Deep Learning
HelpSteer3-Preference: Open Human-Annotated Preference Data across Diverse Tasks and Languages
Preference datasets are essential for training general-domain, instruction-following language models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Each subsequent data release raises expectations for future data collection, meaning there is a constant need to advance the quality and diversity of openly available preference data. To address this need, we introduce HelpSteer3-Preference, a permissively licensed (CC-BY-4.0),
Accelerating Chain of Thought Reasoning through Semantically Aligned Implicit Tokens
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks by encouraging step-by-step solutions. However, the verbosity of CoT reasoning hinders its mass deployment in efficiency-critical applications. Recently, implicit CoT approaches have emerged, which encode reasoning steps within LLM's hidden embeddings (termed "implicit reasoning") rather than explicit tokens. This approach accelerates CoT reasoning by reducing the reasoning length and bypassing some LLM components. However, existing implicit CoT methods face two significant challenges: (1) they fail to preserve the semantic alignment between the implicit reasoning (when transformed to natural language) and the ground-truth reasoning, resulting in a significant CoT performance degradation, and (2) they focus on reducing the length of the implicit reasoning; however, they neglect the considerable time cost for an LLM to generate one individual implicit reasoning token.
ROGR: Relightable 3DObjects using Generative Relighting
We introduce ROGR, a novel approach that reconstructs a relightable 3D model of an that object simulates captured the ef from fects multiple of placing vie the ws, object driven under by a no generati vel en v vironment e relighting illuminamodel tions. Our method samples the appearance of the object under multiple lighting environments, creating a dataset that is used to train a lighting-conditioned Neural environmental Radiance Field lighting.
AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLMAgents
Despite the rapid advancement of LLM-based agents, the reliable evaluation of their safety and security remains a significant challenge. Existing rule-based or LLM-based evaluators often miss dangers in agents' step-by-step actions, overlook subtle meanings, fail to see how small issues compound, and get confused by unclear safety or security rules. To overcome this evaluation crisis, we introduce AgentAuditor, a universal, training-free, memory-augmented reasoning framework that empowers LLM evaluators to emulate human expert evaluators. AgentAuditor constructs an experiential memory by having an LLM adaptively extract structured semantic features (e.g., scenario, risk, behavior) and generate associated chain-of-thought reasoning traces for past interactions. A multi-stage, contextaware retrieval-augmented generation process then dynamically retrieves the most relevant reasoning experiences to guide the LLM evaluator's assessment of new cases. Moreover, we develop ASSEBench, the first benchmark designed to check how well LLM-based evaluators can spot both safety risks and security threats. ASSEBench comprises 2293 meticulously annotated interaction records, covering 15 risk types across 29 application scenarios. A key feature of ASSEBench is its nuanced approach to ambiguous risk situations, employing "Strict" and "Lenient" judgment standards. Experiments demonstrate that AgentAuditor not only consistently improves the evaluation performance of LLMs across all benchmarks but also sets a new state-of-the-art in LLM-as-a-judge for agent safety and security, achieving human-level accuracy.
The Structure of Relation Decoding Linear Operators in Large Language Models
This paper investigates the structure of linear operators introduced in Hernandez et al. [2023] that decode specific relational facts in transformer language models. We extend their single-relation findings to a collection of relations and systematically chart their organization. We show that such collections of relation decoders can be highly compressed by simple order-3 tensor networks without significant loss in decoding accuracy. To explain this surprising redundancy, we develop a cross-evaluation protocol, in which we apply each linear decoder operator to the subjects of every other relation. Our results reveal that these linear maps do not encode distinct relations, but extract recurring, coarse-grained semantic properties (e.g., country of capital city and country of food are both in the country-of-X property). This property-centric structure clarifies both the operators' compressibility and highlights why they generalize only to new relations that are semantically close. Our findings thus interpret linear relational decoding in transformer language models as primarily property-based, rather than relation-specific.1
NSNQuant: ADouble Normalization Approach for Calibration-Free Low-Bit Vector Quantization of KV Cache
Large Language Model (LLM) inference is typically memory-intensive, especially when processing large batch sizes and long sequences, due to the large size of key-value (KV) cache. Vector Quantization (VQ) is recently adopted to alleviate this issue, but we find that the existing approach is susceptible to distribution shift due to its reliance on calibration datasets. To address this limitation, we introduce NSNQuant, a calibration-free Vector Quantization (VQ) technique designed for low-bit compression of the KV cache. By applying a three-step transformation--1) a token-wise normalization (Normalize), 2) a channel-wise centering (Shift), and 3) a second token-wise normalization (Normalize)--with Hadamard transform, NSNQuant effectively aligns the token distribution with the standard normal distribution. This alignment enables robust, calibration-free vector quantization using a single reusable codebook. Extensive experiments show that NSNQuant consistently outperforms prior methods in both 1-bit and 2-bit settings, offering strong generalization and up to 3 throughput gain over full-precision baselines.
3d3a9e085540c65dd3e5731361f9320e-Paper-Conference.pdf
Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) has emerged as a ubiquitous strategy for specializing large language models (LLMs), yet it implicitly assumes a single, coherent "groundtruth" preference behind all human-written instructions. In practice, annotators differ in the styles, emphases, and granularities they prefer, introducing preference bias that can erode both robustness and generalization. We propose Dynamic Cross-Layer Preference Correction (DCPC), it couples (i) a preference-sensitive similarity estimator that detects mismatched instructional cues, (ii) cross-layer prefix alignment to reconcile semantic representations across transformer layers, and (iii) a lightweight Preference Correction Module (PCM) that dynamically adjusts hidden states to honor the inferred dominant preference. On five Super/GLUE tasks and the ALPACA set--plus six preference-shifted variants--DCPC boosts accuracy/F1-EM by 4.0-6.7 points and gpt-score by +0.7, while cutting inter-seed variance up to 35% on LlaMA-2 13B and Mistral-7B, setting a new state of the art for robust instruction tuning.
as Mamba [16(a, 11) ],MRWKVixed [31Do, 32, 33m],aiGated n PreDeltaNet-Trai[51].ningThese architectures primarily inherit (b) Limited Domain Pre-Training
Pre-trained language models represented by the Transformer have been proven to possess strong base capabilities, and the representative self-attention mechanism in the Transformer has become a classic in sequence modeling architectures. Different from the work of proposing sequence modeling architecture to improve the efficiency of attention mechanism, this work focuses on the impact of sequence modeling architectures on base capabilities. Specifically, our concern is: How exactly do sequence modeling architectures affect the base capabilities of pretrained language models? In this work, we first point out that the mixed domain pre-training setting commonly adopted in existing architecture design works fails to adequately reveal the differences in base capabilities among various architectures. To address this, we propose a limited domain pre-training setting with out-of-distribution testing, which successfully uncovers significant differences in base capabilities among architectures at an early stage. Next, we analyze the base capabilities of stateful sequence modeling architectures, and find that they exhibit significant degradation in base capabilities compared to the Transformer. Then, through a series of architecture component analysis, we summarize a key architecture design principle: A sequence modeling architecture need possess full-sequence arbitrary selection capability to avoid degradation in base capabilities. Finally, we empirically validate this principle using an extremely simple Top-1 element selection architecture and further generalize it to a more practical Top-1 chunk selection architecture. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed sequence modeling architecture design principle and suggest that our work can serve as a valuable reference for future architecture improvements and novel designs.
STEAD: Robust Provably Secure Linguistic Steganography with Diffusion Language Model
Recent provably secure linguistic steganography (PSLS) methods rely on mainstream autoregressive language models (ARMs) to address historically challenging tasks, that is, to disguise covert communication as "innocuous" natural language communication. However, due to the characteristic of sequential generation of ARMs, the stegotext generated by ARM-based PSLS methods will produce serious error propagation once it changes, making existing methods unavailable under an active tampering attack. To address this, we propose a robust provably secure linguistic steganography with diffusion language models (DLMs). Unlike ARMs, DLMs can generate text in partial parallel manner, allowing us to find robust positions for steganographic embedding that can be combined with error-correcting codes. Furthermore, we introduce an error correction strategies, including pseudorandom error correction and neighborhood search correction, during steganographic extraction. Theoretical proof and experimental results demonstrate that our method is secure and robust. It can resist token ambiguity in stegotext segmentation and, to some extent, withstand token-level attacks of insertion, deletion, and substitution.