Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown promise across many tasks, yet their scientific reasoning capabilities remain untested, particularly in multimodal settings. We present MMSciBench, a benchmark for evaluating mathematical and physical reasoning through text-only and text-image formats, with human-annotated difficulty levels, solutions with detailed explanations, and taxonomic mappings. Evaluation of state-of-the-art models reveals significant limitations, with even the best model achieving only \textbf{63.77\%} accuracy and particularly struggling with visual reasoning tasks. Our analysis exposes critical gaps in complex reasoning and visual-textual integration, establishing MMSciBench as a rigorous standard for measuring progress in multimodal scientific understanding. The code for MMSciBench is open-sourced at GitHub, and the dataset is available at Hugging Face.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling and text generation, with improvements scaling proportionally with model size. However, the limitations of GPU memory have restricted LLM training accessibility for many researchers. Existing heterogeneous training methods significantly expand the scale of trainable models but introduce substantial communication overheads and CPU workloads. In this work, we propose AutoHete, an automatic and efficient heterogeneous training system compatible with both single-GPU and multi-GPU environments. AutoHete dynamically adjusts activation checkpointing, parameter offloading, and optimizer offloading based on the specific hardware configuration and LLM training needs. Additionally, we design a priority-based scheduling mechanism that maximizes the overlap between operations across training iterations, enhancing throughput. Compared to state-of-the-art heterogeneous training systems, AutoHete delivers a 1.32x~1.91x throughput improvement across various model sizes and training configurations.

--Integrating the structural inductive biases of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the global contextual modeling capabilities of Transformers represents a pivotal challenge in graph representation learning. While GNNs excel at capturing localized topological patterns through message-passing mechanisms, their inherent limitations in modeling long-range dependencies and parallelizability hinder their deployment in large-scale scenarios. Conversely, Transformers leverage self-attention mechanisms to achieve global receptive fields but struggle to inherit the intrinsic graph structural priors of GNNs. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework that systematically transfers multiscale structural knowledge from GNN teacher models to Transformer student models, offering a new perspective on addressing the critical challenges in cross-architectural distillation. This work establishes a new paradigm for inheriting graph structural biases in Transformer architectures, with broad application prospects.

Prediction of item difficulty based on its text content is of substantial interest. In this paper, we focus on the related problem of recovering IRT-based difficulty when the data originally reported item p-value (percent correct responses). We model this item difficulty using a repository of reading passages and student data from US standardized tests from New York and Texas for grades 3-8 spanning the years 2017-23. This repository is annotated with meta-data on (1) linguistic features of the reading items, (2) test features of the passage, and (3) context features. A penalized regression prediction model with all these features can predict item difficulty with RMSE 0.52 compared to baseline RMSE of 0.92, and with a correlation of 0.77 between true and predicted difficulty. We supplement these features with embeddings from LLMs (ModernBERT, BERT, and LlAMA), which marginally improve item difficulty prediction. When models use only item linguistic features or LLM embeddings, prediction performance is similar, which suggests that only one of these feature categories may be required. This item difficulty prediction model can be used to filter and categorize reading items and will be made publicly available for use by other stakeholders.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have demonstrated their potential across various robotic tasks. However, they still heavily rely on human-engineered reward functions, requiring extensive trial-and-error and access to target behavior information, often unavailable in real-world settings. This paper introduces REDS: REward learning from Demonstration with Segmentations, a novel reward learning framework that leverages action-free videos with minimal supervision. Specifically, REDS employs video demonstrations segmented into subtasks from diverse sources and treats these segments as ground-truth rewards. We train a dense reward function conditioned on video segments and their corresponding subtasks to ensure alignment with ground-truth reward signals by minimizing the Equivalent-Policy Invariant Comparison distance. Additionally, we employ contrastive learning objectives to align video representations with subtasks, ensuring precise subtask inference during online interactions. Our experiments show that REDS significantly outperforms baseline methods on complex robotic manipulation tasks in Meta-World and more challenging real-world tasks, such as furniture assembly in FurnitureBench, with minimal human intervention. Moreover, REDS facilitates generalization to unseen tasks and robot embodiments, highlighting its potential for scalable deployment in diverse environments.

Maintaining a balanced diet is essential for overall health, yet many individuals struggle with meal planning due to nutritional complexity, time constraints, and lack of dietary knowledge. Personalized food recommendations can help address these challenges by tailoring meal plans to individual preferences, habits, and dietary restrictions. However, existing dietary recommendation systems often lack adaptability, fail to consider real-world constraints such as food ingredient availability, and require extensive user input, making them impractical for sustainable and scalable daily use. To address these limitations, we introduce NutriGen, a framework based on large language models (LLM) designed to generate personalized meal plans that align with user-defined dietary preferences and constraints. By building a personalized nutrition database and leveraging prompt engineering, our approach enables LLMs to incorporate reliable nutritional references like the USDA nutrition database while maintaining flexibility and ease-of-use. We demonstrate that LLMs have strong potential in generating accurate and user-friendly food recommendations, addressing key limitations in existing dietary recommendation systems by providing structured, practical, and scalable meal plans. Our evaluation shows that Llama 3.1 8B and GPT-3.5 Turbo achieve the lowest percentage errors of 1.55\% and 3.68\%, respectively, producing meal plans that closely align with user-defined caloric targets while minimizing deviation and improving precision. Additionally, we compared the performance of DeepSeek V3 against several established models to evaluate its potential in personalized nutrition planning.

With the increasingly congested and contested space environment, safe and effective satellite operation has become increasingly challenging. As a result, there is growing interest in autonomous satellite capabilities, with common machine learning techniques gaining attention for their potential to address complex decision-making in the space domain. However, the "black-box" nature of many of these methods results in difficulty understanding the model's input/output relationship and more specifically its sensitivity to environmental disturbances, sensor noise, and control intervention. This paper explores the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for satellite control in multi-agent inspection tasks. The Local Intelligent Network of Collaborative Satellites (LINCS) Lab is used to test the performance of these control algorithms across different environments, from simulations to real-world quadrotor UAV hardware, with a particular focus on understanding their behavior and potential degradation in performance when deployed beyond the training environment.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce $Q\sharp$, a value-based algorithm for KL-regularized RL that guides the reference policy using the optimal regularized $Q$ function. We propose to learn the optimal $Q$ function using distributional RL on an aggregated online dataset. Unlike prior value-based baselines that guide the model using unregularized $Q$-values, our method is theoretically principled and provably learns the optimal policy for the KL-regularized RL problem. Empirically, $Q\sharp$ outperforms prior baselines in math reasoning benchmarks while maintaining a smaller KL divergence to the reference policy. Theoretically, we establish a reduction from KL-regularized RL to no-regret online learning, providing the first bounds for deterministic MDPs under only realizability. Thanks to distributional RL, our bounds are also variance-dependent and converge faster when the reference policy has small variance. In sum, our results highlight $Q\sharp$ as an effective approach for post-training LLMs, offering both improved performance and theoretical guarantees. The code can be found at https://github.com/jinpz/q_sharp.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored in higher education, yet their effectiveness as teaching agents remains underexamined. In this paper, we present the development of GuideLM, a fine-tuned LLM designed for programming education. GuideLM has been integrated into the Debugging C Compiler (DCC), an educational C compiler that leverages LLMs to generate pedagogically sound error explanations. Previously, DCC relied on off-the-shelf OpenAI models, which, while accurate, often over-assisted students by directly providing solutions despite contrary prompting. To address this, we employed supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a dataset of 528 student-question/teacher-answer pairs, creating two models: GuideLM and GuideLM-mini, fine-tuned on ChatGPT-4o and 4o-mini, respectively. We conducted an expert analysis of 400 responses per model, comparing their pedagogical effectiveness against base OpenAI models. Our evaluation, grounded in constructivism and cognitive load theory, assessed factors such as conceptual scaffolding, clarity, and Socratic guidance. Results indicate that GuideLM and GuideLM-mini improve pedagogical performance, with an 8% increase in Socratic guidance and a 58% improvement in economy of words compared to GPT-4o. However, this refinement comes at the cost of a slight reduction in general accuracy. While further work is needed, our findings suggest that fine-tuning LLMs with targeted datasets is a promising approach for developing models better suited to educational contexts.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable advancements in embodying diverse personas, enhancing their effectiveness as conversational agents and virtual assistants. Consequently, LLMs have made significant strides in processing and integrating multimodal information. However, even though human personas can be expressed in both text and image, the extent to which the modality of a persona impacts the embodiment by the LLM remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how do different modalities influence the expressiveness of personas in multimodal LLMs. To this end, we create a novel modality-parallel dataset of 40 diverse personas varying in age, gender, occupation, and location. This consists of four modalities to equivalently represent a persona: image-only, text-only, a combination of image and small text, and typographical images, where text is visually stylized to convey persona-related attributes. We then create a systematic evaluation framework with 60 questions and corresponding metrics to assess how well LLMs embody each persona across its attributes and scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on $5$ multimodal LLMs show that personas represented by detailed text show more linguistic habits, while typographical images often show more consistency with the persona. Our results reveal that LLMs often overlook persona-specific details conveyed through images, highlighting underlying limitations and paving the way for future research to bridge this gap. We release the data and code at https://github.com/claws-lab/persona-modality .