Ruiyang Xu

Yisheng Xiao, Ruiyang Xu, Lijun Wu et al.

Transformer-based autoregressive (AR) methods have achieved appealing performance for varied sequence-to-sequence generation tasks, e.g., neural machine translation, summarization, and code generation, but suffer from low inference efficiency. To speed up the inference stage, many non-autoregressive (NAR) strategies have been proposed in the past few years. Among them, the conditional masked language model (CMLM) is one of the most versatile frameworks, as it can support many different sequence generation scenarios and achieve very competitive performance on these tasks. In this paper, we further introduce a simple yet effective adaptive masking over masking strategy to enhance the refinement capability of the decoder and make the encoder optimization easier. Experiments on \textbf{3} different tasks (neural machine translation, summarization, and code generation) with \textbf{15} datasets in total confirm that our proposed simple method achieves significant performance improvement over the strong CMLM model. Surprisingly, our proposed model yields state-of-the-art performance on neural machine translation (\textbf{34.62} BLEU on WMT16 EN$\to$RO, \textbf{34.82} BLEU on WMT16 RO$\to$EN, and \textbf{34.84} BLEU on IWSLT De$\to$En) and even better performance than the \textbf{AR} Transformer on \textbf{7} benchmark datasets with at least \textbf{2.2$\times$} speedup. Our code is available at GitHub.

Ziyang Ma, Guanrou Yang, Wenxi Chen et al.

The recent surge in open-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) frameworks, such as LLaVA, provides a convenient kickoff for artificial intelligence developers and researchers. However, most of the MLLM frameworks take vision as the main input modality, and provide limited in-depth support for the modality of speech, audio, and music. This situation hinders the development of audio-language models, and forces researchers to spend a lot of effort on code writing and hyperparameter tuning. We present SLAM-LLM, an open-source deep learning framework designed to train customized MLLMs, focused on speech, language, audio, and music processing. SLAM-LLM provides a modular configuration of different encoders, projectors, LLMs, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning plugins. SLAM-LLM also includes detailed training and inference recipes for mainstream tasks, along with high-performance checkpoints like LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automated Audio Captioning (AAC), and Music Captioning (MC). Some of these recipes have already reached or are nearing state-of-the-art performance, and some relevant techniques have also been accepted by academic papers. We hope SLAM-LLM will accelerate iteration, development, data engineering, and model training for researchers. We are committed to continually pushing forward audio-based MLLMs through this open-source framework, and call on the community to contribute to the LLM-based speech, audio and music processing.

Ruiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu et al.

Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) coding capabilities. However, there is an unignorable programming language bias in existing code benchmarks -- over 95% code generation benchmarks are dominated by Python, leaving the LLMs' capabilities in other programming languages such as Java and C/C++ unknown. Moreover, coding task bias is also crucial. Most benchmarks focus on code generation capability, while benchmarks for code reasoning (given input, reasoning output; and given output, reasoning input), an essential coding capability, are insufficient. Yet, constructing multi-lingual benchmarks can be expensive and labor-intensive, and codes in contest websites such as Leetcode suffer from data contamination during training. To fill this gap, we propose CRUXEVAL-X, a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages. It comprises at least 600 subjects for each language, along with 19K content-consistent tests in total. In particular, the construction pipeline of CRUXEVAL-X works in a fully automated and test-guided manner, which iteratively generates and repairs based on execution feedback. Also, to cross language barriers (e.g., dynamic/static type systems in Python/C++), we formulated various transition rules between language pairs to facilitate translation. Our intensive evaluation of 24 representative LLMs reveals the correlation between language pairs. For example, TypeScript and JavaScript show a significant positive correlation, while Racket has less correlation with other languages. More interestingly, even a model trained solely on Python can achieve at most 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs.

Zihao Cheng, Weixin Wang, Yu Zhao et al.

Long-term memory is fundamental for personalized agents capable of accumulating knowledge, reasoning over user experiences, and adapting across time. However, existing memory benchmarks primarily target declarative memory, specifically semantic and episodic types, where all information is explicitly presented in dialogues. In contrast, real-world actions are also governed by non-declarative memory, including habitual and procedural types, and need to be inferred from diverse digital traces. To bridge this gap, we introduce Lifebench, which features densely connected, long-horizon event simulation. It pushes AI agents beyond simple recall, requiring the integration of declarative and non-declarative memory reasoning across diverse and temporally extended contexts. Building such a benchmark presents two key challenges: ensuring data quality and scalability. We maintain data quality by employing real-world priors, including anonymized social surveys, map APIs, and holiday-integrated calendars, thus enforcing fidelity, diversity and behavioral rationality within the dataset. Towards scalability, we draw inspiration from cognitive science and structure events according to their partonomic hierarchy; enabling efficient parallel generation while maintaining global coherence. Performance results show that top-tier, state-of-the-art memory systems reach just 55.2\% accuracy, highlighting the inherent difficulty of long-horizon retrieval and multi-source integration within our proposed benchmark. The dataset and data synthesis code are available at https://github.com/1754955896/LifeBench.

RuiYang Xu, Di Wu, Xin Luo

Traditional feature selections need to know the feature space before learning, and online streaming feature selection (OSFS) is proposed to process streaming features on the fly. Existing methods divide features into relevance or irrelevance without missing data, and deleting irrelevant features may lead to in-formation loss. Motivated by this, we focus on completing the streaming feature matrix and division of feature correlation and propose online sparse streaming feature selection based on adapted classification (OS2FS-AC). This study uses Latent Factor Analysis (LFA) to pre-estimate missed data. Besides, we use the adaptive method to obtain the threshold, divide the features into strongly relevant, weakly relevant, and irrelevant features, and then divide weak relevance with more information. Experimental results on ten real-world data sets demonstrate that OS2FS-AC performs better than state-of-the-art algo-rithms.

Zheqing Zhu, Rodrigo de Salvo Braz, Jalaj Bhandari et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a versatile framework for optimizing long-term goals. Although many real-world problems can be formalized with RL, learning and deploying a performant RL policy requires a system designed to address several important challenges, including the exploration-exploitation dilemma, partial observability, dynamic action spaces, and safety concerns. While the importance of these challenges has been well recognized, existing open-source RL libraries do not explicitly address them. This paper introduces Pearl, a Production-Ready RL software package designed to embrace these challenges in a modular way. In addition to presenting benchmarking results, we also highlight examples of Pearl's ongoing industry adoption to demonstrate its advantages for production use cases. Pearl is open sourced on GitHub at github.com/facebookresearch/pearl and its official website is pearlagent.github.io.

Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Zhenghao Xing et al.

Fine-grained perception of multimodal information is critical for advancing human-AI interaction. With recent progress in audio-visual technologies, Omni Language Models (OLMs), capable of processing audio and video signals in parallel, have emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving richer understanding and reasoning. However, their capacity to capture and describe fine-grained details remains limited explored. In this work, we present a systematic and comprehensive investigation of omni detailed perception from the perspectives of the data pipeline, models, and benchmark. We first identify an inherent "co-growth" between detail and hallucination in current OLMs. To address this, we propose Omni-Detective, an agentic data generation pipeline integrating tool-calling, to autonomously produce highly detailed yet minimally hallucinatory multimodal data. Based on the data generated with Omni-Detective, we train two captioning models: Audio-Captioner for audio-only detailed perception, and Omni-Captioner for audio-visual detailed perception. Under the cascade evaluation protocol, Audio-Captioner achieves the best performance on MMAU and MMAR among all open-source models, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash and delivering performance comparable to Gemini 2.5 Pro. On existing detailed captioning benchmarks, Omni-Captioner sets a new state-of-the-art on VDC and achieves the best trade-off between detail and hallucination on the video-SALMONN 2 testset. Given the absence of a dedicated benchmark for omni detailed perception, we design Omni-Cloze, a novel cloze-style evaluation for detailed audio, visual, and audio-visual captioning that ensures stable, efficient, and reliable assessment. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of Omni-Detective in generating high-quality detailed captions, as well as the superiority of Omni-Cloze in evaluating such detailed captions.

Ziyang Ma, Yinghao Ma, Yanqiao Zhu et al.

We introduce MMAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the deep reasoning capabilities of Audio-Language Models (ALMs) across massive multi-disciplinary tasks. MMAR comprises 1,000 meticulously curated audio-question-answer triplets, collected from real-world internet videos and refined through iterative error corrections and quality checks to ensure high quality. Unlike existing benchmarks that are limited to specific domains of sound, music, or speech, MMAR extends them to a broad spectrum of real-world audio scenarios, including mixed-modality combinations of sound, music, and speech. Each question in MMAR is hierarchically categorized across four reasoning layers: Signal, Perception, Semantic, and Cultural, with additional sub-categories within each layer to reflect task diversity and complexity. To further foster research in this area, we annotate every question with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationale to promote future advancements in audio reasoning. Each item in the benchmark demands multi-step deep reasoning beyond surface-level understanding. Moreover, a part of the questions requires graduate-level perceptual and domain-specific knowledge, elevating the benchmark's difficulty and depth. We evaluate MMAR using a broad set of models, including Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs), Large Audio Reasoning Models (LARMs), Omni Language Models (OLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), with audio caption inputs. The performance of these models on MMAR highlights the benchmark's challenging nature, and our analysis further reveals critical limitations of understanding and reasoning capabilities among current models. We hope MMAR will serve as a catalyst for future advances in this important but little-explored area.

Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Yinghao Ma et al.

Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) excel in understanding but often lack transparent reasoning. To address this "black-box" limitation, we organized the Audio Reasoning Challenge at Interspeech 2026, the first shared task dedicated to evaluating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) quality in the audio domain. The challenge introduced MMAR-Rubrics, a novel instance-level protocol assessing the factuality and logic of reasoning chains. Featured Single Model and Agent tracks, the competition attracting 156 teams from 18 countries and regions. Results show agent systems currently lead in reasoning quality, utilizing iterative tool orchestration and cross-modal analysis. Besides, single models are rapidly advancing via reinforcement learning and sophisticated data pipeline. We details the challenge design, methodology, and a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art systems, providing new insights for explainable audio intelligence.

Ruiyang Xu

The processing of high-dimensional streaming data commonly utilizes online streaming feature selection (OSFS) techniques. However, practical implementations often face challenges with data incompleteness due to equipment failures and technical constraints. Online Sparse Streaming Feature Selection (OS2FS) tackles this issue through latent factor analysis-based missing data imputation. Despite this advancement, existing OS2FS approaches exhibit substantial limitations in feature evaluation, resulting in performance deterioration. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel Online Differential Evolution for Sparse Feature Selection (ODESFS) in data streams, incorporating two key innovations: (1) missing value imputation using a latent factor analysis model, and (2) feature importance evaluation through differential evolution. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate that ODESFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art OSFS and OS2FS methods by selecting optimal feature subsets and achieving superior accuracy.

Ruiyang Xu

In real-world applications involving high-dimensional streaming data, online streaming feature selection (OSFS) is widely adopted. Yet, practical deployments frequently face data incompleteness due to sensor failures or technical constraints. While online sparse streaming feature selection (OS2FS) mitigates this issue via latent factor analysis-based imputation, existing methods struggle with uncertain feature-label correlations, leading to inflexible models and degraded performance. To address these gaps, this work proposes POS2FS-an uncertainty-aware online sparse streaming feature selection framework enhanced by particle swarm optimization (PSO). The approach introduces: 1) PSO-driven supervision to reduce uncertainty in feature-label relationships; 2) Three-way decision theory to manage feature fuzziness in supervised learning. Rigorous testing on six real-world datasets confirms POS2FS outperforms conventional OSFS and OS2FS techniques, delivering higher accuracy through more robust feature subset selection.

Ruiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Mingyuan Wu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in various tasks, yet few benchmarks assess their capabilities in embedded system development.In this paper, we introduce EmbedAgent, a paradigm designed to simulate real-world roles in embedded system development, such as Embedded System Programmer, Architect, and Integrator. This paradigm enables LLMs to be tested in tasks that bridge the gap between digital and physical systems, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of their capabilities. To evaluate LLMs on these tasks, we propose Embedbench, the first comprehensive benchmark for embedded system programming, circuit design, and cross-platform migration.Embedbench consists of 126 cases, covering 9 electronic components across 3 hardware platforms. Through extensive experiments on 10 mainstream LLMs, we uncover several key findings. Surprisingly, despite the simplicity of the cases, DeepSeek-R1 achieves only a 55.6% pass@1 rate when provided with schematic information, and 50.0% when tasked with generating the schematics itself. In the cross-platform migration tasks, LLMs show relatively strong performance with MicroPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico (with the top model achieving 73.8% pass@1), but perform poorly on ESP-IDF, where the best model reaches only 29.4% pass@1.Interestingly, we observe that general-purpose chat LLMs like DeepSeek-V3 often fail to utilize relevant pre-trained knowledge in this domain, while reasoning LLMs tend to overthink and overlook efficient knowledge during pretraining. Based on these insights, we propose two strategies: retrieval augmented generation and compiler feedback-to enhance LLM performance. These strategies result in significant improvements, with Deepseek-R1 reaching a 65.1% pass@1 with correct schematics, and 53.1% without. Additionally, the accuracy of the Arduino to ESP32 migration task improves from 21.4% to 27.8%.

Ruiyang Xu, Jalaj Bhandari, Dmytro Korenkevych et al.

Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of recommendations on user behavior. In this study, we employ reinforcement learning to optimize for long-term return metrics in an auction-based recommender system. Utilizing temporal difference learning, a fundamental reinforcement learning algorithm, we implement an one-step policy improvement approach that biases the system towards recommendations with higher long-term user engagement metrics. This optimizes value over long horizons while maintaining compatibility with the auction framework. Our approach is grounded in dynamic programming ideas which show that our method provably improves upon the existing auction-based base policy. Through an online A/B test conducted on an auction-based recommender system which handles billions of impressions and users daily, we empirically establish that our proposed method outperforms the current production system in terms of long-term user engagement metrics.

Ruiyang Xu, Zhengxing Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attraction in the academia and tech industry with launches to a variety of impactful applications and products. Although research is being actively conducted on many fronts (e.g., offline RL, performance, etc.), many RL practitioners face a challenge that has been largely ignored: determine whether a designed Markov Decision Process (MDP) is valid and meaningful. This study proposes a heuristic-based feature analysis method to validate whether an MDP is well formulated. We believe an MDP suitable for applying RL should contain a set of state features that are both sensitive to actions and predictive in rewards. We tested our method in constructed environments showing that our approach can identify certain invalid environment formulations. As far as we know, performing validity analysis for RL problem formulation is a novel direction. We envision that our tool will serve as a motivational example to help practitioners apply RL in real-world problems more easily.

Ruiyang Xu, Ayush Singh

Natural interface to database (NLIDB) has been researched a lot during the past decades. In the core of NLIDB, is a semantic parser used to convert natural language into SQL. Solutions from traditional NLP methodology focuses on grammar rule pattern learning and pairing via intermediate logic forms. Although those methods give an acceptable performance on certain specific database and parsing tasks, they are hard to generalize and scale. On the other hand, recent progress in neural deep learning seems to provide a promising direction towards building a general NLIDB system. Unlike the traditional approach, those neural methodologies treat the parsing problem as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem. In this paper, we experimented on several sequence-to-sequence learning models and evaluate their performance on general database parsing task.

Prashank Kadam, Ruiyang Xu, Karl Lieberherr

AlphaZero, using a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), has successfully trained reinforcement learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. The neural MCTS algorithm has been successful in finding near-optimal strategies for games through self-play. However, the AlphaZero algorithm has a significant drawback; it takes a long time to converge and requires high computational power due to complex neural networks for solving games like Chess, Go, Shogi, etc. Owing to this, it is very difficult to pursue neural MCTS research without cutting-edge hardware, which is a roadblock for many aspiring neural MCTS researchers. In this paper, we propose a new neural MCTS algorithm, called Dual MCTS, which helps overcome these drawbacks. Dual MCTS uses two different search trees, a single deep neural network, and a new update technique for the search trees using a combination of the PUCB, a sliding-window, and the epsilon-greedy algorithm. This technique is applicable to any MCTS based algorithm to reduce the number of updates to the tree. We show that Dual MCTS performs better than one of the most widely used neural MCTS algorithms, AlphaZero, for various symmetric and asymmetric games.

Ruiyang Xu, Karl Lieberherr

Recent achievements from AlphaZero using self-play has shown remarkable performance on several board games. It is plausible to think that self-play, starting from zero knowledge, can gradually approximate a winning strategy for certain two-player games after an amount of training. In this paper, we try to leverage the computational power of neural Monte Carlo Tree Search (neural MCTS), the core algorithm from AlphaZero, to solve Quantified Boolean Formula Satisfaction (QSAT) problems, which are PSPACE complete. Knowing that every QSAT problem is equivalent to a QSAT game, the game outcome can be used to derive the solutions of the original QSAT problems. We propose a way to encode Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) as graphs and apply a graph neural network (GNN) to embed the QBFs into the neural MCTS. After training, an off-the-shelf QSAT solver is used to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Our result shows that, for problems within a limited size, the algorithm learns to solve the problem correctly merely from self-play.

Ruiyang Xu, Prashank Kadam, Karl Lieberherr

The formal semantics of an interpreted first-order logic (FOL) statement can be given in Tarskian Semantics or a basically equivalent Game Semantics. The latter maps the statement and the interpretation into a two-player semantic game. Many combinatorial problems can be described using interpreted FOL statements and can be mapped into a semantic game. Therefore, learning to play a semantic game perfectly leads to the solution of a specific instance of a combinatorial problem. We adapt the AlphaZero algorithm so that it becomes better at learning to play semantic games that have different characteristics than Go and Chess. We propose a general framework, Persephone, to map the FOL description of a combinatorial problem to a semantic game so that it can be solved through a neural MCTS based reinforcement learning algorithm. Our goal for Persephone is to make it tabula-rasa, mapping a problem stated in interpreted FOL to a solution without human intervention.

Ruiyang Xu, Karl Lieberherr

Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) using self-game-play has shown remarkable performance on several board games (e.g., Chess and Go) as well as video games (e.g., Atari games and Dota2). It is plausible to consider that RL, starting from zero knowledge, might be able to gradually approximate a winning strategy after a certain amount of training. In this paper, we explore neural Monte-Carlo-Tree-Search (neural MCTS), an RL algorithm which has been applied successfully by DeepMind to play Go and Chess at a super-human level. We try to leverage the computational power of neural MCTS to solve a class of combinatorial optimization problems. Following the idea of Hintikka's Game-Theoretical Semantics, we propose the Zermelo Gamification (ZG) to transform specific combinatorial optimization problems into Zermelo games whose winning strategies correspond to the solutions of the original optimization problem. The ZG also provides a specially designed neural MCTS. We use a combinatorial planning problem for which the ground-truth policy is efficiently computable to demonstrate that ZG is promising.