Kan Li

Xinglin Wang, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li et al.

Self-consistency (SC), a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning, shows significant gains across various multi-step reasoning tasks but comes with a high cost due to multiple sampling with the preset size. Its variants, Adaptive self-consistency (ASC) and Early-stopping self-consistency (ESC), dynamically adjust the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples, reducing the cost of SC with minimal impact on performance. Both methods, however, do not exploit the prior information about question difficulty. It often results in unnecessary repeated sampling for easy questions that could be accurately answered with just one attempt, wasting resources. To tackle this problem, we propose Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC), which leverages the difficulty information of batch queries from both prior and posterior perspectives to adaptively allocate inference resources, further reducing the overall cost of SC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DSC, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning on six benchmarks. The empirical results show that DSC consistently surpasses the strong baseline ASC and ESC in terms of costs by a significant margin, while attaining comparable performances.

Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng et al.

Instruction data is crucial for improving the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human-level performance. Recent research LIMA demonstrates that alignment is essentially a process where the model adapts instructions' interaction style or format to solve various tasks, leveraging pre-trained knowledge and skills. Therefore, for instructional data, the most important aspect is the task it represents, rather than the specific semantics and knowledge information. The latent representations of instructions play roles for some instruction-related tasks like data selection and demonstrations retrieval. However, they are always derived from text embeddings, encompass overall semantic information that influences the representation of task categories. In this work, we introduce a new concept, instruction embedding, and construct Instruction Embedding Benchmark (IEB) for its training and evaluation. Then, we propose a baseline Prompt-based Instruction Embedding (PIE) method to make the representations more attention on tasks. The evaluation of PIE, alongside other embedding methods on IEB with two designed tasks, demonstrates its superior performance in accurately identifying task categories. Moreover, the application of instruction embeddings in four downstream tasks showcases its effectiveness and suitability for instruction-related tasks.

Shenxi Liu, Kan Li, Mingyang Zhao et al.

With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI) in multi-modal understanding, there is increasing potential for video comprehension technologies to support professional domains such as medical education. However, existing benchmarks suffer from two primary limitations: (1) Linguistic Singularity: they are largely confined to English, neglecting the need for multilingual resources; and (2) Shallow Reasoning: their questions are often designed for surface-level information retrieval, failing to properly assess deep multi-modal integration. To address these limitations, we present M3-Med, the first benchmark for Multi-lingual, Multi-modal, and Multi-hop reasoning in Medical instructional video understanding. M3-Med consists of medical questions paired with corresponding video segments, annotated by a team of medical experts. A key innovation of M3-Med is its multi-hop reasoning task, which requires a model to first locate a key entity in the text, then find corresponding visual evidence in the video, and finally synthesize information across both modalities to derive the answer. This design moves beyond simple text matching and poses a substantial challenge to a model's deep cross-modal understanding capabilities. We define two tasks: Temporal Answer Grounding in Single Video (TAGSV) and Temporal Answer Grounding in Video Corpus (TAGVC). We evaluated several state-of-the-art models and Large Language Models (LLMs) on M3-Med. The results reveal a significant performance gap between all models and human experts, especially on the complex multi-hop questions where model performance drops sharply. M3-Med effectively highlights the current limitations of AI models in deep cross-modal reasoning within specialized domains and provides a new direction for future research.