Daily Papers

Understanding data visualizations like charts and plots requires reasoning about both visual elements and numerics. Although strong in extractive questions, current chart visual question answering (chart VQA) models suffer on complex reasoning questions. In this work, we address the lack of reasoning ability by data augmentation. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), which have shown to have strong reasoning ability, as an automatic data annotator that generates question-answer annotations for chart images. The key innovation in our method lies in the Synthesize Step-by-Step strategy: our LLM-based data generator learns to decompose the complex question into step-by-step sub-questions (rationales), which are then used to derive the final answer using external tools, i.e. Python. This step-wise generation procedure is trained on synthetic data generated using a template-based QA generation pipeline. Experimental results highlight the significance of the proposed step-by-step generation. By training with the LLM-augmented data (LAMENDA), we significantly enhance the chart VQA models, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartQA and PlotQA datasets. In particular, our approach improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art approach from 38% to 54% on the human-written questions in the ChartQA dataset, which needs strong reasoning. We hope our work underscores the potential of synthetic data and encourages further exploration of data augmentation using LLMs for reasoning-heavy tasks.

Recent advancements in automatic 3D avatar generation guided by text have made significant progress. However, existing methods have limitations such as oversaturation and low-quality output. To address these challenges, we propose X-Oscar, a progressive framework for generating high-quality animatable avatars from text prompts. It follows a sequential Geometry->Texture->Animation paradigm, simplifying optimization through step-by-step generation. To tackle oversaturation, we introduce Adaptive Variational Parameter (AVP), representing avatars as an adaptive distribution during training. Additionally, we present Avatar-aware Score Distillation Sampling (ASDS), a novel technique that incorporates avatar-aware noise into rendered images for improved generation quality during optimization. Extensive evaluations confirm the superiority of X-Oscar over existing text-to-3D and text-to-avatar approaches. Our anonymous project page: https://xmu-xiaoma666.github.io/Projects/X-Oscar/.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chart understanding tasks. However, interpreting charts with textual descriptions often leads to information loss, as it fails to fully capture the dense information embedded in charts. In contrast, parsing charts into code provides lossless representations that can effectively contain all critical details. Although existing open-source MLLMs have achieved success in chart understanding tasks, they still face two major challenges when applied to chart-to-code tasks.: (1) Low executability and poor restoration of chart details in the generated code and (2) Lack of large-scale and diverse training data. To address these challenges, we propose ChartCoder, the first dedicated chart-to-code MLLM, which leverages Code LLMs as the language backbone to enhance the executability of the generated code. Furthermore, we introduce Chart2Code-160k, the first large-scale and diverse dataset for chart-to-code generation, and propose the Snippet-of-Thought (SoT) method, which transforms direct chart-to-code generation data into step-by-step generation. Experiments demonstrate that ChartCoder, with only 7B parameters, surpasses existing open-source MLLMs on chart-to-code benchmarks, achieving superior chart restoration and code excitability. Our code will be available at https://github.com/thunlp/ChartCoder.

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative recommendation has attracted significant research interest, where item tokenization is a critical step. It involves assigning item identifiers for LLMs to encode user history and generate the next item. Existing approaches leverage either token-sequence identifiers, representing items as discrete token sequences, or single-token identifiers, using ID or semantic embeddings. Token-sequence identifiers face issues such as the local optima problem in beam search and low generation efficiency due to step-by-step generation. In contrast, single-token identifiers fail to capture rich semantics or encode Collaborative Filtering (CF) information, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose two fundamental principles for item identifier design: 1) integrating both CF and semantic information to fully capture multi-dimensional item information, and 2) designing order-agnostic identifiers without token dependency, mitigating the local optima issue and achieving simultaneous generation for generation efficiency. Accordingly, we introduce a novel set identifier paradigm for LLM-based generative recommendation, representing each item as a set of order-agnostic tokens. To implement this paradigm, we propose SETRec, which leverages CF and semantic tokenizers to obtain order-agnostic multi-dimensional tokens. To eliminate token dependency, SETRec uses a sparse attention mask for user history encoding and a query-guided generation mechanism for simultaneous token generation. We instantiate SETRec on T5 and Qwen (from 1.5B to 7B). Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness under various scenarios (e.g., full ranking, warm- and cold-start ranking, and various item popularity groups). Moreover, results validate SETRec's superior efficiency and show promising scalability on cold-start items as model sizes increase.

Personalizing generative models offers a way to guide image generation with user-provided references. Current personalization methods can invert an object or concept into the textual conditioning space and compose new natural sentences for text-to-image diffusion models. However, representing and editing specific visual attributes such as material, style, and layout remains a challenge, leading to a lack of disentanglement and editability. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages the step-by-step generation process of diffusion models, which generate images from low to high frequency information, providing a new perspective on representing, generating, and editing images. We develop the Prompt Spectrum Space P*, an expanded textual conditioning space, and a new image representation method called \sysname. ProSpect represents an image as a collection of inverted textual token embeddings encoded from per-stage prompts, where each prompt corresponds to a specific generation stage (i.e., a group of consecutive steps) of the diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that P* and ProSpect offer better disentanglement and controllability compared to existing methods. We apply ProSpect in various personalized attribute-aware image generation applications, such as image-guided or text-driven manipulations of materials, style, and layout, achieving previously unattainable results from a single image input without fine-tuning the diffusion models. Our source code is available athttps://github.com/zyxElsa/ProSpect.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leveraged explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve reasoning accuracy. However, most existing methods primarily compress verbose reasoning outputs. These Long-to-Short transformations aim to improve efficiency, but still rely on explicit reasoning during inference. In this work, we introduce 3TF (Thought-Training and Thought-Free inference), a framework for efficient reasoning that takes a Short-to-Long perspective. We first train a hybrid model that can operate in both reasoning and non-reasoning modes, and then further train it on CoT-annotated data to internalize structured reasoning, while enforcing concise, thought-free outputs at inference time using the no-reasoning mode. Unlike compression-based approaches, 3TF improves the reasoning quality of non-reasoning outputs, enabling models to perform rich internal reasoning implicitly while keeping external outputs short. Empirically, 3TF-trained models obtain large improvements on reasoning benchmarks under thought-free inference, demonstrating that high quality reasoning can be learned and executed implicitly without explicit step-by-step generation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on prolonged reasoning chains to solve complex tasks. However, this trial-and-error approach often leads to high computational overhead and error propagation, where early mistakes can derail subsequent steps. To address these issues, we introduce Meta-Reasoner, a framework that dynamically optimizes inference-time reasoning by enabling LLMs to "think about how to think." Drawing inspiration from human meta-cognition and dual-process theory, Meta-Reasoner operates as a strategic advisor, decoupling high-level guidance from step-by-step generation. It employs "contextual multi-armed bandits" to iteratively evaluate reasoning progress, and select optimal strategies (e.g., backtrack, clarify ambiguity, restart from scratch, or propose alternative approaches), and reallocates computational resources toward the most promising paths. Our evaluations on mathematical reasoning and puzzles highlight the potential of dynamic reasoning chains to overcome inherent challenges in the LLM reasoning process and also show promise in broader applications, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for reasoning-intensive tasks.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been extensively explored in large models to tackle complex understanding tasks. However, it still remains an open question whether such strategies can be applied to verifying and reinforcing image generation scenarios. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive investigation of the potential of CoT reasoning to enhance autoregressive image generation. We focus on three techniques: scaling test-time computation for verification, aligning model preferences with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and integrating these techniques for complementary effects. Our results demonstrate that these approaches can be effectively adapted and combined to significantly improve image generation performance. Furthermore, given the pivotal role of reward models in our findings, we propose the Potential Assessment Reward Model (PARM) and PARM++, specialized for autoregressive image generation. PARM adaptively assesses each generation step through a potential assessment approach, merging the strengths of existing reward models, and PARM++ further introduces a reflection mechanism to self-correct the generated unsatisfactory image. Using our investigated reasoning strategies, we enhance a baseline model, Show-o, to achieve superior results, with a significant +24% improvement on the GenEval benchmark, surpassing Stable Diffusion 3 by +15%. We hope our study provides unique insights and paves a new path for integrating CoT reasoning with autoregressive image generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Image-Generation-CoT

Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models struggle to align spatial composition with the input text, especially in complex scenes. Even layout-based approaches yield suboptimal spatial control, as their generation process is decoupled from layout planning, making it difficult to refine the layout during synthesis. We present CoT-Diff, a framework that brings step-by-step CoT-style reasoning into T2I generation by tightly integrating Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-driven 3D layout planning with the diffusion process. CoT-Diff enables layout-aware reasoning inline within a single diffusion round: at each denoising step, the MLLM evaluates intermediate predictions, dynamically updates the 3D scene layout, and continuously guides the generation process. The updated layout is converted into semantic conditions and depth maps, which are fused into the diffusion model via a condition-aware attention mechanism, enabling precise spatial control and semantic injection. Experiments on 3D Scene benchmarks show that CoT-Diff significantly improves spatial alignment and compositional fidelity, and outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 34.7% in complex scene spatial accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness of this entangled generation paradigm.

We propose a novel step-by-step video-to-audio generation method that sequentially produces individual audio tracks, each corresponding to a specific sound event in the video. Our approach mirrors traditional Foley workflows, aiming to capture all sound events induced by a given video comprehensively. Each generation step is formulated as a guided video-to-audio synthesis task, conditioned on a target text prompt and previously generated audio tracks. This design is inspired by the idea of concept negation from prior compositional generation frameworks. To enable this guided generation, we introduce a training framework that leverages pre-trained video-to-audio models and eliminates the need for specialized paired datasets, allowing training on more accessible data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates multiple semantically distinct audio tracks for a single input video, leading to higher-quality composite audio synthesis than existing baselines.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used extensively for addressing problems in drug design and discovery. Both ligand and target molecules are represented as graphs with node and edge features encoding information about atomic elements and bonds respectively. Although existing deep learning models perform remarkably well at predicting physicochemical properties and binding affinities, the generation of new molecules with optimized properties remains challenging. Inherently, most GNNs perform poorly in whole-graph representation due to the limitations of the message-passing paradigm. Furthermore, step-by-step graph generation frameworks that use reinforcement learning or other sequential processing can be slow and result in a high proportion of invalid molecules with substantial post-processing needed in order to satisfy the principles of stoichiometry. To address these issues, we propose a representation-first approach to molecular graph generation. We guide the latent representation of an autoencoder by capturing graph structure information with the geometric scattering transform and apply penalties that structure the representation also by molecular properties. We show that this highly structured latent space can be directly used for molecular graph generation by the use of a GAN. We demonstrate that our architecture learns meaningful representations of drug datasets and provides a platform for goal-directed drug synthesis.

As large language models have demonstrated impressive performance in many domains, recent works have adopted language models (LMs) as controllers of visual modules for vision-and-language tasks. While existing work focuses on equipping LMs with visual understanding, we propose two novel interpretable/explainable visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation. First, we introduce VPGen, an interpretable step-by-step T2I generation framework that decomposes T2I generation into three steps: object/count generation, layout generation, and image generation. We employ an LM to handle the first two steps (object/count generation and layout generation), by finetuning it on text-layout pairs. Our step-by-step T2I generation framework provides stronger spatial control than end-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task. Furthermore, we leverage the world knowledge of pretrained LMs, overcoming the limitation of previous layout-guided T2I works that can only handle predefined object classes. We demonstrate that our VPGen has improved control in counts/spatial relations/scales of objects than state-of-the-art T2I generation models. Second, we introduce VPEval, an interpretable and explainable evaluation framework for T2I generation based on visual programming. Unlike previous T2I evaluations with a single scoring model that is accurate in some skills but unreliable in others, VPEval produces evaluation programs that invoke a set of visual modules that are experts in different skills, and also provides visual+textual explanations of the evaluation results. Our analysis shows VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models. Website: https://vp-t2i.github.io

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in handling complex reasoning tasks through step-by-step rationale generation. However, recent studies have raised concerns regarding the hallucination and flaws in their reasoning process. Substantial efforts are being made to improve the reliability and faithfulness of the generated rationales. Some approaches model reasoning as planning, while others focus on annotating for process supervision. Nevertheless, the planning-based search process often results in high latency due to the frequent assessment of intermediate reasoning states and the extensive exploration space. Additionally, supervising the reasoning process with human annotation is costly and challenging to scale for LLM training. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a framework to learn planning-based reasoning through direct preference optimization (DPO) on collected trajectories, which are ranked according to synthesized process rewards. Our results on challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our learning framework, showing that our 7B model can surpass the strong counterparts like GPT-3.5-Turbo.

We introduce a framework for generating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales to enhance text-to-SQL model fine-tuning. These rationales consist of intermediate SQL statements and explanations, serving as incremental steps toward constructing the final SQL query. The process begins with manually annotating a small set of examples, which are then used to prompt a large language model in an iterative, dynamic few-shot knowledge distillation procedure from a teacher model. A rationalization model is subsequently trained on the validated decomposed queries, enabling extensive synthetic CoT annotations for text-to-SQL datasets. To evaluate the approach, we fine-tune small language models with and without these rationales on the BIRD dataset. Results indicate that step-by-step query generation improves execution accuracy, especially for moderately and highly complex queries, while also enhancing explainability.

Videos serve as a powerful medium to convey ideas, tell stories, and provide detailed instructions, especially through long-format tutorials. Such tutorials are valuable for learning new skills at one's own pace, yet they can be overwhelming due to their length and dense content. Viewers often seek specific information, like precise measurements or step-by-step execution details, making it essential to extract and summarize key segments efficiently. An intelligent, time-sensitive video assistant capable of summarizing and detecting highlights in long videos is highly sought after. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models offer promising solutions to develop such an assistant. Our research explores the use of multimodal models to enhance video summarization and step-by-step instruction generation within specific domains. These models need to understand temporal events and relationships among actions across video frames. Our approach focuses on fine-tuning TimeChat to improve its performance in specific domains: cooking and medical procedures. By training the model on domain-specific datasets like Tasty for cooking and MedVidQA for medical procedures, we aim to enhance its ability to generate concise, accurate summaries of instructional videos. We curate and restructure these datasets to create high-quality video-centric instruction data. Our findings indicate that when finetuned on domain-specific procedural data, TimeChat can significantly improve the extraction and summarization of key instructional steps in long-format videos. This research demonstrates the potential of specialized multimodal models to assist with practical tasks by providing personalized, step-by-step guidance tailored to the unique aspects of each domain.

Leading large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning-intensive tasks, such as standardized educational testing. However, they often require extensive training in low-resource settings with inaccessible infrastructure. Small or compact models, though more efficient, frequently lack sufficient support for underrepresented languages, leaving a performance gap in critical domains. This work explores the potential of parameter-efficient fine-tuning of compact open-weight language models to handle reasoning-intensive tasks in the underrepresented Ukrainian language, building on the findings of the ZNO-Eval benchmark. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLaMA 3.1 (8 billion parameters), LLaMA 3.2 (3 billion parameters), and Gemma 2 (9 billion parameters) models on chain-of-thought solutions resulted in a modest test score improvement of up to 17.4% on complex matching tasks and 1.6% overall compared to tuning on answer letters alone, offering enhanced interpretability and robustness. In addition, the proposed tuning method with joint task topic and step-by-step solution generation outperforms standard chain-of-thought tuning in matching tasks and provides a 5.4% gain over the best LLaMA 3.2 model due to guiding the model to recall and apply domain-relevant information. Contrasting obtained results with zero-shot evaluations of leading open-weight and proprietary models such as Qwen, DeepSeek R1, OpenAI o1 and o3, Gemini, and Claude, highlight that fine-tuning LLaMA and Gemma models with 2,032 step-by-step solutions and 20 to 50 million trainable parameters on a single A100 GPU lets them outperform GPT-4o mini, Mistral Large, and larger open-weight models. This research also evaluates how merging the quantized adapter with the base model influences the generation quality. Source code and tuned models are available at https://github.com/NLPForUA/ZNO.

Mathematical reasoning has been challenging for large language models (LLMs). However, the introduction of step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference has significantly advanced the mathematical capabilities of LLMs. Despite this progress, current approaches either necessitate extensive inference datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that frequently compromise computational accuracy. To address these bottlenecks in mathematical reasoning, we propose a novel method called Step Guidied Reasoning, which is more stable and generalizable than few-shot methods and does not involve further fine-tuning of the model. In this approach, LLMs reflect on small reasoning steps, similar to how humans deliberate and focus attention on what to do next. By incorporating this reflective process into the inference stage, LLMs can effectively guide their reasoning from one step to the next. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the significant effect of Step Guidied Reasoning in augmenting mathematical performance in state-of-the-art language models. Qwen2-72B-Instruct outperforms its math-specific counterpart, Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct, on MMLU- STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. The average scores of Qwen2-7B-Instruct and Qwen2-72B-Instruct increase from 27.1% to 36.3% and from 36.5% to 47.4% on the mathematics domain, respectively.

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work investigates the neural sub-structures within LLMs that manifest CoT reasoning from a mechanistic point of view. From an analysis of LLaMA-2 7B applied to multistep reasoning over fictional ontologies, we demonstrate that LLMs deploy multiple parallel pathways of answer generation for step-by-step reasoning. These parallel pathways provide sequential answers from the input question context as well as the generated CoT. We observe a striking functional rift in the middle layers of the LLM. Token representations in the initial half remain strongly biased towards the pretraining prior, with the in-context taking over abruptly in the later half. This internal phase shift manifests in different functional components: attention heads that write the answer token predominantly appear in the later half, attention heads that move information along ontological relationships appear exclusively in the initial half, and so on. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards mechanistic investigation of CoT reasoning in LLMs.

Creating high-quality sound effects from videos and text prompts requires precise alignment between visual and audio domains, both semantically and temporally, along with step-by-step guidance for professional audio generation. However, current state-of-the-art video-guided audio generation models often fall short of producing high-quality audio for both general and specialized use cases. To address this challenge, we introduce a multi-stage, multi-modal, end-to-end generative framework with Chain-of-Thought-like (CoT-like) guidance learning, termed Chain-of-Perform (CoP). First, we employ a transformer-based network architecture designed to achieve CoP guidance, enabling the generation of both general and professional audio. Second, we implement a multi-stage training framework that follows step-by-step guidance to ensure the generation of high-quality sound effects. Third, we develop a CoP multi-modal dataset, guided by video, to support step-by-step sound effects generation. Evaluation results highlight the advantages of the proposed multi-stage CoP generative framework compared to the state-of-the-art models on a variety of datasets, with FAD 0.79 to 0.74 (+6.33%), CLIP 16.12 to 17.70 (+9.80%) on VGGSound, SI-SDR 1.98dB to 3.35dB (+69.19%), MOS 2.94 to 3.49(+18.71%) on PianoYT-2h, and SI-SDR 2.22dB to 3.21dB (+44.59%), MOS 3.07 to 3.42 (+11.40%) on Piano-10h.

Planning remains one of the last standing bastions for large language models (LLMs), which now turn their attention to search. Most of the literature uses the language models as world models to define the search space, forgoing soundness for the sake of flexibility. A recent work, Thought of Search (ToS), proposed defining the search space with code, having the language models produce that code. ToS requires a human in the loop, collaboratively producing a sound successor function and goal test. The result, however, is worth the effort: all the tested datasets were solved with 100% accuracy. At the same time LLMs have demonstrated significant progress in code generation and refinement for complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we automate ToS (AutoToS), completely taking the human out of the loop of solving planning problems. AutoToS guides the language model step by step towards the generation of sound and complete search components, through feedback from both generic and domain specific unit tests. We achieve 100% accuracy, with minimal feedback iterations, using LLMs of various sizes on all evaluated domains.

Relational databases play an important role in business, science, and more. However, many users cannot fully unleash the analytical power of relational databases, because they are not familiar with database languages such as SQL. Many techniques have been proposed to automatically generate SQL from natural language, but they suffer from two issues: (1) they still make many mistakes, particularly for complex queries, and (2) they do not provide a flexible way for non-expert users to validate and refine incorrect queries. To address these issues, we introduce a new interaction mechanism that allows users to directly edit a step-by-step explanation of a query to fix errors. Our experiments on multiple datasets, as well as a user study with 24 participants, demonstrate that our approach can achieve better performance than multiple SOTA approaches. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/magic-YuanTian/STEPS.

Knowledge erasure in large language models (LLMs) is important for ensuring compliance with data and AI regulations, safeguarding user privacy, mitigating bias, and misinformation. Existing unlearning methods aim to make the process of knowledge erasure more efficient and effective by removing specific knowledge while preserving overall model performance, especially for retained information. However, it has been observed that the unlearning techniques tend to suppress and leave the knowledge beneath the surface, thus making it retrievable with the right prompts. In this work, we demonstrate that step-by-step reasoning can serve as a backdoor to recover this hidden information. We introduce a step-by-step reasoning-based black-box attack, Sleek, that systematically exposes unlearning failures. We employ a structured attack framework with three core components: (1) an adversarial prompt generation strategy leveraging step-by-step reasoning built from LLM-generated queries, (2) an attack mechanism that successfully recalls erased content, and exposes unfair suppression of knowledge intended for retention and (3) a categorization of prompts as direct, indirect, and implied, to identify which query types most effectively exploit unlearning weaknesses. Through extensive evaluations on four state-of-the-art unlearning techniques and two widely used LLMs, we show that existing approaches fail to ensure reliable knowledge removal. Of the generated adversarial prompts, 62.5% successfully retrieved forgotten Harry Potter facts from WHP-unlearned Llama, while 50% exposed unfair suppression of retained knowledge. Our work highlights the persistent risks of information leakage, emphasizing the need for more robust unlearning strategies for erasure.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination. However, dense retrievers often become the bottleneck of RAG systems due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning. While prompt-based iterative RAG attempts to address these limitations, it is constrained by human-designed workflows. To address these limitations, we propose R3-RAG, which uses Reinforcement learning to make the LLM learn how to Reason and Retrieve step by step, thus retrieving comprehensive external knowledge and leading to correct answers. R3-RAG is divided into two stages. We first use cold start to make the model learn the manner of iteratively interleaving reasoning and retrieval. Then we use reinforcement learning to further harness its ability to better explore the external retrieval environment. Specifically, we propose two rewards for R3-RAG: 1) answer correctness for outcome reward, which judges whether the trajectory leads to a correct answer; 2) relevance-based document verification for process reward, encouraging the model to retrieve documents that are relevant to the user question, through which we can let the model learn how to iteratively reason and retrieve relevant documents to get the correct answer. Experimental results show that R3-RAG significantly outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers. We release R3-RAG at https://github.com/Yuan-Li-FNLP/R3-RAG.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in reasoning while they still suffer from severe factual hallucinations due to timeliness, accuracy, and coverage of parametric knowledge. Meanwhile, integrating reasoning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains challenging due to ineffective task decomposition and redundant retrieval, which can introduce noise and degrade response quality. In this paper, we propose DeepRAG, a framework that models retrieval-augmented reasoning as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), enabling strategic and adaptive retrieval. By iteratively decomposing queries, DeepRAG dynamically determines whether to retrieve external knowledge or rely on parametric reasoning at each step. Experiments show that DeepRAG improves retrieval efficiency while improving answer accuracy by 21.99%, demonstrating its effectiveness in optimizing retrieval-augmented reasoning.

We propose Step-by-Step Coding (SBSC): a multi-turn math reasoning framework that enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate sequence of programs for solving Olympiad level math problems. At each step/turn, by leveraging the code execution outputs and programs of previous steps, the model generates the next sub-task and the corresponding program to solve it. This way, SBSC, sequentially navigates to reach the final answer. SBSC allows more granular, flexible and precise approach to problem-solving compared to existing methods. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of SBSC in tackling competition and Olympiad-level math problems. For Claude-3.5-Sonnet, we observe SBSC (greedy decoding) surpasses existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) program generation based reasoning strategies by absolute 10.7% on AMC12, 8% on AIME and 12.6% on MathOdyssey. Given SBSC is multi-turn in nature, we also benchmark SBSC's greedy decoding against self-consistency decoding results of existing SOTA math reasoning strategies and observe performance gain by absolute 6.2% on AMC, 6.7% on AIME and 7.4% on MathOdyssey.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have begun to demonstrate robust reasoning capabilities on general tasks, yet their application in the medical domain remains in its early stages. Constructing chain-of-thought (CoT) training data is essential for bolstering the reasoning abilities of medical MLLMs. However, existing approaches exhibit a deficiency in offering a comprehensive framework for searching and evaluating effective reasoning paths towards critical diagnosis. To address this challenge, we propose Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search (MICS), a novel reasoning-path searching scheme to generate rigorous and effective medical CoT data. MICS first leverages mentor models to initialize the reasoning, one step at a time, then prompts each intern model to continue the thinking along those initiated paths, and finally selects the optimal reasoning path according to the overall reasoning performance of multiple intern models. The reasoning performance is determined by an MICS-Score, which assesses the quality of generated reasoning paths. Eventually, we construct MMRP, a multi-task medical reasoning dataset with ranked difficulty, and Chiron-o1, a new medical MLLM devised via a curriculum learning strategy, with robust visual question-answering and generalizable reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Chiron-o1, trained on our CoT dataset constructed using MICS, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a list of medical visual question answering and reasoning benchmarks. Codes are available at GitHub - manglu097/Chiron-o1: Enhancing Step-by-Step and Verifiable Medical Reasoning in MLLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by the substantial memory and computational costs associated with generating lengthy tokens. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a novel method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress intermediate thoughts during reasoning. Inspired by human cognitive processes, LightThinker compresses verbose thought steps into compact representations and discards the original reasoning chains, thereby significantly reducing the number of tokens stored in the context window. This is achieved by training the model on when and how to perform compression through data construction, mapping hidden states to condensed gist tokens, and creating specialized attention masks. Additionally, we introduce the Dependency (Dep) metric to quantify the degree of compression by measuring the reliance on historical tokens during generation. Extensive experiments on four datasets and two models show that LightThinker reduces peak memory usage and inference time, while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our work provides a new direction for improving the efficiency of LLMs in complex reasoning tasks without sacrificing performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightThinker.

Recent years have seen considerable advancements in multi-step reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). The previous studies have elucidated the merits of integrating feedback or search mechanisms during model inference to improve the reasoning accuracy. The Process-Supervised Reward Model (PRM), typically furnishes LLMs with step-by-step feedback during the training phase, akin to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) or reject sampling. Our objective is to examine the efficacy of PRM in the inference phase to help discern the optimal solution paths for multi-step tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. To this end, we propose a heuristic greedy search algorithm that employs the step-level feedback from PRM to optimize the reasoning pathways explored by LLMs. This tailored PRM demonstrated enhanced results compared to the Chain of Thought (CoT) on mathematical benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH. Additionally, to explore the versatility of our approach, we develop a novel method to automatically generate step-level reward dataset for coding tasks and observed similar improved performance in the code generation tasks. Thus highlighting the robust nature of our reward-model-based approach to inference for reasoning tasks.

While large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks, certain challenges require complex multi-step reasoning to reach accurate answers. One particularly challenging task is autonomous driving, which demands thorough cognitive processing before decisions can be made. In this domain, a sequential and interpretive understanding of visual cues is essential for effective perception, prediction, and planning. Nevertheless, common VQA benchmarks often focus on the accuracy of the final answer while overlooking the reasoning process that enables the generation of accurate responses. Moreover, existing methods lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating step-by-step reasoning in realistic driving scenarios. To address this gap, we propose DriveLMM-o1, a new dataset and benchmark specifically designed to advance step-wise visual reasoning for autonomous driving. Our benchmark features over 18k VQA examples in the training set and more than 4k in the test set, covering diverse questions on perception, prediction, and planning, each enriched with step-by-step reasoning to ensure logical inference in autonomous driving scenarios. We further introduce a large multimodal model that is fine-tuned on our reasoning dataset, demonstrating robust performance in complex driving scenarios. In addition, we benchmark various open-source and closed-source methods on our proposed dataset, systematically comparing their reasoning capabilities for autonomous driving tasks. Our model achieves a +7.49% gain in final answer accuracy, along with a 3.62% improvement in reasoning score over the previous best open-source model. Our framework, dataset, and model are available at https://github.com/ayesha-ishaq/DriveLMM-o1.

Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.

Embodied agents operating in the physical world must make decisions that are not only effective but also safe, spatially coherent, and grounded in context. While recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown promising capabilities in visual understanding and language generation, their ability to perform structured reasoning for real-world embodied tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we aim to understand how well foundation models can perform step-by-step reasoning in embodied environments. To this end, we propose the Foundation Model Embodied Reasoning (FoMER) benchmark, designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs in complex embodied decision-making scenarios. Our benchmark spans a diverse set of tasks that require agents to interpret multimodal observations, reason about physical constraints and safety, and generate valid next actions in natural language. We present (i) a large-scale, curated suite of embodied reasoning tasks, (ii) a novel evaluation framework that disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning, and (iii) empirical analysis of several leading LMMs under this setting. Our benchmark includes over 1.1k samples with detailed step-by-step reasoning across 10 tasks and 8 embodiments, covering three different robot types. Our results highlight both the potential and current limitations of LMMs in embodied reasoning, pointing towards key challenges and opportunities for future research in robot intelligence. Our data and code will be made publicly available.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) perform strongly in complex reasoning tasks via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, but often suffer from verbose outputs caused by redundant content, increasing computational overhead, and degrading user experience. Existing compression methods either operate post-hoc pruning, risking disruption to reasoning coherence, or rely on sampling-based selection, which fails to intervene effectively during generation. In this work, we introduce a confidence-guided perspective to explain the emergence of redundant reflection in LRMs, identifying two key patterns: Confidence Deficit, where the model reconsiders correct steps due to low internal confidence, and Termination Delay, where reasoning continues even after reaching a confident answer. Based on this analysis, we propose ConCISE (Confidence-guided Compression In Step-by-step Efficient Reasoning), a framework that simplifies reasoning chains by reinforcing the model's confidence during inference, thus preventing the generation of redundant reflection steps. It integrates Confidence Injection to stabilize intermediate steps and Early Stopping to terminate reasoning when confidence is sufficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LRMs on ConCISE-generated data yields significantly shorter outputs, reducing length by up to approximately 50% under SimPO, while maintaining high task accuracy. ConCISE consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple reasoning benchmarks.

Large language models show improved downstream task performance when prompted to generate step-by-step reasoning to justify their final answers. These reasoning steps greatly improve model interpretability and verification, but objectively studying their correctness (independent of the final answer) is difficult without reliable methods for automatic evaluation. We simply do not know how often the stated reasoning steps actually support the final end task predictions. In this work, we present ROSCOE, a suite of interpretable, unsupervised automatic scores that improve and extend previous text generation evaluation metrics. To evaluate ROSCOE against baseline metrics, we design a typology of reasoning errors and collect synthetic and human evaluation scores on commonly used reasoning datasets. In contrast with existing metrics, ROSCOE can measure semantic consistency, logicality, informativeness, fluency, and factuality - among other traits - by leveraging properties of step-by-step rationales. We empirically verify the strength of our metrics on five human annotated and six programmatically perturbed diagnostics datasets - covering a diverse set of tasks that require reasoning skills and show that ROSCOE can consistently outperform baseline metrics.

Large language models have demonstrated substantial advancements in reasoning capabilities, particularly through inference-time scaling, as illustrated by models such as OpenAI's o1. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to perform systematic and structured reasoning, especially when handling complex visual question-answering tasks. In this work, we introduce LLaVA-o1, a novel VLM designed to conduct autonomous multistage reasoning. Unlike chain-of-thought prompting, LLaVA-o1 independently engages in sequential stages of summarization, visual interpretation, logical reasoning, and conclusion generation. This structured approach enables LLaVA-o1 to achieve marked improvements in precision on reasoning-intensive tasks. To accomplish this, we compile the LLaVA-o1-100k dataset, integrating samples from various visual question answering sources and providing structured reasoning annotations. Besides, we propose an inference-time stage-level beam search method, which enables effective inference-time scaling. Remarkably, with only 100k training samples and a simple yet effective inference time scaling method, LLaVA-o1 not only outperforms its base model by 8.9% on a wide range of multimodal reasoning benchmarks, but also surpasses the performance of larger and even closed-source models, such as Gemini-1.5-pro, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Instruct.

To solve complex reasoning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting-based methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. However, as reasoning chains extend, critical intermediate steps and the original prompt will be buried in the context, receiving insufficient attention and leading to errors. In this paper, we propose Self-Anchor, a novel pipeline that leverages the inherent structure of reasoning to steer LLM attention. Self-Anchor decomposes reasoning trajectories into structured plans and automatically aligns the model's attention to the most relevant inference steps, allowing the model to maintain focus throughout generation. Our experiment shows that Self-Anchor outperforms SOTA prompting methods across six benchmarks. Notably, Self-Anchor significantly reduces the performance gap between ``non-reasoning'' models and specialized reasoning models, with the potential to enable most LLMs to tackle complex reasoning tasks without retraining.

Flow-based generative models have recently demonstrated strong performance, yet sampling typically relies on expensive numerical integration of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Rectified Flow enables one-step sampling by learning nearly straight probability paths, but achieving such straightness requires multiple computationally intensive reflow iterations. MeanFlow achieves one-step generation by directly modeling the average velocity over time; however, when trained on highly curved flows, it suffers from slow convergence and noisy supervision. To address these limitations, we propose Rectified MeanFlow, a framework that models the mean velocity field along the rectified trajectory using only a single reflow step. This eliminates the need for perfectly straightened trajectories while enabling efficient training. Furthermore, we introduce a simple yet effective truncation heuristic that aims to reduce residual curvature and further improve performance. Extensive experiments on ImageNet at 64, 256, and 512 resolutions show that Re-MeanFlow consistently outperforms prior one-step flow distillation and Rectified Flow methods in both sample quality and training efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Xinxi-Zhang/Re-MeanFlow.

With the rapid advancement of agent-based methods in recent years, Agentic RAG has undoubtedly become an important research direction. Multi-hop reasoning, which requires models to engage in deliberate thinking and multi-step interaction, serves as a critical testbed for assessing such capabilities. However, existing benchmarks typically provide only final questions and answers, while lacking the intermediate hop-level questions that gradually connect atomic questions to the final multi-hop query. This limitation prevents researchers from analyzing at which step an agent fails and restricts more fine-grained evaluation of model capabilities. Moreover, most current benchmarks are manually constructed, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, while also limiting scalability and generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce AgenticRAGTracer, the first Agentic RAG benchmark that is primarily constructed automatically by large language models and designed to support step-by-step validation. Our benchmark spans multiple domains, contains 1,305 data points, and has no overlap with existing mainstream benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even the best large language models perform poorly on our dataset. For instance, GPT-5 attains merely 22.6\% EM accuracy on the hardest portion of our dataset. Hop-aware diagnosis reveals that failures are primarily driven by distorted reasoning chains -- either collapsing prematurely or wandering into over-extension. This highlights a critical inability to allocate steps consistent with the task's logical structure, providing a diagnostic dimension missing in traditional evaluations. We believe our work will facilitate research in Agentic RAG and inspire further meaningful progress in this area. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YqjMartin/AgenticRAGTracer.

Generative models like Flow Matching have achieved state-of-the-art performance but are often hindered by a computationally expensive iterative sampling process. To address this, recent work has focused on few-step or one-step generation by learning the average velocity field, which directly maps noise to data. MeanFlow, a leading method in this area, learns this field by enforcing a differential identity that connects the average and instantaneous velocities. In this work, we argue that this differential formulation is a limiting special case of a more fundamental principle. We return to the first principles of average velocity and leverage the additivity property of definite integrals. This leads us to derive a novel, purely algebraic identity we term Interval Splitting Consistency. This identity establishes a self-referential relationship for the average velocity field across different time intervals without resorting to any differential operators. Based on this principle, we introduce SplitMeanFlow, a new training framework that enforces this algebraic consistency directly as a learning objective. We formally prove that the differential identity at the core of MeanFlow is recovered by taking the limit of our algebraic consistency as the interval split becomes infinitesimal. This establishes SplitMeanFlow as a direct and more general foundation for learning average velocity fields. From a practical standpoint, our algebraic approach is significantly more efficient, as it eliminates the need for JVP computations, resulting in simpler implementation, more stable training, and broader hardware compatibility. One-step and two-step SplitMeanFlow models have been successfully deployed in large-scale speech synthesis products (such as Doubao), achieving speedups of 20x.

The vanilla autoregressive image generation model generates visual tokens in a step-by-step fashion, which limits the ability to capture holistic relationships among token sequences. Moreover, most visual tokenizers map local image patches into latent tokens, leading to limited global information. To address this, we introduce Hita, a novel image tokenizer for autoregressive (AR) image generation. It introduces a holistic-to-local tokenization scheme with learnable holistic queries and local patch tokens. Besides, Hita incorporates two key strategies for improved alignment with the AR generation process: 1) it arranges a sequential structure with holistic tokens at the beginning followed by patch-level tokens while using causal attention to maintain awareness of previous tokens; and 2) before feeding the de-quantized tokens into the decoder, Hita adopts a lightweight fusion module to control information flow to prioritize holistic tokens. Extensive experiments show that Hita accelerates the training speed of AR generators and outperforms those trained with vanilla tokenizers, achieving 2.59 FID and 281.9 IS on the ImageNet benchmark. A detailed analysis of the holistic representation highlights its ability to capture global image properties such as textures, materials, and shapes. Additionally, Hita also demonstrates effectiveness in zero-shot style transfer and image in-painting. The code is available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Hita{https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Hita}

Although large language models have demonstrated impressive ability in code generation, they are still struggling to address the complicated intent provided by humans. It is widely acknowledged that humans typically employ planning to decompose complex problems and schedule the solution steps prior to implementation. Thus we introduce planning into code generation to help the model understand complex intent and reduce the difficulty of problem solving. This paper proposes a self-planning code generation method with large language model, which consists of two phases, namely planning phase and implementation phase. Specifically, in the planning phase, the language model plans out the solution steps from the intent combined with in-context learning. Then it enters the implementation phase, where the model generates code step by step, guided by the solution steps. The effectiveness of self-planning code generation has been rigorously evaluated on multiple code generation datasets and the results have demonstrated a marked superiority over naive direct generation approaches with language model. The improvement in performance is substantial, highlighting the significance of self-planning in code generation tasks.

Large Language Models are transforming software development by automatically generating code. Current prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suggest tasks step by step and the reasoning process follows a linear structure, which hampers the understanding of complex programming problems, particularly those requiring hierarchical solutions. Inspired by the principle of modularization in software development, in this work, we propose a novel prompting technique, called MoT, to enhance the code generation performance of LLMs. At first, MoT exploits modularization principles to decompose complex programming problems into smaller, independent reasoning steps, enabling a more structured and interpretable problem-solving process. This hierarchical structure improves the LLM's ability to comprehend complex programming problems. Then, it structures the reasoning process using an MLR Graph (Multi-Level Reasoning Graph), which hierarchically organizes reasoning steps. This approach enhances modular understanding and ensures better alignment between reasoning steps and the generated code, significantly improving code generation performance. Our experiments on two advanced LLMs (GPT-4o-mini and DeepSeek-R1), comparing MoT to six baseline prompting techniques across six widely used datasets, HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, HumanEval+, MBPP, MBPP-ET, and MBPP+, demonstrate that MoT significantly outperforms existing baselines (e.g., CoT and SCoT), achieving Pass@1 scores ranging from 58.1% to 95.1%. The experimental results confirm that MoT significantly enhances the performance of LLM-based code generation.

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) struggle with mathematical geometric reasoning due to a lack of high-quality image-text paired data. Current geometric data generation approaches, which apply preset templates to generate geometric data or use Large Language Models (LLMs) to rephrase questions and answers (Q&A), unavoidably limit data accuracy and diversity. To synthesize higher-quality data, we propose a two-stage Reverse Chain-of-Thought (R-CoT) geometry problem generation pipeline. First, we introduce GeoChain to produce high-fidelity geometric images and corresponding descriptions highlighting relations among geometric elements. We then design a Reverse A&Q method that reasons step-by-step based on the descriptions and generates questions in reverse from the reasoning results. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method brings significant and consistent improvements on multiple LMM baselines, achieving new performance records in the 2B, 7B, and 8B settings. Notably, R-CoT-8B significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art open-source mathematical models by 16.6% on MathVista and 9.2% on GeoQA, while also surpassing the closed-source model GPT-4o by an average of 13% across both datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/dle666/R-CoT.

Recent works have made notable advancements in enhancing unified models for text-to-image generation through the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, these reasoning methods separate the processes of understanding and generation, which limits their ability to guide the reasoning of unified models in addressing the deficiencies of their generative capabilities. To this end, we propose a novel reasoning framework for unified models, Understanding-in-Generation (UiG), which harnesses the robust understanding capabilities of unified models to reinforce their performance in image generation. The core insight of our UiG is to integrate generative guidance by the strong understanding capabilities during the reasoning process, thereby mitigating the limitations of generative abilities. To achieve this, we introduce "Image Editing" as a bridge to infuse understanding into the generation process. Initially, we verify the generated image and incorporate the understanding of unified models into the editing instructions. Subsequently, we enhance the generated image step by step, gradually infusing the understanding into the generation process. Our UiG framework demonstrates a significant performance improvement in text-to-image generation over existing text-to-image reasoning methods, e.g., a 3.92% gain on the long prompt setting of the TIIF benchmark. The project code: https://github.com/QC-LY/UiG

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have led to new possibilities in terms of problem-solving, through the devising of a natural language thought process prior to answering a query. While their capabilities are well known across mathematics and coding tasks, their impact on the task of machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. In this work, we explore the benefits of the generation of intermediate tokens when performing MT across multiple language pairs of different levels of resourcedness and multiple setups. We find that "thinking tokens" do not help LRMs better perform MT. This result generalizes to models fine-tuned to reason before translating using distilled chain of thought (CoT) inspired by human translators' practices. Specifically, fine-tuning a model with synthetic CoT explanations detailing how to translate step-by-step does not outperform standard input-output fine-tuning. However, constructing the intermediate tokens by combining the outputs of modular translation-specific prompting strategies results in improvements. Our findings underscore that the contribution of intermediate tokens during fine-tuning highly depends on the presence of translation attempts within them. More broadly, our results suggest that using a teacher to refine target translations or to expand parallel corpora is more impactful than distilling their CoT explanations into "thinking" MT models.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guides large language models (LLMs) to reason step-by-step, and can motivate their logical reasoning ability. While effective for logical tasks, CoT is not conducive to creative problem-solving which often requires out-of-box thoughts and is crucial for innovation advancements. In this paper, we explore the Leap-of-Thought (LoT) abilities within LLMs -- a non-sequential, creative paradigm involving strong associations and knowledge leaps. To this end, we study LLMs on the popular Oogiri game which needs participants to have good creativity and strong associative thinking for responding unexpectedly and humorously to the given image, text, or both, and thus is suitable for LoT study. Then to investigate LLMs' LoT ability in the Oogiri game, we first build a multimodal and multilingual Oogiri-GO dataset which contains over 130,000 samples from the Oogiri game, and observe the insufficient LoT ability or failures of most existing LLMs on the Oogiri game. Accordingly, we introduce a creative Leap-of-Thought (CLoT) paradigm to improve LLM's LoT ability. CLoT first formulates the Oogiri-GO dataset into LoT-oriented instruction tuning data to train pretrained LLM for achieving certain LoT humor generation and discrimination abilities. Then CLoT designs an explorative self-refinement that encourages the LLM to generate more creative LoT data via exploring parallels between seemingly unrelated concepts and selects high-quality data to train itself for self-refinement. CLoT not only excels in humor generation in the Oogiri game but also boosts creative abilities in various tasks like cloud guessing game and divergent association task. These findings advance our understanding and offer a pathway to improve LLMs' creative capacities for innovative applications across domains. The dataset, code, and models will be released online. https://zhongshsh.github.io/CLoT/.

This paper introduces an approach for training o1-like RAG models that retrieve and reason over relevant information step by step before generating the final answer. Conventional RAG methods usually perform a single retrieval step before the generation process, which limits their effectiveness in addressing complex queries due to imperfect retrieval results. In contrast, our proposed method, CoRAG (Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation), allows the model to dynamically reformulate the query based on the evolving state. To train CoRAG effectively, we utilize rejection sampling to automatically generate intermediate retrieval chains, thereby augmenting existing RAG datasets that only provide the correct final answer. At test time, we propose various decoding strategies to scale the model's test-time compute by controlling the length and number of sampled retrieval chains. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks validate the efficacy of CoRAG, particularly in multi-hop question answering tasks, where we observe more than 10 points improvement in EM score compared to strong baselines. On the KILT benchmark, CoRAG establishes a new state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of knowledge-intensive tasks. Furthermore, we offer comprehensive analyses to understand the scaling behavior of CoRAG, laying the groundwork for future research aimed at developing factual and grounded foundation models.

Interleaved multimodal generation enables capabilities beyond unimodal generation models, such as step-by-step instructional guides, visual planning, and generating visual drafts for reasoning. However, the quality of existing interleaved generation models under general instructions remains limited by insufficient training data and base model capacity. We present DuoGen, a general-purpose interleaved generation framework that systematically addresses data curation, architecture design, and evaluation. On the data side, we build a large-scale, high-quality instruction-tuning dataset by combining multimodal conversations rewritten from curated raw websites, and diverse synthetic examples covering everyday scenarios. Architecturally, DuoGen leverages the strong visual understanding of a pretrained multimodal LLM and the visual generation capabilities of a diffusion transformer (DiT) pretrained on video generation, avoiding costly unimodal pretraining and enabling flexible base model selection. A two-stage decoupled strategy first instruction-tunes the MLLM, then aligns DiT with it using curated interleaved image-text sequences. Across public and newly proposed benchmarks, DuoGen outperforms prior open-source models in text quality, image fidelity, and image-context alignment, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance on text-to-image and image editing among unified generation models. Data and code will be released at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/duogen/.

This paper presents a novel approach for unified retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems using the recent emerging large language model (LLM) agent concept. Specifically, Agent LLM, which utilizes LLM as fundamental controllers, has become a promising approach to enable the interpretability of RAG tasks, especially for complex reasoning question-answering systems (e.g., multi-hop queries). Nonetheless, previous works mainly focus on solving RAG systems with either single-hop or multi-hop approaches separately, which limits the application of those approaches to real-world applications. In this study, we propose a trainable agent framework called Agent-UniRAG for unified retrieval-augmented LLM systems, which enhances the effectiveness and interpretability of RAG systems. The main idea is to design an LLM agent framework to solve RAG tasks step-by-step based on the complexity of the inputs, simultaneously including single-hop and multi-hop queries in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, we introduce SynAgent-RAG, a synthetic dataset to enable the proposed agent framework for small open-source LLMs (e.g., Llama-3-8B). The results show comparable performances with closed-source and larger open-source LLMs across various RAG benchmarks. Our source code and dataset are publicly available for further exploitation.

Although LEGO sets have entertained generations of children and adults, the challenge of designing customized builds matching the complexity of real-world or imagined scenes remains too great for the average enthusiast. In order to make this feat possible, we implement a system that generates a LEGO brick model from 2D images. We design a novel solution to this problem that uses an octree-structured autoencoder trained on 3D voxelized models to obtain a feasible latent representation for model reconstruction, and a separate network trained to predict this latent representation from 2D images. LEGO models are obtained by algorithmic conversion of the 3D voxelized model to bricks. We demonstrate first-of-its-kind conversion of photographs to 3D LEGO models. An octree architecture enables the flexibility to produce multiple resolutions to best fit a user's creative vision or design needs. In order to demonstrate the broad applicability of our system, we generate step-by-step building instructions and animations for LEGO models of objects and human faces. Finally, we test these automatically generated LEGO sets by constructing physical builds using real LEGO bricks.

Most recent advances in 3D generative modeling rely on diffusion or flow-matching formulations. We instead explore a fully autoregressive alternative and introduce GaussianGPT, a transformer-based model that directly generates 3D Gaussians via next-token prediction, thus facilitating full 3D scene generation. We first compress Gaussian primitives into a discrete latent grid using a sparse 3D convolutional autoencoder with vector quantization. The resulting tokens are serialized and modeled using a causal transformer with 3D rotary positional embedding, enabling sequential generation of spatial structure and appearance. Unlike diffusion-based methods that refine scenes holistically, our formulation constructs scenes step-by-step, naturally supporting completion, outpainting, controllable sampling via temperature, and flexible generation horizons. This formulation leverages the compositional inductive biases and scalability of autoregressive modeling while operating on explicit representations compatible with modern neural rendering pipelines, positioning autoregressive transformers as a complementary paradigm for controllable and context-aware 3D generation.

We introduce UEval, a benchmark to evaluate unified models, i.e., models capable of generating both images and text. UEval comprises 1,000 expert-curated questions that require both images and text in the model output, sourced from 8 real-world tasks. Our curated questions cover a wide range of reasoning types, from step-by-step guides to textbook explanations. Evaluating open-ended multimodal generation is non-trivial, as simple LLM-as-a-judge methods can miss the subtleties. Different from previous works that rely on multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to rate image quality or text accuracy, we design a rubric-based scoring system in UEval. For each question, reference images and text answers are provided to a MLLM to generate an initial rubric, consisting of multiple evaluation criteria, and human experts then refine and validate these rubrics. In total, UEval contains 10,417 validated rubric criteria, enabling scalable and fine-grained automatic scoring. UEval is challenging for current unified models: GPT-5-Thinking scores only 66.4 out of 100, while the best open-source model reaches merely 49.1. We observe that reasoning models often outperform non-reasoning ones, and transferring reasoning traces from a reasoning model to a non-reasoning model significantly narrows the gap. This suggests that reasoning may be important for tasks requiring complex multimodal understanding and generation.

Procedural videos, exemplified by recipe demonstrations, are instrumental in conveying step-by-step instructions. However, understanding such videos is challenging as it involves the precise localization of steps and the generation of textual instructions. Manually annotating steps and writing instructions is costly, which limits the size of current datasets and hinders effective learning. Leveraging large but noisy video-transcript datasets for pre-training can boost performance but demands significant computational resources. Furthermore, transcripts contain irrelevant content and differ in style from human-written instructions. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel technique, Sieve-&-Swap, to automatically generate high-quality training data for the recipe domain: (i) Sieve: filters irrelevant transcripts and (ii) Swap: acquires high-quality text by replacing transcripts with human-written instruction from a text-only recipe dataset. The resulting dataset is three orders of magnitude smaller than current web-scale datasets but enables efficient training of large-scale models. Alongside Sieve-&-Swap, we propose Procedure Transformer (ProcX), a model for end-to-end step localization and instruction generation for procedural videos. When pre-trained on our curated dataset, this model achieves state-of-the-art performance on YouCook2 and Tasty while using a fraction of the training data. We have released code and dataset.

We release Code World Model (CWM), a 32-billion-parameter open-weights LLM, to advance research on code generation with world models. To improve code understanding beyond what can be learned from training on static code alone, we mid-train CWM on a large amount of observation-action trajectories from Python interpreter and agentic Docker environments, and perform extensive multi-task reasoning RL in verifiable coding, math, and multi-turn software engineering environments. With CWM, we provide a strong testbed for researchers to explore the opportunities world modeling affords for improving code generation with reasoning and planning in computational environments. We present first steps of how world models can benefit agentic coding, enable step-by-step simulation of Python code execution, and show early results of how reasoning can benefit from the latter. CWM is a dense, decoder-only LLM trained with a context size of up to 131k tokens. Independent of its world modeling capabilities, CWM offers strong performance on general coding and math tasks: it reaches pass@1 scores of 65.8% on SWE-bench Verified (with test-time scaling), 68.6% on LiveCodeBench, 96.6% on Math-500, and 76.0% on AIME 2024. To support further research on code world modeling, we release model checkpoints after mid-training, SFT, and RL.

Recent code large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in generating standalone functions but face limitations in repository-level code generation due to their lack of awareness of repository-level dependencies (e.g., user-defined attributes), resulting in dependency errors such as undefined-variable and no-member errors. In this work, we introduce ToolGen, an approach that integrates autocompletion tools into the code LLM generation process to address these dependencies. ToolGen comprises two main phases: Trigger Insertion and Model Fine-tuning (Offline), and Tool-integrated Code Generation (Online). During the offline phase, ToolGen augments functions within a given code corpus with a special mark token, indicating positions to trigger autocompletion tools. These augmented functions, along with their corresponding docstrings, are then used to fine-tune a selected code LLM. In the online phase, ToolGen iteratively generates functions by predicting tokens step-by-step using the fine-tuned LLM. Whenever a mark token is encountered, ToolGen invokes the autocompletion tool to suggest code completions and selects the most appropriate one. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate ToolGen's effectiveness in repository-level code generation. To facilitate this evaluation, we create a benchmark comprising 680 real-world code repositories and introduce two new repository-level metrics: Dependency Coverage and Static Validity Rate. The results demonstrate that ToolGen significantly improves Dependency Coverage by 15.2% to 45.8% and Static Validity Rate by 10.9% to 42.2% across three distinct code LLMs, while maintaining competitive performance in widely-recognized similarity metrics. Furthermore, our generalizability evaluation confirms ToolGen's consistent performance when applied to diverse code LLMs, including various model architectures and scales.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in code generation and problem solving. Current approaches employ external tool-based iterative debuggers that use compiler or other tool-based runtime feedback to refine coarse programs generated by various methods. However, the effectiveness of these approaches heavily relies on the quality of the initial code generation, which remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce CodeSim, a novel multi-agent code generation framework that comprehensively addresses the stages of program synthesis-planning, coding, and debugging-through a human-like perception approach. As human verifies their understanding of any algorithms through visual simulation, CodeSim uniquely features a method of plan verification and internal debugging through the step-by-step simulation of input/output. Extensive experiments across seven challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks demonstrate CodeSim's remarkable code generation capabilities. Our framework achieves new state-of-the-art (pass@1) results-(HumanEval 95.1%, MBPP 90.7%, APPS 22%, and CodeContests 29.1%). Furthermore, our method shows potential for even greater enhancement when cascaded with external debuggers. To facilitate further research and development in this area, we have open-sourced our framework in this link (https://kagnlp.github.io/codesim.github.io/).

Why must vision-language navigation be bound to detailed and verbose language instructions? While such details ease decision-making, they fundamentally contradict the goal for navigation in the real-world. Ideally, agents should possess the autonomy to navigate in unknown environments guided solely by simple and high-level intents. Realizing this ambition introduces a formidable challenge: Beyond-the-View Navigation (BVN), where agents must locate distant, unseen targets without dense and step-by-step guidance. Existing large language model (LLM)-based methods, though adept at following dense instructions, often suffer from short-sighted behaviors due to their reliance on short-horimzon supervision. Simply extending the supervision horizon, however, destabilizes LLM training. In this work, we identify that video generation models inherently benefit from long-horizon supervision to align with language instructions, rendering them uniquely suitable for BVN tasks. Capitalizing on this insight, we propose introducing the video generation model into this field for the first time. Yet, the prohibitive latency for generating videos spanning tens of seconds makes real-world deployment impractical. To bridge this gap, we propose SparseVideoNav, achieving sub-second trajectory inference guided by a generated sparse future spanning a 20-second horizon. This yields a remarkable 27x speed-up compared to the unoptimized counterpart. Extensive real-world zero-shot experiments demonstrate that SparseVideoNav achieves 2.5x the success rate of state-of-the-art LLM baselines on BVN tasks and marks the first realization of such capability in challenging night scenes.

Despite their remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been underutilized for retrieval tasks. We present Search-R3, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by adapting LLMs to generate search embeddings as a direct output of their reasoning process. Our approach exploits LLMs' chain-of-thought capabilities, allowing them to produce more effective embeddings by reasoning step-by-step through complex semantic analyses. We implement this through three complementary mechanisms. (1) a supervised learning stage enables the model's ability to produce quality embeddings, (2) a reinforcement learning (RL) methodology that optimizes embedding generation alongside reasoning, and (3) a specialized RL environment that efficiently handles evolving embedding representations without requiring complete corpus re-encoding at each training iteration. Our extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Search-R3 significantly outperforms prior methods by unifying the reasoning and embedding generation processes. This integrated post-training approach represents a substantial advancement in handling complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require both sophisticated reasoning and effective information retrieval. Project page: https://github.com/ytgui/Search-R3

We introduce the GANformer2 model, an iterative object-oriented transformer, explored for the task of generative modeling. The network incorporates strong and explicit structural priors, to reflect the compositional nature of visual scenes, and synthesizes images through a sequential process. It operates in two stages: a fast and lightweight planning phase, where we draft a high-level scene layout, followed by an attention-based execution phase, where the layout is being refined, evolving into a rich and detailed picture. Our model moves away from conventional black-box GAN architectures that feature a flat and monolithic latent space towards a transparent design that encourages efficiency, controllability and interpretability. We demonstrate GANformer2's strengths and qualities through a careful evaluation over a range of datasets, from multi-object CLEVR scenes to the challenging COCO images, showing it successfully achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of visual quality, diversity and consistency. Further experiments demonstrate the model's disentanglement and provide a deeper insight into its generative process, as it proceeds step-by-step from a rough initial sketch, to a detailed layout that accounts for objects' depths and dependencies, and up to the final high-resolution depiction of vibrant and intricate real-world scenes. See https://github.com/dorarad/gansformer for model implementation.

While the ``deep reasoning'' paradigm has spurred significant advances in verifiable domains like mathematics, its application to open-ended, creative generation remains a critical challenge. The two dominant methods for instilling reasoning -- reinforcement learning (RL) and instruction distillation -- falter in this area; RL struggles with the absence of clear reward signals and high-quality reward models, while distillation is prohibitively expensive and capped by the teacher model's capabilities. To overcome these limitations, we introduce REverse-Engineered Reasoning (REER), a new paradigm that fundamentally shifts the approach. Instead of building a reasoning process ``forwards'' through trial-and-error or imitation, REER works ``backwards'' from known-good solutions to computationally discover the latent, step-by-step deep reasoning process that could have produced them. Using this scalable, gradient-free approach, we curate and open-source DeepWriting-20K, a large-scale dataset of 20,000 deep reasoning trajectories for open-ended tasks. Our model, DeepWriter-8B, trained on this data, not only surpasses strong open-source baselines but also achieves performance competitive with, and at times superior to, leading proprietary models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5.

Despite their impressive capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face challenges with fine-grained perception and complex reasoning. Prevalent multimodal pre-training approaches focus on enhancing perception by training on high-quality image captions due to the extremely high cost of collecting chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning data for improving reasoning. While leveraging advanced MLLMs for caption generation enhances scalability, the outputs often lack comprehensiveness and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce Self-Improving cognition (SIcog), a self-learning framework designed to construct next-generation foundation MLLMs by enhancing their systematic cognitive capabilities through multimodal pre-training with self-generated data. Specifically, we propose Chain-of-Description, an approach that improves an MLLM's systematic perception by enabling step-by-step visual understanding, ensuring greater comprehensiveness and accuracy. Additionally, we adopt a structured CoT reasoning technique to enable MLLMs to integrate in-depth multimodal reasoning. To construct a next-generation foundation MLLM with self-improved cognition, SIcog first equips an MLLM with systematic perception and reasoning abilities using minimal external annotations. The enhanced models then generate detailed captions and CoT reasoning data, which are further curated through self-consistency. This curated data is ultimately used for multimodal pre-training to develop next-generation foundation models. Extensive experiments on both low- and high-resolution MLLMs across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that, with merely 213K self-generated pre-training samples, SIcog produces next-generation foundation MLLMs with significantly improved cognition, achieving benchmark-leading performance compared to prevalent pre-training approaches.

Despite recent progress in generating hardware RTL code with LLMs, existing solutions still suffer from a substantial gap between practical application scenarios and the requirements of real-world RTL code development. Prior approaches either focus on overly simplified hardware descriptions or depend on extensive human guidance to process complex specifications, limiting their scalability and automation potential. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing an LLM agent system, termed Spec2RTL-Agent, designed to directly process complex specification documentation and generate corresponding RTL code implementations, advancing LLM-based RTL code generation toward more realistic application settings. To achieve this goal, Spec2RTL-Agent introduces a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that integrates three key enablers: (1) a reasoning and understanding module that translates specifications into structured, step-by-step implementation plans; (2) a progressive coding and prompt optimization module that iteratively refines the code across multiple representations to enhance correctness and synthesisability for RTL conversion; and (3) an adaptive reflection module that identifies and traces the source of errors during generation, ensuring a more robust code generation flow. Instead of directly generating RTL from natural language, our system strategically generates synthesizable C++ code, which is then optimized for HLS. This agent-driven refinement ensures greater correctness and compatibility compared to naive direct RTL generation approaches. We evaluate Spec2RTL-Agent on three specification documents, showing it generates accurate RTL code with up to 75% fewer human interventions than existing methods. This highlights its role as the first fully automated multi-agent system for RTL generation from unstructured specs, reducing reliance on human effort in hardware design.

Automatic workflow generation is the process of automatically synthesizing sequences of LLM calls, tool invocations, and post-processing steps for complex end-to-end tasks. Most prior methods cast this task as an optimization problem with limited theoretical grounding. We propose to cast workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows, and introduce Bayesian Workflow Generation (BWG), a sampling framework that builds workflows step-by-step using parallel look-ahead rollouts for importance weighting and a sequential in-loop refiner for pool-wide improvements. We prove that, without the refiner, the weighted empirical distribution converges to the target posterior. We instantiate BWG as BayesFlow, a training-free algorithm for workflow construction. Across six benchmark datasets, BayesFlow improves accuracy by up to 9 percentage points over SOTA workflow generation baselines and by up to 65 percentage points over zero-shot prompting, establishing BWG as a principled upgrade to search-based workflow design. Code will be available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/BayesFlow.

Much previous AI research has focused on developing monolithic models to maximize their intelligence and capability, with the primary goal of enhancing performance on specific tasks. In contrast, this paper explores an alternative approach: collaborative AI systems that use workflows to integrate models, data sources, and pipelines to solve complex and diverse tasks. We introduce GenAgent, an LLM-based framework that automatically generates complex workflows, offering greater flexibility and scalability compared to monolithic models. The core innovation of GenAgent lies in representing workflows with code, alongside constructing workflows with collaborative agents in a step-by-step manner. We implement GenAgent on the ComfyUI platform and propose a new benchmark, OpenComfy. The results demonstrate that GenAgent outperforms baseline approaches in both run-level and task-level evaluations, showing its capability to generate complex workflows with superior effectiveness and stability.

Human motion understanding and generation are crucial for vision and robotics but remain limited in reasoning capability and test-time planning. We propose MoRL, a unified multimodal motion model trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Our task-specific reward design combines semantic alignment and reasoning coherence for understanding with physical plausibility and text-motion consistency for generation, improving both logical reasoning and perceptual realism. To further enhance inference, we introduce Chain-of-Motion (CoM), a test-time reasoning method that enables step-by-step planning and reflection. We also construct two large-scale CoT datasets, MoUnd-CoT-140K and MoGen-CoT-140K, to align motion sequences with reasoning traces and action descriptions. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that MoRL achieves significant gains over state-of-the-art baselines. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MoRL. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MoRL.

Generative diffusion models are developing rapidly and attracting increasing attention due to their wide range of applications. Image-to-Video (I2V) generation has become a major focus in the field of video synthesis. However, existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on aspects such as video quality and temporal consistency, while largely overlooking the model's ability to understand the semantics of specific subjects in the input image or to ensure that the generated video aligns with physical laws and human commonsense. To address this gap, we propose UI2V-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating I2V models with a focus on semantic understanding and reasoning. It introduces four primary evaluation dimensions: spatial understanding, attribute binding, category understanding, and reasoning. To assess these dimensions, we design two evaluation methods based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): an instance-level pipeline for fine-grained semantic understanding, and a feedback-based reasoning pipeline that enables step-by-step causal assessment for more accurate evaluation. UI2V-Bench includes approximately 500 carefully constructed text-image pairs and evaluates a range of both open source and closed-source I2V models across all defined dimensions. We further incorporate human evaluations, which show strong alignment with the proposed MLLM-based metrics. Overall, UI2V-Bench fills a critical gap in I2V evaluation by emphasizing semantic comprehension and reasoning ability, offering a robust framework and dataset to support future research and model development in the field.

Spatial control is a core capability in controllable image generation. Advancements in layout-guided image generation have shown promising results on in-distribution (ID) datasets with similar spatial configurations. However, it is unclear how these models perform when facing out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with arbitrary, unseen layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutBench, a diagnostic benchmark for layout-guided image generation that examines four categories of spatial control skills: number, position, size, and shape. We benchmark two recent representative layout-guided image generation methods and observe that the good ID layout control may not generalize well to arbitrary layouts in the wild (e.g., objects at the boundary). Next, we propose IterInpaint, a new baseline that generates foreground and background regions in a step-by-step manner via inpainting, demonstrating stronger generalizability than existing models on OOD layouts in LayoutBench. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation and fine-grained analysis on the four LayoutBench skills to pinpoint the weaknesses of existing models. Lastly, we show comprehensive ablation studies on IterInpaint, including training task ratio, crop&paste vs. repaint, and generation order. Project website: https://layoutbench.github.io

Unified generative models have demonstrated extraordinary performance in both text and image generation. However, they tend to underperform when generating intricate images with various interwoven conditions, which is hard to solely rely on straightforward text-to-image generation. In response to this challenge, we introduce MINT, an innovative unified generative model, empowered with native multimodal chain of thought (MCoT) for enhanced image generation for the first time. Firstly, we design Mixture of Transformer Experts (MTXpert), an expert-parallel structure that effectively supports both natural language generation (NLG) and visual capabilities, while avoiding potential modality conflicts that could hinder the full potential of each modality. Building on this, we propose an innovative MCoT training paradigm, a step-by-step approach to multimodal thinking, reasoning, and reflection specifically designed to enhance image generation. This paradigm equips MINT with nuanced, element-wise decoupled alignment and a comprehensive understanding of textual and visual components. Furthermore, it fosters advanced multimodal reasoning and self-reflection, enabling the construction of images that are firmly grounded in the logical relationships between these elements. Notably, MINT has been validated to exhibit superior performance across multiple benchmarks for text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) tasks.

We introduce Complex-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate instruction-based image editing models across instructions of varying complexity. To develop this benchmark, we harness GPT-4o to automatically collect a diverse set of editing instructions at scale. Our approach follows a well-structured ``Chain-of-Edit'' pipeline: we first generate individual atomic editing tasks independently and then integrate them to form cohesive, complex instructions. Additionally, we introduce a suite of metrics to assess various aspects of editing performance, along with a VLM-based auto-evaluation pipeline that supports large-scale assessments. Our benchmark yields several notable insights: 1) Open-source models significantly underperform relative to proprietary, closed-source models, with the performance gap widening as instruction complexity increases; 2) Increased instructional complexity primarily impairs the models' ability to retain key elements from the input images and to preserve the overall aesthetic quality; 3) Decomposing a complex instruction into a sequence of atomic steps, executed in a step-by-step manner, substantially degrades performance across multiple metrics; 4) A straightforward Best-of-N selection strategy improves results for both direct editing and the step-by-step sequential approach; and 5) We observe a ``curse of synthetic data'': when synthetic data is involved in model training, the edited images from such models tend to appear increasingly synthetic as the complexity of the editing instructions rises -- a phenomenon that intriguingly also manifests in the latest GPT-4o outputs.

Many students struggle with math word problems (MWPs), often finding it difficult to identify key information and select the appropriate mathematical operations.Schema-based instruction (SBI) is an evidence-based strategy that helps students categorize problems based on their structure, improving problem-solving accuracy. Building on this, we propose a Schema-Based Instruction Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SBI-RAG) framework that incorporates a large language model (LLM).Our approach emphasizes step-by-step reasoning by leveraging schemas to guide solution generation. We evaluate its performance on the GSM8K dataset, comparing it with GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo, and introduce a "reasoning score" metric to assess solution quality. Our findings suggest that SBI-RAG enhances reasoning clarity and problem-solving accuracy, potentially providing educational benefits for students

Diffusion models have made significant breakthroughs in image, audio, and video generation, but they depend on an iterative generation process that causes slow sampling speed and caps their potential for real-time applications. To overcome this limitation, we propose consistency models, a new family of generative models that achieve high sample quality without adversarial training. They support fast one-step generation by design, while still allowing for few-step sampling to trade compute for sample quality. They also support zero-shot data editing, like image inpainting, colorization, and super-resolution, without requiring explicit training on these tasks. Consistency models can be trained either as a way to distill pre-trained diffusion models, or as standalone generative models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that they outperform existing distillation techniques for diffusion models in one- and few-step generation. For example, we achieve the new state-of-the-art FID of 3.55 on CIFAR-10 and 6.20 on ImageNet 64x64 for one-step generation. When trained as standalone generative models, consistency models also outperform single-step, non-adversarial generative models on standard benchmarks like CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64 and LSUN 256x256.

A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and interpretability. However, it is unclear whether human understanding of this text matches the model's actual computational process. In this paper, we investigate a necessary condition for correspondence: the ability of humans to identify which steps in a reasoning text causally influence later steps. We evaluated humans on this ability by composing questions based on counterfactual measurements and found a significant discrepancy: participant accuracy was only 29.3%, barely above chance (25%), and remained low (42%) even when evaluating the majority vote on questions with high agreement. Our results reveal a fundamental gap between how humans interpret reasoning texts and how models use it, challenging its utility as a simple interpretability tool. We argue that reasoning texts should be treated as an artifact to be investigated, not taken at face value, and that understanding the non-human ways these models use language is a critical research direction.

The use of natural language interfaces (NLIs) for the creation of charts is becoming increasingly popular due to the intuitiveness of natural language interactions. One key challenge in this approach is to accurately capture user intents and transform them to proper chart specifications. This obstructs the wide use of NLI in chart generation, as users' natural language inputs are generally abstract (i.e., ambiguous or under-specified), without a clear specification of visual encodings. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have exhibited superior performance in understanding and generating natural language, demonstrating great potential for downstream tasks. Inspired by this major trend, we propose ChartGPT, generating charts from abstract natural language inputs. However, LLMs are struggling to address complex logic problems. To enable the model to accurately specify the complex parameters and perform operations in chart generation, we decompose the generation process into a step-by-step reasoning pipeline, so that the model only needs to reason a single and specific sub-task during each run. Moreover, LLMs are pre-trained on general datasets, which might be biased for the task of chart generation. To provide adequate visualization knowledge, we create a dataset consisting of abstract utterances and charts and improve model performance through fine-tuning. We further design an interactive interface for ChartGPT that allows users to check and modify the intermediate outputs of each step. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated through quantitative evaluations and a user study.

We introduce a new method of generating Computer Aided Design (CAD) profiles via a sequence of simple geometric constructions including curve offsetting, rotations and intersections. These sequences start with geometry provided by a designer and build up the points and curves of the final profile step by step. We demonstrate that adding construction steps between the designer's input geometry and the final profile improves generation quality in a similar way to the introduction of a chain of thought in language models. Similar to the constraints in a parametric CAD model, the construction sequences reduce the degrees of freedom in the modeled shape to a small set of parameter values which can be adjusted by the designer, allowing parametric editing with the constructed geometry evaluated to floating point precision. In addition we show that applying reinforcement learning to the construction sequences gives further improvements over a wide range of metrics, including some which were not explicitly optimized.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting reveals that large language models are capable of performing complex reasoning via intermediate steps. CoT prompting is primarily categorized into three approaches. The first approach utilizes straightforward prompts like ``Let's think step by step'' to generate a sequential thought process before yielding an answer. The second approach makes use of human-crafted, step-by-step demonstrations to guide the model's reasoning process. The third automates the generation of reasoned demonstrations with the 'Let's think step by step'.This approach sometimes leads to reasoning errors, highlighting the need to diversify demonstrations to mitigate its misleading effects. However, diverse demonstrations pose challenges for effective representations. In this work, we propose ECHO, a self-harmonized chain-of-thought prompting method. It consolidates diverse solution paths into a uniform and effective solution pattern.ECHO demonstrates the best overall performance across three reasoning domains.

Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models face several limitations, including large model sizes, slow runtime, and low-quality generation on mobile devices. This paper aims to address all of these challenges by developing an extremely small and fast T2I model that generates high-resolution and high-quality images on mobile platforms. We propose several techniques to achieve this goal. First, we systematically examine the design choices of the network architecture to reduce model parameters and latency, while ensuring high-quality generation. Second, to further improve generation quality, we employ cross-architecture knowledge distillation from a much larger model, using a multi-level approach to guide the training of our model from scratch. Third, we enable a few-step generation by integrating adversarial guidance with knowledge distillation. For the first time, our model SnapGen, demonstrates the generation of 1024x1024 px images on a mobile device around 1.4 seconds. On ImageNet-1K, our model, with only 372M parameters, achieves an FID of 2.06 for 256x256 px generation. On T2I benchmarks (i.e., GenEval and DPG-Bench), our model with merely 379M parameters, surpasses large-scale models with billions of parameters at a significantly smaller size (e.g., 7x smaller than SDXL, 14x smaller than IF-XL).

We introduce PRISM-Bench, a benchmark of puzzle-based visual challenges designed to evaluate not only whether models can solve problems, but how their reasoning unfolds. Unlike prior evaluations that measure only final-answer accuracy, PRISM-Bench introduces a diagnostic task: given a visual puzzle and a step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) containing exactly one error, models must identify the first incorrect step. This setting enables fine-grained assessment of logical consistency, error detection, and visual reasoning. The puzzles in PRISM-Bench require multi-step symbolic, geometric, and analogical reasoning, resisting shortcuts based on superficial pattern matching. Evaluations across state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a persistent gap between fluent generation and faithful reasoning: models that produce plausible CoTs often fail to locate simple logical faults. By disentangling answer generation from reasoning verification, PRISM-Bench offers a sharper lens on multimodal reasoning competence and underscores the need for diagnostic evaluation protocols in the development of trustworthy MLLMs.

MeanFlow (MF) is a diffusion-motivated generative model that enables efficient few-step generation by learning long jumps directly from noise to data. In practice, it is often used as a latent MF by leveraging the pre-trained Stable Diffusion variational autoencoder (SD-VAE) for high-dimensional data modeling. However, MF training remains computationally demanding and is often unstable. During inference, the SD-VAE decoder dominates the generation cost, and MF depends on complex guidance hyperparameters for class-conditional generation. In this work, we develop an efficient training and sampling scheme for MF in the latent space of a Representation Autoencoder (RAE), where a pre-trained vision encoder (e.g., DINO) provides semantically rich latents paired with a lightweight decoder. We observe that naive MF training in the RAE latent space suffers from severe gradient explosion. To stabilize and accelerate training, we adopt Consistency Mid-Training for trajectory-aware initialization and use a two-stage scheme: distillation from a pre-trained flow matching teacher to speed convergence and reduce variance, followed by an optional bootstrapping stage with a one-point velocity estimator to further reduce deviation from the oracle mean flow. This design removes the need for guidance, simplifies training configurations, and reduces computation in both training and sampling. Empirically, our method achieves a 1-step FID of 2.03, outperforming vanilla MF's 3.43, while reducing sampling GFLOPS by 38% and total training cost by 83% on ImageNet 256. We further scale our approach to ImageNet 512, achieving a competitive 1-step FID of 3.23 with the lowest GFLOPS among all baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/sony/mf-rae.

In this study, we present SingVisio, an interactive visual analysis system that aims to explain the diffusion model used in singing voice conversion. SingVisio provides a visual display of the generation process in diffusion models, showcasing the step-by-step denoising of the noisy spectrum and its transformation into a clean spectrum that captures the desired singer's timbre. The system also facilitates side-by-side comparisons of different conditions, such as source content, melody, and target timbre, highlighting the impact of these conditions on the diffusion generation process and resulting conversions. Through comprehensive evaluations, SingVisio demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of system design, functionality, explainability, and user-friendliness. It offers users of various backgrounds valuable learning experiences and insights into the diffusion model for singing voice conversion.

The landscape of video generation is shifting, from a focus on generating visually appealing clips to building virtual environments that support interaction and maintain physical plausibility. These developments point toward the emergence of video foundation models that function not only as visual generators but also as implicit world models, models that simulate the physical dynamics, agent-environment interactions, and task planning that govern real or imagined worlds. This survey provides a systematic overview of this evolution, conceptualizing modern video foundation models as the combination of two core components: an implicit world model and a video renderer. The world model encodes structured knowledge about the world, including physical laws, interaction dynamics, and agent behavior. It serves as a latent simulation engine that enables coherent visual reasoning, long-term temporal consistency, and goal-driven planning. The video renderer transforms this latent simulation into realistic visual observations, effectively producing videos as a "window" into the simulated world. We trace the progression of video generation through four generations, in which the core capabilities advance step by step, ultimately culminating in a world model, built upon a video generation model, that embodies intrinsic physical plausibility, real-time multimodal interaction, and planning capabilities spanning multiple spatiotemporal scales. For each generation, we define its core characteristics, highlight representative works, and examine their application domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, and interactive gaming. Finally, we discuss open challenges and design principles for next-generation world models, including the role of agent intelligence in shaping and evaluating these systems. An up-to-date list of related works is maintained at this link.

Flow map models such as Consistency Models (CM) and Mean Flow (MF) enable few-step generation by learning the long jump of the ODE solution of diffusion models, yet training remains unstable, sensitive to hyperparameters, and costly. Initializing from a pre-trained diffusion model helps, but still requires converting infinitesimal steps into a long-jump map, leaving instability unresolved. We introduce mid-training, the first concept and practical method that inserts a lightweight intermediate stage between the (diffusion) pre-training and the final flow map training (i.e., post-training) for vision generation. Concretely, Consistency Mid-Training (CMT) is a compact and principled stage that trains a model to map points along a solver trajectory from a pre-trained model, starting from a prior sample, directly to the solver-generated clean sample. It yields a trajectory-consistent and stable initialization. This initializer outperforms random and diffusion-based baselines and enables fast, robust convergence without heuristics. Initializing post-training with CMT weights further simplifies flow map learning. Empirically, CMT achieves state of the art two step FIDs: 1.97 on CIFAR-10, 1.32 on ImageNet 64x64, and 1.84 on ImageNet 512x512, while using up to 98% less training data and GPU time, compared to CMs. On ImageNet 256x256, CMT reaches 1-step FID 3.34 while cutting total training time by about 50% compared to MF from scratch (FID 3.43). This establishes CMT as a principled, efficient, and general framework for training flow map models.

We introduce Vinci, a real-time embodied smart assistant built upon an egocentric vision-language model. Designed for deployment on portable devices such as smartphones and wearable cameras, Vinci operates in an "always on" mode, continuously observing the environment to deliver seamless interaction and assistance. Users can wake up the system and engage in natural conversations to ask questions or seek assistance, with responses delivered through audio for hands-free convenience. With its ability to process long video streams in real-time, Vinci can answer user queries about current observations and historical context while also providing task planning based on past interactions. To further enhance usability, Vinci integrates a video generation module that creates step-by-step visual demonstrations for tasks that require detailed guidance. We hope that Vinci can establish a robust framework for portable, real-time egocentric AI systems, empowering users with contextual and actionable insights. We release the complete implementation for the development of the device in conjunction with a demo web platform to test uploaded videos at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/vinci.

Generating step-by-step "how-to" procedures is a key LLM capability: how-to advice is commonly requested in chatbots, and step-by-step planning is critical for reasoning over complex tasks. Yet, measuring and improving procedural validity at scale on real-world tasks remains challenging and understudied. To address this, we introduce How2Everything, a scalable framework to evaluate and improve goal-conditioned procedure generation. Our framework includes How2Mine, which mines 351K procedures from 980K web pages across 14 topics and readily scales to larger corpora. From this pool we build How2Bench, a 7K-example evaluation set balanced across topics. To reliably score model outputs, we develop How2Score, an evaluation protocol that uses an LLM judge to detect whether a generation contains any critical failure that would prevent achieving the goal. For low-cost, reproducible evaluation, we distill a frontier model into an open 8B model, achieving 80.5% agreement with human annotators. How2Bench reveals clear scaling trends across model sizes and training stages, providing signal early in pretraining. Finally, RL using How2Score as a reward improves performance on How2Bench by >10 points across three models without systematic regressions on standard benchmarks, with gains robust to superficial source-document memorization or format compliance. Taken together, How2Everything shows how pretraining web data can support a closed loop of capability evaluation and improvement at scale.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive problem-solving capabilities in mathematics through step-by-step reasoning chains. However, they are susceptible to reasoning errors that impact the quality of subsequent reasoning chains and the final answer due to language models' autoregressive token-by-token generating nature. Recent works have proposed adopting external verifiers to guide the generation of reasoning paths, but existing works utilize models that have been trained with step-by-step labels to assess the correctness of token-by-token reasoning chains. Consequently, they struggle to recognize discriminative details of tokens within a reasoning path and lack the ability to evaluate whether an intermediate reasoning path is on a promising track toward the correct final answer. To amend the lack of sound and token-grained math-verification signals, we devise a novel training scheme for verifiers that apply token-level supervision with the expected cumulative reward (i.e., value). Furthermore, we propose a practical formulation of the cumulative reward by reducing it to finding the probability of future correctness of the final answer and thereby enabling the empirical estimation of the value. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that Token-Supervised Value Model (TVM) can outperform step-by-step verifiers on GSM8K and MATH with Mistral and Llama.

Recent efforts have been dedicated to enhancing time series forecasting accuracy by introducing advanced network architectures and self-supervised pretraining strategies. Nevertheless, existing approaches still exhibit two critical drawbacks. Firstly, these methods often rely on a single dataset for training, limiting the model's generalizability due to the restricted scale of the training data. Secondly, the one-step generation schema is widely followed, which necessitates a customized forecasting head and overlooks the temporal dependencies in the output series, and also leads to increased training costs under different horizon length settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel generative pretrained hierarchical transformer architecture for forecasting, named GPHT. There are two aspects of key designs in GPHT. On the one hand, we advocate for constructing a mixed dataset for pretraining our model, comprising various datasets from diverse data scenarios. This approach significantly expands the scale of training data, allowing our model to uncover commonalities in time series data and facilitating improved transfer to specific datasets. On the other hand, GPHT employs an auto-regressive forecasting approach under the channel-independent assumption, effectively modeling temporal dependencies in the output series. Importantly, no customized forecasting head is required, enabling a single model to forecast at arbitrary horizon settings. We conduct sufficient experiments on eight datasets with mainstream self-supervised pretraining models and supervised models. The results demonstrated that GPHT surpasses the baseline models across various fine-tuning and zero/few-shot learning settings in the traditional long-term forecasting task, providing support for verifying the feasibility of pretrained time series large models.

Unlocking deep, interpretable biological reasoning from complex genomic data is a major AI challenge hindering scientific discovery. Current DNA foundation models, despite strong sequence representation, struggle with multi-step reasoning and lack inherent transparent, biologically intuitive explanations. We introduce BioReason, a pioneering architecture that, for the first time, deeply integrates a DNA foundation model with a Large Language Model (LLM). This novel connection enables the LLM to directly process and reason with genomic information as a fundamental input, fostering a new form of multimodal biological understanding. BioReason's sophisticated multi-step reasoning is developed through supervised fine-tuning and targeted reinforcement learning, guiding the system to generate logical, biologically coherent deductions. On biological reasoning benchmarks including KEGG-based disease pathway prediction - where accuracy improves from 88% to 97% - and variant effect prediction, BioReason demonstrates an average 15% performance gain over strong single-modality baselines. BioReason reasons over unseen biological entities and articulates decision-making through interpretable, step-by-step biological traces, offering a transformative approach for AI in biology that enables deeper mechanistic insights and accelerates testable hypothesis generation from genomic data. Data, code, and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/bowang-lab/BioReason

This paper studies the problem of solving complex chemistry problems with large language models (LLMs). Despite the extensive general knowledge in LLMs (such as GPT-4), they struggle with chemistry reasoning that requires faithful grounded reasoning with diverse chemical knowledge and an integrative understanding of chemical interactions. We propose InstructChem, a new structured reasoning approach that substantially boosts the LLMs' chemical reasoning capabilities. InstructChem explicitly decomposes the reasoning into three critical phrases, including chemical formulae generation by LLMs that offers the basis for subsequent grounded reasoning, step-by-step reasoning that makes multi-step derivations with the identified formulae for a preliminary answer, and iterative review-and-refinement that steers LLMs to progressively revise the previous phases for increasing confidence, leading to the final high-confidence answer. We conduct extensive experiments on four different chemistry challenges, including quantum chemistry, quantum mechanics, physical chemistry, and chemistry kinetics. Our approach significantly enhances GPT-4 on chemistry reasoning, yielding an 8% average absolute improvement and a 30% peak improvement. We further use the generated reasoning by GPT-4 to fine-tune smaller LMs (e.g., Vicuna) and observe strong improvement of the smaller LMs. This validates our approach and enables LLMs to generate high-quality reasoning.

Recent advances in multimodal Reward Models (RMs) have shown significant promise in delivering reward signals to align vision models with human preferences. However, current RMs are generally restricted to providing direct responses or engaging in shallow reasoning processes with limited depth, often leading to inaccurate reward signals. We posit that incorporating explicit long chains of thought (CoT) into the reward reasoning process can significantly strengthen their reliability and robustness. Furthermore, we believe that once RMs internalize CoT reasoning, their direct response accuracy can also be improved through implicit reasoning capabilities. To this end, this paper proposes UnifiedReward-Think, the first unified multimodal CoT-based reward model, capable of multi-dimensional, step-by-step long-chain reasoning for both visual understanding and generation reward tasks. Specifically, we adopt an exploration-driven reinforcement fine-tuning approach to elicit and incentivize the model's latent complex reasoning ability: (1) We first use a small amount of image generation preference data to distill the reasoning process of GPT-4o, which is then used for the model's cold start to learn the format and structure of CoT reasoning. (2) Subsequently, by leveraging the model's prior knowledge and generalization capabilities, we prepare large-scale unified multimodal preference data to elicit the model's reasoning process across various vision tasks. During this phase, correct reasoning outputs are retained for rejection sampling to refine the model (3) while incorrect predicted samples are finally used for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) based reinforcement fine-tuning, enabling the model to explore diverse reasoning paths and optimize for correct and robust solutions. Extensive experiments across various vision reward tasks demonstrate the superiority of our model.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in textual reasoning, they struggle with mathematical domains like geometry that intrinsically rely on visual aids. Existing approaches to Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) are often limited by rigid external tools or fail to generate the high-fidelity, strategically-timed diagrams necessary for complex problem-solving. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathCanvas, a comprehensive framework designed to endow unified Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with intrinsic VCoT capabilities for mathematics. Our approach consists of two phases. First, a Visual Manipulation stage pre-trains the model on a novel 15.2M-pair corpus, comprising 10M caption-to-diagram pairs (MathCanvas-Imagen) and 5.2M step-by-step editing trajectories (MathCanvas-Edit), to master diagram generation and editing. Second, a Strategic Visual-Aided Reasoning stage fine-tunes the model on MathCanvas-Instruct, a new 219K-example dataset of interleaved visual-textual reasoning paths, teaching it when and how to leverage visual aids. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce MathCanvas-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 3K problems that require models to produce interleaved visual-textual solutions. Our model, BAGEL-Canvas, trained under this framework, achieves an 86% relative improvement over strong LMM baselines on MathCanvas-Bench, demonstrating excellent generalization to other public math benchmarks. Our work provides a complete toolkit-framework, datasets, and benchmark-to unlock complex, human-like visual-aided reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mathcanvas.github.io/

We introduce **SWE-Flow**, a novel data synthesis framework grounded in Test-Driven Development (TDD). Unlike existing software engineering data that rely on human-submitted issues, **SWE-Flow** automatically infers incremental development steps directly from unit tests, which inherently encapsulate high-level requirements. The core of **SWE-Flow** is the construction of a Runtime Dependency Graph (RDG), which precisely captures function interactions, enabling the generation of a structured, step-by-step *development schedule*. At each step, **SWE-Flow** produces a partial codebase, the corresponding unit tests, and the necessary code modifications, resulting in fully verifiable TDD tasks. With this approach, we generated 16,061 training instances and 2,020 test instances from real-world GitHub projects, creating the **SWE-Flow-Eval** benchmark. Our experiments show that fine-tuning open model on this dataset significantly improves performance in TDD-based coding. To facilitate further research, we release all code, datasets, models, and Docker images at [Github](https://github.com/Hambaobao/SWE-Flow).

Mathematical reasoning has long represented one of the most fundamental and challenging frontiers in artificial intelligence research. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in this area. This survey examines the development of mathematical reasoning abilities in LLMs through two high-level cognitive phases: comprehension, where models gain mathematical understanding via diverse pretraining strategies, and answer generation, which has progressed from direct prediction to step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We review methods for enhancing mathematical reasoning, ranging from training-free prompting to fine-tuning approaches such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, and discuss recent work on extended CoT and "test-time scaling". Despite notable progress, fundamental challenges remain in terms of capacity, efficiency, and generalization. To address these issues, we highlight promising research directions, including advanced pretraining and knowledge augmentation techniques, formal reasoning frameworks, and meta-generalization through principled learning paradigms. This survey tries to provide some insights for researchers interested in enhancing reasoning capabilities of LLMs and for those seeking to apply these techniques to other domains.

Modern Language Models (LMs) owe much of their success to masked causal attention, the backbone of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models. Although GPTs can process the entire user prompt at once, the causal masking is applied to all input tokens step-by-step, mimicking the generation process. This imposes an unnecessary constraint during the initial "prefill" phase when the model processes the input prompt and generates the internal representations before producing any output tokens. In this work, attention is masked based on the known block structure at the prefill phase, followed by the conventional token-by-token autoregressive process after that. For example, in a typical chat prompt, the system prompt is treated as one block, and the user prompt as the next one. Each of these is treated as a unit for the purpose of masking, such that the first tokens in each block can access the subsequent tokens in a non-causal manner. Then, the model answer is generated in the conventional causal manner. This Segment-by-Segment scheme entails no additional computational overhead. When integrating it into models such as Llama and Qwen, state-of-the-art performance is consistently achieved.

We continue the investigation into the power of smaller Transformer-based language models as initiated by TinyStories -- a 10 million parameter model that can produce coherent English -- and the follow-up work on phi-1, a 1.3 billion parameter model with Python coding performance close to the state-of-the-art. The latter work proposed to use existing Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate ``textbook quality" data as a way to enhance the learning process compared to traditional web data. We follow the ``Textbooks Are All You Need" approach, focusing this time on common sense reasoning in natural language, and create a new 1.3 billion parameter model named phi-1.5, with performance on natural language tasks comparable to models 5x larger, and surpassing most non-frontier LLMs on more complex reasoning tasks such as grade-school mathematics and basic coding. More generally, phi-1.5 exhibits many of the traits of much larger LLMs, both good -- such as the ability to ``think step by step" or perform some rudimentary in-context learning -- and bad, including hallucinations and the potential for toxic and biased generations -- encouragingly though, we are seeing improvement on that front thanks to the absence of web data. We open-source phi-1.5 to promote further research on these urgent topics.

Despite their success in many natural language tasks, solving math problems remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). A large gap exists between LLMs' pass-at-one and pass-at-N performance in solving math problems, suggesting LLMs might be close to finding correct solutions, motivating our exploration of fine-tuning methods to unlock LLMs' performance. Using the challenging MATH dataset, we investigate three fine-tuning strategies: (1) solution fine-tuning, where we fine-tune to generate a detailed solution for a given math problem; (2) solution-cluster re-ranking, where the LLM is fine-tuned as a solution verifier/evaluator to choose among generated candidate solution clusters; (3) multi-task sequential fine-tuning, which integrates both solution generation and evaluation tasks together efficiently to enhance the LLM performance. With these methods, we present a thorough empirical study on a series of PaLM 2 models and find: (1) The quality and style of the step-by-step solutions used for fine-tuning can make a significant impact on the model performance; (2) While solution re-ranking and majority voting are both effective for improving the model performance when used separately, they can also be used together for an even greater performance boost; (3) Multi-task fine-tuning that sequentially separates the solution generation and evaluation tasks can offer improved performance compared with the solution fine-tuning baseline. Guided by these insights, we design a fine-tuning recipe that yields approximately 58.8% accuracy on the MATH dataset with fine-tuned PaLM 2-L models, an 11.2% accuracy improvement over the few-shot performance of pre-trained PaLM 2-L model with majority voting.

We present ExpliCIT-QA, a system that extends our previous MRT approach for tabular question answering into a multimodal pipeline capable of handling complex table images and providing explainable answers. ExpliCIT-QA follows a modular design, consisting of: (1) Multimodal Table Understanding, which uses a Chain-of-Thought approach to extract and transform content from table images; (2) Language-based Reasoning, where a step-by-step explanation in natural language is generated to solve the problem; (3) Automatic Code Generation, where Python/Pandas scripts are created based on the reasoning steps, with feedback for handling errors; (4) Code Execution to compute the final answer; and (5) Natural Language Explanation that describes how the answer was computed. The system is built for transparency and auditability: all intermediate outputs, parsed tables, reasoning steps, generated code, and final answers are available for inspection. This strategy works towards closing the explainability gap in end-to-end TableVQA systems. We evaluated ExpliCIT-QA on the TableVQA-Bench benchmark, comparing it with existing baselines. We demonstrated improvements in interpretability and transparency, which open the door for applications in sensitive domains like finance and healthcare where auditing results are critical.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced, yet their adoption in medicine remains limited by gaps in domain coverage, modality alignment, and grounded reasoning. In this work, we introduce MedMO, a medical foundation model built upon a generalized MLLM architecture and trained exclusively on large-scale, domain-specific data. MedMO follows a multi-stage training recipe: (i) cross-modal pretraining to align heterogeneous visual encoders with a medical language backbone; (ii) instruction tuning on multi-task supervision that spans captioning, VQA, report generation, retrieval, and grounded disease localization with bounding boxes; and (iii) reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards that combine factuality checks with a box-level GIoU reward to strengthen spatial grounding and step-by-step reasoning in complex clinical scenarios. MedMO consistently outperforms strong open-source medical MLLMs across multiple modalities and tasks. On VQA benchmarks, MedMO achieves an average accuracy improvement of +13.7% over the baseline and performs within 1.9% of the SOTA Fleming-VL. For text-based QA, it attains +6.9% over the baseline and +14.5% over Fleming-VL. In medical report generation, MedMO delivers significant gains in both semantic and clinical accuracy. Moreover, it exhibits strong grounding capability, achieving an IoU improvement of +40.4 over the baseline and +37.0% over Fleming-VL, underscoring its robust spatial reasoning and localization performance. Evaluations across radiology, ophthalmology, and pathology-microscopy confirm MedMO's broad cross-modality generalization. We release two versions of MedMO: 4B and 8B. Project is available at https://genmilab.github.io/MedMO-Page

Modern machine learning (ML) workloads increasingly rely on GPUs, yet achieving high end-to-end performance remains challenging due to dependencies on both GPU kernel efficiency and host-side settings. Although LLM-based methods show promise on automated GPU kernel generation, prior works mainly focus on single-kernel optimization and do not extend to end-to-end programs, hindering practical deployment. To address the challenge, in this work, we propose StitchCUDA, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end GPU program generation, with three specialized agents: a Planner to orchestrate whole system design, a Coder dedicated to implementing it step-by-step, and a Verifier for correctness check and performance profiling using Nsys/NCU. To fundamentally improve the Coder's ability in end-to-end GPU programming, StitchCUDA integrates rubric-based agentic reinforcement learning over two atomic skills, task-to-code generation and feedback-driven code optimization, with combined rubric reward and rule-based reward from real executions. Therefore, the Coder learns how to implement advanced CUDA programming techniques (e.g., custom kernel fusion, cublas epilogue), and we also effectively prevent Coder's reward hacking (e.g., just copy PyTorch code or hardcoding output) during benchmarking. Experiments on KernelBench show that StitchCUDA achieves nearly 100% success rate on end-to-end GPU programming tasks, with 1.72x better speedup over the multi-agent baseline and 2.73x than the RL model baselines.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown strong potential for flow-matching-based text-to-image (T2I) generation, but it faces two key limitations: inaccurate advantage attribution, and the neglect of temporal dynamics of generation. In this work, we argue that shifting the optimization paradigm from the step level to the chunk level can effectively alleviate these issues. Building on this idea, we propose Chunk-GRPO, the first chunk-level GRPO-based approach for T2I generation. The insight is to group consecutive steps into coherent 'chunk's that capture the intrinsic temporal dynamics of flow matching, and to optimize policies at the chunk level. In addition, we introduce an optional weighted sampling strategy to further enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that ChunkGRPO achieves superior results in both preference alignment and image quality, highlighting the promise of chunk-level optimization for GRPO-based methods.

While large-scale language models (LMs) are able to imitate the distribution of natural language well enough to generate realistic text, it is difficult to control which regions of the distribution they generate. This is especially problematic because datasets used for training large LMs usually contain significant toxicity, hate, bias, and negativity. We propose GeDi as an efficient method for using smaller LMs as generative discriminators to guide generation from large LMs to make them safer and more controllable. GeDi guides generation at each step by computing classification probabilities for all possible next tokens via Bayes rule by normalizing over two class-conditional distributions; one conditioned on the desired attribute, or control code, and another conditioned on the undesired attribute, or anti control code. We find that GeDi gives stronger controllability than the state of the art method while also achieving generation speeds more than 30 times faster. Additionally, training GeDi on only four topics allows us to controllably generate new topics zero-shot from just a keyword, unlocking a new capability that previous controllable generation methods do not have. Lastly, we show that GeDi can make GPT-2 (1.5B parameters) significantly less toxic without sacrificing linguistic quality, making it by far the most practical existing method for detoxifying large language models while maintaining a fast generation speed.

We introduce Multi-view Ancestral Sampling (MAS), a method for generating consistent multi-view 2D samples of a motion sequence, enabling the creation of its 3D counterpart. MAS leverages a diffusion model trained solely on 2D data, opening opportunities to exciting and diverse fields of motion previously under-explored as 3D data is scarce and hard to collect. MAS works by simultaneously denoising multiple 2D motion sequences representing the same motion from different angles. Our consistency block ensures consistency across all views at each diffusion step by combining the individual generations into a unified 3D sequence, and projecting it back to the original views for the next iteration. We demonstrate MAS on 2D pose data acquired from videos depicting professional basketball maneuvers, rhythmic gymnastic performances featuring a ball apparatus, and horse obstacle course races. In each of these domains, 3D motion capture is arduous, and yet, MAS generates diverse and realistic 3D sequences without textual conditioning. As we demonstrate, our ancestral sampling-based approach offers a more natural integration with the diffusion framework compared to popular denoising optimization-based approaches, and avoids common issues such as out-of-domain sampling, lack of details and mode-collapse. https://guytevet.github.io/mas-page/

With the increasing popularity of autonomous driving based on the powerful and unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation, a demand for high-quality and large-scale multi-view video data with accurate annotation is urgently required. However, such large-scale multi-view data is hard to obtain due to expensive collection and annotation costs. To alleviate the problem, we propose a spatial-temporal consistent diffusion framework DrivingDiffusion, to generate realistic multi-view videos controlled by 3D layout. There are three challenges when synthesizing multi-view videos given a 3D layout: How to keep 1) cross-view consistency and 2) cross-frame consistency? 3) How to guarantee the quality of the generated instances? Our DrivingDiffusion solves the problem by cascading the multi-view single-frame image generation step, the single-view video generation step shared by multiple cameras, and post-processing that can handle long video generation. In the multi-view model, the consistency of multi-view images is ensured by information exchange between adjacent cameras. In the temporal model, we mainly query the information that needs attention in subsequent frame generation from the multi-view images of the first frame. We also introduce the local prompt to effectively improve the quality of generated instances. In post-processing, we further enhance the cross-view consistency of subsequent frames and extend the video length by employing temporal sliding window algorithm. Without any extra cost, our model can generate large-scale realistic multi-camera driving videos in complex urban scenes, fueling the downstream driving tasks. The code will be made publicly available.

Controllable video generation (CVG) has advanced rapidly, yet current systems falter when more than one actor must move, interact, and exchange positions under noisy control signals. We address this gap with DanceTogether, the first end-to-end diffusion framework that turns a single reference image plus independent pose-mask streams into long, photorealistic videos while strictly preserving every identity. A novel MaskPoseAdapter binds "who" and "how" at every denoising step by fusing robust tracking masks with semantically rich-but noisy-pose heat-maps, eliminating the identity drift and appearance bleeding that plague frame-wise pipelines. To train and evaluate at scale, we introduce (i) PairFS-4K, 26 hours of dual-skater footage with 7,000+ distinct IDs, (ii) HumanRob-300, a one-hour humanoid-robot interaction set for rapid cross-domain transfer, and (iii) TogetherVideoBench, a three-track benchmark centered on the DanceTogEval-100 test suite covering dance, boxing, wrestling, yoga, and figure skating. On TogetherVideoBench, DanceTogether outperforms the prior arts by a significant margin. Moreover, we show that a one-hour fine-tune yields convincing human-robot videos, underscoring broad generalization to embodied-AI and HRI tasks. Extensive ablations confirm that persistent identity-action binding is critical to these gains. Together, our model, datasets, and benchmark lift CVG from single-subject choreography to compositionally controllable, multi-actor interaction, opening new avenues for digital production, simulation, and embodied intelligence. Our video demos and code are available at https://DanceTog.github.io/.

In the era dominated by information overload and its facilitation with Large Language Models (LLMs), the prevalence of misinformation poses a significant threat to public discourse and societal well-being. A critical concern at present involves the identification of machine-generated news. In this work, we take a significant step by introducing a benchmark dataset designed for neural news detection in four languages: English, Turkish, Hungarian, and Persian. The dataset incorporates outputs from multiple multilingual generators (in both, zero-shot and fine-tuned setups) such as BloomZ, LLaMa-2, Mistral, Mixtral, and GPT-4. Next, we experiment with a variety of classifiers, ranging from those based on linguistic features to advanced Transformer-based models and LLMs prompting. We present the detection results aiming to delve into the interpretablity and robustness of machine-generated texts detectors across all target languages.

The development of powerful natural language models have increased the ability to learn meaningful representations of protein sequences. In addition, advances in high-throughput mutagenesis, directed evolution, and next-generation sequencing have allowed for the accumulation of large amounts of labeled fitness data. Leveraging these two trends, we introduce Regularized Latent Space Optimization (ReLSO), a deep transformer-based autoencoder which features a highly structured latent space that is trained to jointly generate sequences as well as predict fitness. Through regularized prediction heads, ReLSO introduces a powerful protein sequence encoder and novel approach for efficient fitness landscape traversal. Using ReLSO, we explicitly model the sequence-function landscape of large labeled datasets and generate new molecules by optimizing within the latent space using gradient-based methods. We evaluate this approach on several publicly-available protein datasets, including variant sets of anti-ranibizumab and GFP. We observe a greater sequence optimization efficiency (increase in fitness per optimization step) by ReLSO compared to other approaches, where ReLSO more robustly generates high-fitness sequences. Furthermore, the attention-based relationships learned by the jointly-trained ReLSO models provides a potential avenue towards sequence-level fitness attribution information.

Recent mesh generation approaches typically tokenize triangle meshes into sequences of tokens and train autoregressive models to generate these tokens sequentially. Despite substantial progress, such token sequences inevitably reuse vertices multiple times to fully represent manifold meshes, as each vertex is shared by multiple faces. This redundancy leads to excessively long token sequences and inefficient generation processes. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework that generates artistic meshes by treating vertices and faces separately, significantly reducing redundancy. We employ an autoregressive model solely for vertex generation, decreasing the token count to approximately 23\% of that required by the most compact existing tokenizer. Next, we leverage a bidirectional transformer to complete the mesh in a single step by capturing inter-vertex relationships and constructing the adjacency matrix that defines the mesh faces. To further improve the generation quality, we introduce a fidelity enhancer to refine vertex positioning into more natural arrangements and propose a post-processing framework to remove undesirable edge connections. Experimental results show that our method achieves more than 8times faster speed on mesh generation compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while producing higher mesh quality.

Frontier language models have demonstrated strong reasoning and long-horizon tool-use capabilities. However, existing RAG systems fail to leverage these capabilities. They still rely on two paradigms: (1) designing an algorithm that retrieves passages in a single shot and concatenates them into the model's input, or (2) predefining a workflow and prompting the model to execute it step-by-step. Neither paradigm allows the model to participate in retrieval decisions, preventing efficient scaling with model improvements. In this paper, we introduce A-RAG, an Agentic RAG framework that exposes hierarchical retrieval interfaces directly to the model. A-RAG provides three retrieval tools: keyword search, semantic search, and chunk read, enabling the agent to adaptively search and retrieve information across multiple granularities. Experiments on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks show that A-RAG consistently outperforms existing approaches with comparable or lower retrieved tokens, demonstrating that A-RAG effectively leverages model capabilities and dynamically adapts to different RAG tasks. We further systematically study how A-RAG scales with model size and test-time compute. We will release our code and evaluation suite to facilitate future research. Code and evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/Ayanami0730/arag.

Auxiliary function is a helpful component to improve language model's code generation ability. However, a systematic exploration of how they affect has yet to be done. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions encoded in recent code-pretrained language models. First, we construct a human-crafted evaluation set, called HumanExtension, which contains examples of two functions where one function assists the other. With HumanExtension, we design several experiments to examine their ability in a multifaceted way. Our evaluation processes enable a comprehensive understanding of including auxiliary functions in the prompt in terms of effectiveness and robustness. An additional implementation style analysis captures the models' various implementation patterns when they access the auxiliary function. Through this analysis, we discover the models' promising ability to utilize auxiliary functions including their self-improving behavior by implementing the two functions step-by-step. However, our analysis also reveals the model's underutilized behavior to call the auxiliary function, suggesting the future direction to enhance their implementation by eliciting the auxiliary function call ability encoded in the models. We release our code and dataset to facilitate this research direction.

In this work, we propose a novel method (GLOV) enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to act as implicit Optimizers for Vision-Langugage Models (VLMs) to enhance downstream vision tasks. Our GLOV meta-prompts an LLM with the downstream task description, querying it for suitable VLM prompts (e.g., for zero-shot classification with CLIP). These prompts are ranked according to a purity measure obtained through a fitness function. In each respective optimization step, the ranked prompts are fed as in-context examples (with their accuracies) to equip the LLM with the knowledge of the type of text prompts preferred by the downstream VLM. Furthermore, we also explicitly steer the LLM generation process in each optimization step by specifically adding an offset difference vector of the embeddings from the positive and negative solutions found by the LLM, in previous optimization steps, to the intermediate layer of the network for the next generation step. This offset vector steers the LLM generation toward the type of language preferred by the downstream VLM, resulting in enhanced performance on the downstream vision tasks. We comprehensively evaluate our GLOV on 16 diverse datasets using two families of VLMs, i.e., dual-encoder (e.g., CLIP) and encoder-decoder (e.g., LLaVa) models -- showing that the discovered solutions can enhance the recognition performance by up to 15.0% and 57.5% (3.8% and 21.6% on average) for these models.

Large language models are typically adapted to downstream tasks through supervised fine-tuning on domain-specific data. While standard fine-tuning focuses on minimizing generation loss to optimize model parameters, we take a deeper step by retaining and leveraging the model's own learning signals, analogous to how human learners reflect on past mistakes to improve future performance. We first introduce the concept of Mistake Log to systematically track the model's learning behavior and recurring errors throughout fine-tuning. Treating the original transformer-based model as the Pilot, we correspondingly design a Copilot model to refine the Pilot's inference performance via logits rectification. We name the overall Pilot-Copilot framework the Transformer Copilot, which introduces (i) a novel Copilot model design, (ii) a joint training paradigm where the Copilot continuously learns from the evolving Mistake Log alongside the Pilot, and (iii) a fused inference paradigm where the Copilot rectifies the Pilot's logits for enhanced generation. We provide both theoretical and empirical analyses on our new learning framework. Experiments on 12 benchmarks spanning commonsense, arithmetic, and recommendation tasks demonstrate that Transformer Copilot consistently improves performance by up to 34.5%, while introducing marginal computational overhead to Pilot models and exhibiting strong scalability and transferability.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit strong understanding, yet this capability often fails to effectively guide generation. We identify this as a Cognitive Gap: the model lacks the understanding of how to enhance its own generation process. To bridge this gap, we propose Endogenous Reprompting, a mechanism that transforms the model's understanding from a passive encoding process into an explicit generative reasoning step by generating self-aligned descriptors during generation. To achieve this, we introduce SEER (Self-Evolving Evaluator and Reprompter), a training framework that establishes a two-stage endogenous loop using only 300 samples from a compact proxy task, Visual Instruction Elaboration. First, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) activates the model's latent evaluation ability via curriculum learning, producing a high-fidelity endogenous reward signal. Second, Reinforcement Learning with Model-rewarded Thinking (RLMT) leverages this signal to optimize the generative reasoning policy. Experiments show that SEER consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in evaluation accuracy, reprompting efficiency, and generation quality, without sacrificing general multimodal capabilities.

Accelerating diffusion model sampling is crucial for efficient AIGC deployment. While diffusion distillation methods -- based on distribution matching and trajectory matching -- reduce sampling to as few as one step, they fall short on complex tasks like text-to-image generation. Few-step generation offers a better balance between speed and quality, but existing approaches face a persistent trade-off: distribution matching lacks flexibility for multi-step sampling, while trajectory matching often yields suboptimal image quality. To bridge this gap, we propose learning few-step diffusion models by Trajectory Distribution Matching (TDM), a unified distillation paradigm that combines the strengths of distribution and trajectory matching. Our method introduces a data-free score distillation objective, aligning the student's trajectory with the teacher's at the distribution level. Further, we develop a sampling-steps-aware objective that decouples learning targets across different steps, enabling more adjustable sampling. This approach supports both deterministic sampling for superior image quality and flexible multi-step adaptation, achieving state-of-the-art performance with remarkable efficiency. Our model, TDM, outperforms existing methods on various backbones, such as SDXL and PixArt-alpha, delivering superior quality and significantly reduced training costs. In particular, our method distills PixArt-alpha into a 4-step generator that outperforms its teacher on real user preference at 1024 resolution. This is accomplished with 500 iterations and 2 A800 hours -- a mere 0.01% of the teacher's training cost. In addition, our proposed TDM can be extended to accelerate text-to-video diffusion. Notably, TDM can outperform its teacher model (CogVideoX-2B) by using only 4 NFE on VBench, improving the total score from 80.91 to 81.65. Project page: https://tdm-t2x.github.io/

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

Current research in multimodal models faces a key challenge where enhancing generative capabilities often comes at the expense of understanding, and vice versa. We analyzed this trade-off and identify the primary cause might be the potential conflict between generation and understanding, which creates a competitive dynamic within the model. To address this, we propose the Reason-Reflect-Refine (R3) framework. This innovative algorithm re-frames the single-step generation task into a multi-step process of "generate-understand-regenerate". By explicitly leveraging the model's understanding capability during generation, we successfully mitigate the optimization dilemma, achieved stronger generation results and improved understanding ability which are related to the generation process. This offers valuable insights for designing next-generation unified multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/sen-ye/R3.

Diffusion models have revolutionized generative modeling in continuous domains like image, audio, and video synthesis. However, their iterative sampling process leads to slow generation and inefficient training, challenges that are further exacerbated when incorporating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) due to sparse rewards and long time horizons. Consistency models address these issues by enabling single-step or efficient multi-step generation, significantly reducing computational costs. In this work, we propose a direct reward optimization framework for applying RLHF to consistency models, incorporating distributional regularization to enhance training stability and prevent reward hacking. We investigate various f-divergences as regularization strategies, striking a balance between reward maximization and model consistency. Unlike policy gradient methods, our approach leverages first-order gradients, making it more efficient and less sensitive to hyperparameter tuning. Empirical results show that our method achieves competitive or superior performance compared to policy gradient based RLHF methods, across various automatic metrics and human evaluation. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates the impact of different regularization techniques in improving model generalization and preventing overfitting.

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) is a powerful acceleration paradigm, yet its stability is often compromised in Forbidden Zone, regions where the real teacher provides unreliable guidance while the fake teacher exerts insufficient repulsive force. In this work, we propose a unified optimization framework that reinterprets prior art as implicit strategies to avoid these corrupted regions. Based on this insight, we introduce Adaptive Matching Distillation (AMD), a self-correcting mechanism that utilizes reward proxies to explicitly detect and escape Forbidden Zones. AMD dynamically prioritizes corrective gradients via structural signal decomposition and introduces Repulsive Landscape Sharpening to enforce steep energy barriers against failure mode collapse. Extensive experiments across image and video generation tasks (e.g., SDXL, Wan2.1) and rigorous benchmarks (e.g., VBench, GenEval) demonstrate that AMD significantly enhances sample fidelity and training robustness. For instance, AMD improves the HPSv2 score on SDXL from 30.64 to 31.25, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. These findings validate that explicitly rectifying optimization trajectories within Forbidden Zones is essential for pushing the performance ceiling of few-step generative models.

Few-step diffusion or flow-based generative models typically distill a velocity-predicting teacher into a student that predicts a shortcut towards denoised data. This format mismatch has led to complex distillation procedures that often suffer from a quality-diversity trade-off. To address this, we propose policy-based flow models (pi-Flow). pi-Flow modifies the output layer of a student flow model to predict a network-free policy at one timestep. The policy then produces dynamic flow velocities at future substeps with negligible overhead, enabling fast and accurate ODE integration on these substeps without extra network evaluations. To match the policy's ODE trajectory to the teacher's, we introduce a novel imitation distillation approach, which matches the policy's velocity to the teacher's along the policy's trajectory using a standard ell_2 flow matching loss. By simply mimicking the teacher's behavior, pi-Flow enables stable and scalable training and avoids the quality-diversity trade-off. On ImageNet 256^2, it attains a 1-NFE FID of 2.85, outperforming MeanFlow of the same DiT architecture. On FLUX.1-12B and Qwen-Image-20B at 4 NFEs, pi-Flow achieves substantially better diversity than state-of-the-art few-step methods, while maintaining teacher-level quality.

Recent advances in large multi-modal generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in multi-modal generation, including image and video generation. These models are typically built upon multi-step frameworks like diffusion and flow matching, which inherently limits their inference efficiency (requiring 40-100 Number of Function Evaluations (NFEs)). While various few-step methods aim to accelerate the inference, existing solutions have clear limitations. Prominent distillation-based methods, such as progressive and consistency distillation, either require an iterative distillation procedure or show significant degradation at very few steps (< 4-NFE). Meanwhile, integrating adversarial training into distillation (e.g., DMD/DMD2 and SANA-Sprint) to enhance performance introduces training instability, added complexity, and high GPU memory overhead due to the auxiliary trained models. To this end, we propose TwinFlow, a simple yet effective framework for training 1-step generative models that bypasses the need of fixed pretrained teacher models and avoids standard adversarial networks during training, making it ideal for building large-scale, efficient models. On text-to-image tasks, our method achieves a GenEval score of 0.83 in 1-NFE, outperforming strong baselines like SANA-Sprint (a GAN loss-based framework) and RCGM (a consistency-based framework). Notably, we demonstrate the scalability of TwinFlow by full-parameter training on Qwen-Image-20B and transform it into an efficient few-step generator. With just 1-NFE, our approach matches the performance of the original 100-NFE model on both the GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks, reducing computational cost by 100times with minor quality degradation. Project page is available at https://zhenglin-cheng.com/twinflow.

Deploying GRPO on Flow Matching models has proven effective for text-to-image generation. However, existing paradigms typically propagate an outcome-based reward to all preceding denoising steps without distinguishing the local effect of each step. Moreover, current group-wise ranking mainly compares trajectories at matched timesteps and ignores within-trajectory dependencies, where certain early denoising actions can affect later states via delayed, implicit interactions. We propose TurningPoint-GRPO (TP-GRPO), a GRPO framework that alleviates step-wise reward sparsity and explicitly models long-term effects within the denoising trajectory. TP-GRPO makes two key innovations: (i) it replaces outcome-based rewards with step-level incremental rewards, providing a dense, step-aware learning signal that better isolates each denoising action's "pure" effect, and (ii) it identifies turning points-steps that flip the local reward trend and make subsequent reward evolution consistent with the overall trajectory trend-and assigns these actions an aggregated long-term reward to capture their delayed impact. Turning points are detected solely via sign changes in incremental rewards, making TP-GRPO efficient and hyperparameter-free. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that TP-GRPO exploits reward signals more effectively and consistently improves generation. Demo code is available at https://github.com/YunzeTong/TurningPoint-GRPO.

Consistency-based generative models like Shortcut and MeanFlow achieve impressive results via a target-aware design for solving the Probability Flow ODE (PF-ODE). Typically, such methods introduce a target time r alongside the current time t to modulate outputs between a local multi-step derivative (r = t) and a global few-step integral (r = 0). However, the conventional "one input, one output" paradigm enforces a partition of the training budget, often allocating a significant portion (e.g., 75% in MeanFlow) solely to the multi-step objective for stability. This separation forces a trade-off: allocating sufficient samples to the multi-step objective leaves the few-step generation undertrained, which harms convergence and limits scalability. To this end, we propose Duality Models (DuMo) via a "one input, dual output" paradigm. Using a shared backbone with dual heads, DuMo simultaneously predicts velocity v_t and flow-map u_t from a single input x_t. This applies geometric constraints from the multi-step objective to every sample, bounding the few-step estimation without separating training objectives, thereby significantly improving stability and efficiency. On ImageNet 256 times 256, a 679M Diffusion Transformer with SD-VAE achieves a state-of-the-art (SOTA) FID of 1.79 in just 2 steps. Code is available at: https://github.com/LINs-lab/DuMo

We introduce YOSO, a novel generative model designed for rapid, scalable, and high-fidelity one-step image synthesis. This is achieved by integrating the diffusion process with GANs. Specifically, we smooth the distribution by the denoising generator itself, performing self-cooperative learning. We show that our method can serve as a one-step generation model training from scratch with competitive performance. Moreover, we show that our method can be extended to finetune pre-trained text-to-image diffusion for high-quality one-step text-to-image synthesis even with LoRA fine-tuning. In particular, we provide the first diffusion transformer that can generate images in one step trained on 512 resolution, with the capability of adapting to 1024 resolution without explicit training. Our code is provided at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/YOSO.

We introduce Score identity Distillation (SiD), an innovative data-free method that distills the generative capabilities of pretrained diffusion models into a single-step generator. SiD not only facilitates an exponentially fast reduction in Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) during distillation but also approaches or even exceeds the FID performance of the original teacher diffusion models. By reformulating forward diffusion processes as semi-implicit distributions, we leverage three score-related identities to create an innovative loss mechanism. This mechanism achieves rapid FID reduction by training the generator using its own synthesized images, eliminating the need for real data or reverse-diffusion-based generation, all accomplished within significantly shortened generation time. Upon evaluation across four benchmark datasets, the SiD algorithm demonstrates high iteration efficiency during distillation and surpasses competing distillation approaches, whether they are one-step or few-step, data-free, or dependent on training data, in terms of generation quality. This achievement not only redefines the benchmarks for efficiency and effectiveness in diffusion distillation but also in the broader field of diffusion-based generation. The PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD