Large language models (LLMs) are known to struggle with complicated reasoning tasks such as math word problems (MWPs). In this paper, we present how analogy from similarly structured questions can improve LLMs' problem-solving capabilities for MWPs. Specifically, we rely on the retrieval of problems with similar computational graphs to the given question to serve as exemplars in the prompt, providing the correct reasoning path for the generation model to refer to. Empirical results across six math word problem datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves a significant improvement of up to 6.7 percent on average in absolute value, compared to baseline methods. These results highlight our method's potential in addressing the reasoning challenges in current LLMs.

This paper presents a critical examination of current approaches to replicating OpenAI's O1 model capabilities, with particular focus on the widespread but often undisclosed use of knowledge distillation techniques. While our previous work (Part 1 (Qin et al., 2024)) explored the fundamental technical path to O1 replication, this study reveals how simple distillation from O1's API, combined with supervised fine-tuning, can achieve superior performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that a base model fine-tuned on simply tens of thousands of samples O1-distilled long-thought chains outperforms O1-preview on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) with minimal technical complexity. Moreover, our investigation extends beyond mathematical reasoning to explore the generalization capabilities of O1-distilled models across diverse tasks: hallucination, safety and open-domain QA. Notably, despite training only on mathematical problem-solving data, our models demonstrated strong generalization to open-ended QA tasks and became significantly less susceptible to sycophancy after fine-tuning. We deliberately make this finding public to promote transparency in AI research and to challenge the current trend of obscured technical claims in the field. Our work includes: (1) A detailed technical exposition of the distillation process and its effectiveness, (2) A comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating and categorizing O1 replication attempts based on their technical transparency and reproducibility, (3) A critical discussion of the limitations and potential risks of over-relying on distillation approaches, our analysis culminates in a crucial "bitter lesson": while the pursuit of more capable AI systems is important, the development of researchers grounded in firstprinciples thinking is paramount. This educational imperative represents not just a technical consideration, but a fundamental human mission that will shape the future of AI innovation.

When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to novel constructions that have never been uttered before. Language models are powerful tools that create representations of language by incrementally predicting the next word in a sentence, and they have had a tremendous societal impact in recent years. The central research question of this thesis is whether these models possess a deep understanding of grammatical structure similar to that of humans. This question lies at the intersection of natural language processing, linguistics, and interpretability. To address it, we will develop novel interpretability techniques that enhance our understanding of the complex nature of large-scale language models. We approach our research question from three directions. First, we explore the presence of abstract linguistic information through structural priming, a key paradigm in psycholinguistics for uncovering grammatical structure in human language processing. Next, we examine various linguistic phenomena, such as adjective order and negative polarity items, and connect a model's comprehension of these phenomena to the data distribution on which it was trained. Finally, we introduce a controlled testbed for studying hierarchical structure in language models using various synthetic languages of increasing complexity and examine the role of feature interactions in modelling this structure. Our findings offer a detailed account of the grammatical knowledge embedded in language model representations and provide several directions for investigating fundamental linguistic questions using computational methods.

We explore the collaborative dynamics of an innovative language model interaction system involving advanced models such as GPT-4-0125-preview, Meta-LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct, Claude-3-Opus, and Gemini-1.5-Flash. These models generate and answer complex, PhD-level statistical questions without exact ground-truth answers. Our study investigates how inter-model consensus enhances the reliability and precision of responses. By employing statistical methods such as chi-square tests, Fleiss' Kappa, and confidence interval analysis, we evaluate consensus rates and inter-rater agreement to quantify the reliability of collaborative outputs. Key results reveal that Claude and GPT-4 exhibit the highest reliability and consistency, as evidenced by their narrower confidence intervals and higher alignment with question-generating models. Conversely, Gemini and LLaMA show more significant variability in their consensus rates, as reflected in wider confidence intervals and lower reliability percentages. These findings demonstrate that collaborative interactions among large language models (LLMs) significantly improve response reliability, offering novel insights into autonomous, cooperative reasoning and validation in AI systems.

In the area of recommender systems, the vast majority of research efforts is spent on developing increasingly sophisticated recommendation models, also using increasingly more computational resources. Unfortunately, most of these research efforts target a very small set of application domains, mostly e-commerce and media recommendation. Furthermore, many of these models are never evaluated with users, let alone put into practice. The scientific, economic and societal value of much of these efforts by scholars therefore remains largely unclear. To achieve a stronger positive impact resulting from these efforts, we posit that we as a research community should more often address use cases where recommender systems contribute to societal good (RS4Good). In this opinion piece, we first discuss a number of examples where the use of recommender systems for problems of societal concern has been successfully explored in the literature. We then proceed by outlining a paradigmatic shift that is needed to conduct successful RS4Good research, where the key ingredients are interdisciplinary collaborations and longitudinal evaluation approaches with humans in the loop.

We present our submission to the BabyLM challenge, aiming to push the boundaries of data-efficient language model pretraining. Our method builds upon deep mutual learning, introducing a student model search for diverse initialization. We address the limitation of treating students equally by formulating weighted mutual learning as a bi-level optimization problem. The inner loop learns compact students through online distillation, while the outer loop optimizes weights for better knowledge distillation from diverse students. This dynamic weighting strategy eliminates the need for a teacher model, reducing computational requirements. Our evaluations show that teacher-less methods can match or surpass teacher-supervised approaches.

Artistic typography is a technique to visualize the meaning of input character in an imaginable and readable manner. With powerful text-to-image diffusion models, existing methods directly design the overall geometry and texture of input character, making it challenging to ensure both creativity and legibility. In this paper, we introduce a dual-branch and training-free method, namely VitaGlyph, enabling flexible artistic typography along with controllable geometry change to maintain the readability. The key insight of VitaGlyph is to treat input character as a scene composed of Subject and Surrounding, followed by rendering them under varying degrees of geometry transformation. The subject flexibly expresses the essential concept of input character, while the surrounding enriches relevant background without altering the shape. Specifically, we implement VitaGlyph through a three-phase framework: (i) Knowledge Acquisition leverages large language models to design text descriptions of subject and surrounding. (ii) Regional decomposition detects the part that most matches the subject description and divides input glyph image into subject and surrounding regions. (iii) Typography Stylization firstly refines the structure of subject region via Semantic Typography, and then separately renders the textures of Subject and Surrounding regions through Controllable Compositional Generation. Experimental results demonstrate that VitaGlyph not only achieves better artistry and readability, but also manages to depict multiple customize concepts, facilitating more creative and pleasing artistic typography generation. Our code will be made publicly at https://github.com/Carlofkl/VitaGlyph.

One of the difficulties imposed on the manipulation of deformable objects is their characterization and the detection of representative keypoints for the purpose of manipulation. A keen interest was manifested by researchers in the last decade to characterize and manipulate deformable objects of non-fluid nature, such as clothes and ropes. Even though several propositions were made in the regard of object characterization, however researchers were always confronted with the need of pixel-level information of the object through images to extract relevant information. This usually is accomplished by means of segmentation networks trained on manually labeled data for this purpose. In this paper, we address the subject of characterizing weld pool to define stable features that serve as information for further motion control objectives. We achieve this by employing different pipelines. The first one consists of characterizing fluid deformable objects through the use of a generative model that is trained using a teacher-student framework. And in the second one we leverage foundation models by using them as teachers to characterize the object in the image, without the need of any pre-training and any dataset. The performance of knowledge distillation from foundation models into a smaller generative model shows prominent results in the characterization of deformable objects. The student network was capable of learning to retrieve the keypoitns of the object with an error of 13.4 pixels. And the teacher was evaluated based on its capacities to retrieve pixel level information represented by the object mask, with a mean Intersection Over Union (mIoU) of 75.26%.

This study introduces growth-based training strategies that incrementally increase parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) depth during training, mitigating overfitting and managing model complexity dynamically. We develop three distinct methods: Block Growth, Sequential Feature Map Growth, and Interleave Feature Map Growth, which add reuploader blocks to PQCs adaptively, expanding the accessible frequency spectrum of the model in response to training needs. This approach enables PQCs to achieve more stable convergence and generalization, even in noisy settings. We evaluate our methods on regression tasks and the 2D Laplace equation, demonstrating that dynamic growth methods outperform traditional, fixed-depth approaches, achieving lower final losses and reduced variance between runs. These findings underscore the potential of growth-based PQCs for quantum scientific machine learning (QSciML) applications, where balancing expressivity and stability is essential.

To demonstrate supremacy of quantum computing, increasingly large-scale superconducting quantum computing chips are being designed and fabricated, sparking the demand for electronic design automation in pursuit of better efficiency and effectiveness. However, the complexity of simulating quantum systems poses a significant challenge to computer-aided design of quantum chips. Harnessing the scalability of graph neural networks (GNNs), we here propose a parameter designing algorithm for large-scale superconducting quantum circuits. The algorithm depends on the so-called 'three-stair scaling' mechanism, which comprises two neural-network models: an evaluator supervisedly trained on small-scale circuits for applying to medium-scale circuits, and a designer unsupervisedly trained on medium-scale circuits for applying to large-scale ones. We demonstrate our algorithm in mitigating quantum crosstalk errors, which are commonly present and closely related to the graph structures and parameter assignments of superconducting quantum circuits. Parameters for both single- and two-qubit gates are considered simultaneously. Numerical results indicate that the well-trained designer achieves notable advantages not only in efficiency but also in effectiveness, especially for large-scale circuits. For example, in superconducting quantum circuits consisting of around 870 qubits, the trained designer requires only 27 seconds to complete the frequency designing task which necessitates 90 minutes for the traditional Snake algorithm. More importantly, the crosstalk errors using our algorithm are only 51% of those produced by the Snake algorithm. Overall, this study initially demonstrates the advantages of applying graph neural networks to design parameters in quantum processors, and provides insights for systems where large-scale numerical simulations are challenging in electronic design automation.