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Aug 12

ActAvatar: Temporally-Aware Precise Action Control for Talking Avatars

Despite significant advances in talking avatar generation, existing methods face critical challenges: insufficient text-following capability for diverse actions, lack of temporal alignment between actions and audio content, and dependency on additional control signals such as pose skeletons. We present ActAvatar, a framework that achieves phase-level precision in action control through textual guidance by capturing both action semantics and temporal context. Our approach introduces three core innovations: (1) Phase-Aware Cross-Attention (PACA), which decomposes prompts into a global base block and temporally-anchored phase blocks, enabling the model to concentrate on phase-relevant tokens for precise temporal-semantic alignment; (2) Progressive Audio-Visual Alignment, which aligns modality influence with the hierarchical feature learning process-early layers prioritize text for establishing action structure while deeper layers emphasize audio for refining lip movements, preventing modality interference; (3) A two-stage training strategy that first establishes robust audio-visual correspondence on diverse data, then injects action control through fine-tuning on structured annotations, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and the model's text-following capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ActAvatar significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both action control and visual quality.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 19

DriveAgent-R1: Advancing VLM-based Autonomous Driving with Active Perception and Hybrid Thinking

The advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating powerful reasoning abilities for high-level behavior planning tasks. However, existing methods are often constrained by a passive perception paradigm, relying solely on text-based reasoning. This passivity restricts the model's capacity to actively seek crucial visual evidence when faced with uncertainty. To address this, we introduce DriveAgent-R1, the first autonomous driving agent capable of active perception for planning. In complex scenarios, DriveAgent-R1 proactively invokes tools to perform visual reasoning, firmly grounding its decisions in visual evidence, thereby enhancing both interpretability and reliability. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid thinking framework, inspired by human driver cognitive patterns, allowing the agent to adaptively switch between efficient text-only reasoning and robust tool-augmented visual reasoning based on scene complexity. This capability is cultivated through a three-stage progressive training strategy, featuring a core Cascaded Reinforcement Learning (Cascaded RL) phase. Extensive experiments on the Drive-Internal dataset, which is rich in long-tail scenarios, and the public nuScenes dataset show that, with only 3B parameters, DriveAgent-R1 achieves competitive performance comparable to top closed model systems such as GPT-5 and to human driving proficiency while remaining deployment-friendly, offering a proven path toward building more intelligent autonomous driving systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Mellum2 Technical Report

We present Mellum 2, an open-weight 12B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 2.5B active parameters per token. Mellum 2 is a general-purpose language model specialized in software engineering, spanning code generation and editing, debugging, multi-step reasoning, tool use and function calling, agentic coding, and conversational programming assistance, and it is the successor to the completion-focused 4B dense Mellum model. The architecture builds on the Mixture-of-Experts (64 experts, 8 active) and combines Grouped-Query Attention with 4 KV heads, Sliding Window Attention on three of every four layers, and a single Multi-Token Prediction head that doubles as both an auxiliary pre-training objective and a built-in draft model for speculative decoding; each choice was validated by ablation with inference efficiency on commodity GPUs as a design constraint. Pre-training spans approximately 10.6 trillion tokens through a three-phase curriculum that progressively shifts the mixture from diverse web data toward curated code and mathematical content, optimized with Muon under FP8 hybrid precision and a Warmup-Hold-Decay schedule with linear decay to zero. The pre-trained base is extended to a 128K context window via a layer-selective YaRN and then post-trained in two stages (supervised fine-tuning followed by RLVR), yielding two released variants: an Instruct model that answers directly and a Thinking model that emits an explicit reasoning trace before its final answer. Across code generation, math and reasoning, tool use, knowledge, and safety benchmarks, Mellum 2 is competitive with open-weight baselines in the 4B-14B range while running at the per-token compute of a 2.5B dense model. We release the base, instruct, and thinking checkpoints, together with this report on the architecture decisions, data pipeline, and training recipe behind them, under the Apache 2.0 license.

JetBrains JetBrains
·
May 28 3

Chem-R: Learning to Reason as a Chemist

Although large language models (LLMs) have significant potential to advance chemical discovery, current LLMs lack core chemical knowledge, produce unreliable reasoning trajectories, and exhibit suboptimal performance across diverse chemical tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Chem-R, a generalizable Chemical Reasoning model designed to emulate the deliberative processes of chemists. Chem-R is trained through a three-phase framework that progressively builds advanced reasoning capabilities, including: 1) Chemical Foundation Training, which establishes core chemical knowledge. 2) Chemical Reasoning Protocol Distillation, incorporating structured, expert-like reasoning traces to guide systematic and reliable problem solving. 3) Multi-task Group Relative Policy Optimization that optimizes the model for balanced performance across diverse molecular- and reaction-level tasks. This structured pipeline enables Chem-R to achieve state-of-the-art performance on comprehensive benchmarks, surpassing leading large language models, including Gemini-2.5-Pro and DeepSeek-R1, by up to 46% on molecular tasks and 66% on reaction tasks. Meanwhile, Chem-R also consistently outperforms the existing chemical foundation models across both molecular and reaction level tasks. These results highlight Chem-R's robust generalization, interpretability, and potential as a foundation for next-generation AI-driven chemical discovery.

ShanghaiAiLab shanghai ailab
·
Oct 19, 2025 3

DreamO: A Unified Framework for Image Customization

Recently, extensive research on image customization (e.g., identity, subject, style, background, etc.) demonstrates strong customization capabilities in large-scale generative models. However, most approaches are designed for specific tasks, restricting their generalizability to combine different types of condition. Developing a unified framework for image customization remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present DreamO, an image customization framework designed to support a wide range of tasks while facilitating seamless integration of multiple conditions. Specifically, DreamO utilizes a diffusion transformer (DiT) framework to uniformly process input of different types. During training, we construct a large-scale training dataset that includes various customization tasks, and we introduce a feature routing constraint to facilitate the precise querying of relevant information from reference images. Additionally, we design a placeholder strategy that associates specific placeholders with conditions at particular positions, enabling control over the placement of conditions in the generated results. Moreover, we employ a progressive training strategy consisting of three stages: an initial stage focused on simple tasks with limited data to establish baseline consistency, a full-scale training stage to comprehensively enhance the customization capabilities, and a final quality alignment stage to correct quality biases introduced by low-quality data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DreamO can effectively perform various image customization tasks with high quality and flexibly integrate different types of control conditions.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025 2

Three-Phase Transformer

We present Three-Phase Transformer (3PT), a residual-stream structural prior for decoder-only Transformers on a standard SwiGLU + RMSNorm + RoPE + GQA backbone. The hidden vector is partitioned into N equally-sized cyclic channels, each maintained by phase-respecting ops: a per-channel RMSNorm, a 2D Givens rotation between attention and FFN that rotates each channel by theta + i*(2*pi/N), and a head-count constraint aligning GQA heads with the partition. The architecture is a self-stabilizing equilibrium between scrambling and re-imposition, not a bolted-on module. The partition carves out a one-dimensional DC subspace orthogonal to the channels, into which we inject a fixed Gabriel's horn profile r(p) = 1/(p+1) as an absolute-position side-channel composing orthogonally with RoPE's relative-position rotation. The canonical N=3 borrows its metaphor from balanced three-phase AC, where three sinusoids 120 degrees apart sum to zero with no anti-correlated pair. At 123M parameters on WikiText-103, 3PT achieves -7.20% perplexity (-2.62% bits-per-byte) over a matched RoPE-Only baseline at +1,536 parameters (0.00124% of total), with 1.93x step-count convergence speedup (1.64x wall-clock). N behaves as a parameter-sharing knob rather than a unique optimum: at 5.5M an N-sweep over {1,2,3,4,6,8,12} is near-monotone with N=1 winning; at 123M a three-seed sweep finds N=3 and N=1 statistically indistinguishable. The load-bearing mechanism is the channel-partitioned residual stream, per-block rotation, per-phase normalization, and horn DC injection. We characterize (a) self-stabilization of the geometry without explicit enforcement, a novel instance of the conservation-law framework for neural networks; (b) a U-shaped depth profile of rotation-angle drift at 12 layers; (c) orthogonal composition with RoPE, attention, and FFN.

BrainsBuild BrainsBuild
·
Apr 14 5

Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Reinforcement Learning for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Task-Level Rewards

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to not only understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, but also optimize their action outputs via thinking and reasoning, benefiting from reinforcement learning, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing research centers on offline reinforcement learning training or online optimization using action-level rewards, which limits the agent's dynamic interaction with the environment. This often results in agents settling into local optima, thereby weakening their ability for exploration and error action correction. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach called Mobile-R1, which employs interactive multi-turn reinforcement learning with task-level rewards for mobile agents. Our training framework consists of three stages: initial format finetuning, single-step online training via action-level reward, followed by online training via task-level reward based on multi-turn trajectories. This strategy is designed to enhance the exploration and error correction capabilities of Mobile-R1, leading to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we have collected a dataset covering 28 Chinese applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations and established a new benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025

Progressive Human Motion Generation Based on Text and Few Motion Frames

Although existing text-to-motion (T2M) methods can produce realistic human motion from text description, it is still difficult to align the generated motion with the desired postures since using text alone is insufficient for precisely describing diverse postures. To achieve more controllable generation, an intuitive way is to allow the user to input a few motion frames describing precise desired postures. Thus, we explore a new Text-Frame-to-Motion (TF2M) generation task that aims to generate motions from text and very few given frames. Intuitively, the closer a frame is to a given frame, the lower the uncertainty of this frame is when conditioned on this given frame. Hence, we propose a novel Progressive Motion Generation (PMG) method to progressively generate a motion from the frames with low uncertainty to those with high uncertainty in multiple stages. During each stage, new frames are generated by a Text-Frame Guided Generator conditioned on frame-aware semantics of the text, given frames, and frames generated in previous stages. Additionally, to alleviate the train-test gap caused by multi-stage accumulation of incorrectly generated frames during testing, we propose a Pseudo-frame Replacement Strategy for training. Experimental results show that our PMG outperforms existing T2M generation methods by a large margin with even one given frame, validating the effectiveness of our PMG. Code is available at https://github.com/qinghuannn/PMG.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

Progressive Rendering Distillation: Adapting Stable Diffusion for Instant Text-to-Mesh Generation without 3D Data

It is highly desirable to obtain a model that can generate high-quality 3D meshes from text prompts in just seconds. While recent attempts have adapted pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion (SD), into generators of 3D representations (e.g., Triplane), they often suffer from poor quality due to the lack of sufficient high-quality 3D training data. Aiming at overcoming the data shortage, we propose a novel training scheme, termed as Progressive Rendering Distillation (PRD), eliminating the need for 3D ground-truths by distilling multi-view diffusion models and adapting SD into a native 3D generator. In each iteration of training, PRD uses the U-Net to progressively denoise the latent from random noise for a few steps, and in each step it decodes the denoised latent into 3D output. Multi-view diffusion models, including MVDream and RichDreamer, are used in joint with SD to distill text-consistent textures and geometries into the 3D outputs through score distillation. Since PRD supports training without 3D ground-truths, we can easily scale up the training data and improve generation quality for challenging text prompts with creative concepts. Meanwhile, PRD can accelerate the inference speed of the generation model in just a few steps. With PRD, we train a Triplane generator, namely TriplaneTurbo, which adds only 2.5% trainable parameters to adapt SD for Triplane generation. TriplaneTurbo outperforms previous text-to-3D generators in both efficiency and quality. Specifically, it can produce high-quality 3D meshes in 1.2 seconds and generalize well for challenging text input. The code is available at https://github.com/theEricMa/TriplaneTurbo.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025 2

A Multi-Level Framework for Accelerating Training Transformer Models

The fast growing capabilities of large-scale deep learning models, such as Bert, GPT and ViT, are revolutionizing the landscape of NLP, CV and many other domains. Training such models, however, poses an unprecedented demand for computing power, which incurs exponentially increasing energy cost and carbon dioxide emissions. It is thus critical to develop efficient training solutions to reduce the training costs. Motivated by a set of key observations of inter- and intra-layer similarities among feature maps and attentions that can be identified from typical training processes, we propose a multi-level framework for training acceleration. Specifically, the framework is based on three basic operators, Coalescing, De-coalescing and Interpolation, which can be orchestrated to build a multi-level training framework. The framework consists of a V-cycle training process, which progressively down- and up-scales the model size and projects the parameters between adjacent levels of models via coalescing and de-coalescing. The key idea is that a smaller model that can be trained for fast convergence and the trained parameters provides high-qualities intermediate solutions for the next level larger network. The interpolation operator is designed to break the symmetry of neurons incurred by de-coalescing for better convergence performance. Our experiments on transformer-based language models (e.g. Bert, GPT) as well as a vision model (e.g. DeiT) prove that the proposed framework reduces the computational cost by about 20% on training BERT/GPT-Base models and up to 51.6% on training the BERT-Large model while preserving the performance.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 6, 2024

UniViTAR: Unified Vision Transformer with Native Resolution

Conventional Vision Transformer simplifies visual modeling by standardizing input resolutions, often disregarding the variability of natural visual data and compromising spatial-contextual fidelity. While preliminary explorations have superficially investigated native resolution modeling, existing approaches still lack systematic analysis from a visual representation perspective. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniViTAR, a family of homogeneous vision foundation models tailored for unified visual modality and native resolution scenario in the era of multimodal. Our framework first conducts architectural upgrades to the vanilla paradigm by integrating multiple advanced components. Building upon these improvements, a progressive training paradigm is introduced, which strategically combines two core mechanisms: (1) resolution curriculum learning, transitioning from fixed-resolution pretraining to native resolution tuning, thereby leveraging ViT's inherent adaptability to variable-length sequences, and (2) visual modality adaptation via inter-batch image-video switching, which balances computational efficiency with enhanced temporal reasoning. In parallel, a hybrid training framework further synergizes sigmoid-based contrastive loss with feature distillation from a frozen teacher model, thereby accelerating early-stage convergence. Finally, trained exclusively on public datasets, externsive experiments across multiple model scales from 0.3B to 1B demonstrate its effectiveness.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

Progressive Volume Distillation with Active Learning for Efficient NeRF Architecture Conversion

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been widely adopted as practical and versatile representations for 3D scenes, facilitating various downstream tasks. However, different architectures, including the plain Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Tensors, low-rank Tensors, Hashtables, and their combinations, entail distinct trade-offs. For instance, representations based on Hashtables enable faster rendering but lack clear geometric meaning, thereby posing challenges for spatial-relation-aware editing. To address this limitation and maximize the potential of each architecture, we propose Progressive Volume Distillation with Active Learning (PVD-AL), a systematic distillation method that enables any-to-any conversion between diverse architectures. PVD-AL decomposes each structure into two parts and progressively performs distillation from shallower to deeper volume representation, leveraging effective information retrieved from the rendering process. Additionally, a three-level active learning technique provides continuous feedback from teacher to student during the distillation process, achieving high-performance outcomes. Experimental evidence showcases the effectiveness of our method across multiple benchmark datasets. For instance, PVD-AL can distill an MLP-based model from a Hashtables-based model at a 10~20X faster speed and 0.8dB~2dB higher PSNR than training the MLP-based model from scratch. Moreover, PVD-AL permits the fusion of diverse features among distinct structures, enabling models with multiple editing properties and providing a more efficient model to meet real-time requirements like mobile devices. Project website: https://sk-fun.fun/PVD-AL.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 8, 2023

Progressive Pretext Task Learning for Human Trajectory Prediction

Human trajectory prediction is a practical task of predicting the future positions of pedestrians on the road, which typically covers all temporal ranges from short-term to long-term within a trajectory. However, existing works attempt to address the entire trajectory prediction with a singular, uniform training paradigm, neglecting the distinction between short-term and long-term dynamics in human trajectories. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel Progressive Pretext Task learning (PPT) framework, which progressively enhances the model's capacity of capturing short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies for the final entire trajectory prediction. Specifically, we elaborately design three stages of training tasks in the PPT framework. In the first stage, the model learns to comprehend the short-term dynamics through a stepwise next-position prediction task. In the second stage, the model is further enhanced to understand long-term dependencies through a destination prediction task. In the final stage, the model aims to address the entire future trajectory task by taking full advantage of the knowledge from previous stages. To alleviate the knowledge forgetting, we further apply a cross-task knowledge distillation. Additionally, we design a Transformer-based trajectory predictor, which is able to achieve highly efficient two-step reasoning by integrating a destination-driven prediction strategy and a group of learnable prompt embeddings. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks have demonstrated that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/PPT.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 16, 2024

RL-100: Performant Robotic Manipulation with Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Real-world robotic manipulation in homes and factories demands reliability, efficiency, and robustness that approach or surpass skilled human operators. We present RL-100, a real-world reinforcement learning training framework built on diffusion visuomotor policies trained bu supervised learning. RL-100 introduces a three-stage pipeline. First, imitation learning leverages human priors. Second, iterative offline reinforcement learning uses an Offline Policy Evaluation procedure, abbreviated OPE, to gate PPO-style updates that are applied in the denoising process for conservative and reliable improvement. Third, online reinforcement learning eliminates residual failure modes. An additional lightweight consistency distillation head compresses the multi-step sampling process in diffusion into a single-step policy, enabling high-frequency control with an order-of-magnitude reduction in latency while preserving task performance. The framework is task-, embodiment-, and representation-agnostic and supports both 3D point clouds and 2D RGB inputs, a variety of robot platforms, and both single-step and action-chunk policies. We evaluate RL-100 on seven real-robot tasks spanning dynamic rigid-body control, such as Push-T and Agile Bowling, fluids and granular pouring, deformable cloth folding, precise dexterous unscrewing, and multi-stage orange juicing. RL-100 attains 100\% success across evaluated trials for a total of 900 out of 900 episodes, including up to 250 out of 250 consecutive trials on one task. The method achieves near-human teleoperation or better time efficiency and demonstrates multi-hour robustness with uninterrupted operation lasting up to two hours.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 1

Plenoptic Video Generation

Camera-controlled generative video re-rendering methods, such as ReCamMaster, have achieved remarkable progress. However, despite their success in single-view setting, these works often struggle to maintain consistency across multi-view scenarios. Ensuring spatio-temporal coherence in hallucinated regions remains challenging due to the inherent stochasticity of generative models. To address it, we introduce PlenopticDreamer, a framework that synchronizes generative hallucinations to maintain spatio-temporal memory. The core idea is to train a multi-in-single-out video-conditioned model in an autoregressive manner, aided by a camera-guided video retrieval strategy that adaptively selects salient videos from previous generations as conditional inputs. In addition, Our training incorporates progressive context-scaling to improve convergence, self-conditioning to enhance robustness against long-range visual degradation caused by error accumulation, and a long-video conditioning mechanism to support extended video generation. Extensive experiments on the Basic and Agibot benchmarks demonstrate that PlenopticDreamer achieves state-of-the-art video re-rendering, delivering superior view synchronization, high-fidelity visuals, accurate camera control, and diverse view transformations (e.g., third-person to third-person, and head-view to gripper-view in robotic manipulation). Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/plenopticdreamer/

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Jan 8 2

Progressive Supernet Training for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models significantly reduce inference steps through the "next-scale" prediction paradigm. However, progressive multi-scale generation incurs substantial memory overhead due to cumulative KV caching, limiting practical deployment. We observe a scale-depth asymmetric dependency in VAR: early scales exhibit extreme sensitivity to network depth, while later scales remain robust to depth reduction. Inspired by this, we propose VARiant: by equidistant sampling, we select multiple subnets ranging from 16 to 2 layers from the original 30-layer VAR-d30 network. Early scales are processed by the full network, while later scales utilize subnet. Subnet and the full network share weights, enabling flexible depth adjustment within a single model. However, weight sharing between subnet and the entire network can lead to optimization conflicts. To address this, we propose a progressive training strategy that breaks through the Pareto frontier of generation quality for both subnets and the full network under fixed-ratio training, achieving joint optimality. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that, compared to the pretrained VAR-d30 (FID 1.95), VARiant-d16 and VARiant-d8 achieve nearly equivalent quality (FID 2.05/2.12) while reducing memory consumption by 40-65%. VARiant-d2 achieves 3.5 times speedup and 80% memory reduction at moderate quality cost (FID 2.97). In terms of deployment, VARiant's single-model architecture supports zero-cost runtime depth switching and provides flexible deployment options from high quality to extreme efficiency, catering to diverse application scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025

Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning

Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging, as existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over synthetic data, which encourages teacher-forced imitation rather than exploration and generalization. Different from them, we propose Parallel-R1, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables parallel thinking behaviors for complex real-world reasoning tasks. Our framework employs a progressive curriculum that explicitly addresses the cold-start problem in training parallel thinking with RL. We first use SFT on prompt-generated trajectories from easier tasks to instill the parallel thinking ability, then transition to RL to explore and generalize this skill on harder problems. Experiments on various math benchmarks, including MATH, AMC23, and AIME, show that Parallel-R1 successfully instills parallel thinking, leading to 8.4% accuracy improvements over the sequential thinking model trained directly on challenging tasks with RL. Further analysis reveals a clear shift in the model's thinking behavior: at an early stage, it uses parallel thinking as an exploration strategy, while in a later stage, it uses the same capability for multi-perspective verification. Most significantly, we validate parallel thinking as a mid-training exploration scaffold, where this temporary exploratory phase unlocks a higher performance ceiling after RL, yielding a 42.9% improvement over the baseline on AIME25. Our model, data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/Parallel-R1.

tencent Tencent
·
Sep 9, 2025 3

Weak-to-Strong Reasoning

When large language models (LLMs) exceed human-level capabilities, it becomes increasingly challenging to provide full-scale and accurate supervisions for these models. Weak-to-strong learning, which leverages a less capable model to unlock the latent abilities of a stronger model, proves valuable in this context. Yet, the efficacy of this approach for complex reasoning tasks is still untested. Furthermore, tackling reasoning tasks under the weak-to-strong setting currently lacks efficient methods to avoid blindly imitating the weak supervisor including its errors. In this paper, we introduce a progressive learning framework that enables the strong model to autonomously refine its training data, without requiring input from either a more advanced model or human-annotated data. This framework begins with supervised fine-tuning on a selective small but high-quality dataset, followed by preference optimization on contrastive samples identified by the strong model itself. Extensive experiments on the GSM8K and MATH datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of Llama2-70b using three separate weak models. This method is further validated in a forward-looking experimental setup, where Llama3-8b-instruct effectively supervises Llama3-70b on the highly challenging OlympicArena dataset. This work paves the way for a more scalable and sophisticated strategy to enhance AI reasoning powers. All relevant code and resources are available in https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/weak-to-strong-reasoning.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

PIE: Simulating Disease Progression via Progressive Image Editing

Disease progression simulation is a crucial area of research that has significant implications for clinical diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. One major challenge in this field is the lack of continuous medical imaging monitoring of individual patients over time. To address this issue, we develop a novel framework termed Progressive Image Editing (PIE) that enables controlled manipulation of disease-related image features, facilitating precise and realistic disease progression simulation. Specifically, we leverage recent advancements in text-to-image generative models to simulate disease progression accurately and personalize it for each patient. We theoretically analyze the iterative refining process in our framework as a gradient descent with an exponentially decayed learning rate. To validate our framework, we conduct experiments in three medical imaging domains. Our results demonstrate the superiority of PIE over existing methods such as Stable Diffusion Walk and Style-Based Manifold Extrapolation based on CLIP score (Realism) and Disease Classification Confidence (Alignment). Our user study collected feedback from 35 veteran physicians to assess the generated progressions. Remarkably, 76.2% of the feedback agrees with the fidelity of the generated progressions. To our best knowledge, PIE is the first of its kind to generate disease progression images meeting real-world standards. It is a promising tool for medical research and clinical practice, potentially allowing healthcare providers to model disease trajectories over time, predict future treatment responses, and improve patient outcomes.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023 1

Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4

Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model's capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca (We are working with our legal team to publicly release a diff of the model weights in accordance with LLaMA's release policy to be published at https://aka.ms/orca-lm), a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT-4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT-4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 5, 2023 18

Think Thrice Before You Act: Progressive Thought Refinement in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on supervision signals to evaluate previous responses, making it difficult to assess output quality in more open-ended scenarios effectively. Additionally, these methods are typically designed for specific tasks, which limits their generalization to new domains. To address these limitations, we propose Progressive Thought Refinement (PTR), a framework that enables LLMs to refine their responses progressively. PTR operates in two phases: (1) Thought data construction stage: We propose a weak and strong model collaborative selection strategy to build a high-quality progressive refinement dataset to ensure logical consistency from thought to answers, and the answers are gradually refined in each round. (2) Thought-Mask Fine-Tuning Phase: We design a training structure to mask the "thought" and adjust loss weights to encourage LLMs to refine prior thought, teaching them to implicitly understand "how to improve" rather than "what is correct." Experimental results show that PTR significantly enhances LLM performance across ten diverse tasks (avg. from 49.6% to 53.5%) without task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, in more open-ended tasks, LLMs also demonstrate substantial improvements in the quality of responses beyond mere accuracy, suggesting that PTR truly teaches LLMs to self-improve over time.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

Self-Knowledge Distillation with Progressive Refinement of Targets

The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization method named progressive self-knowledge distillation (PS-KD), which progressively distills a model's own knowledge to soften hard targets (i.e., one-hot vectors) during training. Hence, it can be interpreted within a framework of knowledge distillation as a student becomes a teacher itself. Specifically, targets are adjusted adaptively by combining the ground-truth and past predictions from the model itself. We show that PS-KD provides an effect of hard example mining by rescaling gradients according to difficulty in classifying examples. The proposed method is applicable to any supervised learning tasks with hard targets and can be easily combined with existing regularization methods to further enhance the generalization performance. Furthermore, it is confirmed that PS-KD achieves not only better accuracy, but also provides high quality of confidence estimates in terms of calibration as well as ordinal ranking. Extensive experimental results on three different tasks, image classification, object detection, and machine translation, demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of the state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/lgcnsai/PS-KD-Pytorch.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 22, 2020

HiPA: Enabling One-Step Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via High-Frequency-Promoting Adaptation

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation, but their real-world applications are hampered by the extensive time needed for hundreds of diffusion steps. Although progressive distillation has been proposed to speed up diffusion sampling to 2-8 steps, it still falls short in one-step generation, and necessitates training multiple student models, which is highly parameter-extensive and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, we introduce High-frequency-Promoting Adaptation (HiPA), a parameter-efficient approach to enable one-step text-to-image diffusion. Grounded in the insight that high-frequency information is essential but highly lacking in one-step diffusion, HiPA focuses on training one-step, low-rank adaptors to specifically enhance the under-represented high-frequency abilities of advanced diffusion models. The learned adaptors empower these diffusion models to generate high-quality images in just a single step. Compared with progressive distillation, HiPA achieves much better performance in one-step text-to-image generation (37.3 rightarrow 23.8 in FID-5k on MS-COCO 2017) and 28.6x training speed-up (108.8 rightarrow 3.8 A100 GPU days), requiring only 0.04% training parameters (7,740 million rightarrow 3.3 million). We also demonstrate HiPA's effectiveness in text-guided image editing, inpainting and super-resolution tasks, where our adapted models consistently deliver high-quality outputs in just one diffusion step. The source code will be released.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

Accelerating Training Speed of Tiny Recursive Models with Curriculum Guided Adaptive Recursion

Background: Recursive reasoning models achieve strong performance through iterative refinement, allowing small networks to match large language models. However, training is computationally expensive, often requiring 36 GPU-hours for Sudoku extreme. Existing models use fixed recursion depth and uniform supervision weighting, leading to inefficient training. Objectives: We propose CGAR (Curriculum-Guided Adaptive Recursion), applying curriculum learning to architectural depth. CGAR introduces Progressive Depth Curriculum (PDC) to dynamically adjust recursion depth and Hierarchical Supervision Weighting (HSW) to apply exponentially decaying importance to supervision steps. Methods: PDC implements a three-stage schedule transitioning from shallow (2, 1) to full depth (6, 3) configurations, providing 41.4% FLOPs reduction. HSW applies exponential decay to supervision steps, achieving 40% gradient variance reduction and accelerated convergence. Results: On Sudoku-Extreme, CGAR achieves 1.71x training speedup (10.93 to 6.38 hours) with only a 0.63% accuracy drop (86.65% to 86.02%). PDC alone achieves 2.26x speedup with 85.47% accuracy, showing a Pareto improvement in efficiency and quality. HSW provides 1.61x speedup. CGAR-trained models show superior inference efficiency with 100% halting accuracy and 11% fewer reasoning steps. Conclusions: CGAR enables efficient training of recursive models on modest hardware. By treating depth as a scheduled parameter, it achieves substantial savings and prevents overfitting, making these models practical for neurosymbolic AI and program synthesis. https://github.com/Kaleemullahqasim/CGAR and huggingface.co/Kaleemullah/trm-cgar-sudoku.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025

Improving the Training of Rectified Flows

Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting. Our main insight is that under realistic settings, a single iteration of the Reflow algorithm for training rectified flows is sufficient to learn nearly straight trajectories; hence, the current practice of using multiple Reflow iterations is unnecessary. We thus propose techniques to improve one-round training of rectified flows, including a U-shaped timestep distribution and LPIPS-Huber premetric. With these techniques, we improve the FID of the previous 2-rectified flow by up to 72% in the 1 NFE setting on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet 64times64, our improved rectified flow outperforms the state-of-the-art distillation methods such as consistency distillation and progressive distillation in both one-step and two-step settings and rivals the performance of improved consistency training (iCT) in FID. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/rfpp.

  • 3 authors
·
May 30, 2024

EchoGen: Cycle-Consistent Learning for Unified Layout-Image Generation and Understanding

In this work, we present EchoGen, a unified framework for layout-to-image generation and image grounding, capable of generating images with accurate layouts and high fidelity to text descriptions (e.g., spatial relationships), while grounding the image robustly at the same time. We believe that image grounding possesses strong text and layout understanding abilities, which can compensate for the corresponding limitations in layout-to-image generation. At the same time, images generated from layouts exhibit high diversity in content, thereby enhancing the robustness of image grounding. Jointly training both tasks within a unified model can promote performance improvements for each. However, we identify that this joint training paradigm encounters several optimization challenges and results in restricted performance. To address these issues, we propose progressive training strategies. First, the Parallel Multi-Task Pre-training (PMTP) stage equips the model with basic abilities for both tasks, leveraging shared tokens to accelerate training. Next, the Dual Joint Optimization (DJO) stage exploits task duality to sequentially integrate the two tasks, enabling unified optimization. Finally, the Cycle RL stage eliminates reliance on visual supervision by using consistency constraints as rewards, significantly enhancing the model's unified capabilities via the GRPO strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both layout-to-image generation and image grounding benchmarks, and reveal clear synergistic gains from optimizing the two tasks together.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 18

World Modeling with Probabilistic Structure Integration

We present Probabilistic Structure Integration (PSI), a system for learning richly controllable and flexibly promptable world models from data. PSI consists of a three-step cycle. The first step, Probabilistic prediction, involves building a probabilistic graphical model Psi of the data, in the form of a random-access autoregressive sequence model. Psi supports a complete set of learned conditional distributions describing the dependence of any variables in the data on any other set of variables. In step 2, Structure extraction, we show how to extract underlying low-dimensional properties in the data, corresponding to a diverse set of meaningful "intermediate structures", in a zero-shot fashion via causal inference on Psi. Step 3, Integration, completes the cycle by converting these structures into new token types that are then continually mixed back into the training diet as conditioning signals and prediction targets. Each such cycle augments the capabilities of Psi, both allowing it to model the underlying data better, and creating new control handles -- akin to an LLM-like universal prompting language. We train an instance of Psi on 1.4 trillion tokens of internet video data; we use it to perform a variety of useful video prediction and understanding inferences; we extract state-of-the-art optical flow, self-supervised depth and object segmentation; and we use these structures to support a full cycle of predictive improvements.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 10, 2025 4

HuMo: Human-Centric Video Generation via Collaborative Multi-Modal Conditioning

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 10, 2025 5

Innovator: Scientific Continued Pretraining with Fine-grained MoE Upcycling

A large language model (LLM) with knowledge in both scientific and general tasks is the foundation of science general intelligence. However, directly continued pretraining an LLM using science data usually leads to catastrophic forgetting, which indicates severe degradation in general ability. In this report, we present Innovator, which solves this problem by upcycling a pre-trained dense LLM into a fine-grained Mixtures-of-Experts model during continued pretraining, where different experts are expected to learn science knowledge in different disciplines, and a shared expert is utilized for general tasks. Innovator introduces a four-stage upcycle training paradigm: (1) Scientific Expert Induction on discipline-specific data, (2) Fine-grained Expert Splitting via FFN dimension decomposition, (3) Science-Aware Routing warmup, and (4) Generalist-Scientist Integration training on hybrid datasets. Such a paradigm enables knowledge in the general domain, and different scientific disciplines can be decoupled, avoiding the negative influence among knowledge in different domains. With 53.3B total parameters and 13.3B activated, Innovator extends Qwen2.5-7B using a shared general expert and 64 specialized scientific experts with 8 activated. Trained on 300B tokens with tri-level quality-controlled data, Innovator achieves 25% average improvement across 30 scientific tasks with a win rate as 70%, while retaining 99% performance in general tasks. Furthermore, Innovator-Reason, which is post-trained from Innovator for reasoning boosting, exhibits excellent reasoning performance in solving complex scientific problems with improvements over 30%.

  • 21 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025

daVinci-LLM:Towards the Science of Pretraining

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

SII-GAIR-NLP SII-GAIR
·
Mar 28 2

Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. To make the CPT approach more traceable, this paper presents a technical report for continually pre-training Llama-3 (8B), which significantly enhances the Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of the backbone model. To enhance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, we design specific data mixture and curriculum strategies by utilizing existing datasets and synthesizing high-quality datasets. Specifically, we synthesize multidisciplinary scientific question and answer (QA) pairs based on related web pages, and subsequently incorporate these synthetic data to improve the scientific reasoning ability of Llama-3. We refer to the model after CPT as Llama-3-SynE (Synthetic data Enhanced Llama-3). We also present the tuning experiments with a relatively small model -- TinyLlama, and employ the derived findings to train the backbone model. Extensive experiments on a number of evaluation benchmarks show that our approach can largely improve the performance of the backbone models, including both the general abilities (+8.81 on C-Eval and +6.31 on CMMLU) and the scientific reasoning abilities (+12.00 on MATH and +4.13 on SciEval), without hurting the original capacities. Our model, data, and codes are available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/Llama-3-SynE.

  • 19 authors
·
Jul 26, 2024

Improving Progressive Generation with Decomposable Flow Matching

Generating high-dimensional visual modalities is a computationally intensive task. A common solution is progressive generation, where the outputs are synthesized in a coarse-to-fine spectral autoregressive manner. While diffusion models benefit from the coarse-to-fine nature of denoising, explicit multi-stage architectures are rarely adopted. These architectures have increased the complexity of the overall approach, introducing the need for a custom diffusion formulation, decomposition-dependent stage transitions, add-hoc samplers, or a model cascade. Our contribution, Decomposable Flow Matching (DFM), is a simple and effective framework for the progressive generation of visual media. DFM applies Flow Matching independently at each level of a user-defined multi-scale representation (such as Laplacian pyramid). As shown by our experiments, our approach improves visual quality for both images and videos, featuring superior results compared to prior multistage frameworks. On Imagenet-1k 512px, DFM achieves 35.2% improvements in FDD scores over the base architecture and 26.4% over the best-performing baseline, under the same training compute. When applied to finetuning of large models, such as FLUX, DFM shows faster convergence speed to the training distribution. Crucially, all these advantages are achieved with a single model, architectural simplicity, and minimal modifications to existing training pipelines.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 24, 2025 1

CADENCE: Closing the Reasoning Gap via Coverage-Adaptive On-Policy Distillation

On-policy knowledge distillation transfers reasoning from large teachers to compact students, but existing approaches suffer three compounding failure modes: (i) cold-start collapse, where a fresh student assigns near-zero mass to teacher-preferred tokens; (ii) state-agnostic divergence scheduling, where time-only forward/reverse-KL interpolation ignores the student's coverage state; and (iii) binary reward sparsity, where pass/fail signals discard information from partially correct traces. We present CADENCE, a unified framework with a targeted fix for each. Its DRIFT mechanism schedules a per-token convex mixture of forward-KL and reverse-KL surrogate objectives on student-sampled trajectories (per-token surrogates, not sequence-level KL gradient estimators). Six components extend it: (A) COVA, a coverage-adaptive β schedule accelerating the forward-to-reverse transition; (B) FTB, a forking-token boost concentrating gradient at high-entropy positions via a globally-normalized entropy reference; (C) CCD, a dense reward adding numerical-proximity partial credit for incorrect-but-close traces; (D) LAP, brevity-preferential correct-rollout reinforcement; (E) EMR, an entropy-matching calibration regularizer; (F) BSD, a bootstrapped self-distillation phase. On GSM8K and MATH-500 (corrected 512-token protocol, 5 seeds, reported std), CADENCE distills a 0.5B student from a 1.5B teacher to 69.8 pm 0.5% GSM8K pass@1 (from 48.7% pretrained; 63.2% of the teacher gap closed) and to 72.1 pm 0.4% with a 3B teacher (76.2% closed), beating the strongest matched-compute label-using baseline (DRIFT+binary reward) by +4.4 pm 0.7 points. All experiments run on a single Apple Mac Studio (M-series, 64GB unified memory), showing principled distillation reaches strong reasoning quality without datacenter-scale hardware.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 17 2

Kwai Keye-VL 1.5 Technical Report

In recent years, the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced, extending their capabilities to multimodal tasks through Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, video understanding remains a challenging area due to the dynamic and information-dense nature of videos. Existing models struggle with the trade-off between spatial resolution and temporal coverage when processing video content. We present Keye-VL-1.5, which addresses fundamental challenges in video comprehension through three key innovations. First, we introduce a novel Slow-Fast video encoding strategy that dynamically allocates computational resources based on inter-frame similarity, processing key frames with significant visual changes at higher resolution (Slow pathway) while handling relatively static frames with increased temporal coverage at lower resolution (Fast pathway). Second, we implement a progressive four-stage pre-training methodology that systematically extends the model's context length from 8K to 128K tokens, enabling processing of longer videos and more complex visual content. Third, we develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline focusing on reasoning enhancement and human preference alignment, incorporating a 5-step chain-of-thought data construction process, iterative GSPO-based reinforcement learning with progressive prompt hinting for difficult cases, and alignment training. Through extensive evaluation on public benchmarks and rigorous internal human assessment, Keye-VL-1.5 demonstrates significant improvements over existing models, particularly excelling in video understanding tasks while maintaining competitive performance on general multimodal benchmarks.

  • 60 authors
·
Sep 1, 2025 1

The Physics of Multi-Turn Long-Horizon Planning: From Pre-training to Post-training via Single- and Multi-Teacher On-Policy Agentic Distillation

Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify how planning ability is acquired, shaped, and integrated. To address this challenge, we introduce a unified and controlled multi-turn environment that enables precise control. It allows systematically study long-horizon planning across three stages. (1) Planning ability acquisition during pre-training. We study data format, distribution, and quality. Explicit world model construction through CoT state transition modeling yields stronger long-horizon generalization. Atomic skills alone are insufficient for compositional generalization, whereas a litte long-horizon data works. Moreover, suboptimal trajectories severely impair performance because errors amplify over long horizons. (2) Planning ability shaping via GRPO and OPD post-training. Through mutual information, we distinguish general planning patterns from task-specific planning knowledge. For planning patterns, we identify three application regions of post-training: unnecessary, effective, and unsupported. OPD has a broader effective region than GRPO under low-quality and long-horizon settings, as it provides more consistent update directions. For planning knowledge, distilling unseen procedures from a teacher with different knowledge may impair student's prior world modeling without fully establishing new knowledge. (3) Planning ability integration through MOPD post-training. We show that multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) integrates capabilities by converging to shared planning-pattern across environments. Compatible patterns enable cross-environment generalization, partially shared patterns support continual learning, while completely conflicting patterns cause severe interference.

DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation

Recent advancements in foundation models have revolutionized joint audio-video generation. However, existing approaches typically treat human-centric tasks including reference-based audio-video generation (R2AV), video editing (RV2AV) and audio-driven video animation (RA2V) as isolated objectives. Furthermore, achieving precise, disentangled control over multiple character identities and voice timbres within a single framework remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose DreamID-Omni, a unified framework for controllable human-centric audio-video generation. Specifically, we design a Symmetric Conditional Diffusion Transformer that integrates heterogeneous conditioning signals via a symmetric conditional injection scheme. To resolve the pervasive identity-timbre binding failures and speaker confusion in multi-person scenarios, we introduce a Dual-Level Disentanglement strategy: Synchronized RoPE at the signal level to ensure rigid attention-space binding, and Structured Captions at the semantic level to establish explicit attribute-subject mappings. Furthermore, we devise a Multi-Task Progressive Training scheme that leverages weakly-constrained generative priors to regularize strongly-constrained tasks, preventing overfitting and harmonizing disparate objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID-Omni achieves comprehensive state-of-the-art performance across video, audio, and audio-visual consistency, even outperforming leading proprietary commercial models. We will release our code to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial-grade applications.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Feb 12 5

CosFly-VLA: A Spatially Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Tracking

Dynamic target tracking is essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in complex urban environments, where both the target and the camera viewpoint change continuously. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies can track visible targets effectively, but their performance often degrades when buildings, vegetation, or roadside objects block the line of sight. During sustained occlusion, a policy may lose the target state, execute actions toward an incorrect region, and amplify this error through subsequent observations until re-acquisition becomes impossible. To this end, we present CosFly-VLA, a spatially aware VLA model that jointly grounds the target, estimates its visibility, and generates continuous flight actions through a structured prediction interface. To train this policy, we use a large-scale recipe over diverse data sources. Spatially Grounded Continued Pretraining (CPT) on a 500k mixed pool injects UAV-view depth, distance, and 3-D spatial reasoning. A three-stage Curriculum-based Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process then specializes the tracker through multi-head warm-up followed by two-stage curriculum learning over natural and hard / long-occlusion data. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training subsequently teaches recovery-oriented reasoning traces before structured answers. Finally, a closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage optimizes tracking behavior with a multi-component reward covering stand-off tracking, grounding quality, collision avoidance, and task success. Relative to OpenVLA, CosFly-VLA-0.8B reduces open-loop Average Displacement Error (ADE) by 34.1% on seen-test and 35.3% on unseen-test. Closed-loop optimization improves Success Rate (SR) by 29.8% and 2.5%, respectively. These results demonstrate progress from visible-frame imitation toward spatially grounded action-closed-loop control, evaluated under a shared oracle state history.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 15

Catastrophic Interference is Mitigated in Naturalistic Power-Law Learning Environments

Neural networks often suffer from catastrophic interference (CI): performance on previously learned tasks drops off significantly when learning a new task. This contrasts strongly with humans, who can sequentially learn new tasks without appreciably forgetting previous tasks. Prior work has explored various techniques for mitigating CI such as regularization, rehearsal, generative replay, and distillation methods. The current work takes a different approach, one guided by cognitive science research showing that in naturalistic environments, the probability of encountering a task decreases as a power-law of the time since it was last performed. We argue that a realistic evaluation of techniques for the mitigation of CI should be performed in simulated naturalistic learning environments. Thus, we evaluate the extent of mitigation of CI when training simple rehearsal-based methods in power-law environments similar to the ones humans face. Our work explores this novel rehearsal-based approach for a domain-incremental task: learning permutations in the MNIST task. We compare our rehearsal environment with other baselines to show its efficacy in promoting continual learning. Additionally, we investigate whether this environment shows forward facilitation, i.e., faster learning of later tasks. Next, we explore the robustness of our learning environment to the number of tasks, model size, and amount of data rehearsed after each task. Notably, our results show that the performance is comparable or superior to that of models trained using popular regularization methods and also to rehearsals in non-power-law environments. The benefits of this training paradigm include simplicity and the lack of a need for extra neural circuitry. In addition, because our method is orthogonal to other methods, future research can combine training in power-law environments with other continual learning mechanisms.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

MinerU2.5-Pro: Pushing the Limits of Data-Centric Document Parsing at Scale

Current document parsing methods compete primarily on model architecture innovation, while systematic engineering of training data remains underexplored. Yet SOTA models of different architectures and parameter scales exhibit highly consistent failure patterns on the same set of hard samples, suggesting that the performance bottleneck stems from shared deficiencies in training data rather than architecture itself. Building on this finding, we present \minerupro, which advances the state of the art solely through data engineering and training strategy optimization while keeping the 1.2B-parameter architecture of \mineru completely fixed. At its core is a Data Engine co-designed around coverage, informativeness, and annotation accuracy: Diversity-and-Difficulty-Aware Sampling expands training data from under 10M to 65.5M samples while correcting distribution shift; Cross-Model Consistency Verification leverages output agreement among heterogeneous models to assess sample difficulty and generate reliable annotations; the Judge-and-Refine pipeline improves annotation quality for hard samples through render-then-verify iterative correction. A three-stage progressive training strategy -- large-scale pre-training, hard sample fine-tuning, and GRPO alignment -- sequentially exploits these data at different quality tiers. On the evaluation front, we fix element-matching biases in OmniDocBench~v1.5 and introduce a Hard subset, establishing the more discriminative OmniDocBench~v1.6 protocol. Without any architectural modification, \minerupro achieves 95.69 on OmniDocBench~v1.6, improving over the same-architecture baseline by 2.71 points and surpassing all existing methods including models with over 200times more parameters.

opendatalab OpenDataLab
·
Apr 5 4

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 9

TIDE: Task-Isolated Diffusion for Unified Video Editing and Generation

Recent advances in Diffusion Transformers have driven rapid progress in video generation and editing, yet these capabilities are still handled by separate, task-specific models. Building a unified framework that supports diverse video tasks remains an open challenge: existing unified attempts either require dedicated auxiliary encoders or lack explicit mechanisms to distinguish heterogeneous conditioning tokens, struggling when the number and type of visual conditions vary across tasks. We propose TIDE, a unified framework that integrates instruction-based editing, reference-guided editing, and multi-reference generation. At its core, we introduce per-token task embeddings that assign each input token a task-specific identifier, enabling the model to explicitly disambiguate target, source, and reference tokens. To simultaneously capture high-level semantic understanding and fine-grained structural fidelity, we design a dual-path conditioning scheme that couples a vision-language model with a VAE latent path for complementary signals. We further devise a multi-task progressive training strategy that incrementally introduces tasks of increasing complexity, effectively harmonizing diverse objectives and enabling smooth generalization across heterogeneous task distributions. Extensive experiments on multiple video editing and generation benchmarks demonstrate that TIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated tasks. Our project page is available at https://LittleWork123.github.io/tide.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 6

Slow Thinking for Sequential Recommendation

To develop effective sequential recommender systems, numerous methods have been proposed to model historical user behaviors. Despite the effectiveness, these methods share the same fast thinking paradigm. That is, for making recommendations, these methods typically encodes user historical interactions to obtain user representations and directly match these representations with candidate item representations. However, due to the limited capacity of traditional lightweight recommendation models, this one-step inference paradigm often leads to suboptimal performance. To tackle this issue, we present a novel slow thinking recommendation model, named STREAM-Rec. Our approach is capable of analyzing historical user behavior, generating a multi-step, deliberative reasoning process, and ultimately delivering personalized recommendations. In particular, we focus on two key challenges: (1) identifying the suitable reasoning patterns in recommender systems, and (2) exploring how to effectively stimulate the reasoning capabilities of traditional recommenders. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training framework. In the first stage, the model is pretrained on large-scale user behavior data to learn behavior patterns and capture long-range dependencies. In the second stage, we design an iterative inference algorithm to annotate suitable reasoning traces by progressively refining the model predictions. This annotated data is then used to fine-tune the model. Finally, in the third stage, we apply reinforcement learning to further enhance the model generalization ability. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 12, 2025

AlphaOPT: Formulating Optimization Programs with Self-Improving LLM Experience Library

Optimization modeling enables critical decisions across industries but remains difficult to automate: informal language must be mapped to precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code. Prior LLM approaches either rely on brittle prompting or costly retraining with limited generalization. We present AlphaOPT, a self-improving experience library that enables an LLM to learn from limited demonstrations (even answers alone, without gold-standard programs) and solver feedback - without annotated reasoning traces or parameter updates. AlphaOPT operates in a continual two-phase cycle: (i) a Library Learning phase that reflects on failed attempts, extracting solver-verified, structured insights as {taxonomy, condition, explanation, example}; and (ii) a Library Evolution phase that diagnoses retrieval misalignments and refines the applicability conditions of stored insights, improving transfer across tasks. This design (1) learns efficiently from limited demonstrations without curated rationales, (2) expands continually without costly retraining by updating the library rather than model weights, and (3) makes knowledge explicit and interpretable for human inspection and intervention. Experiments show that AlphaOPT steadily improves with more data (65% to 72% from 100 to 300 training items) and surpasses the strongest baseline by 7.7% on the out-of-distribution OptiBench dataset when trained only on answers. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Minw913/AlphaOPT.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025 2

CDFSL-V: Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning for Videos

Few-shot video action recognition is an effective approach to recognizing new categories with only a few labeled examples, thereby reducing the challenges associated with collecting and annotating large-scale video datasets. Existing methods in video action recognition rely on large labeled datasets from the same domain. However, this setup is not realistic as novel categories may come from different data domains that may have different spatial and temporal characteristics. This dissimilarity between the source and target domains can pose a significant challenge, rendering traditional few-shot action recognition techniques ineffective. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a novel cross-domain few-shot video action recognition method that leverages self-supervised learning and curriculum learning to balance the information from the source and target domains. To be particular, our method employs a masked autoencoder-based self-supervised training objective to learn from both source and target data in a self-supervised manner. Then a progressive curriculum balances learning the discriminative information from the source dataset with the generic information learned from the target domain. Initially, our curriculum utilizes supervised learning to learn class discriminative features from the source data. As the training progresses, we transition to learning target-domain-specific features. We propose a progressive curriculum to encourage the emergence of rich features in the target domain based on class discriminative supervised features in the source domain. %a schedule that helps with this transition. We evaluate our method on several challenging benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing cross-domain few-shot learning techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sarinda251/CDFSL-V{https://github.com/Sarinda251/CDFSL-V}

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 7, 2023

Better Tokens for Better 3D: Advancing Vision-Language Modeling in 3D Medical Imaging

Recent progress in vision-language modeling for 3D medical imaging has been fueled by large-scale computed tomography (CT) corpora with paired free-text reports, stronger architectures, and powerful pretrained models. This has enabled applications such as automated report generation and text-conditioned 3D image synthesis. Yet, current approaches struggle with high-resolution, long-sequence volumes: contrastive pretraining often yields vision encoders that are misaligned with clinical language, and slice-wise tokenization blurs fine anatomy, reducing diagnostic performance on downstream tasks. We introduce BTB3D (Better Tokens for Better 3D), a causal convolutional encoder-decoder that unifies 2D and 3D training and inference while producing compact, frequency-aware volumetric tokens. A three-stage training curriculum enables (i) local reconstruction, (ii) overlapping-window tiling, and (iii) long-context decoder refinement, during which the model learns from short slice excerpts yet generalizes to scans exceeding 300 slices without additional memory overhead. BTB3D sets a new state-of-the-art on two key tasks: it improves BLEU scores and increases clinical F1 by 40% over CT2Rep, CT-CHAT, and Merlin for report generation; and it reduces FID by 75% and halves FVD compared to GenerateCT and MedSyn for text-to-CT synthesis, producing anatomically consistent 512*512*241 volumes. These results confirm that precise three-dimensional tokenization, rather than larger language backbones alone, is essential for scalable vision-language modeling in 3D medical imaging. The codebase is available at: https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/BTB3D

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

SkillReducer: Optimizing LLM Agent Skills for Token Efficiency

LLM-based coding agents rely on skills, pre-packaged instruction sets that extend agent capabilities, yet every token of skill content injected into the context window incurs both monetary cost and attention dilution. To understand the severity of this problem, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 55,315 publicly available skills and find systemic inefficiencies: 26.4\% lack routing descriptions entirely, over 60\% of body content is non-actionable, and reference files can inject tens of thousands of tokens per invocation. Motivated by these findings, we present SkillReducer, a two-stage optimization framework. Stage~1 optimizes the routing layer by compressing verbose descriptions and generating missing ones via adversarial delta debugging. Stage~2 restructures skill bodies through taxonomy-driven classification and progressive disclosure, separating actionable core rules from supplementary content loaded on demand, validated by faithfulness checks and a self-correcting feedback loop. Evaluated on 600 skills and the SkillsBench benchmark, SkillReducer achieves 48\% description compression and 39\% body compression while improving functional quality by 2.8\%, revealing a less-is-more effect where removing non-essential content reduces distraction in the context window. These benefits transfer across five models from four families with a mean retention of 0.965, and generalize to an independent agent framework.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 30

MindVL: Towards Efficient and Effective Training of Multimodal Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We propose MindVL, a multimodal large langauge model trained on Ascend NPUs. Similar to Qwen2.5-VL, MindVL adopts native-resolution Vision Transformers, which enables it to process images at their original variable resolutions. This design avoids the degradation caused by fixed-resolution tiling while preserving fine-grained details and global layouts, which is crucial for visually dense content such as complex charts and diagrams. To ensure the smooth training of MindVL on Ascend NPUs, we develop Mindspeed-MLLM, a distributed multimodal training framework tailored for Ascend NPUs. To maintain training accuracy, we implement equivalent replacements for certain operators. MindVL undergoes a three-phase training process, namely the warm-up phase, multitask training phase, and supervised instruction tuning phase, to gradually enhance its capabilities. This process starts with basic visual and multimodal pre-training, followed by large-scale multiask trainging and instruction tuning. We also adopt multimodal data packaging and hybrid parallelism techniques, which significantly improve end-to-end training speed. To further boost model performance, we specifically introduce test-time resolution search and model weight averaging. Notably, despite using about 1/10 of the training data required by Qwen2.5-VL, MindVL achieves performance on par with Qwen2.5-VL in evaluations of general multimodal understanding and document/table comprehension. Beyond overall scores, MindVL also delivers leading performance in OCR assessments.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

Towards Better Alignment: Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning Against Sparse Rewards

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue, reinforcement learning (RL) has been considered for diffusion model fine-tuning. Yet, RL's effectiveness is limited by the challenge of sparse reward, where feedback is only available at the end of the generation process. This makes it difficult to identify which actions during the denoising process contribute positively to the final generated image, potentially leading to ineffective or unnecessary denoising policies. To this end, this paper presents a novel RL-based framework that addresses the sparse reward problem when training diffusion models. Our framework, named B^2-DiffuRL, employs two strategies: Backward progressive training and Branch-based sampling. For one thing, backward progressive training focuses initially on the final timesteps of denoising process and gradually extends the training interval to earlier timesteps, easing the learning difficulty from sparse rewards. For another, we perform branch-based sampling for each training interval. By comparing the samples within the same branch, we can identify how much the policies of the current training interval contribute to the final image, which helps to learn effective policies instead of unnecessary ones. B^2-DiffuRL is compatible with existing optimization algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of B^2-DiffuRL in improving prompt-image alignment and maintaining diversity in generated images. The code for this work is available.

  • 9 authors
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Mar 14, 2025

InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models

We introduce InternVL3, a significant advancement in the InternVL series featuring a native multimodal pre-training paradigm. Rather than adapting a text-only large language model (LLM) into a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that supports visual inputs, InternVL3 jointly acquires multimodal and linguistic capabilities from both diverse multimodal data and pure-text corpora during a single pre-training stage. This unified training paradigm effectively addresses the complexities and alignment challenges commonly encountered in conventional post-hoc training pipelines for MLLMs. To further improve performance and scalability, InternVL3 incorporates variable visual position encoding (V2PE) to support extended multimodal contexts, employs advanced post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and mixed preference optimization (MPO), and adopts test-time scaling strategies alongside an optimized training infrastructure. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that InternVL3 delivers superior performance across a wide range of multi-modal tasks. In particular, InternVL3-78B achieves a score of 72.2 on the MMMU benchmark, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source MLLMs. Its capabilities remain highly competitive with leading proprietary models, including ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while also maintaining strong pure-language proficiency. In pursuit of open-science principles, we will publicly release both the training data and model weights to foster further research and development in next-generation MLLMs.

  • 47 authors
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Apr 14, 2025 11

POA: Pre-training Once for Models of All Sizes

Large-scale self-supervised pre-training has paved the way for one foundation model to handle many different vision tasks. Most pre-training methodologies train a single model of a certain size at one time. Nevertheless, various computation or storage constraints in real-world scenarios require substantial efforts to develop a series of models with different sizes to deploy. Thus, in this study, we propose a novel tri-branch self-supervised training framework, termed as POA (Pre-training Once for All), to tackle this aforementioned issue. Our approach introduces an innovative elastic student branch into a modern self-distillation paradigm. At each pre-training step, we randomly sample a sub-network from the original student to form the elastic student and train all branches in a self-distilling fashion. Once pre-trained, POA allows the extraction of pre-trained models of diverse sizes for downstream tasks. Remarkably, the elastic student facilitates the simultaneous pre-training of multiple models with different sizes, which also acts as an additional ensemble of models of various sizes to enhance representation learning. Extensive experiments, including k-nearest neighbors, linear probing evaluation and assessments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our POA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance using ViT, Swin Transformer and ResNet backbones, producing around a hundred models with different sizes through a single pre-training session. The code is available at: https://github.com/Qichuzyy/POA.

  • 10 authors
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Aug 2, 2024 3

VITA-Audio: Fast Interleaved Cross-Modal Token Generation for Efficient Large Speech-Language Model

With the growing requirement for natural human-computer interaction, speech-based systems receive increasing attention as speech is one of the most common forms of daily communication. However, the existing speech models still experience high latency when generating the first audio token during streaming, which poses a significant bottleneck for deployment. To address this issue, we propose VITA-Audio, an end-to-end large speech model with fast audio-text token generation. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Multiple Cross-modal Token Prediction (MCTP) module that efficiently generates multiple audio tokens within a single model forward pass, which not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces the latency for generating the first audio in streaming scenarios. In addition, a four-stage progressive training strategy is explored to achieve model acceleration with minimal loss of speech quality. To our knowledge, VITA-Audio is the first multi-modal large language model capable of generating audio output during the first forward pass, enabling real-time conversational capabilities with minimal latency. VITA-Audio is fully reproducible and is trained on open-source data only. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves an inference speedup of 3~5x at the 7B parameter scale, but also significantly outperforms open-source models of similar model size on multiple benchmarks for automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and spoken question answering (SQA) tasks.

  • 14 authors
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May 6, 2025 1

Beyond Boundary Frames: Audio-Visual Semantic Guidance for Context-Aware Video Interpolation

Handling fast, complex, and highly non-linear motion patterns has long posed challenges for video frame interpolation. Although recent diffusion-based approaches improve upon traditional optical-flow-based methods, they still struggle to cover diverse application scenarios and often fail to produce sharp, temporally consistent frames in fine-grained motion tasks such as audio-visual synchronized interpolation. To address these limitations, we introduce BBF (Beyond Boundary Frames), a context-aware video frame interpolation framework, which could be guided by audio/visual semantics. First, we enhance the input design of the interpolation model so that it can flexibly handle multiple conditional modalities, including text, audio, images, and video. Second, we propose a decoupled multimodal fusion mechanism that sequentially injects different conditional signals into a DiT backbone. Finally, to maintain the generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt a progressive multi-stage training paradigm, where the start-end frame difference embedding is used to dynamically adjust both the data sampling and the loss weighting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BBF outperforms specialized state-of-the-art methods on both generic interpolation and audio-visual synchronized interpolation tasks, establishing a unified framework for video frame interpolation under coordinated multi-channel conditioning.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 3, 2025

Hyperparameters in Continual Learning: a Reality Check

Various algorithms for continual learning (CL) have been designed with the goal of effectively alleviating the trade-off between stability and plasticity during the CL process. To achieve this goal, tuning appropriate hyperparameters for each algorithm is essential. As an evaluation protocol, it has been common practice to train a CL algorithm using diverse hyperparameter values on a CL scenario constructed with a benchmark dataset. Subsequently, the best performance attained with the optimal hyperparameter value serves as the criterion for evaluating the CL algorithm. In this paper, we contend that this evaluation protocol is not only impractical but also incapable of effectively assessing the CL capability of a CL algorithm. Returning to the fundamental principles of model evaluation in machine learning, we propose an evaluation protocol that involves Hyperparameter Tuning and Evaluation phases. Those phases consist of different datasets but share the same CL scenario. In the Hyperparameter Tuning phase, each algorithm is iteratively trained with different hyperparameter values to find the optimal hyperparameter values. Subsequently, in the Evaluation phase, the optimal hyperparameter values is directly applied for training each algorithm, and their performance in the Evaluation phase serves as the criterion for evaluating them. Through experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-100 based on the proposed protocol in class-incremental learning, we not only observed that the existing evaluation method fail to properly assess the CL capability of each algorithm but also observe that some recently proposed state-of-the-art algorithms, which reported superior performance, actually exhibit inferior performance compared to the previous algorithm.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 13, 2024

Relax: An Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning Engine for Omni-Modal Post-Training at Scale

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has proven effective at unlocking reasoning, self-reflection, and tool-use capabilities in large language models. As models extend to omni-modal inputs and agentic multi-turn workflows, RL training systems face three interdependent challenges: heterogeneous data flows, operational robustness at scale, and the staleness -- throughput tradeoff. We present Relax (Reinforcement Engine Leveraging Agentic X-modality), an open-source RL training engine that addresses these challenges through three co-designed architectural layers. First, an omni-native architecture builds multimodal support into the full stack -- from data preprocessing and modality-aware parallelism to inference generation -- rather than retrofitting it onto a text-centric pipeline. Second, each RL role runs as an independent, fault-isolated service that can be scaled, recovered, and upgraded without global coordination. Third, service-level decoupling enables asynchronous training via the TransferQueue data bus, where a single staleness parameter smoothly interpolates among on-policy, near-on-policy, and fully asynchronous execution. Relax achieves a 1.20times end-to-end speedup over veRL on Qwen3-4B on-policy training. Its fully async mode delivers a 1.76times speedup over colocate on Qwen3-4B and a 2.00times speedup on Qwen3-Omni-30B, while all modes converge to the same reward level. Relax supports R3 (Rollout Routing Replay)~ma2025r3 for MoE models with only 1.9\% overhead, compared to 32\% degradation in veRL under the same configuration. It further demonstrates stable omni-modal RL convergence on Qwen3-Omni across image, text, and audio, sustaining over 2{,}000 steps on video without degradation. Relax is available at https://github.com/rednote-ai/Relax.

  • 11 authors
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Apr 13

Continual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Hypernetworks

Effective planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-predictive control (MPC) relies on the accuracy of the learned dynamics model. In many instances of MBRL and MPC, this model is assumed to be stationary and is periodically re-trained from scratch on state transition experience collected from the beginning of environment interactions. This implies that the time required to train the dynamics model - and the pause required between plan executions - grows linearly with the size of the collected experience. We argue that this is too slow for lifelong robot learning and propose HyperCRL, a method that continually learns the encountered dynamics in a sequence of tasks using task-conditional hypernetworks. Our method has three main attributes: first, it includes dynamics learning sessions that do not revisit training data from previous tasks, so it only needs to store the most recent fixed-size portion of the state transition experience; second, it uses fixed-capacity hypernetworks to represent non-stationary and task-aware dynamics; third, it outperforms existing continual learning alternatives that rely on fixed-capacity networks, and does competitively with baselines that remember an ever increasing coreset of past experience. We show that HyperCRL is effective in continual model-based reinforcement learning in robot locomotion and manipulation scenarios, such as tasks involving pushing and door opening. Our project website with videos is at this link https://rvl.cs.toronto.edu/blog/2020/hypercrl

  • 4 authors
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Sep 24, 2020

Curriculum-Driven 3D CT Report Generation via Language-Free Visual Grafting and Zone-Constrained Compression

Automated radiology report generation from 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes is challenging due to extreme sequence lengths, severe class imbalance, and the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to ignore visual tokens in favor of linguistic priors. We present Ker-VLJEPA-3B, a four-phase curriculum learning framework for free-text report generation from thoracic CT volumes. A phased training curriculum progressively adapts a Llama 3.2 3B decoder to ground its output in visual features from a frozen, self-supervised encoder. Our visual backbone (LeJEPA ViT-Large) is trained via self-supervised joint-embedding prediction on unlabeled CTs, without text supervision. Unlike contrastive models (CLIP, BiomedCLIP), this language-free backbone yields modality-pure representations. Vision-language alignment is deferred to the curriculum's bridge and generation phases. This modality-agnostic design can integrate any self-supervised encoder into an LLM without paired text during foundation training. Methodological innovations include: (1) zone-constrained cross-attention compressing slice embeddings into 32 spatially-grounded visual tokens; (2) PCA whitening of anisotropic LLM embeddings; (3) a positive-findings-only strategy eliminating posterior collapse; (4) warm bridge initialization transferring projection weights; and (5) selective cross-attention freezing with elastic weight consolidation to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Evaluated on the CT-RATE benchmark (2,984 validation volumes, 18 classes), Ker-VLJEPA-3B achieves a macro F1 of 0.429, surpassing the state-of-the-art (U-VLM, macro F1 = 0.414) by 3.6%, and reaching 0.448 (+8.2%) with threshold optimization. Ablation studies confirm 56.6% of generation quality derives from patient-specific visual content. Code and weights are available.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 24

Backpropagation-free Training of Deep Physical Neural Networks

Recent years have witnessed the outstanding success of deep learning in various fields such as vision and natural language processing. This success is largely indebted to the massive size of deep learning models that is expected to increase unceasingly. This growth of the deep learning models is accompanied by issues related to their considerable energy consumption, both during the training and inference phases, as well as their scalability. Although a number of work based on unconventional physical systems have been proposed which addresses the issue of energy efficiency in the inference phase, efficient training of deep learning models has remained unaddressed. So far, training of digital deep learning models mainly relies on backpropagation, which is not suitable for physical implementation as it requires perfect knowledge of the computation performed in the so-called forward pass of the neural network. Here, we tackle this issue by proposing a simple deep neural network architecture augmented by a biologically plausible learning algorithm, referred to as "model-free forward-forward training". The proposed architecture enables training deep physical neural networks consisting of layers of physical nonlinear systems, without requiring detailed knowledge of the nonlinear physical layers' properties. We show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art hardware-aware training methods by improving training speed, decreasing digital computations, and reducing power consumption in physical systems. We demonstrate the adaptability of the proposed method, even in systems exposed to dynamic or unpredictable external perturbations. To showcase the universality of our approach, we train diverse wave-based physical neural networks that vary in the underlying wave phenomenon and the type of non-linearity they use, to perform vowel and image classification tasks experimentally.

  • 5 authors
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Apr 20, 2023

The World Model Remembers, the Actor Forgets: Dream Rehearsal for Continual Model-Based RL

Model-based reinforcement-learning agents of the DreamerV3 family forget catastrophically when trained on task sequences, even when an unbounded replay buffer preserves every earlier experience. We ask a question the continual-RL literature has assumed an answer to but never measured: which component forgets? Under never-clear replay, pre-registered component-level probes (n=3 seeds throughout) show that the world model retains essentially everything measurable about old tasks -- reward discrimination (retention ratio ~1.0), value estimates, and termination structure -- while the actor's behavior collapses. Forgetting in this regime is a channel problem, not a memory problem. We demonstrate this by intervention: with the world model frozen and identical imagined rollouts, reinforcement learning in imagination fails to recover a lost skill (0/3 seeds), while supervised self-imitation on the world model's own graded dreams recovers it on 3/3 seeds with zero environment interaction. Interleaved during training, this graded dream rehearsal yields a task-label-free, parameter-constant continual learner: 3/3 four-task chains retained where plain replay passes 0/3, 3/3 eight-task chains, and consistent gains over matched real-episode cloning (paired difference +0.13, bootstrap 95% CI [0.07, 0.24], complete seed separation). The dream-grading step is load-bearing: we characterize two scoring failure modes, provide an offline selection gauge that caught both before they contaminated results, and give a realized-first grading rule that closes them. All experiments were pre-registered with committed protocols; every refuted hypothesis is reported.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 21 1

Fast Certified Robust Training with Short Warmup

Recently, bound propagation based certified robust training methods have been proposed for training neural networks with certifiable robustness guarantees. Despite that state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods including interval bound propagation (IBP) and CROWN-IBP have per-batch training complexity similar to standard neural network training, they usually use a long warmup schedule with hundreds or thousands epochs to reach SOTA performance and are thus still costly. In this paper, we identify two important issues in existing methods, namely exploded bounds at initialization, and the imbalance in ReLU activation states and improve IBP training. These two issues make certified training difficult and unstable, and thereby long warmup schedules were needed in prior works. To mitigate these issues and conduct faster certified training with shorter warmup, we propose three improvements based on IBP training: 1) We derive a new weight initialization method for IBP training; 2) We propose to fully add Batch Normalization (BN) to each layer in the model, since we find BN can reduce the imbalance in ReLU activation states; 3) We also design regularization to explicitly tighten certified bounds and balance ReLU activation states during wamrup. We are able to obtain 65.03% verified error on CIFAR-10 (epsilon=8{255}) and 82.36% verified error on TinyImageNet (epsilon=1{255}) using very short training schedules (160 and 80 total epochs, respectively), outperforming literature SOTA trained with hundreds or thousands epochs under the same network architecture. The code is available at https://github.com/shizhouxing/Fast-Certified-Robust-Training.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 31, 2021

Self-Improving Pretraining: using post-trained models to pretrain better models

Ensuring safety, factuality and overall quality in the generations of large language models is a critical challenge, especially as these models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. The prevailing approach to addressing these issues involves collecting expensive, carefully curated datasets and applying multiple stages of fine-tuning and alignment. However, even this complex pipeline cannot guarantee the correction of patterns learned during pretraining. Therefore, addressing these issues during pretraining is crucial, as it shapes a model's core behaviors and prevents unsafe or hallucinated outputs from becoming deeply embedded. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new pretraining method that streams documents and uses reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the next K generated tokens at each step. A strong, post-trained model judges candidate generations -- including model rollouts, the original suffix, and a rewritten suffix -- for quality, safety, and factuality. Early in training, the process relies on the original and rewritten suffixes; as the model improves, RL rewards high-quality rollouts. This approach builds higher quality, safer, and more factual models from the ground up. In experiments, our method gives 36.2% and 18.5% relative improvements over standard pretraining in terms of factuality and safety, and up to 86.3% win rate improvements in overall generation quality.

CLASSP: a Biologically-Inspired Approach to Continual Learning through Adjustment Suppression and Sparsity Promotion

This paper introduces a new biologically-inspired training method named Continual Learning through Adjustment Suppression and Sparsity Promotion (CLASSP). CLASSP is based on two main principles observed in neuroscience, particularly in the context of synaptic transmission and Long-Term Potentiation (LTP). The first principle is a decay rate over the weight adjustment, which is implemented as a generalization of the AdaGrad optimization algorithm. This means that weights that have received many updates should have lower learning rates as they likely encode important information about previously seen data. However, this principle results in a diffuse distribution of updates throughout the model, as it promotes updates for weights that haven't been previously updated, while a sparse update distribution is preferred to leave weights unassigned for future tasks. Therefore, the second principle introduces a threshold on the loss gradient. This promotes sparse learning by updating a weight only if the loss gradient with respect to that weight is above a certain threshold, i.e. only updating weights with a significant impact on the current loss. Both principles reflect phenomena observed in LTP, where a threshold effect and a gradual saturation of potentiation have been observed. CLASSP is implemented in a Python/PyTorch class, making it applicable to any model. When compared with Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) using Computer Vision and sentiment analysis datasets, CLASSP demonstrates superior performance in terms of accuracy and memory footprint.

  • 1 authors
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Apr 29, 2024