Large language models (LLMs), such as o1 from OpenAI, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. o1 generates a long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) before answering a question. LongCoT allows LLMs to analyze problems, devise plans, reflect, and backtrack effectively. These actions empower LLM to solve complex problems. After the release of o1, many teams have attempted to replicate its LongCoT and reasoning capabilities. In terms of methods, they primarily rely on knowledge distillation with data from existing models with LongCoT capacities (e.g., OpenAI-o1, Qwen-QwQ, DeepSeek-R1-Preview), leaving significant uncertainties on systematically developing such reasoning abilities. In terms of data domains, these works focus narrowly on math while a few others include coding, limiting their generalizability. This paper introduces a novel approach to enable LLM's LongCoT capacity without distillation from o1-like models or expensive human annotations, where we bootstrap LongCoT (BOLT) from a standard instruct model. BOLT involves three stages: 1) LongCoT data bootstrapping with in-context learning on a standard instruct model; 2) LongCoT supervised finetuning; 3) online training to further refine LongCoT capacities. In BOLT, only a few in-context examples need to be constructed during the bootstrapping stage; in our experiments, we created 10 examples, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. We use Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct to bootstrap LongCoT and apply our method to various model scales (7B, 8B, 70B). We achieve impressive performance on a variety of benchmarks, Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, WildBench, ZebraLogic, MATH500, which evaluate diverse task-solving and reasoning capabilities.

Data preprocessing is a critical yet frequently neglected aspect of machine learning, often paid little attention despite its potentially significant impact on model performance. While automated machine learning pipelines are starting to recognize and integrate data preprocessing into their solutions for classification and regression tasks, this integration is lacking for more specialized tasks like survival or time-to-event models. As a result, survival analysis not only faces the general challenges of data preprocessing but also suffers from the lack of tailored, automated solutions in this area. To address this gap, this paper presents 'CleanSurvival', a reinforcement-learning-based solution for optimizing preprocessing pipelines, extended specifically for survival analysis. The framework can handle continuous and categorical variables, using Q-learning to select which combination of data imputation, outlier detection and feature extraction techniques achieves optimal performance for a Cox, random forest, neural network or user-supplied time-to-event model. The package is available on GitHub: https://github.com/datasciapps/CleanSurvival Experimental benchmarks on real-world datasets show that the Q-learning-based data preprocessing results in superior predictive performance to standard approaches, finding such a model up to 10 times faster than undirected random grid search. Furthermore, a simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness in different types and levels of missingness and noise in the data.

For partially observable cooperative tasks, multi-agent systems must develop effective communication and understand the interplay among agents in order to achieve cooperative goals. However, existing multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with communication methods lack evaluation metrics for information weights and information-level communication modeling. This causes agents to neglect the aggregation of multiple messages, thereby significantly reducing policy learning efficiency. In this paper, we propose pluggable adaptive generative networks (PAGNet), a novel framework that integrates generative models into MARL to enhance communication and decision-making. PAGNet enables agents to synthesize global states representations from weighted local observations and use these representations alongside learned communication weights for coordinated decision-making. This pluggable approach reduces the computational demands typically associated with the joint training of communication and policy networks. Extensive experimental evaluations across diverse benchmarks and communication scenarios demonstrate the significant performance improvements achieved by PAGNet. Furthermore, we analyze the emergent communication patterns and the quality of generated global states, providing insights into operational mechanisms.

Although network pruning has been highly popularized to compress deep neural networks, its resulting accuracy heavily depends on a fine-tuning process that is often computationally expensive and requires the original data. However, this may not be the case in real-world scenarios, and hence a few recent works attempt to restore pruned networks without any expensive retraining process. Their strong assumption is that every neuron being pruned can be replaced with another one quite similar to it, but unfortunately this does not hold in many neural networks, where the similarity between neurons is extremely low in some layers. In this article, we propose a more rigorous and robust method of restoring pruned networks in a fine-tuning free and data-free manner, called LBYL (Leave Before You Leave). LBYL significantly relaxes the aforementioned assumption in a way that each pruned neuron leaves its pieces of information to as many preserved neurons as possible and thereby multiple neurons together obtain a more robust approximation to the original output of the neuron who just left. Our method is based on a theoretical analysis on how to formulate the reconstruction error between the original network and its approximation, which nicely leads to a closed form solution for our derived loss function. Through the extensive experiments, LBYL is confirmed to be indeed more effective to approximate the original network and consequently able to achieve higher accuracy for restored networks, compared to the recent approaches exploiting the similarity between two neurons. The very first version of this work, which contains major technical and theoretical components, was submitted to NeurIPS 2021 and ICML 2022.

President Donald Trump's controversially announced plans for the US to'take over and own' Gaza last night. While the proclamation drew criticism for'bringing more suffering to the region,' users on social media have used AI to transform the city into a gentrified metropolis with a large building featuring a'Trump Tower' sign glowing in lights at the city center. The rubble-filled streets were transformed into paved roadways lined with towering skyscrapers and areas where buildings had crumbled featured a green golf course surrounded by resorts. The AI-generated images were met with amusement, but others angered at the insensitivity of the creations and warned how'it would be the biggest blackpill ever if a great Biblical city was paved over.' Trump, who spent his career as a property developer, has long talked up Gaza's coastal location and pleasant climate as a perfect holiday vacation. In his vision, US reconstruction would create thousands of jobs and spare Palestinians the pain and expense of rebuilding once again.

This report analyzes key trends, challenges, risks, and opp ortunities associated with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) globally. It examines natio nal experiences in developing LLMs and assesses the feasibility of investment in this sector. Addi tionally, the report explores strategies for implementing, regulating, and financing AI projects at the s tate level. International experiences indicate that LLMs significantl y enhance administrative efficiency. In regulatory processes, they streamline the management of le gal documents (Albania, Serbia), facilitate communication between government authorities and citizen s (Netherlands), and support public procurement and legal translations (Albania).

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by generating natural language (NL) rationales that lead to the final answer. However, it struggles with numerical computation, which has somehow led to the development of program-aided techniques. Despite their potential, a persistent challenge remains: inconsistencies between LLM-reported reasoning steps and the logic in generated programs, which we term ``reasoning hallucinations." This stems from the inherent ambiguities of NL and the statistical nature of LLMs, which often lack rigorous logical coherence. To address this challenge, we propose a novel test-time scaling framework, Reasoning-as-Logic-Units (RaLU), which constructs a more reliable reasoning path by aligning logical units between the generated program and their corresponding NL descriptions. By decomposing the initially generated program into discrete units using static analysis, RaLU engages in an iterative dialogue with the LLM to judge, refine, and explain each unit. A rewind-and-correct mechanism ensures alignment between code statements and task requirements in each unit, ultimately forming a cohesive reasoning path under the program's logic, from which the model reaches a final solution. Our experiments demonstrate that RaLU significantly outperforms existing baselines in mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH) and algorithmic reasoning (HumanEval+, MBPP+), underscoring its potential to advance LLM reasoning and programming by offering enhanced accuracy and interpretability.

Vehicular communication systems face significant challenges due to high mobility and rapidly changing environments, which affect the channel over which the signals travel. To address these challenges, neural network (NN)-based channel estimation methods have been suggested. These methods are primarily trained on high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with the assumption that training a NN in less noisy conditions can result in good generalisation. This study examines the effectiveness of training NN-based channel estimators on mixed SNR datasets compared to training solely on high SNR datasets, as seen in several related works. Estimators evaluated in this work include an architecture that uses convolutional layers and self-attention mechanisms; a method that employs temporal convolutional networks and data pilot-aided estimation; two methods that combine classical methods with multilayer perceptrons; and the current state-of-the-art model that combines Long-Short-Term Memory networks with data pilot-aided and temporal averaging methods as post processing. Our results indicate that using only high SNR data for training is not always optimal, and the SNR range in the training dataset should be treated as a hyperparameter that can be adjusted for better performance. This is illustrated by the better performance of some models in low SNR conditions when trained on the mixed SNR dataset, as opposed to when trained exclusively on high SNR data.

Implicit neural representations (INRs) exhibit growing promise in addressing Earth representation challenges, ranging from emissions monitoring to climate modeling. However, existing methods disproportionately prioritize global average performance, whereas practitioners require fine-grained insights to understand biases and variations in these models. To bridge this gap, we introduce FAIR-Earth: a first-of-its-kind dataset explicitly crafted to examine and challenge inequities in Earth representations. FAIR-Earth comprises various high-resolution Earth signals and uniquely aggregates extensive metadata along stratifications like landmass size and population density to assess the fairness of models. Evaluating state-of-the-art INRs across the various modalities of FAIR-Earth, we uncover striking performance disparities. Certain subgroups, especially those associated with high-frequency signals (e.g., islands, coastlines), are consistently poorly modeled by existing methods. In response, we propose spherical wavelet encodings, building on previous spatial encoding research. Leveraging the multi-resolution capabilities of wavelets, our encodings yield consistent performance over various scales and locations, offering more accurate and robust representations of the biased subgroups. These open-source contributions represent a crucial step towards the equitable assessment and deployment of Earth INRs.

With the rapid growth in the number of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a recent interest in LLM routing, or directing queries to the cheapest LLM that can deliver a suitable response. Following this line of work, we introduce CARROT, a Cost AwaRe Rate Optimal rouTer that can select models based on any desired trade-off between performance and cost. Given a query, CARROT selects a model based on estimates of models' cost and performance. Its simplicity lends CARROT computational efficiency, while our theoretical analysis demonstrates minimax rate-optimality in its routing performance. Alongside CARROT, we also introduce the Smart Price-aware Routing (SPROUT) dataset to facilitate routing on a wide spectrum of queries with the latest state-of-the-art LLMs. Using SPROUT and prior benchmarks such as Routerbench and open-LLM-leaderboard-v2 we empirically validate CARROT's performance against several alternative routers.