Genre
CODECRASH: Exposing LLMFragility to Misleading Natural Language in Code Reasoning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in code-related tasks, but their robustness in code reasoning under perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce CODECRASH, a stress-testing framework with 1,279 questions from CRUXEVAL and LIVECODEBENCH, designed to evaluate reasoning reliability under structural perturbations and misleading natural language (NL) contexts. Through a systematic evaluation of 17 LLMs, we find that models often shortcut reasoning by over-relying on NL cues, leading to an average performance degradation of 23.2% in output prediction tasks. Even with Chain-of-Thought reasoning, models on average still have a 13.8%drop due to distractibility and rationalization, revealing a lack of critical reasoning capability to distinguish the actual code behaviors. While Large Reasoning Models with internal reasoning mechanisms improve robustness by fostering critical thinking, plausible yet incorrect hints can trigger pathological self-reflection, causing 2 3 times token consumption and even catastrophic cognitive dissonance in extreme cases for QwQ-32B. We refer to this phenomenon as Reasoning Collapse. CODECRASH provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating robustness in code reasoning, guiding future research and development toward more reliable and resilient models.
OptiTree: Hierarchical Thoughts Generation with Tree Search for LLMOptimization Modeling
Optimization modeling is one of the most crucial but technical parts of operations research (OR). To automate the modeling process, existing works have leveraged large language models (LLMs), prompting them to break down tasks into steps for generating variables, constraints, and objectives. However, due to the highly complex mathematical structures inherent in OR problems, standard fixed-step decomposition often fails to achieve high performance. To address this challenge, we introduce OptiTree, a novel tree search approach designed to enhance modeling capabilities for complex problems through adaptive problem decomposition into simpler subproblems. Specifically, we develop a modeling tree that organizes a wide range of OR problems based on their hierarchical problem taxonomy and complexity, with each node representing a problem category and containing relevant high-level modeling thoughts. Given a problem to model, we recurrently search the tree to identify a series of simpler subproblems and synthesize the global modeling thoughts by adaptively integrating the hierarchical thoughts. Experiments show that OptiTree significantly improves the modeling accuracy compared to the state-of-theart, achieving over 10% improvements on the challenging benchmarks.
Language Ranker: ALightweight Ranking framework for LLMDecoding
Conventional research on large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on refining output distributions, while paying less attention to the decoding process that transforms these distributions into final responses. Recent advances, such as scaling the computation of inference time with reward models, have underscored the importance of decoding, but these methods often suffer from high computational costs and limited applicability. In this paper, we revisit LLM generation through the lens of recommender systems, conceptualizing the decoding process as analogous to the ranking stage in recommendation pipelines. From this perspective, we observe that both traditional decoding methods and reward models exhibit clear limitations such as redundancy. Motivated by this insight, we propose Language Ranker, a novel framework that introduces a lightweight module to rerank candidate responses using features extracted by the base model. Experiments across a wide range of tasks show that Language Ranker achieves performance comparable to large-scale reward models, while requiring only <0.5M additional parameters, significantly reducing the computational overhead during both training and inference stages. This highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, showcasing its potential to fully unlock the capabilities of LLMs.
Predictable Scale (Part II) -- Farseer: ARefined Scaling Law in LLMs
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is prohibitively expensive, creating a critical scaling gap where insights from small-scale experiments often fail to transfer to resource-intensive production systems, thereby hindering efficient innovation. To bridge this, we introduce Farseer, a novel and refined scaling law offering enhanced predictive accuracy across scales. By systematically constructing a model loss surface L(N,D), Farseer achieves a significantly better fit to empirical data than prior laws (e.g., Chinchilla's law). Our methodology yields accurate, robust, and highly generalizable predictions, demonstrating excellent extrapolation capabilities, outperforming Chinchilla's law, whose extrapolation error is 433% higher. This allows for the reliable evaluation of competing training strategies across all (N,D) settings, enabling conclusions from small-scale ablation studies to be confidently extrapolated to predict large-scale performance. Furthermore, Farseer provides new insights into optimal compute allocation, better reflecting the nuanced demands of modern LLM training. To validate our approach, we trained an extensive suite of approximately 1,000 LLMs across diverse scales and configurations, consuming roughly 3 million NVIDIAH100 GPU hours. To foster further research, we are comprehensively open-sourcing all code, data, results 3, all training logs4, all models used in scaling law fitting 5.
Leaving No OODInstance Behind: Instance-Level OODFine-Tuning for Anomaly Segmentation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach for anomaly segmentation. Current OOD fine-tuning strategies typically employ global-level objectives, aiming to guide segmentation models to accurately predict a large number of anomaly pixels. However, these strategies often perform poorly on small anomalies. To address this issue, we propose an instance-level OOD fine-tuning framework, dubbed LNOIB (Leaving No OODInstance Behind). We start by theoretically analyzing why global-level objectives fail to segment small anomalies. Building on this analysis, we introduce a simple yet effective instancelevel objective. Moreover, we propose a feature separation objective to explicitly constrain the representations of anomalies, which are prone to be smoothed by their in-distribution (ID) surroundings. LNOIB integrates these objectives to enhance the segmentation of small anomalies and serves as a paradigm adaptable to existing OOD fine-tuning strategies, without introducing additional inference cost. Experimental results show that integrating LNOIB into various OOD fine-tuning strategies yields significant improvements, particularly in component-level results, highlighting its strength in comprehensive anomaly segmentation.
Block-Biased Mamba for Long-Range Sequence Processing
Mamba extends earlier state space models (SSMs) by introducing input-dependent dynamics, and has demonstrated strong empirical performance across a range of domains, including language modeling, computer vision, and foundation models. However, a surprising weakness remains: despite being built on architectures designed for long-range dependencies, Mamba performs poorly on long-range sequential tasks. Understanding and addressing this gap is important for improving Mamba's universality and versatility. In this work, we analyze Mamba's limitations through three perspectives: expressiveness, inductive bias, and training stability. Our theoretical results show how Mamba falls short in each of these aspects compared to earlier SSMs such as S4D. To address these issues, we propose B2S6, a simple extension of Mamba's S6 unit that combines block-wise selective dynamics with a channel-specific bias. We prove that these changes equip the model with a better-suited inductive bias and improve its expressiveness and stability. Empirically, B2S6 outperforms S4 and S4D on Long-Range Arena (LRA) tasks while maintaining Mamba's performance on language modeling benchmarks.
Extremely Simple Multimodal Outlier Synthesis for Out-of-Distribution Detection and Segmentation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and segmentation are crucial for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. While prior research has primarily focused on unimodal image data, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, requiring the integration of multiple modalities for improved OOD detection. A key challenge is the lack of supervision signals from unknown data, leading to overconfident predictions on OOD samples. To address this challenge, we propose Feature Mixing, an extremely simple and fast method for multimodal outlier synthesis with theoretical support, which can be further optimized to help the model better distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data. Feature Mixing is modality-agnostic and applicable to various modality combinations. Additionally, we introduce CARLA-OOD, a novel multimodal dataset for OOD segmentation, featuring synthetic OOD objects across diverse scenes and weather conditions. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, CARLA-OOD datasets, and the MultiOOD benchmark demonstrate that Feature Mixing achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 10 to 370 speedup.
Attention Mechanism, Max-Affine Partition, and Universal Approximation
We establish the universal approximation capability of single-layer, single-head self-and cross-attention mechanisms with minimal attached structures. Our key insight is to interpret single-head attention as an input domain-partition mechanism that assigns distinct values to subregions. This allows us to engineer the attention weights such that this assignment imitates the target function. Building on this, we prove that a single self-attention layer, preceded by sum-of-linear transformations, is capable of approximating any continuous function on a compact domain under the L -norm. Furthermore, we extend this construction to approximate any Lebesgue integrable function under Lp-norm for 1 p < . Lastly, we also extend our techniques and show that, for the first time, single-head cross-attention achieves the same universal approximation guarantees.
QUEEN-l3DGStream OursPSNR: 33.61dBStorage: 0.049MB/frame 32.2 PSNR: 33.01dBComGS-l (Ours)32 Storage: 7.8MB/frame 31.8 ComGS-s (Ours) QUEEN-s 3DGStream4D-GS
However, existing online methods face challenge in prohibitive storage requirements primarily due to point-wise modeling that fails to exploit the motion properties. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Compact Gaussian Streaming (ComGS) framework, leveraging the locality and consistency of motion in dynamic scene, that models object-consistent Gaussian point motion through keypoint-driven motion representation. By transmitting only the keypoint attributes, this framework provides a more storage-efficient solution. Specifically, we first identify a sparse set of motion-sensitive keypoints localized within motion regions using a viewspace gradient difference strategy. Equipped with these keypoints, we propose an adaptive motion-driven mechanism that predicts a spatial influence field for propagating keypoint motion to neighboring Gaussian points with similar motion. Moreover, ComGS adopts an error-aware correction strategy for key frame reconstruction that selectively refines erroneous regions and mitigates error accumulation without unnecessary overhead. Overall, ComGS achieves a remarkable storage reduction of over 159 compared to 3DGStream and 14 compared to the SOTA method QUEEN, while maintaining competitive visual fidelity and rendering speed.