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Sep 9

Reasoning Language Models: A Blueprint

Reasoning language models (RLMs), also known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and o3, DeepSeek-V3, and Alibaba's QwQ, have redefined AI's problem-solving capabilities by extending large language models (LLMs) with advanced reasoning mechanisms. Yet, their high costs, proprietary nature, and complex architectures - uniquely combining Reinforcement Learning (RL), search heuristics, and LLMs - present accessibility and scalability challenges. To address these, we propose a comprehensive blueprint that organizes RLM components into a modular framework, based on a survey and analysis of all RLM works. This blueprint incorporates diverse reasoning structures (chains, trees, graphs, and nested forms), reasoning strategies (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search, Beam Search), RL concepts (policy, value models and others), and supervision schemes (Output-Based and Process-Based Supervision). We also provide detailed mathematical formulations and algorithmic specifications to simplify RLM implementation. By showing how schemes like LLaMA-Berry, QwQ, Journey Learning, and Graph of Thoughts fit as special cases, we demonstrate the blueprint's versatility and unifying potential. To illustrate its utility, we introduce x1, a modular implementation for rapid RLM prototyping and experimentation. Using x1 and a literature review, we provide key insights, such as multi-phase training for policy and value models, and the importance of familiar training distributions. Finally, we outline how RLMs can integrate with a broader LLM ecosystem, including tools and databases. Our work demystifies RLM construction, democratizes advanced reasoning capabilities, and fosters innovation, aiming to mitigate the gap between "rich AI" and "poor AI" by lowering barriers to RLM development and experimentation.

  • 18 authors
·
Jan 19, 2025 2

LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023 1

The Blueprints of Intelligence: A Functional-Topological Foundation for Perception and Representation

Real-world phenomena do not generate arbitrary variability: their signals concentrate on compact, low-variability subsets of functional space, enabling rapid generalization from few examples. A small child can recognize a dog after extremely limited exposure because the perceptual manifold of "dog" is compact, structured, and low-dimensional. We formalize this principle through a deterministic functional-topological framework in which the set of valid realizations produced by a physical process forms a compact subset of a Banach space, endowed with stable invariants, a finite Hausdorff radius, and an induced continuous perceptual functional. This geometry provides explicit limits on knowledge, conditions for identifiability, and guarantees for generalization from sparse evidence -- properties fundamental to both natural and artificial intelligence. Across electromechanical, electrochemical, and physiological domains, we show that real-world processes consistently generate compact perceptual manifolds with the same geometric characteristics. Their boundaries can be discovered in a fully self-supervised manner as the empirical radius saturates with increasing sampling, even when the governing equations are unknown. These results demonstrate that deterministic functional topology offers a unified mathematical foundation for perception, representation, and world-model construction. It provides a geometric explanation for why biological learners and self-supervised AI systems can generalize from few observations, and establishes compact perceptual manifolds as a fundamental building block for future AI architectures. Finally, this work unifies biological perception and modern self-supervised models under a single geometric principle: both derive their generalization ability from the compactness and invariants of real-world perceptual manifolds.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

Stable Diffusion Reference Only: Image Prompt and Blueprint Jointly Guided Multi-Condition Diffusion Model for Secondary Painting

Stable Diffusion and ControlNet have achieved excellent results in the field of image generation and synthesis. However, due to the granularity and method of its control, the efficiency improvement is limited for professional artistic creations such as comics and animation production whose main work is secondary painting. In the current workflow, fixing characters and image styles often need lengthy text prompts, and even requires further training through TextualInversion, DreamBooth or other methods, which is very complicated and expensive for painters. Therefore, we present a new method in this paper, Stable Diffusion Reference Only, a images-to-image self-supervised model that uses only two types of conditional images for precise control generation to accelerate secondary painting. The first type of conditional image serves as an image prompt, supplying the necessary conceptual and color information for generation. The second type is blueprint image, which controls the visual structure of the generated image. It is natively embedded into the original UNet, eliminating the need for ControlNet. We released all the code for the module and pipeline, and trained a controllable character line art coloring model at https://github.com/aihao2000/stable-diffusion-reference-only, that achieved state-of-the-art results in this field. This verifies the effectiveness of the structure and greatly improves the production efficiency of animations, comics, and fanworks.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 4, 2023

IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages

Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

Baton: Explicit Semantic Blueprints for Joint Video-Audio Generation

Current open-source diffusion models struggle to generate stable and synchronized audio-visual content, particularly in scenarios demanding complex semantic reasoning. The root cause is that existing methods rely on coarse text embeddings from off-the-shelf encoders to guide audio-video denoising, which discards fine-grained semantics and, critically, lacks a shared long-horizon plan, leading to uncoordinated denoising trajectories and fragile cross-modal alignment. We propose Baton, the first framework that introduces explicit semantic planning into joint video-audio generation. Our key insight is that complementing coarse text guidance with semantically rich, modality-aware planned tokens, jointly reasoned and mutually aligned before denoising, can simultaneously restore fine-grained semantic detail and establish a shared blueprint that coordinates both audio and video denoising trajectories. Concretely, Baton first introduces the VA-Planner, a multimodal language model equipped with dual semantic alignment towers, where learnable queries cross-attend to both video and audio features to produce a pair of semantically aligned video and audio planned tokens as keyframe-level blueprints. These planned tokens are injected into the diffusion backbone via cross-attention layers, providing temporally grounded guidance complementary to coarse text embeddings. Since planned tokens do not share one-to-one spatial-temporal correspondence with diffusion latents, we further propose Relative Semantic RoPE, a relative positional encoding that maps planned tokens and latents into a shared spatial-temporal coordinate frame, enabling each latent to accurately attend to its positionally corresponding semantic cues. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of Baton both qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 12 authors
·
May 23

The Challenge of Achieving Attributability in Multilingual Table-to-Text Generation with Question-Answer Blueprints

Multilingual Natural Language Generation (NLG) is challenging due to the lack of training data for low-resource languages. However, some low-resource languages have up to tens of millions of speakers globally, making it important to improve NLG tools for them. Table-to-Text NLG is an excellent measure of models' reasoning abilities but is very challenging in the multilingual setting. System outputs are often not attributable, or faithful, to the data in the source table. Intermediate planning techniques like Question-Answer (QA) blueprints have been shown to improve attributability on summarisation tasks. This work explores whether QA blueprints make multilingual Table-to-Text outputs more attributable to the input tables. This paper extends the challenging multilingual Table-to-Text dataset, TaTA, which includes African languages, with QA blueprints. Sequence-to-sequence language models are then finetuned on this dataset, with and without blueprints. Results show that QA blueprints improve performance for models finetuned and evaluated only on English examples, but do not demonstrate gains in the multilingual setting. This is due to inaccuracies in machine translating the blueprints from English into target languages when generating the training data, and models failing to rely closely on the blueprints they generate. An in-depth analysis is conducted on why this is challenging.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 29, 2025

The Unified Autonomy Stack: Toward a Blueprint for Generalizable Robot Autonomy

We introduce and open-source the Unified Autonomy Stack, a system-level solution that enables resilient autonomy across diverse aerial and ground robot morphologies. The architecture centers on three synergistic modules -- multi-modal perception, multi-behavior planning, and multi-layered safe navigation -- that together deliver comprehensive mission autonomy. The stack fuses data from LiDAR, radar, vision, and inertial sensing, enabling (a) robust localization and mapping through factor graph-based fusion, (b) semantic scene understanding, (c) motion and informative path planning through sampling-based techniques adaptive across spatial scales, as well as (d) multi-layered safe navigation both through planning on the online reconstructed map and deep learning-driven exteroceptive policies alongside last-resort safety filters using control barrier functions. The resulting behaviors include safe GNSS-denied navigation into unknown and perceptually-degraded regions, exploration of complex environments, object discovery, and efficient inspection planning. The stack has been field-tested and validated on both aerial (rotorcraft) and ground (legged) robots operating in a host of demanding environments, including self-similar and smoke-filled settings, with complex geometries and high obstacle clutter. These tests demonstrate resilient performance in challenging conditions. To facilitate ease of adoption, we open-source the implementation alongside supporting documentation, validation, and evaluation datasets https://github.com/ntnu-arl/unified_autonomy_stack. A video giving the overview of the paper and the field experiments is available at https://youtu.be/l8Su8OXsM-E.

  • 10 authors
·
May 11

APT: Architectural Planning and Text-to-Blueprint Construction Using Large Language Models for Open-World Agents

We present APT, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM)-driven framework that enables autonomous agents to construct complex and creative structures within the Minecraft environment. Unlike previous approaches that primarily concentrate on skill-based open-world tasks or rely on image-based diffusion models for generating voxel-based structures, our method leverages the intrinsic spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By employing chain-of-thought decomposition along with multimodal inputs, the framework generates detailed architectural layouts and blueprints that the agent can execute under zero-shot or few-shot learning scenarios. Our agent incorporates both memory and reflection modules to facilitate lifelong learning, adaptive refinement, and error correction throughout the building process. To rigorously evaluate the agent's performance in this emerging research area, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark consisting of diverse construction tasks designed to test creativity, spatial reasoning, adherence to in-game rules, and the effective integration of multimodal instructions. Experimental results using various GPT-based LLM backends and agent configurations demonstrate the agent's capacity to accurately interpret extensive instructions involving numerous items, their positions, and orientations. The agent successfully produces complex structures complete with internal functionalities such as Redstone-powered systems. A/B testing indicates that the inclusion of a memory module leads to a significant increase in performance, emphasizing its role in enabling continuous learning and the reuse of accumulated experience. Additionally, the agent's unexpected emergence of scaffolding behavior highlights the potential of future LLM-driven agents to utilize subroutine planning and leverage the emergence ability of LLMs to autonomously develop human-like problem-solving techniques.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

From Economic Agents to Agentic Economies: A Systems Blueprint for Economic World Models

Economic World Models (EWMs) are generative economic models that simulate how economies evolve from within by modeling heterogeneous agents, their beliefs and actions, and the market and institutional mechanisms through which their interactions produce aggregate outcomes. This paper develops an implementation roadmap for building economic world models as generative engines in which heterogeneous agents act, interact, adapt, and co-evolve with markets and institutions, thereby producing economic dynamics from the inside. We organize EWM systems into a six-level capability ladder, from fixed rule-based agent worlds to adaptive and LLM-based agent worlds, self-evolving agents, evolving institutional worlds, and sim-to-real economic twins aligned with real observations. A systematic literature survey across these levels reveals that existing work remains concentrated in lower-level agent and simulation environments, while systems with self-evolving agents, endogenous institutions, persistent empirical alignment, and validated economic mechanisms remain rare. By translating the EWM agenda into an implementation blueprint, this paper aims to accelerate the development of the next generation of economic simulation environments that can serve as high-fidelity sandboxes for human decision-makers and as training, planning, evaluation, and safety substrates for AI agents. We release a curated paper list and related resources to support future research.

FreedomIntelligence FreedomAI
·
Aug 5 6

Toward an Engineering of Science: Rebalancing Generation and Verification in the Age of AI

AI systems can now cheaply generate plausible scientific artifacts such as papers, reviews, and surveys. This creates a risk of epistemic pollution in our scientific systems, where unreliable but plausible-looking artifacts can accumulate faster than the system can filter them out. The problem is structural: the epistemic infrastructure of science was calibrated to a world where producing a plausible artifact required substantial expertise, labor, and time, so generation cost itself served as a rough filter; AI weakens that filter without comparably lowering verification cost. We argue that AI-era science should treat this as an engineering problem: redesigning epistemic infrastructure to rebalance the costs of generation and verification. The current paper-centered system makes verification expensive: papers compress long-context scientific logic into prose, forcing reviewers, human or AI, to reconstruct underlying argument structure before they can evaluate it. As one step in this direction, we propose blueprints as preliminary epistemic infrastructure: structured, decomposed research artifacts that represent claims, evidence, assumptions, and definitions as typed graph components. Blueprints are designed to trade an upfront generation cost for cheaper, more local, more distributed verification downstream. We have instantiated the proposal in a proof-of-concept prototype.

  • 1 authors
·
May 10

Orchestrator-Agent Trust: A Modular Agentic AI Visual Classification System with Trust-Aware Orchestration and RAG-Based Reasoning

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components including the complete software source code are openly released to support reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 9, 2025 1

APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 4, 2025 4

Map the Flow: Revealing Hidden Pathways of Information in VideoLLMs

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) extend the capabilities of vision-language models to spatiotemporal inputs, enabling tasks such as video question answering (VideoQA). Despite recent advances in VideoLLMs, their internal mechanisms on where and how they extract and propagate video and textual information remain less explored. In this study, we investigate the internal information flow of VideoLLMs using mechanistic interpretability techniques. Our analysis reveals consistent patterns across diverse VideoQA tasks: (1) temporal reasoning in VideoLLMs initiates with active cross-frame interactions in early-to-middle layers, (2) followed by progressive video-language integration in middle layers. This is facilitated by alignment between video representations and linguistic embeddings containing temporal concepts. (3) Upon completion of this integration, the model is ready to generate correct answers in middle-to-late layers. (4) Based on our analysis, we show that VideoLLMs can retain their VideoQA performance by selecting these effective information pathways while suppressing a substantial amount of attention edges, e.g., 58% in LLaVA-NeXT-7B-Video-FT. These findings provide a blueprint on how VideoLLMs perform temporal reasoning and offer practical insights for improving model interpretability and downstream generalization. Our project page with the source code is available at https://map-the-flow.github.io

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 15, 2025 1

Towards Robust Foundation Models for Digital Pathology

Biomedical Foundation Models (FMs) are rapidly transforming AI-enabled healthcare research and entering clinical validation. However, their susceptibility to learning non-biological technical features -- including variations in surgical/endoscopic techniques, laboratory procedures, and scanner hardware -- poses risks for clinical deployment. We present the first systematic investigation of pathology FM robustness to non-biological features. Our work (i) introduces measures to quantify FM robustness, (ii) demonstrates the consequences of limited robustness, and (iii) proposes a framework for FM robustification to mitigate these issues. Specifically, we developed PathoROB, a robustness benchmark with three novel metrics, including the robustness index, and four datasets covering 28 biological classes from 34 medical centers. Our experiments reveal robustness deficits across all 20 evaluated FMs, and substantial robustness differences between them. We found that non-robust FM representations can cause major diagnostic downstream errors and clinical blunders that prevent safe clinical adoption. Using more robust FMs and post-hoc robustification considerably reduced (but did not yet eliminate) the risk of such errors. This work establishes that robustness evaluation is essential for validating pathology FMs before clinical adoption and demonstrates that future FM development must integrate robustness as a core design principle. PathoROB provides a blueprint for assessing robustness across biomedical domains, guiding FM improvement efforts towards more robust, representative, and clinically deployable AI systems that prioritize biological information over technical artifacts.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

ConceptWeaver: Weaving Disentangled Concepts with Flow

Pre-trained flow-based models excel at synthesizing complex scenes yet lack a direct mechanism for disentangling and customizing their underlying concepts from one-shot real-world sources. To demystify this process, we first introduce a novel differential probing technique to isolate and analyze the influence of individual concept tokens on the velocity field over time. This investigation yields a critical insight: the generative process is not monolithic but unfolds in three distinct stages. An initial Blueprint Stage establishes low-frequency structure, followed by a pivotal Instantiation Stage where content concepts emerge with peak intensity and become naturally disentangled, creating an optimal window for manipulation. A final concept-insensitive refinement stage then synthesizes fine-grained details. Guided by this discovery, we propose ConceptWeaver, a framework for one-shot concept disentanglement. ConceptWeaver learns concept-specific semantic offsets from a single reference image using a stage-aware optimization strategy that aligns with the three-stage framework. These learned offsets are then deployed during inference via our novel ConceptWeaver Guidance (CWG) mechanism, which strategically injects them at the appropriate generative stage. Extensive experiments validate that ConceptWeaver enables high-fidelity, compositional synthesis and editing, demonstrating that understanding and leveraging the intrinsic, staged nature of flow models is key to unlocking precise, multi-granularity content manipulation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 29

Uncovering Security Threats and Architecting Defenses in Autonomous Agents: A Case Study of OpenClaw

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous, tool-calling agents has fundamentally altered the cybersecurity landscape. Frameworks like OpenClaw grant AI systems operating-system-level permissions and the autonomy to execute complex workflows. This level of access creates unprecedented security challenges. Consequently, traditional content-filtering defenses have become obsolete. This report presents a comprehensive security analysis of the OpenClaw ecosystem. We systematically investigate its current threat landscape, highlighting critical vulnerabilities such as prompt injection-driven Remote Code Execution (RCE), sequential tool attack chains, context amnesia, and supply chain contamination. To systematically contextualize these threats, we propose a novel tri-layered risk taxonomy for autonomous Agents, categorizing vulnerabilities across AI Cognitive, Software Execution, and Information System dimensions. To address these systemic architectural flaws, we introduce the Full-Lifecycle Agent Security Architecture (FASA). This theoretical defense blueprint advocates for zero-trust agentic execution, dynamic intent verification, and cross-layer reasoning-action correlation. Building on this framework, we present Project ClawGuard, our ongoing engineering initiative. This project aims to implement the FASA paradigm and transition autonomous agents from high-risk experimental utilities into trustworthy systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/NY1024/ClawGuard.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 12

Shaping AI's Impact on Billions of Lives

Artificial Intelligence (AI), like any transformative technology, has the potential to be a double-edged sword, leading either toward significant advancements or detrimental outcomes for society as a whole. As is often the case when it comes to widely-used technologies in market economies (e.g., cars and semiconductor chips), commercial interest tends to be the predominant guiding factor. The AI community is at risk of becoming polarized to either take a laissez-faire attitude toward AI development, or to call for government overregulation. Between these two poles we argue for the community of AI practitioners to consciously and proactively work for the common good. This paper offers a blueprint for a new type of innovation infrastructure including 18 concrete milestones to guide AI research in that direction. Our view is that we are still in the early days of practical AI, and focused efforts by practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders can still maximize the upsides of AI and minimize its downsides. We talked to luminaries such as recent Nobelist John Jumper on science, President Barack Obama on governance, former UN Ambassador and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice on security, philanthropist Eric Schmidt on several topics, and science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson on entertainment. This ongoing dialogue and collaborative effort has produced a comprehensive, realistic view of what the actual impact of AI could be, from a diverse assembly of thinkers with deep understanding of this technology and these domains. From these exchanges, five recurring guidelines emerged, which form the cornerstone of a framework for beginning to harness AI in service of the public good. They not only guide our efforts in discovery but also shape our approach to deploying this transformative technology responsibly and ethically.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

A Methodology for Evaluating RAG Systems: A Case Study On Configuration Dependency Validation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an umbrella of different components, design decisions, and domain-specific adaptations to enhance the capabilities of large language models and counter their limitations regarding hallucination and outdated and missing knowledge. Since it is unclear which design decisions lead to a satisfactory performance, developing RAG systems is often experimental and needs to follow a systematic and sound methodology to gain sound and reliable results. However, there is currently no generally accepted methodology for RAG evaluation despite a growing interest in this technology. In this paper, we propose a first blueprint of a methodology for a sound and reliable evaluation of RAG systems and demonstrate its applicability on a real-world software engineering research task: the validation of configuration dependencies across software technologies. In summary, we make two novel contributions: (i) A novel, reusable methodological design for evaluating RAG systems, including a demonstration that represents a guideline, and (ii) a RAG system, which has been developed following this methodology, that achieves the highest accuracy in the field of dependency validation. For the blueprint's demonstration, the key insights are the crucial role of choosing appropriate baselines and metrics, the necessity for systematic RAG refinements derived from qualitative failure analysis, as well as the reporting practices of key design decision to foster replication and evaluation.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

Foundation Models for Natural Language Processing -- Pre-trained Language Models Integrating Media

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 16, 2023

SLUE Phase-2: A Benchmark Suite of Diverse Spoken Language Understanding Tasks

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 20, 2022

LiveFigure: Generating Editable Scientific Illustration with VLM Agents

Scientific illustrations are essential for depicting conceptual designs, methodologies, and experimental workflows in research, playing a pivotal role in communicating complex academic insights. However, creating high-quality scientific illustrations remains a labor-intensive task for human scientists. While recent generative image models have advanced prompt-based editing, the synthesis of fully editable figures remains a fundamental challenge. Valid editability involves structured transformations of graphical elements, scales, attributes, and text, rather than simple pixel-level changes. Existing models generate raster outputs that do not support manual correction or layout adjustment, limiting their utility in scientific publishing, where editable vector figures are typically required for submission. To address this challenge, we introduce LiveFigure, an agentic framework driven by VLM agents that imitates the multi-step drawing workflow of human researchers. It first plans figure blueprints by drawing inspiration from high-quality references in previous works, then generates executable scripts that produce figures via the PowerPoint interface based on skills and experience, and finally refines the outputs with targeted visual diagnostics, producing fully vectorized, editable figures that meet publication standards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveFigure generates inherently editable figures, achieving 80% publication-readiness in only 17 manual edits, far surpassing the 24% rate of the strongest baseline, NanoBanana. Human preference studies further validate this advantage, with LiveFigure securing a 60% win rate against NanoBanana. Our code is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LiveFigure.git.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21

KlingAvatar 2.0 Technical Report

Avatar video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, prior work exhibits limited efficiency in generating long-duration high-resolution videos, suffering from temporal drifting, quality degradation, and weak prompt following as video length increases. To address these challenges, we propose KlingAvatar 2.0, a spatio-temporal cascade framework that performs upscaling in both spatial resolution and temporal dimension. The framework first generates low-resolution blueprint video keyframes that capture global semantics and motion, and then refines them into high-resolution, temporally coherent sub-clips using a first-last frame strategy, while retaining smooth temporal transitions in long-form videos. To enhance cross-modal instruction fusion and alignment in extended videos, we introduce a Co-Reasoning Director composed of three modality-specific large language model (LLM) experts. These experts reason about modality priorities and infer underlying user intent, converting inputs into detailed storylines through multi-turn dialogue. A Negative Director further refines negative prompts to improve instruction alignment. Building on these components, we extend the framework to support ID-specific multi-character control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model effectively addresses the challenges of efficient, multimodally aligned long-form high-resolution video generation, delivering enhanced visual clarity, realistic lip-teeth rendering with accurate lip synchronization, strong identity preservation, and coherent multimodal instruction following.

KlingTeam Kling Team
·
Dec 15, 2025 2

Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

  • 18 authors
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Dec 13, 2024 5

Secrets of RLHF in Large Language Models Part I: PPO

Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans assumes paramount significance, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) emerges as the pivotal technological paradigm underpinning this pursuit. Current technical routes usually include reward models to measure human preferences, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to optimize policy model outputs, and process supervision to improve step-by-step reasoning capabilities. However, due to the challenges of reward design, environment interaction, and agent training, coupled with huge trial and error cost of large language models, there is a significant barrier for AI researchers to motivate the development of technical alignment and safe landing of LLMs. The stable training of RLHF has still been a puzzle. In the first report, we dissect the framework of RLHF, re-evaluate the inner workings of PPO, and explore how the parts comprising PPO algorithms impact policy agent training. We identify policy constraints being the key factor for the effective implementation of the PPO algorithm. Therefore, we explore the PPO-max, an advanced version of PPO algorithm, to efficiently improve the training stability of the policy model. Based on our main results, we perform a comprehensive analysis of RLHF abilities compared with SFT models and ChatGPT. The absence of open-source implementations has posed significant challenges to the investigation of LLMs alignment. Therefore, we are eager to release technical reports, reward models and PPO codes

  • 27 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023 1

PhotoFlow: Agentic 3D Virtual Photography Missions

Virtual photography asks an agent to enter a prepared 3D scene with no preselected camera pose or reference image, infer a suitable shot from scene information and a language intent, choose executable camera parameters, and render the final photograph. Recent progress in vision-language models makes this kind of spatial agent increasingly plausible, but the task stresses two capabilities that remain hard to evaluate together: complex 3D spatial understanding and abstract aesthetic judgment. We introduce PhotoFlow, a Director-Reviewer-Reflector agent for closed-loop camera search. The Director builds a soft photographic blueprint and proposes diverse candidate cameras; the Reviewer combines rule checks, visual critique, and pairwise incumbent selection; and the Reflector converts failures into region memory, dead-zone suppression, and high-explore relocation. We also introduce VPhotoBench, a benchmark of 47 open-license Blender scenes and 141 language-conditioned photography missions spanning subject placement, relational composition, and atmosphere/style. On held-out experiments, PhotoFlow achieves the strongest external quality-alignment composite and success rate among one-shot prediction, single-chain reflection, anchor-bank selection, and random search under a six-round rendering budget. To our knowledge, this is the first work to make language-conditioned virtual photography in arbitrary Blender scenes an executable agent task, and our results show that an LLM-centered spatial agent can already produce strong photographs in a setting designed to challenge both 3D reasoning and aesthetic choice.

A Systematic Post-Train Framework for Video Generation

While large-scale video diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-resolution and semantically rich content, a significant gap remains between their pretraining performance and real-world deployment requirements due to critical issues such as prompt sensitivity, temporal inconsistency, and prohibitive inference costs. To bridge this gap, we propose a comprehensive post-training framework that systematically aligns pretrained models with user intentions through four synergistic stages: we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to transform the base model into a stable instruction-following policy, followed by a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) stage that utilizes a novel Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) method tailored for video diffusion to enhance perceptual quality and temporal coherence; subsequently, we integrate Prompt Enhancement via a specialized language model to refine user inputs, and finally address system efficiency through Inference Optimization. Together, these components provide a systematic approach to improving visual quality, temporal coherence, and instruction following, while preserving the controllability learned during pretraining. The result is a practical blueprint for building scalable post-training pipelines that are stable, adaptable, and effective in real-world deployment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this unified pipeline effectively mitigates common artifacts and significantly improves controllability and visual aesthetics while adhering to strict sampling cost constraints.

  • 12 authors
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Apr 27 1

Taming the Memory Footprint Crisis: System Design for Production Diffusion LLM Serving

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Models (ARMs), utilizing parallel decoding to overcome sequential bottlenecks. However, existing research focuses primarily on kernel-level optimizations, lacking a holistic serving framework that addresses the unique memory dynamics of diffusion processes in production. We identify a critical "memory footprint crisis" specific to dLLMs, driven by monolithic logit tensors and the severe resource oscillation between compute-bound "Refresh" phases and bandwidth-bound "Reuse" phases. To bridge this gap, we present dLLM-Serve, an efficient dLLM serving system that co-optimizes memory footprint, computational scheduling, and generation quality. dLLM-Serve introduces Logit-Aware Activation Budgeting to decompose transient tensor peaks, a Phase-Multiplexed Scheduler to interleave heterogeneous request phases, and Head-Centric Sparse Attention to decouple logical sparsity from physical storage. We evaluate dLLM-Serve on diverse workloads (LiveBench, Burst, OSC) and GPUs (RTX 4090, L40S). Relative to the state-of-the-art baseline, dLLM-Serve improves throughput by 1.61times-1.81times on the consumer-grade RTX 4090 and 1.60times-1.74times on the server-grade NVIDIA L40S, while reducing tail latency by nearly 4times under heavy contention. dLLM-Serve establishes the first blueprint for scalable dLLM inference, converting theoretical algorithmic sparsity into tangible wall-clock acceleration across heterogeneous hardware.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 18, 2025

EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecycle

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents show strong performance in tool use, but lack the crucial capability to systematically learn from their own experiences. While existing frameworks mainly focus on mitigating external knowledge gaps, they fail to address a more fundamental limitation: the inability to iteratively refine problem-solving strategies. In this work, we introduce EvolveR, a framework designed to enable agent to self-improve through a complete, closed-loop experience lifecycle. This lifecycle comprises two key stages: (1) Offline Self-Distillation, where the agent's interaction trajectories are synthesized into a structured repository of abstract, reusable strategic principles; (2) Online Interaction, where the agent interacts with tasks and actively retrieves distilled principles to guide its decision-making, accumulating a diverse set of behavioral trajectories. This loop employs a policy reinforcement mechanism to iteratively update the agent based on its performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EvolveR on complex multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, where it achieves superior performance over strong agentic baselines. Our work presents a comprehensive blueprint for agents that learn not only from external data but also from the consequences of their own actions, paving the way for more autonomous and continuously improving systems. Code is available at https://github.com/Edaizi/EvolveR.

  • 11 authors
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Oct 17, 2025

Small Language Models for Agentic Systems: A Survey of Architectures, Capabilities, and Deployment Trade offs

Small language models (SLMs; 1-12B params, sometimes up to 20B) are sufficient and often superior for agentic workloads where the objective is schema- and API-constrained accuracy rather than open-ended generation. We synthesize recent evidence across open and proprietary SLMs (Phi-4-Mini, Qwen-2.5-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Llama-3.2-1B/3B, Ministral-3B/8B, Apple on-device 3B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill) and connect it to modern evaluations (BFCL v3/v4, StableToolBench) and serving stacks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) paired with guided decoding libraries (XGrammar, Outlines). We formalize SLM-default, LLM-fallback systems with uncertainty-aware routing and verifier cascades, and propose engineering metrics that reflect real production goals: cost per successful task (CPS), schema validity rate, executable call rate, p50/p95 latency, and energy per request. Guided decoding, strict JSON Schema outputs, and validator-first tool execution close much of the capability gap with larger models and often let SLMs match or surpass LLMs on tool use, function calling, and RAG at 10x-100x lower token cost with materially better latency and energy. We provide design patterns for agent stacks that prioritize SLMs: schema-first prompting, type-safe function registries, confidence scoring with verifier rollups, and lightweight adaptation via LoRA/QLoRA. We also delineate limits where fallback remains valuable (open-domain reasoning and some long-horizon planning). The result is a practical blueprint for building fast, inexpensive, and reliable agents that default to SLMs while preserving headroom with targeted LLM assistance. Keywords: small language models, agents, function calling, structured outputs, JSON Schema, guided decoding, LoRA/QLoRA, routing, energy efficiency, edge inference

  • 2 authors
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Oct 4, 2025

A Unified Multi-Modal Sensing and Active-Stabilization Framework for Autonomous IoT Nodes in Connectivity-Denied Environments: From Perimeter Sentinel to High-Value Cargo Protection

Autonomous embedded nodes deployed in connectivity-denied environments - remote forest perimeters, farm boundaries, and cargo in transit across highways or open ocean - share a common set of engineering requirements that are usually addressed by separate, purpose-built systems: passive-infrared (PIR) triggered wake-up, inertial-measurement-unit (IMU) driven active stabilization, and long-range communication under strict power budgets. This paper argues that a perimeter/wildlife security turret and a high-value cargo protection crate are, from a systems perspective, two parametrizations of the same generalized node architecture rather than two unrelated designs. We formalize this generalized architecture, extend it with three sensing/communication modalities not present in either original design - single-point LiDAR ranging, a LoRa/LoRaWAN regional mesh tier, and a satellite short-burst-data (SBD) global tier - and couple the resulting telemetry to a Geographic Information System (GIS) layer via a proposed Composite Risk Index (CRI) that fuses breach events, impact severity, and connectivity state into a single spatially-referenced score. We present the sensor-fusion, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) stabilization, link-budget, received-signal-strength-indicator (RSSI) localization, and CRI formulations that unify the two deployment modes, provide a simulated closed-loop stabilization response and a tiered-communication trade-off analysis, and instantiate the two original projects as case studies of the generalized architecture. The framework is intended as an engineering blueprint and a starting point for field validation rather than as a report of field-tested results.

  • 1 authors
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Jun 30

HiMAC: Hierarchical Macro-Micro Learning for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in interactive decision-making, yet they remain fundamentally limited in long-horizon tasks that require structured planning and reliable execution. Existing approaches predominantly rely on flat autoregressive policies, where high-level reasoning and low-level actions are generated within a single token sequence, leading to inefficient exploration and severe error propagation over extended trajectories. In this work, we propose HiMAC, a hierarchical agentic RL framework that explicitly decomposes long-horizon decision-making into macro-level planning and micro-level execution. HiMAC models reasoning as a structured blueprint generation process followed by goal-conditioned action execution, enabling robust long-horizon planning within LLM-based agents. To train this hierarchy efficiently, we introduce a critic-free hierarchical policy optimization paradigm that extends group-based reinforcement learning to bi-level structures through hierarchical relative advantage estimation. Furthermore, we propose an iterative co-evolution training strategy that alternates between planner exploration and executor adaptation, mitigating the non-stationarity inherent in hierarchical learning. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Sokoban demonstrate that HiMAC consistently outperforms strong prompting and reinforcement learning baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance and substantially improved sample efficiency across both text-based and visually grounded environments. Our results show that introducing structured hierarchy, rather than increasing model scale alone, is a key factor for enabling robust long-horizon agentic intelligence.

  • 5 authors
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Mar 1

M3DLayout: A Multi-Source Dataset of 3D Indoor Layouts and Structured Descriptions for 3D Generation

In text-driven 3D scene generation, object layout serves as a crucial intermediate representation that bridges high-level language instructions with detailed geometric output. It not only provides a structural blueprint for ensuring physical plausibility but also supports semantic controllability and interactive editing. However, the learning capabilities of current 3D indoor layout generation models are constrained by the limited scale, diversity, and annotation quality of existing datasets. To address this, we introduce M3DLayout, a large-scale, multi-source dataset for 3D indoor layout generation. M3DLayout comprises 15,080 layouts and over 258k object instances, integrating three distinct sources: real-world scans, professional CAD designs, and procedurally generated scenes. Each layout is paired with detailed structured text describing global scene summaries, relational placements of large furniture, and fine-grained arrangements of smaller items. This diverse and richly annotated resource enables models to learn complex spatial and semantic patterns across a wide variety of indoor environments. To assess the potential of M3DLayout, we establish a benchmark using a text-conditioned diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that our dataset provides a solid foundation for training layout generation models. Its multi-source composition enhances diversity, notably through the Inf3DLayout subset which provides rich small-object information, enabling the generation of more complex and detailed scenes. We hope that M3DLayout can serve as a valuable resource for advancing research in text-driven 3D scene synthesis.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 28, 2025

Quantum-RAG and PunGPT2: Advancing Low-Resource Language Generation and Retrieval for the Punjabi Language

Despite the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), low-resource languages remain largely excluded from the NLP landscape. We present PunGPT2, the first fully open-source suite of Punjabi large language models, trained from scratch on a 35GB domain-diverse corpus encompassing literature, religious texts, news, and social discourse. Unlike prior multilingual approaches, PunGPT2 captures rich syntactic and morphological features unique to Punjabi through a tokenizer optimised with byte pair encoding and linguistically aligned pretraining objectives. To improve factual grounding and domain recall, we introduce Pun-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework combining PunGPT2 with a dense FAISS retriever over a curated Punjabi knowledge base. We further develop Pun-Instruct, a parameter-efficient, instruction-tuned variant using QLoRA, enabling robust zero-shot and instruction-following performance with significantly reduced compute needs. As a key innovation, we propose Quantum-RAG, a novel hybrid retrieval system that fuses sparse (BM25) and dense methods with quantum-inspired semantic matching. By encoding queries using amplitude-based embeddings and retrieving via quantum kernel similarity, Quantum-RAG achieves improved contextual relevance with minimal memory overhead marking the first practical integration of quantum representations in low-resource language generation. Our models significantly outperform strong multilingual baselines (mBERT, mT5, MuRIL) in perplexity, factuality, and fluency. This work provides a scalable, reproducible blueprint for extending LLM capabilities to underrepresented languages and pioneers quantum-aware retrieval in low-resource NLP

  • 2 authors
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Aug 3, 2025

RPG: A Repository Planning Graph for Unified and Scalable Codebase Generation

Large language models excel at function- and file-level code generation, yet generating complete repositories from scratch remains a fundamental challenge. This process demands coherent and reliable planning across proposal- and implementation-level stages, while natural language, due to its ambiguity and verbosity, is ill-suited for faithfully representing complex software structures. To address this, we introduce the Repository Planning Graph (RPG), a persistent representation that unifies proposal- and implementation-level planning by encoding capabilities, file structures, data flows, and functions in one graph. RPG replaces ambiguous natural language with an explicit blueprint, enabling long-horizon planning and scalable repository generation. Building on RPG, we develop ZeroRepo, a graph-driven framework for repository generation from scratch. It operates in three stages: proposal-level planning and implementation-level refinement to construct the graph, followed by graph-guided code generation with test validation. To evaluate this setting, we construct RepoCraft, a benchmark of six real-world projects with 1,052 tasks. On RepoCraft, ZeroRepo produces repositories averaging nearly 36K LOC, roughly 3.9times the strongest baseline (Claude Code) and about 64times other baselines. It attains 81.5% functional coverage and a 69.7% pass rate, exceeding Claude Code by 27.3 and 35.8 percentage points, respectively. Further analysis shows that RPG models complex dependencies, enables progressively more sophisticated planning through near-linear scaling, and enhances LLM understanding of repositories, thereby accelerating agent localization.

  • 14 authors
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Sep 19, 2025 23

Toward Ultra-Long-Horizon Agentic Science: Cognitive Accumulation for Machine Learning Engineering

The advancement of artificial intelligence toward agentic science is currently bottlenecked by the challenge of ultra-long-horizon autonomy, the ability to sustain strategic coherence and iterative correction over experimental cycles spanning days or weeks. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in short-horizon reasoning, they are easily overwhelmed by execution details in the high-dimensional, delayed-feedback environments of real-world research, failing to consolidate sparse feedback into coherent long-term guidance. Here, we present ML-Master 2.0, an autonomous agent that masters ultra-long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) which is a representative microcosm of scientific discovery. By reframing context management as a process of cognitive accumulation, our approach introduces Hierarchical Cognitive Caching (HCC), a multi-tiered architecture inspired by computer systems that enables the structural differentiation of experience over time. By dynamically distilling transient execution traces into stable knowledge and cross-task wisdom, HCC allows agents to decouple immediate execution from long-term experimental strategy, effectively overcoming the scaling limits of static context windows. In evaluations on OpenAI's MLE-Bench under 24-hour budgets, ML-Master 2.0 achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44%. Our findings demonstrate that ultra-long-horizon autonomy provides a scalable blueprint for AI capable of autonomous exploration beyond human-precedent complexities.

LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics

Learning manipulable representations of the world and its dynamics is central to AI. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a promising blueprint, but lack of practical guidance and theory has led to ad-hoc R&D. We present a comprehensive theory of JEPAs and instantiate it in {\bf LeJEPA}, a lean, scalable, and theoretically grounded training objective. First, we identify the isotropic Gaussian as the optimal distribution that JEPAs' embeddings should follow to minimize downstream prediction risk. Second, we introduce a novel objective--{\bf Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization} (SIGReg)--to constrain embeddings to reach that ideal distribution. Combining the JEPA predictive loss with SIGReg yields LeJEPA with numerous theoretical and practical benefits: (i) single trade-off hyperparameter, (ii) linear time and memory complexity, (iii) stability across hyper-parameters, architectures (ResNets, ViTs, ConvNets) and domains, (iv) heuristics-free, e.g., no stop-gradient, no teacher-student, no hyper-parameter schedulers, and (v) distributed training-friendly implementation requiring only approx50 lines of code. Our empirical validation covers 10+ datasets, 60+ architectures, all with varying scales and domains. As an example, using imagenet-1k for pretraining and linear evaluation with frozen backbone, LeJEPA reaches 79\% with a ViT-H/14. We hope that the simplicity and theory-friendly ecosystem offered by LeJEPA will reestablish self-supervised pre-training as a core pillar of AI research (https://github.com/rbalestr-lab/lejepa{GitHub repo}).

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025 1

A Practical Two-Stage Recipe for Mathematical LLMs: Maximizing Accuracy with SFT and Efficiency with Reinforcement Learning

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a pivotal challenge in advancing AI capabilities. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are the dominant training paradigms, a systematic methodology for combining them to maximize both accuracy and efficiency remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a practical and effective training recipe that strategically integrates extended SFT with RL from online inference (GRPO). We posit that these methods play complementary, not competing, roles: a prolonged SFT phase first pushes the model's accuracy to its limits, after which a GRPO phase dramatically improves token efficiency while preserving this peak performance. Our experiments reveal that extending SFT for as many as 10 epochs is crucial for performance breakthroughs, and that the primary role of GRPO in this framework is to optimize solution length. The efficacy of our recipe is rigorously validated through top-tier performance on challenging benchmarks, including a high rank among over 2,200 teams in the strictly leak-free AI Mathematical Olympiad (AIMO). This work provides the community with a battle-tested blueprint for developing state-of-the-art mathematical reasoners that are both exceptionally accurate and practically efficient. To ensure full reproducibility and empower future research, we will open-source our entire framework, including all code, model checkpoints, and training configurations at https://github.com/analokmaus/kaggle-aimo2-fast-math-r1.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 10, 2025 2

RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems

We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.

  • 15 authors
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Sep 12, 2025 2

The Auton Agentic AI Framework

The field of Artificial Intelligence is undergoing a transition from Generative AI -- probabilistic generation of text and images -- to Agentic AI, in which autonomous systems execute actions within external environments on behalf of users. This transition exposes a fundamental architectural mismatch: Large Language Models (LLMs) produce stochastic, unstructured outputs, whereas the backend infrastructure they must control -- databases, APIs, cloud services -- requires deterministic, schema-conformant inputs. The present paper describes the Auton Agentic AI Framework, a principled architecture for standardizing the creation, execution, and governance of autonomous agent systems. The framework is organized around a strict separation between the Cognitive Blueprint, a declarative, language-agnostic specification of agent identity and capabilities, and the Runtime Engine, the platform-specific execution substrate that instantiates and runs the agent. This separation enables cross-language portability, formal auditability, and modular tool integration via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The paper formalizes the agent execution model as an augmented Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with a latent reasoning space, introduces a hierarchical memory consolidation architecture inspired by biological episodic memory systems, defines a constraint manifold formalism for safety enforcement via policy projection rather than post-hoc filtering, presents a three-level self-evolution framework spanning in-context adaptation through reinforcement learning, and describes runtime optimizations -- including parallel graph execution, speculative inference, and dynamic context pruning -- that reduce end-to-end latency for multi-step agent workflows.

  • 6 authors
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Feb 27

Progress by Pieces: Test-Time Scaling for Autoregressive Image Generation

Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models have shown promising capabilities in text-to-image generation, operating in a manner similar to large language models. While test-time computation scaling has brought remarkable success in enabling reasoning-enhanced outputs for challenging natural language tasks, its adaptation to visual AR models remains unexplored and poses unique challenges. Naively applying test-time scaling strategies such as Best-of-N can be suboptimal: they consume full-length computation on erroneous generation trajectories, while the raster-scan decoding scheme lacks a blueprint of the entire canvas, limiting scaling benefits as only a few prompt-aligned candidates are generated. To address these, we introduce GridAR, a test-time scaling framework designed to elicit the best possible results from visual AR models. GridAR employs a grid-partitioned progressive generation scheme in which multiple partial candidates for the same position are generated within a canvas, infeasible ones are pruned early, and viable ones are fixed as anchors to guide subsequent decoding. Coupled with this, we present a layout-specified prompt reformulation strategy that inspects partial views to infer a feasible layout for satisfying the prompt. The reformulated prompt then guides subsequent image generation to mitigate the blueprint deficiency. Together, GridAR achieves higher-quality results under limited test-time scaling: with N=4, it even outperforms Best-of-N (N=8) by 14.4% on T2I-CompBench++ while reducing cost by 25.6%. It also generalizes to autoregressive image editing, showing comparable edit quality and a 13.9% gain in semantic preservation on PIE-Bench over larger-N baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

CHIRP dataset: towards long-term, individual-level, behavioral monitoring of bird populations in the wild

Long-term behavioral monitoring of individual animals is crucial for studying behavioral changes that occur over different time scales, especially for conservation and evolutionary biology. Computer vision methods have proven to benefit biodiversity monitoring, but automated behavior monitoring in wild populations remains challenging. This stems from the lack of datasets that cover a range of computer vision tasks necessary to extract biologically meaningful measurements of individual animals. Here, we introduce such a dataset (CHIRP) with a new method (CORVID) for individual re-identification of wild birds. The CHIRP (Combining beHaviour, Individual Re-identification and Postures) dataset is curated from a long-term population of wild Siberian jays studied in Swedish Lapland, supporting re-identification (re-id), action recognition, 2D keypoint estimation, object detection, and instance segmentation. In addition to traditional task-specific benchmarking, we introduce application-specific benchmarking with biologically relevant metrics (feeding rates, co-occurrence rates) to evaluate the performance of models in real-world use cases. Finally, we present CORVID (COlouR-based Video re-ID), a novel pipeline for individual identification of birds based on the segmentation and classification of colored leg rings, a widespread approach for visual identification of individual birds. CORVID offers a probability-based id tracking method by matching the detected combination of color rings with a database. We use application-specific benchmarking to show that CORVID outperforms state-of-the-art re-id methods. We hope this work offers the community a blueprint for curating real-world datasets from ethically approved biological studies to bridge the gap between computer vision research and biological applications.

  • 9 authors
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Mar 25

MERLIN: Building Low-SNR Robust Multimodal LLMs for Electromagnetic Signals

The paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offers a promising blueprint for advancing the electromagnetic (EM) domain. However, prevailing approaches often deviate from the native MLLM paradigm, instead using task-specific or pipelined architectures that lead to fundamental limitations in model performance and generalization. Fully realizing the MLLM potential in EM domain requires overcoming three main challenges: (1) Data. The scarcity of high-quality datasets with paired EM signals and descriptive text annotations used for MLLMs pre-training; (2) Benchmark. The absence of comprehensive benchmarks to systematically evaluate and compare the performance of models on EM signal-to-text tasks; (3) Model. A critical fragility in low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) environments, where critical signal features can be obscured, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we introduce a tripartite contribution to establish a foundation for MLLMs in the EM domain. First, to overcome data scarcity, we construct and release EM-100k, a large-scale dataset comprising over 100,000 EM signal-text pairs. Second, to enable rigorous and standardized evaluation, we propose EM-Bench, the most comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse downstream tasks spanning from perception to reasoning. Finally, to tackle the core modeling challenge, we present MERLIN, a novel training framework designed not only to align low-level signal representations with high-level semantic text, but also to explicitly enhance model robustness and performance in challenging low-SNR environments. Comprehensive experiments validate our method, showing that MERLIN is state-of-the-art in the EM-Bench and exhibits remarkable robustness in low-SNR settings.

  • 16 authors
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Mar 23

The Orchestration of Multi-Agent Systems: Architectures, Protocols, and Enterprise Adoption

Orchestrated multi-agent systems represent the next stage in the evolution of artificial intelligence, where autonomous agents collaborate through structured coordination and communication to achieve complex, shared objectives. This paper consolidates and formalizes the technical composition of such systems, presenting a unified architectural framework that integrates planning, policy enforcement, state management, and quality operations into a coherent orchestration layer. Another primary contribution of this work is the in-depth technical delineation of two complementary communication protocols - the Model Context Protocol, which standardizes how agents access external tools and contextual data, and the Agent2Agent protocol, which governs peer coordination, negotiation, and delegation. Together, these protocols establish an interoperable communication substrate that enables scalable, auditable, and policy-compliant reasoning across distributed agent collectives. Beyond protocol design, the paper details how orchestration logic, governance frameworks, and observability mechanisms collectively sustain system coherence, transparency, and accountability. By synthesizing these elements into a cohesive technical blueprint, this paper provides comprehensive treatments of orchestrated multi-agent systems - bridging conceptual architectures with implementation-ready design principles for enterprise-scale AI ecosystems.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 19

PosterVerse: A Full-Workflow Framework for Commercial-Grade Poster Generation with HTML-Based Scalable Typography

Commercial-grade poster design demands the seamless integration of aesthetic appeal with precise, informative content delivery. Current automated poster generation systems face significant limitations, including incomplete design workflows, poor text rendering accuracy, and insufficient flexibility for commercial applications. To address these challenges, we propose PosterVerse, a full-workflow, commercial-grade poster generation method that seamlessly automates the entire design process while delivering high-density and scalable text rendering. PosterVerse replicates professional design through three key stages: (1) blueprint creation using fine-tuned LLMs to extract key design elements from user requirements, (2) graphical background generation via customized diffusion models to create visually appealing imagery, and (3) unified layout-text rendering with an MLLM-powered HTML engine to guarantee high text accuracy and flexible customization. In addition, we introduce PosterDNA, a commercial-grade, HTML-based dataset tailored for training and validating poster design models. To the best of our knowledge, PosterDNA is the first Chinese poster generation dataset to introduce HTML typography files, enabling scalable text rendering and fundamentally solving the challenges of rendering small and high-density text. Experimental results demonstrate that PosterVerse consistently produces commercial-grade posters with appealing visuals, accurate text alignment, and customizable layouts, making it a promising solution for automating commercial poster design. The code and model are available at https://github.com/wuhaer/PosterVerse.

  • 8 authors
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Jan 7

Advancing Dialectal Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic Machine Translation

Dialectal Arabic (DA) poses a persistent challenge for natural language processing (NLP), as most everyday communication in the Arab world occurs in dialects that diverge significantly from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This linguistic divide limits access to digital services and educational resources and impedes progress in Arabic machine translation. This paper presents two core contributions to advancing DA-MSA translation for the Levantine, Egyptian, and Gulf dialects, particularly in low-resource and computationally constrained settings: a comprehensive evaluation of training-free prompting techniques, and the development of a resource-efficient fine-tuning pipeline. Our evaluation of prompting strategies across six large language models (LLMs) found that few-shot prompting consistently outperformed zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and our proposed Ara-TEaR method. GPT-4o achieved the highest performance across all prompting settings. For fine-tuning, a quantized Gemma2-9B model achieved a CHrF++ score of 49.88, outperforming zero-shot GPT-4o (44.58). Joint multi-dialect trained models outperformed single-dialect counterparts by over 10% CHrF++, and 4-bit quantization reduced memory usage by 60% with less than 1% performance loss. The results and insights of our experiments offer a practical blueprint for improving dialectal inclusion in Arabic NLP, showing that high-quality DA-MSA machine translation is achievable even with limited resources and paving the way for more inclusive language technologies.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 27, 2025

Specialist vision-language models for clinical ophthalmology

Clinicians spend a significant amount of time reviewing medical images and transcribing their findings regarding patient diagnosis, referral and treatment in text form. Vision-language models (VLMs), which automatically interpret images and summarize their findings as text, have enormous potential to alleviate clinical workloads and increase patient access to high-quality medical care. While foundational models have stirred considerable interest in the medical community, it is unclear whether their general capabilities translate to real-world clinical utility. In this work, we show that foundation VLMs markedly underperform compared to practicing ophthalmologists on specialist tasks crucial to the care of patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). To address this, we initially identified the essential capabilities required for image-based clinical decision-making, and then developed a curriculum to selectively train VLMs in these skills. The resulting model, RetinaVLM, can be instructed to write reports that significantly outperform those written by leading foundation medical VLMs in disease staging (F1 score of 0.63 vs. 0.11) and patient referral (0.67 vs. 0.39), and approaches the diagnostic performance of junior ophthalmologists (who achieve 0.77 and 0.78 on the respective tasks). Furthermore, in a reader study involving two senior ophthalmologists with up to 32 years of experience, RetinaVLM's reports were found to be similarly correct (78.6% vs. 82.1%) and complete (both 78.6%) as reports written by junior ophthalmologists with up to 10 years of experience. These results demonstrate that our curriculum-based approach provides a blueprint for specializing generalist foundation medical VLMs to handle real-world clinical tasks.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

A Large-Scale Dataset of Search Interests Related to Disease X Originating from Different Geographic Regions

The World Health Organization added Disease X to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. During different virus outbreaks of the past, such as COVID-19, Influenza, Lyme Disease, and Zika virus, researchers from various disciplines utilized Google Trends to mine multimodal components of web behavior to study, investigate, and analyze the global awareness, preparedness, and response associated with these respective virus outbreaks. As the world prepares for Disease X, a dataset on web behavior related to Disease X would be crucial to contribute towards the timely advancement of research in this field. Furthermore, none of the prior works in this field have focused on the development of a dataset to compile relevant web behavior data, which would help to prepare for Disease X. To address these research challenges, this work presents a dataset of web behavior related to Disease X, which emerged from different geographic regions of the world, between February 2018 and August 2023. Specifically, this dataset presents the search interests related to Disease X from 94 geographic regions. The dataset was developed by collecting data using Google Trends. The relevant search interests for all these regions for each month in this time range are available in this dataset. This paper also discusses the compliance of this dataset with the FAIR principles of scientific data management. Finally, an analysis of this dataset is presented to uphold the applicability, relevance, and usefulness of this dataset for the investigation of different research questions in the interrelated fields of Big Data, Data Mining, Healthcare, Epidemiology, and Data Analysis with a specific focus on Disease X.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

MedPRMBench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Process Reward Models in Medical Reasoning

Process-Level Reward Models (PRMs) are essential for guiding complex reasoning in large language models, yet existing PRM benchmarks cover only general domains such as mathematics, failing to address medical reasoning -- which is uniquely characterized by safety criticality, knowledge intensity, and diverse error patterns. Without a reliable medical PRM evaluation framework, we cannot quantify models' error detection capabilities in clinical reasoning, leaving their safety in real-world healthcare applications unverified. We propose MedPRMBench, the first process-level reward model benchmark for the medical domain. Built through a three-phase pipeline based on Clinical Reasoning Blueprints (CRBs), MedPRMBench systematically generates high-quality evaluation data from seven medical QA sources, covering 14 fine-grained error types across three categories (Simplicity, Soundness, and Sensitivity) with the first 4-level severity grading system to quantify clinical impact. The benchmark comprises 6{,}500 questions with 13{,}000 reasoning chains and 113{,}910 step-level labels, plus 6{,}879 questions for training. Our medical PRM baseline achieves an 87.1\% overall PRMScore -- substantially surpassing all baselines -- and serves as a plug-and-play verifier that improves downstream medical QA accuracy by 3.2--6.7 percentage points. Systematic evaluation spanning proprietary frontier models, open-source reasoning models, and medical-specialized models reveals critical weaknesses in current models' medical reasoning error detection capabilities, providing clear directions for future PRM improvement.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 18

Kling-Avatar: Grounding Multimodal Instructions for Cascaded Long-Duration Avatar Animation Synthesis

Recent advances in audio-driven avatar video generation have significantly enhanced audio-visual realism. However, existing methods treat instruction conditioning merely as low-level tracking driven by acoustic or visual cues, without modeling the communicative purpose conveyed by the instructions. This limitation compromises their narrative coherence and character expressiveness. To bridge this gap, we introduce Kling-Avatar, a novel cascaded framework that unifies multimodal instruction understanding with photorealistic portrait generation. Our approach adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we design a multimodal large language model (MLLM) director that produces a blueprint video conditioned on diverse instruction signals, thereby governing high-level semantics such as character motion and emotions. In the second stage, guided by blueprint keyframes, we generate multiple sub-clips in parallel using a first-last frame strategy. This global-to-local framework preserves fine-grained details while faithfully encoding the high-level intent behind multimodal instructions. Our parallel architecture also enables fast and stable generation of long-duration videos, making it suitable for real-world applications such as digital human livestreaming and vlogging. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a benchmark of 375 curated samples covering diverse instructions and challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Kling-Avatar is capable of generating vivid, fluent, long-duration videos at up to 1080p and 48 fps, achieving superior performance in lip synchronization accuracy, emotion and dynamic expressiveness, instruction controllability, identity preservation, and cross-domain generalization. These results establish Kling-Avatar as a new benchmark for semantically grounded, high-fidelity audio-driven avatar synthesis.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025 3

Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces

Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in long-context reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the Generative Semantic Workspace (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an Operator, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a Reconciler, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) huet_episodic_2025 comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to 20\%. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by 51\% compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025 2

The Expense of Seeing: Attaining Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning Within the Monolithic Paradigm

The rapid proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is often framed as enabling unified multimodal knowledge discovery but rests on an under-examined assumption: that current VLMs faithfully synthesise multimodal data. We argue they often do not, and this gap reflects a trustworthiness problem in the dominant Vision Encoder-Projector-LLM paradigm. Rather than extracting grounded knowledge from visual inputs, state-of-the-art models frequently exhibit functional blindness, i.e., exploiting strong language priors to bypass severe visual representation bottlenecks. In this work, we challenge the conventional methodology of multimodal evaluation, which relies on data ablation or new dataset creation and therefore conflates dataset biases with architectural incapacity. We propose an information-theoretic departure: the Modality Translation Protocol, designed to quantify what we call the Expense of Seeing. By translating semantic payloads rather than ablating them, we formulate three novel metrics -- the Toll (ToS), Curse (CoS), and Fallacy (FoS) of Seeing -- culminating in the Semantic Sufficiency Criterion (SSC). Furthermore, we hypothesise a Divergence Law of Multimodal Scaling: as the underlying language engines scale to unprecedented reasoning capabilities, the penalty of the visual knowledge bottleneck may increase rather than diminish. We argue the community should move beyond "multimodal gain" as a primary evaluation target. By elevating the SSC from a passive diagnostic constraint to an active architectural blueprint, we provide a foundation for guiding the next generation of AI systems toward genuine multimodal reasoning.

  • 1 authors
·
May 20 2

Small Language Models for Privacy-Preserving Clinical Information Extraction in Low-Resource Languages

Extracting clinical information from medical transcripts in low-resource languages remains a significant challenge in healthcare natural language processing (NLP). This study evaluates a two-step pipeline combining Aya-expanse-8B as a Persian-to-English translation model with five open-source small language models (SLMs) -- Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, and Gemma-3-1B-it -- for binary extraction of 13 clinical features from 1,221 anonymized Persian transcripts collected at a cancer palliative care call center. Using a few-shot prompting strategy without fine-tuning, models were assessed on macro-averaged F1-score, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), sensitivity, and specificity to account for class imbalance. Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct achieved the highest overall performance (median macro-F1: 0.899; MCC: 0.797), while Gemma-3-1B-it showed the weakest results. Larger models (7B--8B parameters) consistently outperformed smaller counterparts in sensitivity and MCC. A bilingual analysis of Aya-expanse-8B revealed that translating Persian transcripts to English improved sensitivity, reduced missing outputs, and boosted metrics robust to class imbalance, though at the cost of slightly lower specificity and precision. Feature-level results showed reliable extraction of physiological symptoms across most models, whereas psychological complaints, administrative requests, and complex somatic features remained challenging. These findings establish a practical, privacy-preserving blueprint for deploying open-source SLMs in multilingual clinical NLP settings with limited infrastructure and annotation resources, and highlight the importance of jointly optimizing model scale and input language strategy for sensitive healthcare applications.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 24 2

Parallel CPU-GPU Execution for LLM Inference on Constrained GPUs

Deploying large language models (LLMs) for online inference is often constrained by limited GPU memory, particularly due to the growing KV cache during auto-regressive decoding. Hybrid GPU-CPU execution has emerged as a promising solution by offloading KV cache management and parts of attention computation to the CPU. However, a key bottleneck remains: existing schedulers fail to effectively overlap CPU-offloaded tasks with GPU execution during the latency-critical, bandwidth-bound decode phase. This particularly penalizes real-time, decode-heavy applications (e.g., chat, Chain-of-Thought reasoning) which are currently underserved by existing systems, especially under memory pressure typical of edge or low-cost deployments. We present APEX, a novel, profiling-informed scheduling strategy that maximizes CPU-GPU parallelism during hybrid LLM inference. Unlike systems relying on static rules or purely heuristic approaches, APEX dynamically dispatches compute across heterogeneous resources by predicting execution times of CPU and GPU subtasks to maximize overlap while avoiding scheduling overheads. We evaluate APEX on diverse workloads and GPU architectures (NVIDIA T4, A10), using LLaMa-2-7B and LLaMa-3.1-8B models. Compared to GPU-only schedulers like VLLM, APEX improves throughput by 84% - 96% on T4 and 11% - 89% on A10 GPUs, while preserving latency. Against the best existing hybrid schedulers, it delivers up to 49% (T4) and 37% (A10) higher throughput in long-output settings. APEX significantly advances hybrid LLM inference efficiency on such memory-constrained hardware and provides a blueprint for scheduling in heterogeneous AI systems, filling a critical gap for efficient real-time LLM applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

AutoP2C: An LLM-Based Agent Framework for Code Repository Generation from Multimodal Content in Academic Papers

Machine Learning (ML) research is spread through academic papers featuring rich multimodal content, including text, diagrams, and tabular results. However, translating these multimodal elements into executable code remains a challenging and time-consuming process that requires substantial ML expertise. We introduce ``Paper-to-Code'' (P2C), a novel task that transforms the multimodal content of scientific publications into fully executable code repositories, which extends beyond the existing formulation of code generation that merely converts textual descriptions into isolated code snippets. To automate the P2C process, we propose AutoP2C, a multi-agent framework based on large language models that processes both textual and visual content from research papers to generate complete code repositories. Specifically, AutoP2C contains four stages: (1) repository blueprint extraction from established codebases, (2) multimodal content parsing that integrates information from text, equations, and figures, (3) hierarchical task decomposition for structured code generation, and (4) iterative feedback-driven debugging to ensure functionality and performance. Evaluation on a benchmark of eight research papers demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoP2C, which can successfully generate executable code repositories for all eight papers, while OpenAI-o1 or DeepSeek-R1 can only produce runnable code for one paper. The code is available at https://github.com/shoushouyu/Automated-Paper-to-Code.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

Transform Once: Efficient Operator Learning in Frequency Domain

Spectral analysis provides one of the most effective paradigms for information-preserving dimensionality reduction, as simple descriptions of naturally occurring signals are often obtained via few terms of periodic basis functions. In this work, we study deep neural networks designed to harness the structure in frequency domain for efficient learning of long-range correlations in space or time: frequency-domain models (FDMs). Existing FDMs are based on complex-valued transforms i.e. Fourier Transforms (FT), and layers that perform computation on the spectrum and input data separately. This design introduces considerable computational overhead: for each layer, a forward and inverse FT. Instead, this work introduces a blueprint for frequency domain learning through a single transform: transform once (T1). To enable efficient, direct learning in the frequency domain we derive a variance-preserving weight initialization scheme and investigate methods for frequency selection in reduced-order FDMs. Our results noticeably streamline the design process of FDMs, pruning redundant transforms, and leading to speedups of 3x to 10x that increase with data resolution and model size. We perform extensive experiments on learning the solution operator of spatio-temporal dynamics, including incompressible Navier-Stokes, turbulent flows around airfoils and high-resolution video of smoke. T1 models improve on the test performance of FDMs while requiring significantly less computation (5 hours instead of 32 for our large-scale experiment), with over 20% reduction in average predictive error across tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 25, 2022

CLI-Universe: Towards Verifiable Task Synthesis Engine for Terminal Agents

While recent LLM-based terminal agents have demonstrated promising capabilities, the scarcity of high-quality, executable training data remains a critical bottleneck. Existing synthesis pipelines typically scale by retrofitting surface-level artifacts into tasks, frequently yielding ambiguous instructions, shallow execution paths, and brittle tests that provide weak learning signals. To overcome this, we introduce CLI-Universe, a principled synthesis engine that constructs terminal-agent tasks. CLI-Universe generates candidate tasks by sampling combinations across a multi-dimensional capability taxonomy (domain, skill type, capability, and engineering pillar), then grounds each candidate through evidence-guided deep research over real-world technical materials. To ensure rigorous supervision, validated blueprints are instantiated into Dockerized environments and subjected to a multi-stage executable verification pipeline featuring rubric-gated test construction, hint-conditional filtering, and strict fail-to-pass checking. Across the full pipeline, from candidate generation to verification, approximately two-thirds of candidates are discarded, retaining only those that are genuine, verifiable, and non-trivially challenging. To validate our framework, we instantiate a highly distilled dataset of 6,000 trajectories called CLI-Universe-6K. Remarkably, fine-tuning Qwen3-32B on CLI-Universe-6K achieves 33.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0. This sets a new state-of-the-art for models trained on open-source data at or below 32B parameters, and outperforms several models an order of magnitude larger, demonstrating the profound data efficiency of structured, high-fidelity synthesis.

NJU-LINK NJU-LINK Lab
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Jun 21 2

LUMOS: A Semantic Operating-System Layer for Accessibility-Grounded AI Agents

Current operating systems expose interfaces optimized for human users but not for AI agents. Humans benefit from pixels, icons, windows, visual grouping, mouse movement, and keyboard shortcuts; AI agents instead need compact semantic state, grounded actions, and reliable feedback. As a result, many computer-use agents are forced to interpret screenshots, OCR output, and visual crops, introducing high token costs, visual ambiguity, latency, and coordinate uncertainty. This paper introduces LUMOS (Language Model Unified Machine-Readable Operating-System Semantics), a semantic interaction layer between AI agents and operating systems. LUMOS converts native accessibility metadata and browser UI structures into machine readable semantic blueprints with stable identifiers, roles, names, values, bounds, and action affordances. It also supports live semantic pointer grounding by querying the UI element under or near the cursor through operating-system automation APIs. An LLM then acts through an accessibility grounded observe act loop using constrained visible-UI primitives rather than application-specific scripts. LUMOS does not claim to replace visual agents; instead, it reduces dependence on screenshots when operating systems already provide semantic structure. These results suggest a path toward AI-native operating systems and machine-readable interaction layers.

Share Your Attention: Transformer Weight Sharing via Matrix-based Dictionary Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI applications, yet their high computational and memory demands hinder their widespread deployment. Existing compression techniques focus on intra-block optimizations (e.g. low-rank approximation, attention head pruning), while the repetitive layered structure of transformers implies significant inter-block redundancy - a dimension largely unexplored beyond key-value (KV) caching. Inspired by dictionary learning in CNNs, we propose a framework for structured weight sharing across transformer layers. Our approach decomposes attention projection matrices into shared dictionary atoms, reducing the attention module's parameters by 66.7% while achieving on-par performance. Unlike complex methods requiring distillation or architectural changes, MASA (Matrix Atom Sharing in Attention) operates as a drop-in replacement - trained with standard optimizers - and represents each layer's weights as linear combinations of shared matrix atoms. Experiments across scales (100M-700M parameters) show that MASA achieves better benchmark accuracy and perplexity than grouped-query attention (GQA), low-rank baselines and recently proposed Repeat-all-over/Sequential sharing at comparable parameter budgets. Ablation studies confirm robustness to the dictionary size and the efficacy of shared representations in capturing cross-layer statistical regularities. Extending to Vision Transformers (ViT), MASA matches performance metrics on image classification and detection tasks with 66.7% fewer attention parameters. By combining dictionary learning strategies with transformer efficiency, MASA offers a scalable blueprint for parameter-efficient models without sacrificing performance. Finally, we investigate the possibility of employing MASA on pretrained LLMs to reduce their number of parameters without experiencing any significant drop in their performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

HAMLET: Hyperadaptive Agent-based Modeling for Live Embodied Theatrics

Creating an immersive and interactive theatrical experience is a long-term goal in the field of interactive narrative. The emergence of large language model (LLM) is providing a new path to achieve this goal. However, existing LLM-based drama generation methods often result in agents that lack initiative and cannot interact with the physical scene. Furthermore, these methods typically require detailed user input to drive the drama. These limitations reduce the interactivity and immersion of online real-time performance. To address the above challenges, we propose HAMLET, a multi-agent framework focused on drama creation and online performance. Given a simple topic, the framework generates a narrative blueprint, guiding the subsequent improvisational performance. During the online performance, each actor is given an autonomous mind. This means that actors can make independent decisions based on their own background, goals, and emotional state. In addition to conversations with other actors, their decisions can also change the state of scene props through actions such as opening a letter or picking up a weapon. The change is then broadcast to other related actors, updating what they know and care about, which in turn influences their next action. To evaluate the quality of drama performance generated by HAMLET, we designed an evaluation method to assess three primary aspects, including character performance, narrative quality, and interaction experience. The experimental evaluation shows that HAMLET can create expressive and coherent theatrical experiences.

Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models via Generative Continual Learning

Foundation models have revolutionized fields such as natural language processing and computer vision by enabling general-purpose learning across diverse tasks and datasets. However, building analogous models for human mobility remains challenging due to the privacy-sensitive nature of mobility data and the resulting data silos across institutions. To bridge this gap, we propose MoveGCL, a scalable and privacy-preserving framework for training mobility foundation models via generative continual learning. Without sharing raw data, MoveGCL enables decentralized and progressive model evolution by replaying synthetic trajectories generated from a frozen teacher model, and reinforces knowledge retention through a tailored distillation strategy that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. To address the heterogeneity of mobility patterns, MoveGCL incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer with a mobility-aware expert routing mechanism, and employs a layer-wise progressive adaptation strategy to stabilize continual updates. Experiments on six real-world urban datasets demonstrate that MoveGCL achieves performance comparable to joint training and significantly outperforms federated learning baselines, while offering strong privacy protection. MoveGCL marks a crucial step toward unlocking foundation models for mobility, offering a practical blueprint for open, scalable, and privacy-preserving model development in the era of foundation models.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 7, 2025 2

SPACE-CLIP: Spatial Perception via Adaptive CLIP Embeddings for Monocular Depth Estimation

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has accomplished extraordinary success for semantic understanding but inherently struggles to perceive geometric structure. Existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by querying CLIP with textual prompts, a process that is often indirect and inefficient. This paper introduces a fundamentally different approach using a dual-pathway decoder. We present SPACE-CLIP, an architecture that unlocks and interprets latent geometric knowledge directly from a frozen CLIP vision encoder, completely bypassing the text encoder and its associated textual prompts. A semantic pathway interprets high-level features, dynamically conditioned on global context using feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM). In addition, a structural pathway extracts fine-grained spatial details from early layers. These complementary streams are hierarchically fused, enabling a robust synthesis of semantic context and precise geometry. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that SPACE-CLIP dramatically outperforms previous CLIP-based methods. Our ablation studies validate that the synergistic fusion of our dual pathways is critical to this success. SPACE-CLIP offers a new, efficient, and architecturally elegant blueprint for repurposing large-scale vision models. The proposed method is not just a standalone depth estimator, but a readily integrable spatial perception module for the next generation of embodied AI systems, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models. Our model is available at https://github.com/taewan2002/space-clip

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 24

Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling

In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning, the paradigm of reward modeling faces unprecedented challenges--most notably, the lack of benchmarks specifically designed to assess RM capabilities within tool-integrated environments. To address this gap, we present Plan-RewardBench, a trajectory-level preference benchmark designed to evaluate how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios. Plan-RewardBench covers four representative task families -- (i) Safety Refusal, (ii) Tool-Irrelevance / Unavailability, (iii) Complex Planning, and (iv) Robust Error Recovery -- comprising validated positive trajectories and confusable hard negatives constructed via multi-model natural rollouts, rule-based perturbations, and minimal-edit LLM perturbations. We benchmark representative RMs (generative, discriminative, and LLM-as-Judge) under a unified pairwise protocol, reporting accuracy trends across varying trajectory lengths and task categories. Furthermore, we provide diagnostic analyses of prevalent failure modes. Our results reveal that all three evaluator families face substantial challenges, with performance degrading sharply on long-horizon trajectories, underscoring the necessity for specialized training in agentic, trajectory-level reward modeling. Ultimately, Plan-RewardBench aims to serve as both a practical evaluation suite and a reusable blueprint for constructing agentic planning preference data.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 8

ST-ResGAT: Explainable Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Road Condition Prediction and Priority-Driven Maintenance

Climate-vulnerable road networks require a paradigm shift from reactive, fix-on-failure repairs to predictive, decision-ready maintenance. This paper introduces ST-ResGAT, a novel Spatio-Temporal Residual Graph Attention Network that fuses residual graph-attention encoding with GRU temporal aggregation to forecast pavement deterioration. Engineered for resource-constrained deployment, the framework translates continuous Pavement Condition Index (PCI) forecasts directly into the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)-compliant maintenance priorities. Using a real-world inspection dataset of 750 segments in Sylhet, Bangladesh (2021-2024), ST-ResGAT significantly outperforms traditional non-spatial machine learning baselines, achieving exceptional predictive fidelity (R2 = 0.93, RMSE = 2.72). Crucially, ablation testing confirmed the mathematical necessity of modeling topological neighbor effects, proving that structural decay acts as a spatial contagion. Uniquely, we integrate GNNExplainer to unbox the model, demonstrating that its learned priorities align perfectly with established physical engineering theory. Furthermore, we quantify classification safety: achieving 85.5% exact ASTM class agreement and 100% adjacent-class containment, ensuring bounded, engineer-safe predictions. To connect model outputs to policy, we generate localized longitudinal maintenance profiles, perform climate stress-testing, and derive Pareto sustainability frontiers. ST-ResGAT therefore offers a practical, explainable, and sustainable blueprint for intelligent infrastructure management in high-risk, low-resource geological settings.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 14

HKGAI-V1: Towards Regional Sovereign Large Language Model for Hong Kong

This paper presents the development of HKGAI-V1, a foundational sovereign large language model (LLM), developed as part of an initiative to establish value-aligned AI infrastructure specifically tailored for Hong Kong. Addressing the region's unique multilingual environment (Cantonese, Mandarin, and English), its distinct socio-legal context under the "one country, two systems" framework, and specific local cultural and value considerations, the model is built upon the DeepSeek architecture and systematically aligned with regional norms through a multifaceted full parameter fine-tuning process. It is further integrated with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to ensure timely and factually grounded information access. The core contribution lies in the design and implementation of a comprehensive, region-specific AI alignment and safety framework, demonstrated through two key achievements: 1) The successful development of HKGAI-V1 itself - which outper-forms general-purpose models in handling Hong Kong-specific culturally sensitive queries, and embodies a "governance-embedded" approach to digital sovereignty - empowers Hong Kong to exercise control over AI applications in critical sectors including public services, legal systems, and edu-cation. 2) The development of the proprietary Adversarial HK Value Benchmark, a rigorous tool for evaluating model alignment with local ethical and legal stand-ards under challenging conditions. By documenting these achievements, the paper provides not only a technological artifact but also a replicable blueprint for developing advanced, regionally focused AI systems deeply rooted in their local identities.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025