its effectiveness across natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks.

Zhimeng Jiang, Zirui Liu, Xiaotian Han et al.

Deep neural networks are ubiquitously adopted in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and graph analytics. However, well-trained neural networks can make prediction errors after deployment as the world changes. \textit{Model editing} involves updating the base model to correct prediction errors with less accessible training data and computational resources. Despite recent advances in model editors in computer vision and natural language processing, editable training in graph neural networks (GNNs) is rarely explored. The challenge with editable GNN training lies in the inherent information aggregation across neighbors, which can lead model editors to affect the predictions of other nodes unintentionally. In this paper, we first observe the gradient of cross-entropy loss for the target node and training nodes with significant inconsistency, which indicates that directly fine-tuning the base model using the loss on the target node deteriorates the performance on training nodes. Motivated by the gradient inconsistency observation, we propose a simple yet effective \underline{G}radient \underline{R}ewiring method for \underline{E}ditable graph neural network training, named \textbf{GRE}. Specifically, we first store the anchor gradient of the loss on training nodes to preserve the locality. Subsequently, we rewire the gradient of the loss on the target node to preserve performance on the training node using anchor gradient. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GRE on various model architectures and graph datasets in terms of multiple editing situations. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/Gradient_rewiring_editing}

Xiaotian Han, Jianwei Yang, Houdong Hu et al.

There is a surge of interest in image scene graph generation (object, attribute and relationship detection) due to the need of building fine-grained image understanding models that go beyond object detection. Due to the lack of a good benchmark, the reported results of different scene graph generation models are not directly comparable, impeding the research progress. We have developed a much-needed scene graph generation benchmark based on the maskrcnn-benchmark and several popular models. This paper presents main features of our benchmark and a comprehensive ablation study of scene graph generation models using the Visual Genome and OpenImages Visual relationship detection datasets. Our codebase is made publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/scene_graph_benchmark.

Ting-Hsiang Wang, Qingquan Song, Xiaotian Han et al.

Realistic recommender systems are often required to adapt to ever-changing data and tasks or to explore different models systematically. To address the need, we present AutoRec, an open-source automated machine learning (AutoML) platform extended from the TensorFlow ecosystem and, to our knowledge, the first framework to leverage AutoML for model search and hyperparameter tuning in deep recommendation models. AutoRec also supports a highly flexible pipeline that accommodates both sparse and dense inputs, rating prediction and click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, and an array of recommendation models. Lastly, AutoRec provides a simple, user-friendly API. Experiments conducted on the benchmark datasets reveal AutoRec is reliable and can identify models which resemble the best model without prior knowledge.

Wang Yang, Xiang Yue, Vipin Chaudhary et al.

Recent advances leverage post-training to enhance model reasoning performance, which typically requires costly training pipelines and still suffers from inefficient, overly lengthy outputs. We introduce Speculative Thinking, a training-free framework that enables large reasoning models to guide smaller ones during inference at the reasoning level, distinct from speculative decoding, which operates at the token level. Our approach is based on two observations: (1) reasoning-supportive tokens such as "wait" frequently appear after structural delimiters like "\n\n", serving as signals for reflection or continuation; and (2) larger models exhibit stronger control over reflective behavior, reducing unnecessary backtracking while improving reasoning quality. By strategically delegating reflective steps to a more capable model, our method significantly boosts the reasoning accuracy of reasoning models while shortening their output. With the assistance of the 32B reasoning model, the 1.5B model's accuracy on MATH500 increases from 83.2% to 89.4%, marking a substantial improvement of 6.2%. Simultaneously, the average output length is reduced from 5439 tokens to 4583 tokens, representing a 15.7% decrease. Moreover, when applied to a non-reasoning model (Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct), our framework boosts its accuracy from 74.0% to 81.8% on the same benchmark, achieving a relative improvement of 7.8%.

Shouren Wang, Wang Yang, Chuang Ma et al.

Hybrid-thinking language models expose explicit think and no-think modes, but current designs do not separate them cleanly. Even in no-think mode, models often emit long and self-reflective responses, causing reasoning leakage. Existing work reduces this issue through better data curation and multi-stage training, yet leakage remains because both modes are still encoded in the same feed-forward parameters. We propose Path-Lock Expert (PLE), an architecture-level solution that replaces the single MLP in each decoder layer with two semantically locked experts, one for think and one for no-think, while keeping attention, embeddings, normalization, and the language-model head shared. A deterministic control-token router selects exactly one expert path for the entire sequence, so inference preserves the dense model's per-token computation pattern and each expert receives mode-pure updates during supervised fine-tuning. Across math and science reasoning benchmarks, PLE maintains strong think performance while producing a substantially stronger no-think mode that is more accurate, more concise, and far less prone to reasoning leakage. On Qwen3-4B, for example, PLE reduces no-think reflective tokens on AIME24 from 2.54 to 0.39 and improves no-think accuracy from 20.67% to 40.00%, all while preserving think-mode performance. These results suggest that controllable hybrid thinking is fundamentally an architectural problem, and separating mode-specific feed-forward pathways is a simple and effective solution.

Qihang Fan, Quanzeng You, Xiaotian Han et al.

This paper tackles a significant challenge faced by Vision Transformers (ViTs): their constrained scalability across different image resolutions. Typically, ViTs experience a performance decline when processing resolutions different from those seen during training. Our work introduces two key innovations to address this issue. Firstly, we propose a novel module for dynamic resolution adjustment, designed with a single Transformer block, specifically to achieve highly efficient incremental token integration. Secondly, we introduce fuzzy positional encoding in the Vision Transformer to provide consistent positional awareness across multiple resolutions, thereby preventing overfitting to any single training resolution. Our resulting model, ViTAR (Vision Transformer with Any Resolution), demonstrates impressive adaptability, achieving 83.3\% top-1 accuracy at a 1120x1120 resolution and 80.4\% accuracy at a 4032x4032 resolution, all while reducing computational costs. ViTAR also shows strong performance in downstream tasks such as instance and semantic segmentation and can easily combined with self-supervised learning techniques like Masked AutoEncoder. Our work provides a cost-effective solution for enhancing the resolution scalability of ViTs, paving the way for more versatile and efficient high-resolution image processing.

Feng Luo, Yu-Neng Chuang, Guanchu Wang et al.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student models under their own induced distribution while leveraging supervision from stronger teachers. We identify a failure mode of OPD: as training progresses, on-policy rollouts can undergo abrupt length inflation, causing truncated trajectories to dominate the training data. This truncation collapse coincides with abrupt repetition saturation and induces biased gradient signals, leading to severe training instability and sharp degradation in validation performance. We attribute this problem to the interaction between student-induced data collection and the distillation objective, which implicitly favors long and repetitive rollouts. To address this issue, we propose StableOPD, a stabilized OPD framework that combines a reference-based divergence constraint with rollout mixture distillation. These together mitigate repetition-induced length inflation and further stabilize OPD training. Across multiple math reasoning datasets, our approach prevents truncation collapse, stabilizes training dynamics, and improves performance by 7.2% on average.

Zhuoran Qiao, Feizhi Ding, Thomas Dresselhaus et al.

Structure determination is essential to a mechanistic understanding of diseases and the development of novel therapeutics. Machine-learning-based structure prediction methods have made significant advancements by computationally predicting protein and bioassembly structures from sequences and molecular topology alone. Despite substantial progress in the field, challenges remain to deliver structure prediction models to real-world drug discovery. Here, we present NeuralPLexer3 -- a physics-inspired flow-based generative model that achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on key biomolecular interaction types and improves training and sampling efficiency compared to its predecessors and alternative methodologies. Examined through newly developed benchmarking strategies, NeuralPLexer3 excels in vital areas that are crucial to structure-based drug design, such as physical validity and ligand-induced conformational changes.

Nengbo Wang, Xiaotian Han, Jagdip Singh et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), particularly through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances LLM capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, traditional RAG systems face critical limitations, including disrupted contextual integrity due to text chunking, and over-reliance on semantic similarity for retrieval. To address these issues, we propose CausalRAG, a novel framework that incorporates causal graphs into the retrieval process. By constructing and tracing causal relationships, CausalRAG preserves contextual continuity and improves retrieval precision, leading to more accurate and interpretable responses. We evaluate CausalRAG against regular RAG and graph-based RAG approaches, demonstrating its superiority across several metrics. Our findings suggest that grounding retrieval in causal reasoning provides a promising approach to knowledge-intensive tasks.

Wang Yang, Hongye Jin, Jingfeng Yang et al.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) has been a go-to and effective method for enhancing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in relatively small LLMs by fine-tuning them with long CoT responses from larger LLMs. To continually improve reasoning abilities, we can either collect new high-quality long CoT reasoning SFT data or repeatedly train on existing SFT datasets. However, acquiring new long CoT SFT data is costly and limited, while repeated training often results in a performance plateau or decline. To further boost the performance with the SFT data, we propose Thinking Preference Optimization (ThinkPO), a simple yet effective post-SFT method that enhances long CoT reasoning without requiring new long CoT responses. Instead, ThinkPO utilizes readily available or easily obtainable short CoT reasoning responses as rejected answers and long CoT responses as chosen answers for the same question. It then applies direct preference optimization to encourage the model to favor longer reasoning outputs. Experiments show that ThinkPO further improves the reasoning performance of SFT-ed models, e.g. it increases math reasoning accuracy of SFT-ed models by 8.6% and output length by 25.9%. Notably, ThinkPO is capable of continually boosting the performance of the publicly distilled SFT model, e.g., increasing the official DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B's performance on MATH500 from 87.4% to 91.2%.

Yao Fu, Runchao Li, Xianxuan Long et al.

Neural network pruning has emerged as a promising approach for deploying LLMs in low-resource scenarios while preserving downstream task performance. However, for the first time, we reveal that such pruning disrupts LLMs' internal activation features crucial for lie detection, where probing classifiers (typically small logistic regression models) trained on these features assess the truthfulness of LLM-generated statements. This discovery raises a crucial open question: how can we prune LLMs without sacrificing these critical lie detection capabilities? Our investigation further reveals that naively adjusting layer-wise pruning sparsity based on importance inadvertently removes crucial weights, failing to improve lie detection performance despite its reliance on the most crucial LLM layer. To address this issue, we propose Truthful Pruning aligned by Layer-wise Outliers (TPLO), which places greater emphasis on layers with more activation outliers and stronger discriminative features simultaneously. This preserves LLMs' original performance while retaining critical features of inner states needed for robust lie detection. Moreover, we introduce a prompting rule to enrich the TruthfulQA benchmark for better calibrating LLM pruning. Empirical results show that our approach improves the hallucination detection for pruned LLMs (achieving 88% accuracy at 50% sparsity) and enhances their performance on TruthfulQA.

Wang Yang, Zirui Liu, Hongye Jin et al.

Recent language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the influence of long-context capacity on reasoning remains underexplored. In this work, we hypothesize that current limitations in reasoning stem, in part, from insufficient long-context capacity, motivated by empirical observations such as (1) higher context window length often leads to stronger reasoning performance, and (2) failed reasoning cases resemble failed long-context cases. To test this hypothesis, we examine whether enhancing a model's long-context ability before Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) leads to improved reasoning performance. Specifically, we compared models with identical architectures and fine-tuning data but varying levels of long-context capacity. Our results reveal a consistent trend: models with stronger long-context capacity achieve significantly higher accuracy on reasoning benchmarks after SFT. Notably, these gains persist even on tasks with short input lengths, indicating that long-context training offers generalizable benefits for reasoning performance. These findings suggest that long-context modeling is not just essential for processing lengthy inputs, but also serves as a critical foundation for reasoning. We advocate for treating long-context capacity as a first-class objective in the design of future language models.

Xiaotian Han, Yiqi Wang, Bohan Zhai et al.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. Visual instruction fine-tuning (IFT) is a vital process for aligning MLLMs' output with user's intentions. High-quality and diversified instruction following data is the key to this fine-tuning process. Recent studies propose to construct visual IFT datasets through a multifaceted approach: transforming existing datasets with rule-based templates, employing GPT-4 for rewriting annotations, and utilizing GPT-4V for visual dataset pseudo-labeling. LLaVA-1.5 adopted similar approach and construct LLaVA-mix-665k, which is one of the simplest, most widely used, yet most effective IFT datasets today. Notably, when properly fine-tuned with this dataset, MLLMs can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks. However, we noticed that models trained with this dataset often struggle to follow user instructions properly in multi-round dialog. In addition, tradition caption and VQA evaluation benchmarks, with their closed-form evaluation structure, are not fully equipped to assess the capabilities of modern open-ended generative MLLMs. This problem is not unique to the LLaVA-mix-665k dataset, but may be a potential issue in all IFT datasets constructed from image captioning or VQA sources, though the extent of this issue may vary. We argue that datasets with diverse and high-quality detailed instruction following annotations are essential and adequate for MLLMs IFT. In this work, we establish a new IFT dataset, with images sourced from the COCO dataset along with more diverse instructions. Our experiments show that when fine-tuned with out proposed dataset, MLLMs achieve better performance on open-ended evaluation benchmarks in both single-round and multi-round dialog setting.

Wang Yang, Chaoda Song, Xinpeng Li et al.

Existing Agent benchmarks suffer from two critical limitations: high environment interaction overhead (up to 41\% of total evaluation time) and imbalanced task horizon and difficulty distributions that make aggregate scores unreliable. To address these issues, we propose ACE-Bench built around a unified grid-based planning task, where agents must fill hidden slots in a partially completed schedule subject to both local slot constraints and global constraints. Our benchmark offers fine-grained control through two orthogonal axes: Scalable Horizons, controlled by the number of hidden slots $H$, and Controllable Difficulty, governed by a decoy budget $B$ that determines the number of globally misleading decoy candidates. Crucially, all tool calls are resolved via static JSON files under a Lightweight Environment design, eliminating setup overhead and enabling fast, reproducible evaluation suitable for training-time validation. We first validate that H and B provide reliable control over task horizon and difficulty, and that ACE-Bench exhibits strong domain consistency and model discriminability. We then conduct comprehensive experiments across 13 models of diverse sizes and families over 6 domains, revealing significant cross-model performance variation and confirming that ACE-Bench provides interpretable and controllable evaluation of agent reasoning.

Xianxuan Long, Yao Fu, Runchao Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. How deceptive instructions alter the internal representations of LLM compared to truthful ones remains poorly understood beyond output analysis. To bridge this gap, we investigate when and how these representations ``flip'', such as from truthful to deceptive, under deceptive versus truthful/neutral instructions. Analyzing the internal representations of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Gemma-2-9B-Instruct on a factual verification task, we find the model's instructed True/False output is predictable via linear probes across all conditions based on the internal representation. Further, we use Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to show that the Deceptive instructions induce significant representational shifts compared to Truthful/Neutral representations (which are similar), concentrated in early-to-mid layers and detectable even on complex datasets. We also identify specific SAE features highly sensitive to deceptive instruction and use targeted visualizations to confirm distinct truthful/deceptive representational subspaces. % Our analysis pinpoints layer-wise and feature-level correlates of instructed dishonesty, offering insights for LLM detection and control. Our findings expose feature- and layer-level signatures of deception, offering new insights for detecting and mitigating instructed dishonesty in LLMs.

Congkai Xie, Shuo Cai, Wenjun Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges such as high computational demands and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on developing efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) that retain competitive reasoning abilities. We introduce a novel training pipeline that enhances reasoning capabilities and facilitates deployment on edge devices, achieving state-of-the-art performance while minimizing development costs. \InfR~ aims to advance AI systems by improving reasoning, reducing adoption barriers, and addressing privacy concerns through smaller model sizes. Resources are available at https://github. com/Reallm-Labs/InfiR.

Hengrui Gu, Xiaotian Han, Yujing Bian et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, it faces a fundamental limitation termed \textit{restricted exploration}, where the policy rapidly converges to a narrow set of solutions. While entropy regularization is a popular approach used to sustain exploration, it often proves unreliable for LLMs, suffering from high hyperparameter sensitivity and yielding only marginal performance gains. Motivated by these inefficiencies, we propose to rethink the relationship between policy entropy and exploration. By deriving a parametric formulation of group-relative advantage estimation and analyzing entropy dynamics, we conceptually decompose policy entropy into \textit{informative entropy}, which preserves diverse solution paths, and \textit{spurious entropy}, which erodes reasoning patterns. Our analysis reveals that, in contrast to blind maximization, effective exploration requires \textit{entropy refinement}-a mechanism implicitly embedded in group-relative advantage estimation that sustains informative entropy on positive rollouts while suppressing spurious entropy on negative ones. Guided by this insight, we propose \textbf{AsymGRPO}, an exploratory framework that explicitly decouples the modulation of positive and negative rollouts. This allows for independent control over the preservation of informative entropy and the suppression of spurious noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AsymGRPO achieves superior performance compared to strong baselines and exhibits the potential to synergize with existing entropy regularization methods.

Yiyang Liu, James C. Liang, Heng Fan et al.

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) approach to facilitate Large Language Model (LLM) adaptation to downstream tasks by conditioning generation with task-aware guidance. Despite its successes, current prompt-based learning methods heavily rely on laborious grid searching for optimal prompt length and typically require considerable number of prompts, introducing additional computational burden. Worse yet, our pioneer findings indicate that the task-aware prompt design is inherently limited by its absence of instance-aware information, leading to a subtle attention interplay with the input sequence. In contrast, simply incorporating instance-aware information as a part of the guidance can enhance the prompt-tuned model performance without additional fine-tuning. Moreover, we find an interesting phenomenon, namely "attention anchor", that incorporating instance-aware tokens at the earliest position of the sequence can successfully preserve strong attention to critical structural information and exhibit more active attention interaction with all input tokens. In light of our observation, we introduce Capsule Prompt-Tuning (CaPT), an efficient and effective solution that leverages off-the-shelf, informative instance semantics into prompt-based learning. Our approach innovatively integrates both instance-aware and task-aware information in a nearly parameter-free manner (i.e., one single capsule prompt). Empirical results demonstrate that our method can exhibit superior performance across various language tasks (e.g., 84.03\% average accuracy on T5-Large), serving as an "attention anchor," while enjoying high parameter efficiency (e.g., 0.003\% of model parameters on Llama3.2-1B).

Wang Yang, Hongye Jin, Shaochen Zhong et al.

Long-context capability is considered one of the most important abilities of LLMs, as a truly long context-capable LLM enables users to effortlessly process many originally exhausting tasks -- e.g., digesting a long-form document to find answers vs. directly asking an LLM about it. However, existing real-task-based long-context evaluation benchmarks have two major shortcomings. First, benchmarks like LongBench often do not provide proper metrics to separate long-context performance from the model's baseline ability, making cross-model comparison unclear. Second, such benchmarks are usually constructed with fixed input lengths, which limits their applicability across different models and fails to reveal when a model begins to break down. To address these issues, we introduce a length-controllable long-context benchmark and a novel metric that disentangles baseline knowledge from true long-context capabilities. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in effectively evaluating LLMs.