Large Language Model
From Pretraining to Pathology: How Noise Leads to Catastrophic Inheritance in Medical Models
Foundation models pretrained on web-scale data drive contemporary transfer learning in vision, language, and multimodal tasks. Recent work shows that mild label noise in these corpora may lift in-distribution accuracy yet sharply reduce out-ofdistribution generalization, an effect known as catastrophic inheritance. Medical data is especially sensitive because annotations are scarce, domain shifts are large, and pretraining sources are noisy. We present the first systematic analysis of catastrophic inheritance in medical models. Controlled label-corruption experiments expose a clear structural collapse: as noise rises, the skewness and kurtosis of feature and logit distributions decline, signaling a flattened representation space and diminished discriminative detail. These higher-order statistics form a compact, interpretable marker of degradation in fine-grained tasks such as histopathology. Guided by this finding, we introduce a fine-tuning objective that restores skewness and kurtosis through two scalar regularizers added to the task loss. The method leaves the backbone unchanged and incurs negligible overhead. Tests on PLIP models trained with Twitter pathology images, as well as other large-scale vision and language backbones, show consistent gains in robustness and cross-domain accuracy under varied noise levels.
Geo localization Inference via Fine Tuned Vision Language Models and Enhanced Reasoning Chains
Recent advances in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in visual reasoning tasks. However, geo-localization presents unique challenges, requiring the extraction of multigranular visual cues from images and their integration with external world knowledge for systematic reasoning. Current approaches to geo-localization tasks often lack robust reasoning mechanisms and explainability, limiting their effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose the Geo Reason Enhancement (GRE) Suite, a novel framework that augments VLMs with structured reasoning chains for accurate and interpretable location inference. The GRESuite is systematically developed across three key dimensions: dataset, model, and benchmark.
AdaLRS: Loss-Guided Adaptive Learning Rate Search for Efficient Foundation Model Pretraining
Learning rate is widely regarded as crucial for effective foundation model pretraining. Recent research explores and demonstrates the transferability of learning rate configurations across varying model and dataset sizes, etc. Nevertheless, these approaches are constrained to specific training scenarios and typically necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on proxy models. In this work, we propose AdaLRS, a plug-in-and-play adaptive learning rate search algorithm that conducts online optimal learning rate search via optimizing loss descent velocities. We provide theoretical and experimental analyzes to show that foundation model pretraining loss and its descent velocity are both convex and share the same optimal learning rate. Relying solely on training loss dynamics, AdaLRS involves few extra computations to guide the search process, and its convergence is guaranteed via theoretical analysis. Experiments on both LLM and VLM pretraining show that AdaLRS adjusts suboptimal learning rates to the neighborhood of optimum with marked efficiency and effectiveness, with model performance improved accordingly. We also show the robust generalizability of AdaLRS across varying training scenarios, such as different model sizes, training paradigms, base learning rate scheduler choices, and hyperparameter settings.
PRESTO: Preimage-Informed Instruction Optimization for Prompting Black-Box LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This has led to increasing interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but widely used due to their strong performance. To optimize instructions for black-box LLMs, recent methods employ white-box LLMs to generate candidate instructions from optimized soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a structure that hinders optimization efficiency, we reinterpret it as a useful prior knowledge that can accelerate the optimization.
TIME: AMulti-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios
Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TIME, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TIME consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TIME-WIKI, TIME-NEWS, and TIMEDIAL. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TIME-LITE, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning.
UniGTE: Unified Graph-Text Encoding for Zero-Shot Generalization across Graph Tasks and Domains
Generalizing to unseen graph tasks without task-specific supervision is challenging: conventional graph neural networks are typically tied to a fixed label space, while large language models (LLMs) struggle to capture graph structure. We introduce UniGTE, an instruction-tuned encoder-decoder framework that unifies structural and semantic reasoning. The encoder augments a pretrained autoregressive LLM with learnable alignment tokens and a structure-aware graph-text attention mechanism, enabling it to attend jointly to a tokenized graph and a natural-language task prompt while remaining permutation-invariant to node order.
Recursive Transformer Boosting Reasoning Ability with State Stack
The Transformer architecture has emerged as a landmark advancement within the broad field of artificial intelligence, effectively catalyzing the advent of large language models (LLMs). However, despite its remarkable capabilities and the substantial progress it has facilitated, the Transformer architecture still has some limitations. One such intrinsic limitation is its inability to effectively recognize regular expressions or deterministic context-free grammars. Standard Transformers lack an explicit mechanism for recursion and structured state transitions, which can hinder systematic generalization on nested and hierarchical patterns. Drawing inspiration from pushdown automata, which efficiently resolve deterministic context-free grammars using stacks, we equip layers with a differentiable stack and propose STACKTRANS with recursion to address the aforementioned issue within LLMs. Unlike previous approaches that modify the attention computation, STACKTRANS explicitly incorporates hidden state stacks between Transformer layers. This design maintains compatibility with existing frameworks like flash-attention. Specifically, our design features stack operations - such as pushing and popping hidden states - that are differentiable and can be learned in an end-to-end manner.
Multi-Objective One-Shot Pruning for Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained environments. While one-shot pruning methods can reduce model size without expensive retraining, they typically optimize for single objectives, ignoring LLMs' multi-faceted applications. We introduce Multi-Objective One-Shot Pruning (MOSP), which formulates LLM pruning as a multi-objective optimization problem. MOSP efficiently generates a Pareto set of pruned models representing different capability trade-offs, allowing users to select solutions aligned with their preferences. The proposed approach identifies share core support while enabling specialized support. Experiments across various LLMs and sparsity levels demonstrate MOSP's superior performance in navigating multi-objective trade-offs compared to baseline methods.