Education
ChemPile: A 250GB Diverse and Curated Dataset for Chemical Foundation Models
Mirza, Adrian, Alampara, Nawaf, Ríos-García, Martiño, Abdelalim, Mohamed, Butler, Jack, Connolly, Bethany, Dogan, Tunca, Nezhurina, Marianna, Şen, Bünyamin, Tirunagari, Santosh, Worrall, Mark, Young, Adamo, Schwaller, Philippe, Pieler, Michael, Jablonka, Kevin Maik
Foundation models have shown remarkable success across scientific domains, yet their impact in chemistry remains limited due to the absence of diverse, large-scale, high-quality datasets that reflect the field's multifaceted nature. We present the ChemPile, an open dataset containing over 75 billion tokens of curated chemical data, specifically built for training and evaluating general-purpose models in the chemical sciences. The dataset mirrors the human learning journey through chemistry -- from educational foundations to specialized expertise -- spanning multiple modalities and content types including structured data in diverse chemical representations (SMILES, SELFIES, IUPAC names, InChI, molecular renderings), scientific and educational text, executable code, and chemical images. ChemPile integrates foundational knowledge (textbooks, lecture notes), specialized expertise (scientific articles and language-interfaced data), visual understanding (molecular structures, diagrams), and advanced reasoning (problem-solving traces and code) -- mirroring how human chemists develop expertise through diverse learning materials and experiences. Constructed through hundreds of hours of expert curation, the ChemPile captures both foundational concepts and domain-specific complexity. We provide standardized training, validation, and test splits, enabling robust benchmarking. ChemPile is openly released via HuggingFace with a consistent API, permissive license, and detailed documentation. We hope the ChemPile will serve as a catalyst for chemical AI, enabling the development of the next generation of chemical foundation models.
InnateCoder: Learning Programmatic Options with Foundation Models
Moraes, Rubens O., Sadmine, Quazi Asif, Baier, Hendrik, Lelis, Levi H. S.
Outside of transfer learning settings, reinforcement learning agents start their learning process from a clean slate. As a result, such agents have to go through a slow process to learn even the most obvious skills required to solve a problem. In this paper, we present InnateCoder, a system that leverages human knowledge encoded in foundation models to provide programmatic policies that encode "innate skills" in the form of temporally extended actions, or options. In contrast to existing approaches to learning options, InnateCoder learns them from the general human knowledge encoded in foundation models in a zero-shot setting, and not from the knowledge the agent gains by interacting with the environment. Then, InnateCoder searches for a programmatic policy by combining the programs encoding these options into larger and more complex programs. We hypothesized that InnateCoder's way of learning and using options could improve the sampling efficiency of current methods for learning programmatic policies. Empirical results in MicroRTS and Karel the Robot support our hypothesis, since they show that InnateCoder is more sample efficient than versions of the system that do not use options or learn them from experience.
Towards DS-NER: Unveiling and Addressing Latent Noise in Distant Annotations
Ding, Yuyang, Qiao, Dan, Li, Juntao, Xu, Jiajie, Chao, Pingfu, Zhou, Xiaofang, Zhang, Min
Abstract--Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has emerged as a cheap and convenient alternative to traditional human annotation methods, enabling the automatic generation of training data by aligning text with external resources. Despite the many efforts in noise measurement methods, few works focus on the latent noise distribution between different distant annotation methods. In this work, we explore the effectiveness and robustness of DS-NER by two aspects: (1) distant annotation techniques, which encompasses both traditional rule-based methods and the innovative large language model supervision approach, and (2) noise assessment, for which we introduce a novel framework. This framework addresses the challenges by distinctly categorizing them into the unlabeled-entity problem (UEP) and the noisy-entity problem (NEP), subsequently providing specialized solutions for each. Our proposed method achieves significant improvements on eight real-world distant supervision datasets originating from three different data sources and involving four distinct annotation techniques, confirming its superiority over current state-of-the-art methods. Index Terms --Distantly supervised learning, Named entity recognition, Noise measurement. With the prosperous development of neural techniques [3]-[5], the past decade has witnessed the tremendous success of the NER tasks. T o achieve a high performance, the need for massive high-quality data is inevitable, whether for the previous fully supervised methods or the recent fine-tuned T ask-Specific Large Language Models like UniNER [6]. However, obtaining massive data with high-quality annotations is either inapplicable or unaffordable. Thus, NER under distant supervision (DS) has been a popular alternative [7], [8]. Distantly supervised NER first aims to annotate an unlabeled dataset utilizing external resources, such as knowledge bases and dictionaries, then train a model on the distantly annotated data. Recently, LLMs have been demonstrated to be proficient annotators for numerous NLP tasks [9]. However, regardless of the distantly supervised method employed, whether traditional rule-based annotating methods like KB-Matching [8] and Dict-Matching [10] or LLMbased annotating methods, considerable label noise is injected into the datasets. Consequently, devising a strategy to train a high-performance NER model on a noisy NER dataset becomes critically important. W e begin with a preliminary study to compare and assess the annotation capabilities of different annotation methods. Y uyang Ding and Dan Qiao contribute equally. Xiaofang Zhou is with the Hong Kong University of Science and T echnol-ogy, Hong Kong, China.
AFCL: Analytic Federated Continual Learning for Spatio-Temporal Invariance of Non-IID Data
Tang, Jianheng, Zhuang, Huiping, He, Jingyu, He, Run, Wang, Jingchao, Fan, Kejia, Liu, Anfeng, Wang, Tian, Wang, Leye, Zhu, Zhanxing, Zhang, Shanghang, Song, Houbing Herbert, Liu, Yunhuai
Federated Continual Learning (FCL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model from online task streams in dynamic real-world scenarios. However, existing FCL methods face challenges of both spatial data heterogeneity among distributed clients and temporal data heterogeneity across online tasks. Such data heterogeneity significantly degrades the model performance with severe spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting of local and past knowledge. In this paper, we identify that the root cause of this issue lies in the inherent vulnerability and sensitivity of gradients to non-IID data. To fundamentally address this issue, we propose a gradient-free method, named Analytic Federated Continual Learning (AFCL), by deriving analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions from frozen extracted features. In local training, our AFCL enables single-epoch learning with only a lightweight forward-propagation process for each client. In global aggregation, the server can recursively and efficiently update the global model with single-round aggregation. Theoretical analyses validate that our AFCL achieves spatio-temporal invariance of non-IID data. This ideal property implies that, regardless of how heterogeneous the data are distributed across local clients and online tasks, the aggregated model of our AFCL remains invariant and identical to that of centralized joint learning. Extensive experiments show the consistent superiority of our AFCL over state-of-the-art baselines across various benchmark datasets and settings.
Examining Linguistic Shifts in Academic Writing Before and After the Launch of ChatGPT: A Study on Preprint Papers
Bao, Tong, Zhao, Yi, Mao, Jin, Zhang, Chengzhi
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have prompted academic concerns about their impact on academic writing. Existing studies have primarily examined LLM usage in academic writing through quantitative approaches, such as word frequency statistics and probability-based analyses. However, few have systematically examined the potential impact of LLMs on the linguistic characteristics of academic writing. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale analysis across 823,798 abstracts published in last decade from arXiv dataset. Through the linguistic analysis of features such as the frequency of LLM-preferred words, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, readability and sentiment, the results indicate a significant increase in the proportion of LLM-preferred words in abstracts, revealing the widespread influence of LLMs on academic writing. Additionally, we observed an increase in lexical complexity and sentiment in the abstracts, but a decrease in syntactic complexity, suggesting that LLMs introduce more new vocabulary and simplify sentence structure. However, the significant decrease in cohesion and readability indicates that abstracts have fewer connecting words and are becoming more difficult to read. Moreover, our analysis reveals that scholars with weaker English proficiency were more likely to use the LLMs for academic writing, and focused on improving the overall logic and fluency of the abstracts. Finally, at discipline level, we found that scholars in Computer Science showed more pronounced changes in writing style, while the changes in Mathematics were minimal.
Always Clear Depth: Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather
Jiang, Kui, Cao, Jing, Yu, Zhaocheng, Jiang, Junjun, Zhou, Jingchun
Monocular depth estimation is critical for applications such as autonomous driving and scene reconstruction. While existing methods perform well under normal scenarios, their performance declines in adverse weather, due to challenging domain shifts and difficulties in extracting scene information. To address this issue, we present a robust monocular depth estimation method called \textbf{ACDepth} from the perspective of high-quality training data generation and domain adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a one-step diffusion model for generating samples that simulate adverse weather conditions, constructing a multi-tuple degradation dataset during training. To ensure the quality of the generated degradation samples, we employ LoRA adapters to fine-tune the generation weights of diffusion model. Additionally, we integrate circular consistency loss and adversarial training to guarantee the fidelity and naturalness of the scene contents. Furthermore, we elaborate on a multi-granularity knowledge distillation strategy (MKD) that encourages the student network to absorb knowledge from both the teacher model and pretrained Depth Anything V2. This strategy guides the student model in learning degradation-agnostic scene information from various degradation inputs. In particular, we introduce an ordinal guidance distillation mechanism (OGD) that encourages the network to focus on uncertain regions through differential ranking, leading to a more precise depth estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our ACDepth surpasses md4all-DD by 2.50\% for night scene and 2.61\% for rainy scene on the nuScenes dataset in terms of the absRel metric.
Fair-PP: A Synthetic Dataset for Aligning LLM with Personalized Preferences of Social Equity
Zhou, Qi, Zhang, Jie, Wang, Dongxia, Liu, Qiang, Li, Tianlin, Dong, Jin Song, Wang, Wenhai, Guo, Qing
Human preference plays a crucial role in the refinement of large language models (LLMs). However, collecting human preference feedback is costly and most existing datasets neglect the correlation between personalization and preferences. To address this issue, we introduce Fair-PP, a synthetic dataset of personalized preferences targeting social equity, derived from real-world social survey data, which includes 28 social groups, 98 equity topics, and 5 personal preference dimensions. Leveraging GPT-4o-mini, we engage in role-playing based on seven representative persona portrayals guided by existing social survey data, yielding a total of 238,623 preference records. Through Fair-PP, we also contribute (i) An automated framework for generating preference data, along with a more fine-grained dataset of personalized preferences; (ii) analysis of the positioning of the existing mainstream LLMs across five major global regions within the personalized preference space; and (iii) a sample reweighting method for personalized preference alignment, enabling alignment with a target persona while maximizing the divergence from other personas. Empirical experiments show our method outperforms the baselines.
Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Abilities of Large Reasoning Models
Liu, Hanmeng, Ding, Yiran, Fu, Zhizhang, Zhang, Chaoli, Liu, Xiaozhang, Zhang, Yue
Large reasoning models, often post-trained on long chain-of-thought (long CoT) data with reinforcement learning, achieve state-of-the-art performance on mathematical, coding, and domain-specific reasoning benchmarks. However, their logical reasoning capabilities - fundamental to human cognition and independent of domain knowledge - remain understudied. To address this gap, we introduce LogiEval, a holistic benchmark for evaluating logical reasoning in large reasoning models. LogiEval spans diverse reasoning types (deductive, inductive, analogical, and abductive) and task formats (e.g., logical sequence, argument analysis), sourced from high-quality human examinations (e.g., LSAT, GMAT). Our experiments demonstrate that modern reasoning models excel at 4-choice argument analysis problems and analogical reasoning, surpassing human performance, yet exhibit uneven capabilities across reasoning types and formats, highlighting limitations in their generalization. Our analysis reveals that human performance does not mirror model failure distributions. To foster further research, we curate LogiEval-Hard, a challenging subset identified through a novel screening paradigm where small-model failures (Qwen3-30B-A3B) reliably predict difficulties for larger models. Modern models show striking, consistent failures on LogiEval-Hard. This demonstrates that fundamental reasoning bottlenecks persist across model scales, and establishes LogiEval-Hard as both a diagnostic tool and a rigorous testbed for advancing logical reasoning in LLMs.
CL-CaGAN: Capsule differential adversarial continuous learning for cross-domain hyperspectral anomaly detection
Wang, Jianing, Guo, Siying, Hua, Zheng, Huang, Runhu, Hu, Jinyu, Gong, Maoguo
Anomaly detection (AD) has attracted remarkable attention in hyperspectral image (HSI) processing fields, and most existing deep learning (DL)-based algorithms indicate dramatic potential for detecting anomaly samples through specific training process under current scenario. However, the limited prior information and the catastrophic forgetting problem indicate crucial challenges for existing DL structure in open scenarios cross-domain detection. In order to improve the detection performance, a novel continual learning-based capsule differential generative adversarial network (CL-CaGAN) is proposed to elevate the cross-scenario learning performance for facilitating the real application of DL-based structure in hyperspectral AD (HAD) task. First, a modified capsule structure with adversarial learning network is constructed to estimate the background distribution for surmounting the deficiency of prior information. To mitigate the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, clustering-based sample replay strategy and a designed extra self-distillation regularization are integrated for merging the history and future knowledge in continual AD task, while the discriminative learning ability from previous detection scenario to current scenario is retained by the elaborately designed structure with continual learning (CL) strategy. In addition, the differentiable enhancement is enforced to augment the generation performance of the training data. This further stabilizes the training process with better convergence and efficiently consolidates the reconstruction ability of background samples. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed CL-CaGAN, we conduct experiments on several real HSIs, and the results indicate that the proposed CL-CaGAN demonstrates higher detection performance and continuous learning capacity for mitigating the catastrophic forgetting under cross-domain scenarios.
HARDMath2: A Benchmark for Applied Mathematics Built by Students as Part of a Graduate Class
Roggeveen, James V., Wang, Erik Y., Flintoft, Will, Donets, Peter, Nathwani, Lucy S., Gutierrez, Nickholas, Ettel, David, Graf, Anton Marius, Dandavate, Siddharth, Nageswaran, Arjun, Ward, Raglan, Williamson, Ava, Mykland, Anne, Migacz, Kacper K., Wang, Yijun, Bostan, Egemen, Nguyen, Duy Thuc, He, Zhe, Descoteaux, Marc L., Yeung, Felix, Liu, Shida, Ponce, Jorge García, Zhu, Luke, Chen, Yuyang, Ivshina, Ekaterina S., Fernandez, Miguel, Kim, Minjae, Gumbs, Kennan, Tan, Matthew Scott, Yang, Russell, Hoang, Mai, Brown, David, Silveira, Isabella A., Sykes, Lavon, Roman, Ahmed, Fredenberg, William, Chen, Yiming, Martin, Lucas, Tang, Yixing, Smith, Kelly Werker, Liao, Hongyu, Wilson, Logan G., Cai, Alexander Dazhen, Biju, Andrea Elizabeth, Brenner, Michael P.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in mathematical problem-solving, but evaluation has largely focused on problems that have exact analytical solutions or involve formal proofs, often overlooking approximation-based problems ubiquitous in applied science and engineering. To fill this gap, we build on prior work and present HARDMath2, a dataset of 211 original problems covering the core topics in an introductory graduate applied math class, including boundary-layer analysis, WKB methods, asymptotic solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations, and the asymptotics of oscillatory integrals. This dataset was designed and verified by the students and instructors of a core graduate applied mathematics course at Harvard. We build the dataset through a novel collaborative environment that challenges students to write and refine difficult problems consistent with the class syllabus, peer-validate solutions, test different models, and automatically check LLM-generated solutions against their own answers and numerical ground truths. Evaluation results show that leading frontier models still struggle with many of the problems in the dataset, highlighting a gap in the mathematical reasoning skills of current LLMs. Importantly, students identified strategies to create increasingly difficult problems by interacting with the models and exploiting common failure modes. This back-and-forth with the models not only resulted in a richer and more challenging benchmark but also led to qualitative improvements in the students' understanding of the course material, which is increasingly important as we enter an age where state-of-the-art language models can solve many challenging problems across a wide domain of fields.