Congkai Xie

AI
h-index11
17papers
269citations
Novelty53%
AI Score60

17 Papers

CLMay 31
PMC-InterCPT: Rethinking Biomedical Interleaved Data for Multimodal Continued Pretraining

Guanghao Zhu, Zeyu Liu, Zhitian Hou et al.

Large-scale biomedical image-text datasets extracted from scientific literature provide valuable resources for medical multimodal model training. These datasets are commonly organized as image-caption pairs; however, figure captions are often short, context-dependent, and only partially informative without the surrounding article text. At the same time, large-scale automatic extraction introduces structural noise such as missing captions, residual markup, duplicated context, and incoherent multi-paragraph figure descriptions. We revisit data construction for medical multimodal continued pretraining (CPT) and present PMC-InterCPT, a context-grounded biomedical interleaved corpus that incorporates figure-referencing body text in addition to captions. Our pipeline recovers missing captions, cleans caption and context text, reconstructs coherent interleaved image-text samples, and applies LLM-supervised medical relevance and quality classifiers to filter noisy records. We further reveal strong modality imbalance in the resulting corpus and introduce a four-bucket evidence taxonomy for modality-aware resampling. Through CPT followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on Qwen3.5-4B-Base, PMC-InterCPT effectively improves medical and general multimodal performance while using fewer CPT tokens than the raw source pool. The experimental results also illustrate the complementarity between the data quality and modality for medical multimodal CPT.

LGMay 28
Access Sets Matter: Budgeting Expert Reads for Scalable Weight-Space Model Merging

Yuanyi Wang, Yanggan Gu, Su Lu et al.

Weight-space model merging is usually formulated as an algebraic operation on checkpoints, yet at LLM scale the limiting resource is often the set of expert weights that must be read. We introduce MergePipe, a budget-aware execution layer that casts LLM merging as an \emph{expert access-set} problem: given a merge operator and a checkpoint family in a shared weight coordinate system, choose which expert delta blocks to access under an explicit I/O budget. MergePipe indexes parameter blocks, builds deterministic access plans, and executes the induced budgeted merge with replayable manifests. The plan is budget-sound by construction and recovers the full-read merge at full budget; for fixed-coefficient additive operators, the omitted-update error is bounded by the norm of omitted deltas. Across Qwen and Llama merging workloads, MergePipe reduces expert-read I/O by up to an order of magnitude and achieves up to $11\times$ speedups. Representative budget sweeps show $O(10^{-3})$ parameter deviation from full-read merges and no monotonic degradation on downstream benchmarks.

LGMay 26
Not All Disagreement Is Learnable: Token Teachability in On-Policy Distillation

Yuanyi Wang, Su Lu, Yanggan Gu et al.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We revisit this principle and ask: which token-level teacher signals are actually learnable? Using a fixed-context diagnostic that measures same-context teacher-student KL reduction, we show that raw KL disagreement is a coarse proxy for learning value. It conflates learnable disagreement, where the teacher assigns corrective mass to the student's top-K candidates, with incompatible disagreement, where the teacher places mass mostly off the student's current support. We formalize this local compatibility as token teachability and show that it better predicts fixed-context improvement than raw KL alone. Motivated by this finding, we propose Teachability-Aware OPD (TA-OPD), a lightweight token-position selection method that applies OPD loss to high-teachability positions without reward models or verifiers. Across Qwen2.5 and Qwen 3 teacher-student settings, TA-OPD often surpasses full-token OPD with only 5% retained tokens and improves over entropy- and divergence-based baselines. Our results reframe selective OPD as selecting learnable teacher signals rather than merely salient tokens.

AIApr 19, 2025Code
InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners

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.

AIJan 8, 2025Code
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection

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}.

AIMay 29, 2025Code
Infi-MMR: Curriculum-based Unlocking Multimodal Reasoning via Phased Reinforcement Learning in Multimodal Small Language Models

Zeyu Liu, Yuhang Liu, Guanghao Zhu et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial progress in reasoning capabilities, such as DeepSeek-R1, which leverages rule-based reinforcement learning to enhance logical reasoning significantly. However, extending these achievements to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents critical challenges, which are frequently more pronounced for Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) given their typically weaker foundational reasoning abilities: (1) the scarcity of high-quality multimodal reasoning datasets, (2) the degradation of reasoning capabilities due to the integration of visual processing, and (3) the risk that direct application of reinforcement learning may produce complex yet incorrect reasoning processes. To address these challenges, we design a novel framework Infi-MMR to systematically unlock the reasoning potential of MSLMs through a curriculum of three carefully structured phases and propose our multimodal reasoning model Infi-MMR-3B. The first phase, Foundational Reasoning Activation, leverages high-quality textual reasoning datasets to activate and strengthen the model's logical reasoning capabilities. The second phase, Cross-Modal Reasoning Adaptation, utilizes caption-augmented multimodal data to facilitate the progressive transfer of reasoning skills to multimodal contexts. The third phase, Multimodal Reasoning Enhancement, employs curated, caption-free multimodal data to mitigate linguistic biases and promote robust cross-modal reasoning. Infi-MMR-3B achieves both state-of-the-art multimodal math reasoning ability (43.68% on MathVerse testmini, 27.04% on MathVision test, and 21.33% on OlympiadBench) and general reasoning ability (67.2% on MathVista testmini). Resources are available at https://huggingface.co/Reallm-Labs/Infi-MMR-3B.

AIAug 7, 2025Code
InfiGUI-G1: Advancing GUI Grounding with Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimization

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.

AIAug 7, 2025Code
InfiAlign: A Scalable and Sample-Efficient Framework for Aligning LLMs to Enhance Reasoning Capabilities

Shuo Cai, Su Lu, Qi Zhou et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive reasoning abilities on a wide range of complex tasks. However, enhancing these capabilities through post-training remains resource intensive, particularly in terms of data and computational cost. Although recent efforts have sought to improve sample efficiency through selective data curation, existing methods often rely on heuristic or task-specific strategies that hinder scalability. In this work, we introduce InfiAlign, a scalable and sample-efficient post-training framework that integrates supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align LLMs for enhanced reasoning. At the core of InfiAlign is a robust data selection pipeline that automatically curates high-quality alignment data from open-source reasoning datasets using multidimensional quality metrics. This pipeline enables significant performance gains while drastically reducing data requirements and remains extensible to new data sources. When applied to the Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Base model, our SFT model achieves performance on par with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, while using only approximately 12% of the training data, and demonstrates strong generalization across diverse reasoning tasks. Additional improvements are obtained through the application of DPO, with particularly notable gains in mathematical reasoning tasks. The model achieves an average improvement of 3.89% on AIME 24/25 benchmarks. Our results highlight the effectiveness of combining principled data selection with full-stage post-training, offering a practical solution for aligning large reasoning models in a scalable and data-efficient manner. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/InfiX-ai/InfiAlign-Qwen-7B-SFT.

LGMay 10
Geometry Conflict: Explaining and Controlling Forgetting in LLM Continual Post-Training

Yuanyi Wang, Yifan Yang, Su Lu et al.

Continual post-training aims to extend large language models (LLMs) with new knowledge, skills, and behaviors, yet it remains unclear when sequential updates enable capability transfer and when they cause catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mitigate forgetting through sequential fine-tuning, replay, regularization, or model merging, but offer limited criteria for determining when incorporating new updates is beneficial or harmful. In this work, we study LLM continual post-training through three questions: What drives forgetting? When do sequentially acquired capabilities transfer or interfere? How can compatibility be used to control update integration? We address these questions through task geometry: we represent each post-training task by its parameter update and study the covariance geometry induced by the update. Our central finding is that: forgetting can be considered as a state-relative update-integration failure, it arises when the covariance geometries induced by tasks misalign with the geometry of the evolving model state. Sequential updates transfer when they remain compatible with the model state shaped by previous updates, and interfere when state-relative geometry conflict becomes high. Motivated by this finding, we propose Geometry-Conflict Wasserstein Merging (GCWM), a data-free update-integration method that constructs a shared Wasserstein metric via Gaussian Wasserstein barycenters and uses geometry conflict to gate geometry-aware correction. Across Qwen3 0.6B--14B on domain-continual and capability-continual settings, GCWM consistently outperforms data-free baselines, improving retention and final performance without replay data. These results identify geometry conflict as both an explanatory signal for forgetting and a practical control signal for LLM continual post-training.

DBFeb 5
MergePipe: A Budget-Aware Parameter Management System for Scalable LLM Merging

Yuanyi Wang, Yanggan Gu, Zihao Wang et al.

Large language model (LLM) merging has become a key technique in modern LLM development pipelines, enabling the integration of multiple task- or domain-specific expert models without retraining. However, as the number of experts grows, existing merging implementations treat model parameters as unstructured files and execute merges in a stateless, one-shot manner, leading to excessive disk I/O, redundant parameter scans, and poor scalability. In this paper, we present \textbf{MergePipe}, a parameter management system for scalable LLM merging. MergePipe is the first system that treats LLM merging as a data management and execution problem, and introduces a catalog-driven abstraction over model parameters, merge plans, and execution lineage. At its core, MergePipe employs a cost-aware planner that explicitly models expert parameter I/O and enforces user-specified I/O budgets, followed by a streaming execution engine that materializes merged models under transactional guarantees. Our key insight is that while base model reads and output writes are unavoidable, expert parameter reads dominate merge cost and constitute the primary optimization target. By making expert access budget-aware throughout planning and execution, MergePipe mitigates the $O(K)$ I/O growth of naive pipelines and achieves predictable scaling behavior. Experiments show that MergePipe reduces total I/O by up to an order of magnitude and delivers up to $11\times$ end-to-end speedups (up to 90\% wall-time reduction) over state-of-the-art LLM merging pipelines.

CLOct 17, 2025Code
InfiMed-ORBIT: Aligning LLMs on Open-Ended Complex Tasks via Rubric-Based Incremental Training

Pengkai Wang, Qi Zuo, Pengwei Liu et al.

Reinforcement learning has powered many of the recent breakthroughs in large language models, especially for tasks where rewards can be computed automatically, such as code generation. However, these methods deteriorate in open-ended domains like medical consultation, where feedback is inherently ambiguous, highly context-dependent, and cannot be reduced to a reliable scalar signal. In such settings, RL must either rely on supervision-intensive reward models that often fail to generalize, or it falls into pathological behaviors such as reward hacking - an especially troubling risk for high-stakes medical dialogue. To address these limitations, we introduce ORBIT, an open-ended rubric-based incremental training framework for high-stakes medical dialogue. ORBIT integrates synthetic dialogue generation with dynamically constructed rubrics that serve as adaptive guides for incremental RL. Instead of relying on external medical knowledge bases or handcrafted rule sets, ORBIT uses rubric-driven feedback to steer the learning process. Its judge component can be instantiated with general-purpose instruction-following LLMs, removing the need for any task-specific fine-tuning. Applied to the Qwen3-4B-Instruct model, ORBIT raises the HealthBench-Hard score from 7.0 to 27.5 using only 2k training samples, achieving SOTA performance for models at this scale. With larger rubric datasets, ORBIT-trained models further compete with the strongest open-source baselines on HealthBench-Hard. Our analysis shows that rubric-guided RL consistently improves consultation quality across diverse medical scenarios. We also apply such rubric generation and training pipeline to InfoBench, where ORBIT enhances instruction-following performance, highlighting the generality of rubric-based feedback.

CLSep 26, 2025Code
InfiR2: A Comprehensive FP8 Training Recipe for Reasoning-Enhanced Language Models

Wenjun Wang, Shuo Cai, Congkai Xie et al.

The immense computational cost of training Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a major barrier to innovation. While FP8 training offers a promising solution with significant theoretical efficiency gains, its widespread adoption has been hindered by the lack of a comprehensive, open-source training recipe. To bridge this gap, we introduce an end-to-end FP8 training recipe that seamlessly integrates continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. Our methodology employs a fine-grained, hybrid-granularity quantization strategy to maintain numerical fidelity while maximizing computational efficiency. Through extensive experiments, including the continue pre-training of models on a 160B-token corpus, we demonstrate that our recipe is not only remarkably stable but also essentially lossless, achieving performance on par with the BF16 baseline across a suite of reasoning benchmarks. Crucially, this is achieved with substantial efficiency improvements, including up to a 22% reduction in training time, a 14% decrease in peak memory usage, and a 19% increase in throughput. Our results establish FP8 as a practical and robust alternative to BF16, and we will release the accompanying code to further democratize large-scale model training.

AISep 26, 2025Code
InfiMed-Foundation: Pioneering Advanced Multimodal Medical Models with Compute-Efficient Pre-Training and Multi-Stage Fine-Tuning

Guanghao Zhu, Zhitian Hou, Zeyu Liu et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable potential in various domains, yet their application in the medical field is hindered by several challenges. General-purpose MLLMs often lack the specialized knowledge required for medical tasks, leading to uncertain or hallucinatory responses. Knowledge distillation from advanced models struggles to capture domain-specific expertise in radiology and pharmacology. Additionally, the computational cost of continual pretraining with large-scale medical data poses significant efficiency challenges. To address these issues, we propose InfiMed-Foundation-1.7B and InfiMed-Foundation-4B, two medical-specific MLLMs designed to deliver state-of-the-art performance in medical applications. We combined high-quality general-purpose and medical multimodal data and proposed a novel five-dimensional quality assessment framework to curate high-quality multimodal medical datasets. We employ low-to-high image resolution and multimodal sequence packing to enhance training efficiency, enabling the integration of extensive medical data. Furthermore, a three-stage supervised fine-tuning process ensures effective knowledge extraction for complex medical tasks. Evaluated on the MedEvalKit framework, InfiMed-Foundation-1.7B outperforms Qwen2.5VL-3B, while InfiMed-Foundation-4B surpasses HuatuoGPT-V-7B and MedGemma-27B-IT, demonstrating superior performance in medical visual question answering and diagnostic tasks. By addressing key challenges in data quality, training efficiency, and domain-specific knowledge extraction, our work paves the way for more reliable and effective AI-driven solutions in healthcare. InfiMed-Foundation-4B model is available at \href{https://huggingface.co/InfiX-ai/InfiMed-Foundation-4B}{InfiMed-Foundation-4B}.

CLJan 6, 2025
Quantization Meets Reasoning: Exploring LLM Low-Bit Quantization Degradation for Mathematical Reasoning

Zhen Li, Yupeng Su, Runming Yang et al.

Large language models have achieved significant advancements in complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, such as MATH. However, their substantial computational requirements present challenges for practical deployment. Model quantization has emerged as an effective strategy to reduce memory usage and computational costs by employing lower precision and bit-width representations. In this study, we systematically evaluate the impact of quantization on mathematical reasoning tasks. Our results demonstrate that aggressive quantization methods like AWQ and GPTQ introduce up to 32.39% accuracy degradation (average 11.31%) on Llama-3 models, particularly in numerical computation and reasoning planning. To address this, we introduce a multidimensional evaluation framework combining qualitative capability analysis and quantitative error assessment. We further develop targeted recovery strategies, showing that fine-tuning quantized models on only 545 task-specific examples for 3 minutes on 4 GPUs effectively restores reasoning capabilities to near full-precision levels. Additionally, our error assessment pipeline achieves 98.9% accuracy in diagnosing and localizing errors across 3,366 failure cases, providing actionable insights for mitigating quantization-induced degradation.

CLFeb 17, 2025
InfiR : Crafting Effective Small Language Models and Multimodal Small Language Models in Reasoning

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.

AISep 29, 2025
Model Merging Scaling Laws in Large Language Models

Yuanyi Wang, Yanggan Gu, Yiming Zhang et al.

We study empirical scaling laws for language model merging measured by cross-entropy. Despite its wide practical use, merging lacks a quantitative rule that predicts returns as we add experts or scale the model size. We identify a compact power law that links model size and expert number: the size-dependent floor decreases with model capacity, while the merging tail exhibits clear diminishing returns in the number of experts. The law holds in-domain and cross-domain, tightly fits measured curves across diverse architectures and methods (Average, TA, TIES, DARE), and explains two robust regularities: most gains arrive early, and variability shrinks as more experts are included. Building on this, we present a simple theory that explains why gains fall roughly as 1/k and links the floor and tail to properties of the base model and the diversity across domains. This law enables predictive planning: estimate how many experts are needed to reach a target loss, decide when to stop adding experts, and trade off scaling the base model versus adding experts under a fixed budget--turning merging from heuristic practice into a computationally efficient, planable alternative to multitask training. This suggests a scaling principle for distributed generative AI: predictable gains can be achieved by composing specialists, offering a complementary path toward AGI-level systems.

CLMay 29, 2025
InfiMed: Low-Resource Medical MLLMs with Advancing Understanding and Reasoning

Zeyu Liu, Zhitian Hou, Guanghao Zhu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in domains such as visual understanding and mathematical reasoning. However, their application in the medical domain is constrained by two key challenges: (1) multimodal medical datasets are scarce and often contain sparse information, limiting reasoning depth; and (2) Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), though effective in general domains, cannot reliably improve model performance in the medical domain. To overcome these challenges, during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, we incorporate high-quality textual reasoning data and general multimodal data alongside multimodal medical data to efficiently enhance foundational medical capabilities and restore the base model's reasoning ability. Moreover, considering that there are some multimodal medical datasets with sparse information, we further synthesize reflective-pattern-injected chain-of-thought (CoT) in addition to general CoT samples, equipping the model with initial reflective reasoning capabilities that provide a structured foundation for subsequent RLVR training. Finally, we introduce our InfiMed-Series models, InfiMed-SFT-3B and InfiMed-RL-3B, both of which deliver state-of-the-art performance across seven multimodal medical benchmarks. Notably, InfiMed-RL-3B achieves an average accuracy of 59.2%, outperforming even larger models like InternVL3-8B, which achieves 57.3%. Specifically, during the SFT phase, we utilized 188K samples, while the RLVR phase incorporated 36K samples, demonstrating the efficacy of both training strategies in achieving superior performance. We also conducted a series of extensive experiments, which provide valuable insights that contribute to advancing the performance of MLLMs in medical scenarios.