Deep Learning
MegaScale-MoE: Large-Scale Communication-Efficient Training of Mixture-of-Experts Models in Production
Jin, Chao, Jiang, Ziheng, Bai, Zhihao, Zhong, Zheng, Liu, Juncai, Li, Xiang, Zheng, Ningxin, Wang, Xi, Xie, Cong, Huang, Qi, Heng, Wen, Ma, Yiyuan, Bao, Wenlei, Zheng, Size, Peng, Yanghua, Lin, Haibin, Liu, Xuanzhe, Jin, Xin, Liu, Xin
We present MegaScale-MoE, a production system tailored for the efficient training of large-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) models. MoE emerges as a promising architecture to scale large language models (LLMs) to unprecedented sizes, thereby enhancing model performance. However, existing MoE training systems experience a degradation in training efficiency, exacerbated by the escalating scale of MoE models and the continuous evolution of hardware. Recognizing the pivotal role of efficient communication in enhancing MoE training, MegaScale-MoE customizes communication-efficient parallelism strategies for attention and FFNs in each MoE layer and adopts a holistic approach to overlap communication with computation at both inter- and intra-operator levels. Additionally, MegaScale-MoE applies communication compression with adjusted communication patterns to lower precision, further improving training efficiency. When training a 352B MoE model on 1,440 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, MegaScale-MoE achieves a training throughput of 1.41M tokens/s, improving the efficiency by 1.88$\times$ compared to Megatron-LM. We share our operational experience in accelerating MoE training and hope that by offering our insights in system design, this work will motivate future research in MoE systems.
JudgeSQL: Reasoning over SQL Candidates with Weighted Consensus Tournament
Bai, Jiayuan, Pan, Xuan-guang, Tao, Chongyang, Ma, Shuai
Text-to-SQL is a pivotal task that bridges natural language understanding and structured data access, yet it remains fundamentally challenging due to semantic ambiguity and complex compositional reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced SQL generation though prompting, supervised finetuning and reinforced tuning, the shift toward test-time scaling exposes a new bottleneck: selecting the correct query from a diverse candidate pool. Existing selection approaches, such as self-consistency or best-of-$N$ decoding, provide only shallow signals, making them prone to inconsistent scoring, fragile reasoning chains, and a failure to capture fine-grained semantic distinctions between closely related SQL candidates. To this end, we introduce JudgeSQL, a principled framework that redefines SQL candidate selection through structured reasoning and weighted consensus tournament mechanism. JudgeSQL develops a reasoning-based SQL judge model that distills reasoning traces with reinforcement learning guided by verifiable rewards, enabling accurate and interpretable judgments. Building on this, a weighted consensus tournament integrates explicit reasoning preferences with implicit generator confidence, yielding selections that are both more reliable and more efficient. Extensive experiments on the BIRD benchmark demonstrate that JudgeSQL exhibits superior SQL judgment capabilities and good cross-scale generalization and robustness to generator capacity.
AI Adoption in NGOs: A Systematic Literature Review
Rotter, Janne, Bailkoski, William
AI has the potential to significantly improve how NGOs utilize their limited resources for societal benefits, but evidence about how NGOs adopt AI remains scattered. In this study, we systematically investigate the types of AI adoption use cases in NGOs and identify common challenges and solutions, contextualized by organizational size and geographic context. We review the existing primary literature, including studies that investigate AI adoption in NGOs related to social impact between 2020 and 2025 in English. Following the PRISMA protocol, two independent reviewers conduct study selection, with regular cross-checking to ensure methodological rigour, resulting in a final literature body of 65 studies. Leveraging a thematic and narrative approach, we identify six AI use case categories in NGOs - Engagement, Creativity, Decision-Making, Prediction, Management, and Optimization - and extract common challenges and solutions within the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. By integrating our findings, this review provides a novel understanding of AI adoption in NGOs, linking specific use cases and challenges to organizational and environmental factors. Our results demonstrate that while AI is promising, adoption among NGOs remains uneven and biased towards larger organizations. Nevertheless, following a roadmap grounded in literature can help NGOs overcome initial barriers to AI adoption, ultimately improving effectiveness, engagement, and social impact.
Beat Tracking as Object Detection
We propose reframing this task as object detection, where beats and downbeats are modeled as temporal "objects." Adapting the FCOS detector from computer vision to 1D audio, we replace its original backbone with WaveBeat's temporal feature extractor and add a Feature Pyramid Network to capture multi-scale temporal patterns. The model predicts overlapping beat/downbeat intervals with confidence scores, followed by non-maximum suppression (NMS) to select final predictions. This NMS step serves a similar role to DBNs in traditional trackers, but is simpler and less heuristic. Evaluated on standard music datasets, our approach achieves competitive results, showing that object detection techniques can effectively model musical beats with minimal adaptation. 1. INTRODUCTION Beat tracking is a field of research in music information retrieval (MIR) which includes the task of beat and downbeat tracking, in which beat and downbeat positions are computationally predicted in music audio.
Where Did It All Go Wrong? A Hierarchical Look into Multi-Agent Error Attribution
Banerjee, Adi, Nair, Anirudh, Borogovac, Tarik
Error attribution in Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems presents a significant challenge in debugging and improving collaborative AI systems. Current approaches to pinpointing agent and step level failures in interaction traces - whether using all-at-once evaluation, step-by-step analysis, or binary search - fall short when analyzing complex patterns, struggling with both accuracy and consistency. We present ECHO (Error attribution through Contextual Hierarchy and Objective consensus analysis), a novel algorithm that combines hierarchical context representation, objective analysis-based evaluation, and consensus voting to improve error attribution accuracy. Our approach leverages a positional-based leveling of contextual understanding while maintaining objective evaluation criteria, ultimately reaching conclusions through a consensus mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that ECHO outperforms existing methods across various multi-agent interaction scenarios, showing particular strength in cases involving subtle reasoning errors and complex interdependencies. Our findings suggest that leveraging these concepts of structured, hierarchical context representation combined with consensus-based objective decision-making, provides a more robust framework for error attribution in multi-agent systems.
Auto-ARGUE: LLM-Based Report Generation Evaluation
Walden, William, Mason, Marc, Weller, Orion, Dietz, Laura, Conroy, John, Molino, Neil, Recknor, Hannah, Li, Bryan, Liu, Gabrielle Kaili-May, Hou, Yu, Lawrie, Dawn, Mayfield, James, Yang, Eugene
Generation of long-form, citation-backed reports is a primary use case for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. While open-source evaluation tools exist for various RAG tasks, ones tailored to report generation (RG) are lacking. Accordingly, we introduce Auto-ARGUE, a robust LLM-based implementation of the recently proposed ARGUE framework for RG evaluation.
GradES: Significantly Faster Training in Transformers with Gradient-Based Early Stopping
Wen, Qifu, Zeng, Xi, Zhou, Zihan, Liu, Shuaijun, Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi, Su, Ningxin, Rawassizadeh, Reza
Early stopping monitors global validation loss and halts all parameter updates simultaneously, which is computationally costly for large transformers due to the extended time required for validation inference. We propose \textit{GradES}, a novel gradient-based early stopping approach that operates within transformer components (attention projections and Feed-Forward layer matrices). We found that different components converge at varying rates during fine-tuning for both language and vision-language models. \textit{GradES} tracks the magnitude of gradient changes in backpropagation for these matrices during training. When a projection matrix's magnitude of gradient changes fall below a convergence threshold $τ$, we exclude that projection matrix from further updates individually, eliminating costly validation passes while allowing slow converging matrices to continue learning. \textit{GradES} speeds up training time by 1.57--7.22$\times$ while simultaneously enhancing generalization through early prevention of overfitting, resulting in 1.2\% higher average accuracy in language tasks and 3.88\% on multimodal benchmarks.
VerlTool: Towards Holistic Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Tool Use
Jiang, Dongfu, Lu, Yi, Li, Zhuofeng, Lyu, Zhiheng, Nie, Ping, Wang, Haozhe, Su, Alex, Chen, Hui, Zou, Kai, Du, Chao, Pang, Tianyu, Chen, Wenhu
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated success in enhancing LLM reasoning capabilities, but remains limited to single-turn interactions without tool integration. While recent Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Tool use (ARLT) approaches have emerged to address multi-turn tool interactions, existing works develop task-specific codebases that suffer from fragmentation, synchronous execution bottlenecks, and limited extensibility across domains. These inefficiencies hinder broader community adoption and algorithmic innovation. We introduce VerlTool, a unified and modular framework that addresses these limitations through systematic design principles. VerlTool provides four key contributions: (1) upstream alignment with VeRL ensuring compatibility and simplified maintenance, (2) unified tool management via standardized APIs supporting diverse modalities including code execution, search, SQL databases, and vision processing, (3) asynchronous rollout execution achieving near 2$\times$ speedup by eliminating synchronization bottlenecks, and (4) comprehensive evaluation demonstrating competitive performance across 6 ARLT domains. Our framework formalizes ARLT as multi-turn trajectories with multi-modal observation tokens (text/image/video), extending beyond single-turn RLVR paradigms. We train and evaluate models on mathematical reasoning, knowledge QA, SQL generation, visual reasoning, web search, and software engineering tasks, achieving results comparable to specialized systems while providing unified training infrastructure. The modular plugin architecture enables rapid tool integration requiring only lightweight Python definitions, significantly reducing development overhead and providing a scalable foundation for tool-augmented RL research. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/TIGER-AI-Lab/verl-tool.
No Label Left Behind: A Unified Surface Defect Detection Model for all Supervision Regimes
Rolih, Blaž, Fučka, Matic, Skočaj, Danijel
Surface defect detection is a critical task across numerous industries, aimed at efficiently identifying and localising imperfections or irregularities on manufactured components. While numerous methods have been proposed, many fail to meet industrial demands for high performance, efficiency, and adaptability. Existing approaches are often constrained to specific supervision scenarios and struggle to adapt to the diverse data annotations encountered in real-world manufacturing processes, such as unsupervised, weakly supervised, mixed supervision, and fully supervised settings. To address these challenges, we propose SuperSimpleNet, a highly efficient and adaptable discriminative model built on the foundation of SimpleNet. SuperSimpleNet incorporates a novel synthetic anomaly generation process, an enhanced classification head, and an improved learning procedure, enabling efficient training in all four supervision scenarios, making it the first model capable of fully leveraging all available data annotations. SuperSimpleNet sets a new standard for performance across all scenarios, as demonstrated by its results on four challenging benchmark datasets. Beyond accuracy, it is very fast, achieving an inference time below 10 ms. With its ability to unify diverse supervision paradigms while maintaining outstanding speed and reliability, SuperSimpleNet represents a promising step forward in addressing real-world manufacturing challenges and bridging the gap between academic research and industrial applications. Code: https://github.com/blaz-r/SuperSimpleNet
CLAIRE-DSA: Fluoroscopic Image Classification for Quality Assurance of Computer Vision Pipelines in Acute Ischemic Stroke
Berg, Cristo J. van den, Nijenhuis, Frank G. te, Blaauboer, Mirre J., van Erp, Daan T. W., Keppels, Carlijn M., van der Sluijs, Matthijs, Roozenbeek, Bob, van Zwam, Wim, Cornelissen, Sandra, Ruijters, Danny, Su, Ruisheng, van Walsum, Theo
Computer vision models can be used to assist during mechanical thrombectomy (MT) for acute ischemic stroke (AIS), but poor image quality often degrades performance. This work presents CLAIRE-DSA, a deep learning--based framework designed to categorize key image properties in minimum intensity projections (MinIPs) acquired during MT for AIS, supporting downstream quality control and workflow optimization. CLAIRE-DSA uses pre-trained ResNet backbone models, fine-tuned to predict nine image properties (e.g., presence of contrast, projection angle, motion artefact severity). Separate classifiers were trained on an annotated dataset containing $1,758$ fluoroscopic MinIPs. The model achieved excellent performance on all labels, with ROC-AUC ranging from $0.91$ to $0.98$, and precision ranging from $0.70$ to $1.00$. The ability of CLAIRE-DSA to identify suitable images was evaluated on a segmentation task by filtering poor quality images and comparing segmentation performance on filtered and unfiltered datasets. Segmentation success rate increased from $42%$ to $69%$, $p < 0.001$. CLAIRE-DSA demonstrates strong potential as an automated tool for accurately classifying image properties in DSA series of acute ischemic stroke patients, supporting image annotation and quality control in clinical and research applications. Source code is available at https://gitlab.com/icai-stroke-lab/wp3_neurointerventional_ai/claire-dsa.