CVApr 24Code
Can Multimodal Large Language Models Truly Understand Small Objects?Fujun Han, Junan Chen, Xintong Zhu et al.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising potential in diverse understanding tasks, e.g., image and video analysis, math and physics olympiads. However, they remain blank and unexplored for Small Object Understanding (SOU) tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce SOUBench, the first and comprehensive benchmark for exploring the small objects understanding capability of existing MLLMs. Specifically, we first design an effective and automatic visual question-answer generation strategy, constructing a new SOU-VQA evaluation dataset, with 18,204 VQA pairs, six relevant sub-tasks, and three dominant scenarios (i.e., Driving, Aerial, and Underwater). Then, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on 15 state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal their weak capabilities in small object understanding. Furthermore, we develop SOU-Train, a multimodal training dataset with 11,226 VQA pairs, to improve the SOU capabilities of MLLMs. Through supervising fine-tuning of the latest MLLM, we demonstrate that SOU-Train can effectively enhance the latest MLLM's ability to understand small objects. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed SOUBench, along with the SOU-VQA and SOU-Train datasets, provides a crucial empirical foundation to the community for further developing models with enhanced small object understanding capabilities. Datasets and Code: https://github.com/Hanfj-X/SOU.
LGJan 30
A Unified Study of LoRA Variants: Taxonomy, Review, Codebase, and Empirical EvaluationHaonan He, Jingqi Ye, Minglei Li et al.
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a fundamental parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that balances efficiency and performance in large-scale neural networks. However, the proliferation of LoRA variants has led to fragmentation in methodology, theory, code, and evaluation. To this end, this work presents the first unified study of LoRA variants, offering a systematic taxonomy, unified theoretical review, structured codebase, and standardized empirical assessment. First, we categorize LoRA variants along four principal axes: rank, optimization dynamics, initialization, and integration with Mixture-of-Experts. Then, we review their relationships and evolution within a common theoretical framework focused on low-rank update dynamics. Further, we introduce LoRAFactory, a modular codebase that implements variants through a unified interface, supporting plug-and-play experimentation and fine-grained analysis. Last, using this codebase, we conduct a large-scale evaluation across natural language generation, natural language understanding, and image classification tasks, systematically exploring key hyperparameters. Our results uncover several findings, notably: LoRA and its variants exhibit pronounced sensitivity to the choices of learning rate compared to other hyperparameters; moreover, with proper hyperparameter configurations, LoRA consistently matches or surpasses the performance of most of its variants.
AIJan 4Code
Beyond Gemini-3-Pro: Revisiting LLM Routing and Aggregation at ScaleShengji Tang, Weihao Lin, Jingqi Ye et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced, with Gemini-3-Pro setting a new performance milestone. In this work, we explore collective intelligence as an alternative to monolithic scaling, and demonstrate that open-source LLMs' collaboration can surpass Gemini-3-Pro. We first revisit LLM routing and aggregation at scale and identify three key bottlenecks: (1) current train-free routers are limited by a query-based paradigm focusing solely on textual similarity; (2) recent aggregation methods remain largely static, failing to select appropriate aggregators for different tasks;(3) the complementarity of routing and aggregation remains underutilized. To address these problems, we introduce JiSi, a novel framework designed to release the full potential of LLMs' collaboration through three innovations: (1) Query-Response Mixed Routing capturing both semantic information and problem difficulty; (2) Support-Set-based Aggregator Selection jointly evaluating the aggregation and domain capacity of aggregators; (3) Adaptive Routing-Aggregation Switch dynamically leveraging the advantages of routing and aggregation. Comprehensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate that JiSi can surpass Gemini-3-Pro with only 47% costs by orchestrating ten open-source LLMs, while outperforming mainstream baselines. It suggests that collective intelligence represents a novel path towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
AISep 29, 2025
SCI-Verifier: Scientific Verifier with ThinkingShenghe Zheng, Chenyu Huang, Fangchen Yu et al. · tsinghua
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to scientific reasoning, the complexity of answer formats and the diversity of equivalent expressions make answer verification a critical yet challenging task. Existing verification studies in scientific domains suffer from two major limitations: (a) the absence of systematic evaluation standards and insufficient disciplinary coverage, which hinders their comprehensive assessment; and (b) heavy reliance on cumbersome rule design or prompt engineering, which reduces their effectiveness in complex reasoning scenarios or limits their cross-disciplinary generalization. To address these challenges, we propose solutions at both the data and model levels. On the data side, we construct SCI-VerifyBench, a cross-disciplinary benchmark covering mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and general scientific QA. The benchmark is built from real LLM responses and enhanced with domain-specific equivalence transformations that generate challenging and realistic data. Model-based and expert annotations ensure both quality and diversity, enabling rigorous evaluation of verification ability. On the model side, we emphasize the importance of reasoning for verification and introduce SCI-Verifier, a unified reasoning-augmented verifier for scientific domains. Through post-training, SCI-Verifier demonstrates strong logical reasoning and equivalence judgment capabilities while maintaining concise and stable outputs. Together, SCI-VerifyBench and SCI-Verifier provide a principled framework for scientific verification, offering both systematic evaluation and practical pathways to enhance the reliability and applicability of LLMs in scientific domains.