We consider a decentralized stochastic learning problem where data points are distributed among computing nodes communicating over a directed graph. As the model size gets large, decentralized learning faces a major bottleneck that is the heavy communication load due to each node transmitting large messages (model updates) to its neighbors. To tackle this bottleneck, we propose the quantized decentralized stochastic learning algorithm over directed graphs that is based on the push-sum algorithm in decentralized consensus optimization. More importantly, we prove that our algorithm achieves the same convergence rates of the decentralized stochastic learning algorithm with exact-communication for both convex and non-convex losses. Numerical evaluations corroborate our main theoretical results and illustrate significant speed-up compared to the exact-communication methods.

Educational stakeholders are often particularly interested in sparse, delayed student outcomes, like end-of-year statewide exams. The rare occurrence of such assessments makes it harder to identify students likely to fail such assessments, as well as making it slow for researchers and educators to be able to assess the effectiveness of particular educational tools. Prior work has primarily focused on using logs from students full usage (e.g. year-long) of an educational product to predict outcomes, or considered predictive accuracy using a few minutes to predict outcomes after a short (e.g. 1 hour) session. In contrast, we investigate machine learning predictors using students' logs during their first few hours of usage can provide useful predictive insight into those students' end-of-school year external assessment. We do this on three diverse datasets: from students in Uganda using a literacy game product, and from students in the US using two mathematics intelligent tutoring systems. We consider various measures of the accuracy of the resulting predictors, including its ability to identify students at different parts along the assessment performance distribution. Our findings suggest that short-term log usage data, from 2-5 hours, can be used to provide valuable signal about students' long-term external performance.

This paper introduces Typhoon 2, a series of text and multimodal large language models optimized for the Thai language. The series includes models for text, vision, and audio. Typhoon2-Text builds on state-of-the-art open models, such as Llama 3 and Qwen2, and we perform continual pre-training on a mixture of English and Thai data. We employ post-training techniques to enhance Thai language performance while preserving the base models' original capabilities. We release text models across a range of sizes, from 1 to 70 billion parameters, available in both base and instruction-tuned variants. To guardrail text generation, we release Typhoon2-Safety, a classifier enhanced for Thai cultures and language. Typhoon2-Vision improves Thai document understanding while retaining general visual capabilities, such as image captioning. Typhoon2-Audio introduces an end-to-end speech-to-speech model architecture capable of processing audio, speech, and text inputs and generating both text and speech outputs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to generate texts in response to different writing tasks: reports, essays, story telling. However, language models do not have a meta-representation of the text writing process, nor inherent communication learning needs, comparable to those of young human students. This paper introduces a fine-grained linguistic and textual analysis of multilingual Small Language Models' (SLMs) writing. With our method, Chain-of-MetaWriting, SLMs can imitate some steps of the human writing process, such as planning and evaluation. We mainly focused on short story and essay writing tasks in French for schoolchildren and undergraduate students respectively. Our results show that SLMs encounter difficulties in assisting young students on sensitive topics such as violence in the schoolyard, and they sometimes use words too complex for the target audience. In particular, the output is quite different from the human produced texts in term of text cohesion and coherence regarding temporal connectors, topic progression, reference.

In dynamic domains such as autonomous robotics and video game simulations, agents must continuously adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired skills. This ongoing process, known as Continual Reinforcement Learning, presents significant challenges, including the risk of forgetting past knowledge and the need for scalable solutions as the number of tasks increases. To address these issues, we introduce HIerarchical LOW-rank Subspaces of Policies (HILOW), a novel framework designed for continual learning in offline navigation settings. HILOW leverages hierarchical policy subspaces to enable flexible and efficient adaptation to new tasks while preserving existing knowledge. We demonstrate, through a careful experimental study, the effectiveness of our method in both classical MuJoCo maze environments and complex video game-like simulations, showcasing competitive performance and satisfying adaptability according to classical continual learning metrics, in particular regarding memory usage. Our work provides a promising framework for real-world applications where continuous learning from pre-collected data is essential.

The suite of datasets commonly used to train and evaluate the mathematical capabilities of AI-based mathematical copilots (primarily large language models) exhibit several shortcomings. These limitations include a restricted scope of mathematical complexity, typically not exceeding lower undergraduate-level mathematics, binary rating protocols and other issues, which makes comprehensive proof-based evaluation suites difficult. We systematically explore these limitations and contend that enhancing the capabilities of large language models, or any forthcoming advancements in AI-based mathematical assistants (copilots or "thought partners"), necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of mathematical datasets and the evaluation criteria of mathematical ability: It is necessary to move away from result-based datasets (theorem statement to theorem proof) and convert the rich facets of mathematical research practice to data LLMs can train on. Examples of these are mathematical workflows (sequences of atomic, potentially subfield-dependent tasks that are often performed when creating new mathematics), which are an important part of the proof-discovery process. Additionally, we advocate for mathematical dataset developers to consider the concept of "motivated proof", introduced by G. P\'olya in 1949, which can serve as a blueprint for datasets that offer a better proof learning signal, alleviating some of the mentioned limitations. Lastly, we introduce math datasheets for datasets, extending the general, dataset-agnostic variants of datasheets: We provide a questionnaire designed specifically for math datasets that we urge dataset creators to include with their datasets. This will make creators aware of potential limitations of their datasets while at the same time making it easy for readers to assess it from the point of view of training and evaluating mathematical copilots.

High-quality professional development for teachers can facilitate the learning of best teaching practices, which in turn can lead to higher levels of student performance (Borko et al., 2010; Didion et al., 2020; Gore et al., 2021; Hubers et al., 2022; Schelling & Rubenstein, 2023). For instance, feedback on actual practices has proven effective in enhancing teaching methods and subsequently improving student outcomes (Allen et al., 2011; Gregory et al., 2017), even among students not directly taught by the teachers receiving the feedback (Opper, 2019). Thus, focusing on the evaluation of teaching practices to facilitate professional development is essential, as it can lead to improved teaching methods and ultimately to higher levels of student outcomes. Despite its acknowledged importance and the pressures from high-stakes accountability systems, most professional development opportunities remain fragmented and insufficient to meet teachers' needs (Borko, 2004; Hsu & Malkin, 2013). The reason for this may be that, although it is known that teaching practices such as cognitive activation, supportive climate, and classroom management, are relevant for enhancing teaching quality and student outcomes (Xie & Derakhshan, 2021), these dimensions may be too abstract or general, which can hinder the implementation of concrete actions to improve teaching quality. In this regard, evidence suggests that targeting more specific factors for intervention, rather than abstract ones, allows teachers to better understand and change their practices (Soderberg et al., 2015).

Multi-step multimodal reasoning tasks pose significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and finding effective ways to enhance their performance in such scenarios remains an unresolved issue. In this paper, we propose AR-MCTS, a universal framework designed to progressively improve the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs through Active Retrieval (AR) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our approach begins with the development of a unified retrieval module that retrieves key supporting insights for solving complex reasoning problems from a hybrid-modal retrieval corpus. To bridge the gap in automated multimodal reasoning verification, we employ the MCTS algorithm combined with an active retrieval mechanism, which enables the automatic generation of step-wise annotations. This strategy dynamically retrieves key insights for each reasoning step, moving beyond traditional beam search sampling to improve the diversity and reliability of the reasoning space. Additionally, we introduce a process reward model that aligns progressively to support the automatic verification of multimodal reasoning tasks. Experimental results across three complex multimodal reasoning benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the AR-MCTS framework in enhancing the performance of various multimodal models. Further analysis demonstrates that AR-MCTS can optimize sampling diversity and accuracy, yielding reliable multimodal reasoning.

To deploy LLMs on resource-contained platforms such as mobile robotics and wearables, non-transformers LLMs have achieved major breakthroughs. Recently, a novel RNN-based LLM family, Repentance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) models have shown promising results in text generation on resource-constrained devices thanks to their computational efficiency. However, these models remain too large to be deployed on embedded devices due to their high parameter count. In this paper, we propose an efficient suite of compression techniques, tailored to the RWKV architecture. These techniques include low-rank approximation, sparsity predictors, and clustering head, designed to align with the model size. Our methods compress the RWKV models by 4.95--3.8x with only 2.95pp loss in accuracy.

In this paper, we introduce AceMath, a suite of frontier math models that excel in solving complex math problems, along with highly effective reward models capable of evaluating generated solutions and reliably identifying the correct ones. To develop the instruction-tuned math models, we propose a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) process that first achieves competitive performance across general domains, followed by targeted fine-tuning for the math domain using a carefully curated set of prompts and synthetically generated responses. The resulting model, AceMath-72B-Instruct greatly outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-72B-Instruct, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet. To develop math-specialized reward model, we first construct AceMath-RewardBench, a comprehensive and robust benchmark for evaluating math reward models across diverse problems and difficulty levels. After that, we present a systematic approach to build our math reward models. The resulting model, AceMath-72B-RM, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reward models. Furthermore, when combining AceMath-72B-Instruct with AceMath-72B-RM, we achieve the highest average rm@8 score across the math reasoning benchmarks. We will release model weights, training data, and evaluation benchmarks at: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/acemath