Deep Learning
Yet Another Watermark for Large Language Models
Bao, Siyuan, Shi, Ying, Yang, Zhiguang, Wu, Hanzhou, Zhang, Xinpeng
Existing watermarking methods for large language models (LLMs) mainly embed watermark by adjusting the token sampling prediction or post-processing, lacking intrinsic coupling with LLMs, which may significantly reduce the semantic quality of the generated marked texts. Traditional watermarking methods based on training or fine-tuning may be extendable to LLMs. However, most of them are limited to the white-box scenario, or very time-consuming due to the massive parameters of LLMs. In this paper, we present a new watermarking framework for LLMs, where the watermark is embedded into the LLM by manipulating the internal parameters of the LLM, and can be extracted from the generated text without accessing the LLM. Comparing with related methods, the proposed method entangles the watermark with the intrinsic parameters of the LLM, which better balances the robustness and imperceptibility of the watermark. Moreover, the proposed method enables us to extract the watermark under the black-box scenario, which is computationally efficient for use. Experimental results have also verified the feasibility, superiority and practicality. This work provides a new perspective different from mainstream works, which may shed light on future research.
Preservation of Language Understanding Capabilities in Speech-aware Large Language Models
Kubis, Marek, Skรณrzewski, Paweล, Christop, Iwona, Czyลผnikiewicz, Mateusz, Kubiak, Jakub, Bondaruk, ลukasz, Lewandowski, Marcin
The paper presents C3T (Cross-modal Capabilities Conservation Test), a new benchmark for assessing the performance of speech-aware large language models. The benchmark utilizes textual tasks and a voice cloning text-to-speech model to quantify the extent to which language understanding capabilities are preserved when the model is accessed via speech input. C3T quantifies the fairness of the model for different categories of speakers and its robustness across text and speech modalities.
FEWT: Improving Humanoid Robot Perception with Frequency-Enhanced Wavelet-based Transformers
Huang, Jiaxin, Liu, Hanyu, Ma, Yunsheng, Shen, Jian, Zheng, Yilin, Wen, Jiayi, Wan, Baishu, Li, Pan, Song, Zhigong
--The embodied intelligence bridges the physical world and information space. As its typical physical embodiment, humanoid robots have shown great promise through robot learning algorithms in recent years. In this study, a hardware platform, including humanoid robot and exoskeleton -style teleoperation cabin, was developed to realize intuitive remote manipulation and efficient collection of anthropomorphic action data. To improve the perception representation of humanoid robot, an imitation l earning framework, termed Frequency-Enhanced Wavelet -based Transformer (FEWT), was proposed, which consists of two primary modules: Frequency-Enhanced Efficient Multi -Scale Attention (FE-EMA) and Time -Series Discrete Wavelet Transform (TS-DWT). This fusion is able to capture feature information across various scales effectively, thereby enhancing model robustness. Experimental performance demonstrates that FEWT improves the success rate of the state -of-the -art algorithm (Action Chunking with Transformers, ACT baseline) by up to 30% in simulation and by 6-12% in real -world . In the field of imitation learning [1], humanoid robot learning effectiveness is usually determined by the quality and diversity of expert demonstrations and the perception representations.
Merge-of-Thought Distillation
Shen, Zhanming, Qin, Zeyu, Huang, Zenan, Chen, Hao, Hu, Jiaqi, Zhuang, Yihong, Lu, Guoshan, Chen, Gang, Zhao, Junbo
Efficient reasoning distillation for long chain-of-thought (CoT) models is increasingly constrained by the assumption of a single oracle teacher, despite the practical availability of multiple candidate teachers and growing CoT corpora. We revisit teacher selection and observe that different students have different "best teachers," and even for the same student, the best teacher can vary across datasets. Therefore, to unify multiple teachers' reasoning abilities into a student to overcome conflicts among various teachers' supervision, we propose Merge-of-Thought Distillation (MoT), a lightweight framework that alternates between teacher-specific supervised fine-tuning branches and weight-space merging of the resulting student variants. On competition math benchmarks, using only about 200 CoT samples, applying MoT to a Qwen3-14B student surpasses strong models including Deepseek-R1, Qwen3-32B, and OpenAI-O1, demonstrating substantial gains. Besides, MoT consistently outperforms the best single-teacher distillation, improves general reasoning beyond mathematics while reducing catastrophic forgetting, and shows robustness to distribution-shifted and peer-level teachers. Finally, we have demonstrated MoT possesses consensus CoT by eliminating teacher-specific inductive biases and inter-teacher conflicts while repeatedly reinforcing the learning of consensus reasoning features. These results position MoT as a simple, effective route to efficiently distilling long CoT capabilities from diverse teachers into compact students.
Beyond Two-Stage Training: Cooperative SFT and RL for LLM Reasoning
Chen, Liang, Han, Xueting, Shen, Li, Bai, Jing, Wong, Kam-Fai
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a warm-up stage for RL, this decoupled two-stage approach suffers from catastrophic forgetting: second-stage RL gradually loses SFT-acquired behaviors and inefficiently explores new patterns. This study introduces a novel method for learning reasoning models that employs bilevel optimization to facilitate better cooperation between these training paradigms. By conditioning the SFT objective on the optimal RL policy, our approach enables SFT to meta-learn how to guide RL's optimization process. During training, the lower level performs RL updates while simultaneously receiving SFT supervision, and the upper level explicitly maximizes the cooperative gain-the performance advantage of joint SFT-RL training over RL alone. Empirical evaluations on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines and achieves a better balance between effectiveness and efficiency.
Cross-Question Method Reuse in Large Language Models: From Word-Level Prediction to Rational Logical-Layer Reasoning
Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to assist in finding solutions for diverse questions. Prior work has proposed representing a method as a pair of a question and its corresponding solution, enabling method reuse. However, existing approaches typically require the questions to be highly similar . In this paper, we extend the scope of method reuse to address questions with low similarity or with hidden similarities that are not explicitly observable. For questions that are similar in a general-specific sense (i.e., broader or narrower in scope), we propose to first separate the question and solution, rather than directly feeding the pair to the LLM. The LLM is then guided to adapt the solution to new but related questions, allowing it to focus on solution transfer rather than question recognition. Furthermore, we extend this approach to cases where questions only share partial features or hidden characteristics. This enables cross-question method reuse beyond conventional similarity constraints. Experimental verification shows that our scope-extension approach increases the probability of filtering out reusable solutions, thereby improving the effectiveness of cross-question method reuse. Large language models (LLMs) [1] are increasingly used to assist with complex tasks such as writing, reasoning [2], and problem solving [3]. Traditional LLMs are primarily trained at the word level to predict the next token given a context, or through masked word prediction by filling in missing tokens [4].
EviNote-RAG: Enhancing RAG Models via Answer-Supportive Evidence Notes
Dai, Yuqin, Wang, Guoqing, Wang, Yuan, Dou, Kairan, Zhou, Kaichen, Zhang, Zhanwei, Yang, Shuo, Tang, Fei, Yin, Jun, Zeng, Pengyu, Ying, Zhenzhe, Yi, Can, Meng, Changhua, Zhou, Yuchen, Shen, Yongliang, Lu, Shuai
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced open-domain question answering by incorporating external information into model reasoning. However, effectively leveraging external information to enhance reasoning presents the following challenges: (1) low signal-to-noise ratio, where answer-supportive external information is diluted by irrelevant material, and (2) error accumulation, which arises in multi-hop reasoning when incomplete or misleading information is incorporated. To address these challenges, we introduce EviNote-RAG, a framework that follows a retrieve-note-answer workflow. Instead of reasoning directly over raw external information, the model first produces Supportive-Evidence Notes (SENs), which concisely preserve answer-critical information and explicitly mark key and uncertainty information to improve accuracy. We further design an entailment-based Evidence Quality Reward (EQR) to ensure that SENs are logically sufficient to derive the final answer, thereby enhancing SENs' quality. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain QA benchmarks show that EviNote-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving answer accuracy, training stability, robustness, and efficiency. In particular, it yields relative F1 gains of 20% on HotpotQA (+0.093), 40% on Bamboogle (+0.151), and 91% on 2Wiki (+0.256), benefiting from improvements in the reasoning process.
PETLP: A Privacy-by-Design Pipeline for Social Media Data in AI Research
Oh, Nick, Vrakas, Giorgos D., Brooke, Siรขn J. M., Moriniรจre, Sasha, Duke, Toju
We introduce PETLP (Privacy-by-design Extract, Transform, Load, and Present), a compliance framework that embeds legal safeguards directly into extended ETL pipelines. Central to PETLP is treating Data Protection Impact Assessments as living documents that evolve from preregistration through dissemination. Through systematic Red-dit analysis, we demonstrate how extraction rights fundamentally differ between qualifying research organisations (who can invoke DSM Article 3 to override platform restrictions) and commercial entities (bound by terms of service), whilst GDPR obligations apply universally. We demonstrate why true anonymisation remains unachievable for social media data and expose the legal gap between permitted dataset creation and uncertain model distribution. By structuring compliance decisions into practical workflows and simplifying institutional data management plans, PETLP enables researchers to navigate regulatory complexity with confidence, bridging the gap between legal requirements and research practice.
On the Generalization of SFT: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective with Reward Rectification
Wu, Yongliang, Zhou, Yizhou, Ziheng, Zhou, Peng, Yingzhe, Ye, Xinyu, Hu, Xinting, Zhu, Wenbo, Qi, Lu, Yang, Ming-Hsuan, Yang, Xu
In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through mathematical analysis, we reveal that standard SFT gradients implicitly encode a problematic reward structure that may severely restrict the generalization capabilities of model. To rectify this, we propose Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT), stabilizing gradient updates for each token by dynamically rescaling the objective function with the probability of this token. With just a single-line change, the method outperforms standard SFT on multiple difficult benchmarks and base models, from math reasoning to code generation and multi-modal tasks, demonstrating improved generalization. Additionally, DFT achieves competitive results in offline RL settings, providing an effective yet streamlined alternative. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which adapts models to expert demonstrations, has become the standard post-training paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs). It enables efficient task adaptation and capability enhancement (Chung et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024b; Sanh et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2022), and is popular for its ease of implementation and rapid acquisition of expert-like behaviors (Wei et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2023). Despite these advantages, SFT often shows limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL) (Chu et al., 2024; Ouyang et al., 2022; Christiano et al., 2017; Bai et al., 2022; Huan et al., 2025; Swamy et al., 2025). RL leverages explicit reward or verification signals to explore diverse strategies and thus generalizes better. However, RL requires substantial computation, careful hyperparameter tuning, and explicit reward signals--conditions often impractical in real-world settings (Schulman et al., 2017; Ouyang et al., 2022; Sheng et al., 2025; Strubell et al., 2019; Liu & Yin, 2024; Winsta, 2025). Moreover, RL can struggle to recover expert-like behaviors that SFT captures efficiently (Mandlekar et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2025b).
Adversarial Defence without Adversarial Defence: Enhancing Language Model Robustness via Instance-level Principal Component Removal
Wang, Yang, Xiao, Chenghao, Li, Yizhi, Middleton, Stuart E., Moubayed, Noura Al, Lin, Chenghua
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have driven substantial progress in natural language processing but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, raising concerns about their robustness in real-world applications. Previous studies have sought to mitigate the impact of adversarial attacks by introducing adversarial perturbations into the training process, either implicitly or explicitly. While both strategies enhance robustness, they often incur high computational costs. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective add-on module that enhances the adversarial robustness of PLMs by removing instance-level principal components, without relying on conventional adversarial defences or perturbing the original training data. Our approach transforms the embedding space to approximate Gaussian properties, thereby reducing its susceptibility to adversarial perturbations while preserving semantic relationships. This transformation aligns embedding distributions in a way that minimises the impact of adversarial noise on decision boundaries, enhancing robustness without requiring adversarial examples or costly training-time augmentation. Evaluations on eight benchmark datasets show that our approach improves adversarial robustness while maintaining comparable before-attack accuracy to baselines, achieving a balanced trade-off between robustness and generalisation.