OlympicArena: Benchmarking Multi-discipline Cognitive Reasoning for Superintelligent AIZhen Huang, Zengzhi Wang, Shijie Xia et al.
The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problem-solving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy, illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.
O1 Replication Journey -- Part 2: Surpassing O1-preview through Simple Distillation, Big Progress or Bitter Lesson?Zhen Huang, Haoyang Zou, Xuefeng Li et al.
This paper presents a critical examination of current approaches to replicating OpenAI's O1 model capabilities, with particular focus on the widespread but often undisclosed use of knowledge distillation techniques. While our previous work explored the fundamental technical path to O1 replication, this study reveals how simple distillation from O1's API, combined with supervised fine-tuning, can achieve superior performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that a base model fine-tuned on simply tens of thousands of samples O1-distilled long-thought chains outperforms O1-preview on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) with minimal technical complexity. Moreover, our investigation extends beyond mathematical reasoning to explore the generalization capabilities of O1-distilled models across diverse tasks: hallucination, safety and open-domain QA. Notably, despite training only on mathematical problem-solving data, our models demonstrated strong generalization to open-ended QA tasks and became significantly less susceptible to sycophancy after fine-tuning. We deliberately make this finding public to promote transparency in AI research and to challenge the current trend of obscured technical claims in the field. Our work includes: (1) A detailed technical exposition of the distillation process and its effectiveness, (2) A comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating and categorizing O1 replication attempts based on their technical transparency and reproducibility, (3) A critical discussion of the limitations and potential risks of over-relying on distillation approaches, our analysis culminates in a crucial bitter lesson: while the pursuit of more capable AI systems is important, the development of researchers grounded in first-principles thinking is paramount.
10.9CLJul 21, 2025
Interaction as Intelligence: Deep Research With Human-AI PartnershipLyumanshan Ye, Xiaojie Cai, Xinkai Wang et al.
This paper introduces "Interaction as Intelligence" research series, presenting a reconceptualization of human-AI relationships in deep research tasks. Traditional approaches treat interaction merely as an interface for accessing AI capabilities-a conduit between human intent and machine output. We propose that interaction itself constitutes a fundamental dimension of intelligence. As AI systems engage in extended thinking processes for research tasks, meaningful interaction transitions from an optional enhancement to an essential component of effective intelligence. Current deep research systems adopt an "input-wait-output" paradigm where users initiate queries and receive results after black-box processing. This approach leads to error cascade effects, inflexible research boundaries that prevent question refinement during investigation, and missed opportunities for expertise integration. To address these limitations, we introduce Deep Cognition, a system that transforms the human role from giving instructions to cognitive oversight-a mode of engagement where humans guide AI thinking processes through strategic intervention at critical junctures. Deep cognition implements three key innovations: (1)Transparent, controllable, and interruptible interaction that reveals AI reasoning and enables intervention at any point; (2)Fine-grained bidirectional dialogue; and (3)Shared cognitive context where the system observes and adapts to user behaviors without explicit instruction. User evaluation demonstrates that this cognitive oversight paradigm outperforms the strongest baseline across six key metrics: Transparency(+20.0%), Fine-Grained Interaction(+29.2%), Real-Time Intervention(+18.5%), Ease of Collaboration(+27.7%), Results-Worth-Effort(+8.8%), and Interruptibility(+20.7%). Evaluations on challenging research problems show 31.8% to 50.0% points of improvements over deep research systems.