Education
RedOne: Revealing Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services
Zhao, Fei, Lu, Chonggang, Wang, Yue, Xie, Zheyong, Liu, Ziyan, Qian, Haofu, Huang, JianZhao, Shi, Fangcheng, Meng, Zijie, Guo, Hongcheng, He, Mingqian, Lyu, Xinze, Lu, Yiming, Xiang, Ziyang, Ye, Zheyu, Lu, Chengqiang, Xu, Zhe, Wu, Yi, Hu, Yao, Gao, Yan, Fan, Jun, Jiang, Xiaolong, Liu, Weiting, Wang, Boyang, Cao, Shaosheng
As a primary medium for modern information dissemination, social networking services (SNS) have experienced rapid growth, which has proposed significant challenges for platform content management and interaction quality improvement. Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has offered potential solutions but existing studies focus on isolated tasks, which not only encounter diminishing benefit from the data scaling within individual scenarios but also fail to flexibly adapt to diverse real-world context. To address these challenges, we introduce RedOne, a domain-specific LLM designed to break the performance bottleneck of single-task baselines and establish a comprehensive foundation for the SNS. RedOne was developed through a three-stage training strategy consisting of continue pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization, using a large-scale real-world dataset. Through extensive experiments, RedOne maintains strong general capabilities, and achieves an average improvement up to 14.02% across 8 major SNS tasks and 7.56% in SNS bilingual evaluation benchmark, compared with base models. Furthermore, through online testing, RedOne reduced the exposure rate in harmful content detection by 11.23% and improved the click page rate in post-view search by 14.95% compared with single-tasks finetuned baseline models. These results establish RedOne as a robust domain-specific LLM for SNS, demonstrating excellent generalization across various tasks and promising applicability in real-world scenarios.
Understanding and Improving Length Generalization in Recurrent Models
Ruiz, Ricardo Buitrago, Gu, Albert
In addition to matching the performance of Transformers (Vaswani et al. 2017) across many tasks, the recurrent mechanism brings two benefits: the ability to efficiently process long sequences thanks to its linear complexity, and the capacity to easily process tokens beyond their training context by simply rolling out the state. Nevertheless, in practice these benefits are often unrealized, given that their performance can drop considerably when the sequence length exceeds their training context (Ben-Kish et al. 2024; Waleffe et al. 2024; Ye et al. 2025; Yuan et al. 2024). This naturally leads to two questions: (1) why do these models fail to length generalize? and (2) how can we efficiently enable length generalization across several recurrent models? Recently, some works have studied the length generalization of Mamba (Dao and Gu 2024) and have proposed solutions such as forcing the model to forget previous context (Yingfa Chen et al. 2024) or skipping tokens in the state update to reduce the effective context of the processed sequence (Ben-Kish et al. 2024; Ye et al. 2025). However, these methods require changing the internal mechanism of Mamba and might not be easily transferable to other architectures. Other works have linked length generalization to state capacity and overfitting (Yingfa Chen et al. 2024; S. Wang 2024), proposing training on longer sequences and with Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (TBTT) (Sutskever 2013; Williams and J. Peng 1990) as a way to enable length generalization. In this work, we reason about the distribution of states that the model is trained on to introduce a precise hypothesis that explains why recurrent models fail to length generalize. Moreover, we perform comprehensive interventions that elucidate on what distributions recurrent models need to be trained to enable length generalization. 1
GradMetaNet: An Equivariant Architecture for Learning on Gradients
Gelberg, Yoav, Eitan, Yam, Navon, Aviv, Shamsian, Aviv, Theo, null, Putterman, null, Bronstein, Michael, Maron, Haggai
Gradients of neural networks encode valuable information for optimization, editing, and analysis of models. Therefore, practitioners often treat gradients as inputs to task-specific algorithms, e.g. for pruning or optimization. Recent works explore learning algorithms that operate directly on gradients but use architectures that are not specifically designed for gradient processing, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we present a principled approach for designing architectures that process gradients. Our approach is guided by three principles: (1) equivariant design that preserves neuron permutation symmetries, (2) processing sets of gradients across multiple data points to capture curvature information, and (3) efficient gradient representation through rank-1 decomposition. Based on these principles, we introduce GradMetaNet, a novel architecture for learning on gradients, constructed from simple equivariant blocks. We prove universality results for GradMetaNet, and show that previous approaches cannot approximate natural gradient-based functions that GradMetaNet can. We then demonstrate GradMetaNet's effectiveness on a diverse set of gradient-based tasks on MLPs and transformers, such as learned optimization, INR editing, and estimating loss landscape curvature.
A Community-driven vision for a new Knowledge Resource for AI
Chaudhri, Vinay K, Baru, Chaitan, Bennett, Brandon, Bhatt, Mehul, Cassel, Darion, Cohn, Anthony G, Dechter, Rina, Erdem, Esra, Ferrucci, Dave, Forbus, Ken, Gelfond, Gregory, Genesereth, Michael, Gordon, Andrew S., Grosof, Benjamin, Gupta, Gopal, Hendler, Jim, Israni, Sharat, Josephson, Tyler R., Kyllonen, Patrick, Lierler, Yuliya, Lifschitz, Vladimir, McFate, Clifton, McGinty, Hande K., Morgenstern, Leora, Oltramari, Alessandro, Paritosh, Praveen, Roth, Dan, Shepard, Blake, Shimzu, Cogan, Vrandeฤiฤ, Denny, Whiting, Mark, Witbrock, Michael
The Cyc project, started in 1984, created the first large-scale database of commonsense knowledge. The initiative continues to this day with its aim to provide a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of commonsense knowledge to enable human-like reasoning for AI systems. In the concluding paragraph of his Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (CACM) 1995 article A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure [52], Cyc's founder Douglas B. Lenat wrote: Is Cyc necessary? How far would a user get with something simpler than Cyc but that lacks everyday commonsense knowledge? Nobody knows; the question will be settled empirically. Our guess is most of these applications will eventually tap the synergy in a suite of sources (including neural nets and decision theory), one of which will be Cyc. Although 30 years have passed since the above article was written, AI research community has not conclusively settled [10] the question "How far would a user get with something simpler than Cyc but that lacks everyday commonsense knowledge?" However, it is clear that significant strides have been made in addressing many of the tasks that were original Cyc use cases, including information retrieval, semi-automatically linking multiple heterogeneous external information sources, spelling and grammar correction, machine translation, natural language understanding and speech understanding.
Comparing human and LLM proofreading in L2 writing: Impact on lexical and syntactic features
Sung, Hakyung, Csuros, Karla, Sung, Min-Chang
This study examines the lexical and syntactic interventions of human and LLM proofreading aimed at improving overall intelligibility in identical second language writings, and evaluates the consistency of outcomes across three LLMs (ChatGPT-4o, Llama3.1-8b, Deepseek-r1-8b). Findings show that both human and LLM proofreading enhance bigram lexical features, which may contribute to better coherence and contextual connectedness between adjacent words. However, LLM proofreading exhibits a more generative approach, extensively reworking vocabulary and sentence structures, such as employing more diverse and sophisticated vocabulary and incorporating a greater number of adjective modifiers in noun phrases. The proofreading outcomes are highly consistent in major lexical and syntactic features across the three models.
Understanding the Impact of Sampling Quality in Direct Preference Optimization
Kim, Kyung Rok, Bai, Yumo, Wang, Chonghuan, Chen, Guanting
We study how data of higher quality can be leveraged to improve performance in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), aiming to understand its impact on DPO training dynamics. Our analyses show that both the solution space and the convergence behavior of DPO depend on the support and quality of the data-generating distribution. We first analyze how data and reference policy influence policy updates during gradient descent, and how a practical phenomenon known as likelihood displacement can interfere with the desired dynamics. We then design a simplified yet well-structured alignment model as a proxy that preserves most of the beneficial properties of RLHF while avoiding likelihood displacement. Based on this model, we develop quantitative results showing how more frequent high-quality responses amplify the gradient signal and improve the optimization landscape, leading to more effective policy learning. Our theoretical findings are supported by empirical experiments and provide a principled justification for the online DPO framework in practice.
STRAP: Spatio-Temporal Pattern Retrieval for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Zhang, Haoyu, Zhang, Wentao, Miao, Hao, Jiang, Xinke, Fang, Yuchen, Zhang, Yifan
Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling dynamic graph-structured data across diverse domains. However, they often fail to generalize in Spatio-Temporal Out-of-Distribution (STOOD) scenarios, where both temporal dynamics and spatial structures evolve beyond the training distribution. To address this problem, we propose an innovative Spatio-Temporal Retrieval-Augmented Pattern Learning framework,STRAP, which enhances model generalization by integrating retrieval-augmented learning into the STGNN continue learning pipeline. The core of STRAP is a compact and expressive pattern library that stores representative spatio-temporal patterns enriched with historical, structural, and semantic information, which is obtained and optimized during the training phase. During inference, STRAP retrieves relevant patterns from this library based on similarity to the current input and injects them into the model via a plug-and-play prompting mechanism. This not only strengthens spatio-temporal representations but also mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, STRAP introduces a knowledge-balancing objective to harmonize new information with retrieved knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world streaming graph datasets show that STRAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art STGNN baselines on STOOD tasks, demonstrating its robustness, adaptability, and strong generalization capability without task-specific fine-tuning.
From Problem-Solving to Teaching Problem-Solving: Aligning LLMs with Pedagogy using Reinforcement Learning
Dinucu-Jianu, David, Macina, Jakub, Daheim, Nico, Hakimi, Ido, Gurevych, Iryna, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Large language models (LLMs) can transform education, but their optimization for direct question-answering often undermines effective pedagogy which requires strategically withholding answers. To mitigate this, we propose an online reinforcement learning (RL)-based alignment framework that can quickly adapt LLMs into effective tutors using simulated student-tutor interactions by emphasizing pedagogical quality and guided problem-solving over simply giving away answers. We use our method to train a 7B parameter tutor model without human annotations which reaches similar performance to larger proprietary models like LearnLM. We introduce a controllable reward weighting to balance pedagogical support and student solving accuracy, allowing us to trace the Pareto frontier between these two objectives. Our models better preserve reasoning capabilities than single-turn SFT baselines and can optionally enhance interpretability through thinking tags that expose the model's instructional planning.
SoLoPO: Unlocking Long-Context Capabilities in LLMs via Short-to-Long Preference Optimization
Sun, Huashan, Liao, Shengyi, Han, Yansen, Bai, Yu, Gao, Yang, Fu, Cheng, Shen, Weizhou, Wan, Fanqi, Yan, Ming, Zhang, Ji, Huang, Fei
Despite advances in pretraining with extended context lengths, large language models (LLMs) still face challenges in effectively utilizing real-world long-context information, primarily due to insufficient long-context alignment caused by data quality issues, training inefficiencies, and the lack of well-designed optimization objectives. To address these limitations, we propose a framework named $\textbf{S}$h$\textbf{o}$rt-to-$\textbf{Lo}$ng $\textbf{P}$reference $\textbf{O}$ptimization ($\textbf{SoLoPO}$), decoupling long-context preference optimization (PO) into two components: short-context PO and short-to-long reward alignment (SoLo-RA), supported by both theoretical and empirical evidence. Specifically, short-context PO leverages preference pairs sampled from short contexts to enhance the model's contextual knowledge utilization ability. Meanwhile, SoLo-RA explicitly encourages reward score consistency utilization for the responses when conditioned on both short and long contexts that contain identical task-relevant information. This facilitates transferring the model's ability to handle short contexts into long-context scenarios. SoLoPO is compatible with mainstream preference optimization algorithms, while substantially improving the efficiency of data construction and training processes. Experimental results show that SoLoPO enhances all these algorithms with respect to stronger length and domain generalization abilities across various long-context benchmarks, while achieving notable improvements in both computational and memory efficiency.
DUMP: Automated Distribution-Level Curriculum Learning for RL-based LLM Post-training
Wang, Zhenting, Cui, Guofeng, Li, Yu-Jhe, Wan, Kun, Zhao, Wentian
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training have led to notable improvements in large language models (LLMs), particularly in enhancing their reasoning capabilities to handle complex tasks. However, most existing methods treat the training data as a unified whole, overlooking the fact that modern LLM training often involves a mixture of data from diverse distributions-varying in both source and difficulty. This heterogeneity introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively schedule training across distributions to optimize learning efficiency. In this paper, we present a principled curriculum learning framework grounded in the notion of distribution-level learnability. Our core insight is that the magnitude of policy advantages reflects how much a model can still benefit from further training on a given distribution. Based on this, we propose a distribution-level curriculum learning framework for RL-based LLM post-training, which leverages the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) principle to dynamically adjust sampling probabilities for different distrubutions. This approach prioritizes distributions with either high average advantage (exploitation) or low sample count (exploration), yielding an adaptive and theoretically grounded training schedule. We instantiate our curriculum learning framework with GRPO as the underlying RL algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on logic reasoning datasets with multiple difficulties and sources. Our experiments show that our framework significantly improves convergence speed and final performance, highlighting the value of distribution-aware curriculum strategies in LLM post-training. Code: https://github.com/ZhentingWang/DUMP.