Education
Evaluating LLM-Contaminated Crowdsourcing Data Without Ground Truth
The recent success of generative AI highlights the crucial role of high-quality human feedback in building trustworthy AI systems. However, the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) by crowdsourcing workers poses a significant challenge: datasets intended to reflect human input may be compromised by LLM-generated responses. Existing LLM detection approaches often rely on high-dimensional training data such as text, making them unsuitable for structured annotation tasks like multiple-choice labeling. In this work, we investigate the potential of peer prediction--a mechanism that evaluates the information within workers' responses--to mitigate LLM-assisted cheating in crowdsourcing with a focus on annotation tasks.
FINERS: Fine-grained Reasoning and Segmentation of Small Objects with Reinforcement Learning
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, due to the restricted input resolutions, MLLMs face significant challenges in precisely understanding and localizing visual details in high-resolution images--particularly when dealing with extra-small objects embedded in cluttered contexts. To address this issue, we propose FINERS, a two-stage MLLM-based reinforcement learning framework for jointly reasoning and segmenting extremely small objects within high-resolution scenes. FINERS adopts a coarse-to-fine pipeline comprising Global Semantic Exploration (GSE) and Localized Perceptual Refinement (LPR). Specifically, GSE performs instruction-guided reasoning to generate a textural response and a coarse target region, while LPR refines this region to produce an accurate bounding box and segmentation mask. To couple the two stages, we introduce a locate-informed retrospective reward, where LPR's outputs are used to optimize GSE for more robust coarse region exploration.
Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLMReasoning Incentivization
Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on external supervisions-such as labeled reasoning traces, verified golden answers, or pre-trained reward models. In this work, we propose Entropy Minimized Policy Optimization (EMPO), which makes an early attempt at fully unsupervised LLM reasoning incentivization. By minimizing the semantic entropy of LLMs on unlabeled questions, EMPO achieves competitive performance compared to supervised counterparts. Specifically, without any external supervision, EMPO boosts the accuracy of Qwen2.5-Math-7BBase from 33.7% to 51.6% on math benchmarks and improves the accuracy of Qwen2.5-7BBase from 32.1% to 50.1% on MMLU-Pro. Primary analysis are also provided to interpret the effectiveness of EMPO.
MMAR: AChallenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix
We introduce MMAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the deep reasoning capabilities of Audio-Language Models (ALMs) across massive multi-disciplinary tasks. MMAR comprises 1,000 meticulously curated audio-question-answer triplets, collected from real-world internet videos and refined through iterative error corrections and quality checks to ensure high quality. Unlike existing benchmarks that are limited to specific domains of sound, music, or speech, MMAR extends them to a broad spectrum of real-world audio scenarios, including mixedmodality combinations of sound, music, and speech. Each question in MMAR is hierarchically categorized across four reasoning layers: Signal, Perception, Semantic, and Cultural, with additional sub-categories within each layer to reflect task diversity and complexity. To further foster research in this area, we annotate every question with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationale to promote future advancements in audio reasoning.
Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools
Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While integrating computational tools such as Code Interpreters (CIs) offers a promising solution, it introduces a critical challenge: a conflict between the model's internal, probabilistic reasoning and the external, deterministic knowledge provided by the CI, which often leads models to unproductive deliberation. To overcome this, we introduce CoRT (Code-Optimized Reasoning Training), a post-training framework designed to teach LRMs to effectively utilize CIs. We propose Hint-Engineering, a new data synthesis strategy that strategically injects diverse hints at optimal points within reasoning paths. This approach generates high-quality, code-integrated reasoning data specifically tailored to optimize LRMCI interaction. Using this method, we have synthesized 30 high-quality samples to post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters through supervised fine-tuning.
6075d47368ddf560e92efd53264b5405-Paper-Conference.pdf
Visual Reasoning (AVR) entails discerning latent patterns in visual data and inferring underlying rules. Existing solutions often lack scalability and adaptability, as deep architectures tend to overfit training data, and static neural networks fail to dynamically capture diverse rules. To tackle the challenges, we propose a Dynamic and Scalable Reasoning Framework (DSRF) that greatly enhances the reasoning ability by widening the network instead of deepening it, and dynamically adjusting the reasoning network to better fit novel samples instead of a static network. Specifically, we design a Multi-View Reasoning Pyramid (MVRP) to capture complex rules through layered reasoning to focus features at each view on distinct combinations of attributes, widening the reasoning network to cover more attribute combinations analogous to complex reasoning rules. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Domain-Contrast Prediction (DDCP) block to handle varying task-specific relationships dynamically by introducing a Gram matrix to model feature distributions, and a gate matrix to capture subtle domain differences between context and target features. Extensive experiments on six AVR tasks demonstrate DSRF's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art results under various settings. Code is available here: https://github.com/UNNCRoxLi/DSRF.
College Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse
This week only, every donation is doubled! Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we're still well behind where we need to be. But there's good news: This week, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000 We need you right now. We need you right now. The wave of booing aimed at AI-pilled commencement speakers signals a sea change in public opinion.
APartition Cover Approach for Tokenization
Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which formulates the tokenization problem as a compression problem and tackles it by performing sequences of merges. In this work, we formulate tokenization as an optimization objective, show that it is NP-hard via a simple reduction from vertex cover, and propose a polynomial-time greedy algorithm GREEDTOK. Our formulation naturally relaxes to the well-studied weighted maximum coverage problem which has a simple (1 1/e)-approximation algorithm GREEDWMC. Through empirical evaluations on real-world corpora, we show that GREEDTOK outperforms BPE and UNIGRAM on compression and achieves a covering score comparable to GREEDWMC.