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Unlocking Efficient Long-to-Short LLM Reasoning with Model Merging

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The transition from System 1 to System 2 reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has marked significant advancements in handling complex tasks through deliberate, iterative thinking. However, this progress often comes at the cost of efficiency, as models tend to overthink, generating redundant reasoning steps without proportional improvements in output quality. Long-to-Short (L2S) reasoning has emerged as a promising solution to this challenge, aiming to balance reasoning depth with practical efficiency. While existing approaches, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and prompt engineering, have shown potential, they are either computationally expensive or unstable. Model merging, on the other hand, offers a cost-effective and robust alternative by integrating the quick-thinking capabilities of System 1 models with the methodical reasoning of System 2 models. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical study on model merging for L2S reasoning, exploring diverse methodologies, including task-vector-based, SVD-based, and activation-informed merging. Our experiments reveal that model merging can reduce average response length by up to 55% while preserving or even improving baseline performance. We also identify a strong correlation between model scale and merging efficacy with extensive evaluations on 1.5B/7B/14B/32B models. Furthermore, we investigate the merged model's ability to self-critique and self-correct, as well as its adaptive response length based on task complexity. Our findings highlight model merging as a highly efficient and effective paradigm for L2S reasoning, offering a practical solution to the overthinking problem while maintaining the robustness of System 2 reasoning. This work can be found on Github https://github.com/hahahawu/Long-to-Short-via-Model-Merging.


ADS-Edit: A Multimodal Knowledge Editing Dataset for Autonomous Driving Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). However, their direct application to ADS is hindered by challenges such as misunderstanding of traffic knowledge, complex road conditions, and diverse states of vehicle. To address these challenges, we propose the use of Knowledge Editing, which enables targeted modifications to a model's behavior without the need for full retraining. Meanwhile, we introduce ADS-Edit, a multimodal knowledge editing dataset specifically designed for ADS, which includes various real-world scenarios, multiple data types, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. We conduct comprehensive experiments and derive several interesting conclusions. We hope that our work will contribute to the further advancement of knowledge editing applications in the field of autonomous driving. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.


Dolphin: A Large-Scale Automatic Speech Recognition Model for Eastern Languages

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This report introduces Dolphin, a large-scale multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that extends the Whisper architecture to support a wider range of languages. Our approach integrates in-house proprietary and open-source datasets to refine and optimize Dolphin's performance. The model is specifically designed to achieve notable recognition accuracy for 40 Eastern languages across East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, while also supporting 22 Chinese dialects. Experimental evaluations show that Dolphin significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art open-source models across various languages. To promote reproducibility and community-driven innovation, we are making our trained models and inference source code publicly available.


Ignite Forecasting with SPARK: An Efficient Generative Framework for Refining LLMs in Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) forecasting is crucial for predicting future events using historical data. With the surge of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have begun exploring their integration into TKG forecasting and achieved some success. However, they still face limitations such as limited input length, inefficient output generation, and resource-intensive refinement, which undermine their performance and practical applicability. To address these limitations, we introduce SPARK, a Sequence-level Proxy-Adapting framework for Refining LLMs in TKG forecasting. Inspired by inference-time algorithms adopted in controlling generation, SPARK offers a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution through two key innovations: (1) Beam Sequence-Level Generation, which reframes TKG forecasting as a top-K sequence-level generation task, using beam search for efficiently generating next-entity distribution in a single forward pass. (2) TKG Adapter for Refinement, which employs traditional TKG models as trainable proxy adapters to leverage global graph information and refine LLM outputs, overcoming both the input length and the resource-intensive fine-tuning problems. Experiments across diverse datasets validate SPARK's forecasting performance, robust generalization capabilities, and high efficiency. We release source codes at https://github.com/yin-gz/SPARK.


Diffusion Counterfactuals for Image Regressors

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Counterfactual explanations have been successfully applied to create human interpretable explanations for various black-box models. They are handy for tasks in the image domain, where the quality of the explanations benefits from recent advances in generative models. Although counterfactual explanations have been widely applied to classification models, their application to regression tasks remains underexplored. We present two methods to create counterfactual explanations for image regression tasks using diffusion-based generative models to address challenges in sparsity and quality: 1) one based on a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model that operates directly in pixel-space and 2) another based on a Diffusion Autoencoder operating in latent space. Both produce realistic, semantic, and smooth counterfactuals on CelebA-HQ and a synthetic data set, providing easily interpretable insights into the decision-making process of the regression model and reveal spurious correlations. We find that for regression counterfactuals, changes in features depend on the region of the predicted value. Large semantic changes are needed for significant changes in predicted values, making it harder to find sparse counterfactuals than with classifiers. Moreover, pixel space counterfactuals are more sparse while latent space counterfactuals are of higher quality and allow bigger semantic changes.


No signal, no problem: Intelligence firm debuts drone tech equipped to beat GPS jammers

FOX News

Maxar Intelligence demonstrates its Raptor software that can guide drones through remote regions where there is no GPS signal, like this Polar Circle demonstration. A key geospatial intelligence firm on Tuesday announced a new product that can operate drones even in areas where the GPS signal has been jammed - cutting through modern defenses in the age of unmanned vehicular warfare. The war between Russia and Ukraine presented a unique problem: each military had learned how to jam the other's GPS signals, meaning their drones would be flying blind. This prompted the latest innovation from Maxar Intelligence, a drone-guiding technology that does not rely on satellite signals from space. Now, Maxar, a global satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence provider, has the capability to counter GPS-jamming technology through its Raptor system.


Why the world is looking to ditch US AI models

MIT Technology Review

As a result, some policymakers and business leaders--in Europe, in particular--are reconsidering their reliance on US-based tech and asking whether they can quickly spin up better, homegrown alternatives. This is particularly true for AI. One of the clearest examples of this is in social media. Yasmin Curzi, a Brazilian law professor who researches domestic tech policy, put it to me this way: "Since Trump's second administration, we cannot count on [American social media platforms] to do even the bare minimum anymore." Social media content moderation systems--which already use automation and are also experimenting with deploying large language models to flag problematic posts--are failing to detect gender-based violence in places as varied as India, South Africa, and Brazil.


LLM-based Agent Simulation for Maternal Health Interventions: Uncertainty Estimation and Decision-focused Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Agent-based simulation is crucial for modeling complex human behavior, yet traditional approaches require extensive domain knowledge and large datasets. In data-scarce healthcare settings where historic and counterfactual data are limited, large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative by leveraging broad world knowledge. This study examines an LLM-driven simulation of a maternal mobile health program, predicting beneficiaries' listening behavior when they receive health information via automated messages (control) or live representatives (intervention). Since uncertainty quantification is critical for decision-making in health interventions, we propose an LLM epistemic uncertainty estimation method based on binary entropy across multiple samples. We enhance model robustness through ensemble approaches, improving F1 score and model calibration compared to individual models. Beyond direct evaluation, we take a decision-focused approach, demonstrating how LLM predictions inform intervention feasibility and trial implementation in data-limited settings. The proposed method extends to public health, disaster response, and other domains requiring rapid intervention assessment under severe data constraints. All code and prompts used for this work can be found at https://github.com/sarahmart/LLM-ABS-ARMMAN-prediction.


BiblioPage: A Dataset of Scanned Title Pages for Bibliographic Metadata Extraction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we evaluated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction.


Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages.