Large Language Model
Language Models Do Not Embed Numbers Continuously
Davies, Alex O., Nzoyem, Roussel, Ajmeri, Nirav, Filho, Telmo M. Silva
Recent research has extensively studied how large language models manipulate integers in specific arithmetic tasks, and on a more fundamental level, how they represent numeric values. These previous works have found that language model embeddings can be used to reconstruct the original values, however, they do not evaluate whether language models actually model continuous values as continuous. Using expected properties of the embedding space, including linear reconstruction and principal component analysis, we show that language models not only represent numeric spaces as non-continuous but also introduce significant noise. Using models from three major providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini and Voyage AI), we show that while reconstruction is possible with high fidelity ($R^2 \geq 0.95$), principal components only explain a minor share of variation within the embedding space. This indicates that many components within the embedding space are orthogonal to the simple numeric input space. Further, both linear reconstruction and explained variance suffer with increasing decimal precision, despite the ordinal nature of the input space being fundamentally unchanged. The findings of this work therefore have implications for the many areas where embedding models are used, in-particular where high numerical precision, large magnitudes or mixed-sign values are common.
Recycling Pretrained Checkpoints: Orthogonal Growth of Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Large Language Model Pre-Training
Wang, Ruizhe, Ding, Yucheng, Liu, Xiao, Wang, Yaoxiang, Cheng, Peng, Guo, Baining, Zha, Zhengjun, Gong, Yeyun
Numerous computational costs have been invested in existing well-trained checkpoints, but many of them remain underuti-lized due to engineering constraints or limited model capacity. To efficiently reuse this "sunk" cost, we propose to recycle pretrained checkpoints by expanding their parameter counts and continuing training. We propose orthogonal growth method well-suited for converged Mixture-of-Experts model: interpositional layer copying for depth growth and expert duplication with injected noise for width growth. To determine the optimal timing for such growth across checkpoints sequences, we perform comprehensive scaling experiments revealing that the final accuracy has a strong positive correlation with the amount of sunk cost, indicating that greater prior investment leads to better performance. We scale our approach to models with 70B parameters and over 1T training tokens, achieving 10.66% accuracy gain over training from scratch under the same additional compute budget. Our checkpoint recycling approach establishes a foundation for economically efficient large language model pretraining. The unprecedented success of large language models (LLMs) has been largely attributed to scaling laws (Kaplan et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2022), which suggest that increasing model size However, training these models from scratch demands enormous computational resources, and the exponential growth of this cost poses a fundamental barrier to further progress. Consequently, developing methods to scale models efficiently under constrained computational budgets has become a critical research challenge. Modern LLM development pipelines routinely produce smaller pre-trained model checkpoints and numerous intermediate artifacts from processes like hyperparameter tuning or preliminary evaluations. These models are often discarded once training concludes, leaving much of their potential unrealized due to inherent size constraints.
Learning on the Job: An Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agent for Long-Horizon Tasks
Yang, Cheng, Yang, Xuemeng, Wen, Licheng, Fu, Daocheng, Mei, Jianbiao, Wu, Rong, Cai, Pinlong, Shen, Yufan, Deng, Nianchen, Shi, Botian, Qiao, Yu, Li, Haifeng
Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, yet significant challenges persist when deploying them as AI agents for real-world long-horizon tasks. Existing LLM agents suffer from a critical limitation: they are test-time static and cannot learn from experience, lacking the ability to accumulate knowledge and continuously improve on the job. To address this challenge, we propose MUSE, a novel agent framework that introduces an experience-driven, self-evolving system centered around a hierarchical Memory Module. MUSE organizes diverse levels of experience and leverages them to plan and execute long-horizon tasks across multiple applications. After each sub-task execution, the agent autonomously reflects on its trajectory, converting the raw trajectory into structured experience and integrating it back into the Memory Module. This mechanism enables the agent to evolve beyond its static pretrained parameters, fostering continuous learning and self-evolution. We evaluate MUSE on the long-horizon productivity benchmark TAC. It achieves new SOTA performance by a significant margin using only a lightweight Gemini-2.5 Flash model. Sufficient Experiments demonstrate that as the agent autonomously accumulates experience, it exhibits increasingly superior task completion capabilities, as well as robust continuous learning and self-evolution capabilities. Moreover, the accumulated experience from MUSE exhibits strong generalization properties, enabling zero-shot improvement on new tasks. MUSE establishes a new paradigm for AI agents capable of real-world productivity task automation.
Leveraging Author-Specific Context for Scientific Figure Caption Generation: 3rd SciCap Challenge
Timklaypachara, Watcharapong, Chiewhawan, Monrada, Lekuthai, Nopporn, Achakulvisut, Titipat
Scientific figure captions require both accuracy and stylistic consistency to convey visual information. Here, we present a domain-specific caption generation system for the 3rd SciCap Challenge that integrates figure-related textual context with author-specific writing styles using the LaMP-Cap dataset. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline: Stage 1 combines context filtering, category-specific prompt optimization via DSPy's MIPROv2 and SIMBA, and caption candidate selection; Stage 2 applies few-shot prompting with profile figures for stylistic refinement. Our experiments demonstrate that category-specific prompts outperform both zero-shot and general optimized approaches, improving ROUGE-1 recall by +8.3\% while limiting precision loss to -2.8\% and BLEU-4 reduction to -10.9\%. Profile-informed stylistic refinement yields 40--48\% gains in BLEU scores and 25--27\% in ROUGE. Overall, our system demonstrates that combining contextual understanding with author-specific stylistic adaptation can generate captions that are both scientifically accurate and stylistically faithful to the source paper.
ReInAgent: A Context-Aware GUI Agent Enabling Human-in-the-Loop Mobile Task Navigation
Jia, Haitao, He, Ming, Yin, Zimo, Wu, Likang, Fan, Jianping, Sang, Jitao
Mobile GUI agents exhibit substantial potential to facilitate and automate the execution of user tasks on mobile phones. However, exist mobile GUI agents predominantly privilege autonomous operation and neglect the necessity of active user engagement during task execution. This omission undermines their adaptability to information dilemmas including ambiguous, dynamically evolving, and conflicting task scenarios, leading to execution outcomes that deviate from genuine user requirements and preferences. To address these shortcomings, we propose ReInAgent, a context-aware multi-agent framework that leverages dynamic information management to enable human-in-the-loop mobile task navigation. ReInAgent integrates three specialized agents around a shared memory module: an information-managing agent for slot-based information management and proactive interaction with the user, a decision-making agent for conflict-aware planning, and a reflecting agent for task reflection and information consistency validation. Through continuous contextual information analysis and sustained user-agent collaboration, ReInAgent overcomes the limitation of existing approaches that rely on clear and static task assumptions. Consequently, it enables more adaptive and reliable mobile task navigation in complex, real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ReInAgent effectively resolves information dilemmas and produces outcomes that are more closely aligned with genuine user preferences. Notably, on complex tasks involving information dilemmas, ReInAgent achieves a 25% higher success rate than Mobile-Agent-v2.
Executable Analytic Concepts as the Missing Link Between VLM Insight and Precise Manipulation
Sun, Mingyang, Wei, Jiude, He, Qichen, Wang, Donglin, Lu, Cewu, Sun, Jianhua
Enabling robots to perform precise and generalized manipulation in unstructured environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in semantic reasoning and task planning, a significant gap persists between their high-level understanding and the precise physical execution required for real-world manipulation. To bridge this "semantic-to-physical" gap, we introduce GRACE, a novel framework that grounds VLM-based reasoning through executable analytic concepts (EAC)-mathematically defined blueprints that encode object affordances, geometric constraints, and semantics of manipulation. Our approach integrates a structured policy scaffolding pipeline that turn natural language instructions and visual information into an instantiated EAC, from which we derive grasp poses, force directions and plan physically feasible motion trajectory for robot execution. GRACE thus provides a unified and interpretable interface between high-level instruction understanding and low-level robot control, effectively enabling precise and generalizable manipulation through semantic-physical grounding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GRACE achieves strong zero-shot generalization across a variety of articulated objects in both simulated and real-world environments, without requiring task-specific training.
TaoSR-SHE: Stepwise Hybrid Examination Reinforcement Learning Framework for E-commerce Search Relevance
Jiao, Pengkun, Jin, Yiming, Yang, Jianhui, Dong, Chenhe, Huang, Zerui, Yao, Shaowei, Zhou, Xiaojiang, Ou, Dan, Tang, Haihong
Query-product relevance analysis is a foundational technology in e-commerce search engines and has become increasingly important in AI-driven e-commerce. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs), particularly their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities, offers promising opportunities for developing relevance systems that are both more interpretable and more robust. However, existing training paradigms have notable limitations: SFT and DPO suffer from poor generalization on long-tail queries and from a lack of fine-grained, stepwise supervision to enforce rule-aligned reasoning. In contrast, reinforcement learning with verification rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse feedback, which provides insufficient signal to correct erroneous intermediate steps, thereby undermining logical consistency and limiting performance in complex inference scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce the Stepwise Hybrid Examination Reinforcement Learning framework for Taobao Search Relevance (TaoSR-SHE). At its core is Stepwise Reward Policy Optimization (SRPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages step-level rewards generated by a hybrid of a high-quality generative stepwise reward model and a human-annotated offline verifier, prioritizing learning from critical correct and incorrect reasoning steps. TaoSR-SHE further incorporates two key techniques: diversified data filtering to encourage exploration across varied reasoning paths and mitigate policy entropy collapse, and multi-stage curriculum learning to foster progressive capability growth. Extensive experiments on real-world search benchmarks show that TaoSR-SHE improves both reasoning quality and relevance-prediction accuracy in large-scale e-commerce settings, outperforming SFT, DPO, GRPO, and other baselines, while also enhancing interpretability and robustness.
LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?
Wang, Jingyuan, Chen, Yankai, Li, Zhonghang, Huang, Chao
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens, even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language models (LLMs) by revealing high-value reasoning moments that reflect the latter's unique strength? We propose LightReasoner, a novel framework that leverages the behavioral divergence between a stronger expert model (LLM) and a weaker amateur model (SLM). LightReasoner operates in two stages: (1) a sampling stage that pinpoints critical reasoning moments and constructs supervision examples capturing the expert's advantage through expert-amateur contrast, and (2) a fine-tuning stage that aligns the expert model with these distilled examples, amplifying its reasoning strengths. Across seven mathematical benchmarks, LightReasoner improves accuracy by up to 28.1%, while reducing time consumption by 90%, sampled problems by 80%, and tuned token usage by 99%, all without relying on ground-truth labels. By turning weaker SLMs into effective teaching signals, LightReasoner offers a scalable and resource-efficient approach for advancing LLM reasoning. Code is available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LightReasoner
DISCO: Diversifying Sample Condensation for Efficient Model Evaluation
Rubinstein, Alexander, Raible, Benjamin, Gubri, Martin, Oh, Seong Joon
Evaluating modern machine learning models has become prohibitively expensive. Benchmarks such as LMMs-Eval and HELM demand thousands of GPU hours per model. Costly evaluation reduces inclusivity, slows the cycle of innovation, and worsens environmental impact. The typical approach follows two steps. First, select an anchor subset of data. Second, train a mapping from the accuracy on this subset to the final test result. The drawback is that anchor selection depends on clustering, which can be complex and sensitive to design choices. We argue that promoting diversity among samples is not essential; what matters is to select samples that $\textit{maximise diversity in model responses}$. Our method, $\textbf{Diversifying Sample Condensation (DISCO)}$, selects the top-k samples with the greatest model disagreements. This uses greedy, sample-wise statistics rather than global clustering. The approach is conceptually simpler. From a theoretical view, inter-model disagreement provides an information-theoretically optimal rule for such greedy selection. $\textbf{DISCO}$ shows empirical gains over prior methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in performance prediction across MMLU, Hellaswag, Winogrande, and ARC. Code is available here: https://github.com/arubique/disco-public.
A$^2$Search: Ambiguity-Aware Question Answering with Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Fengji, Niu, Xinyao, Ying, Chengyang, Lin, Guancheng, Hao, Zhongkai, Fan, Zhou, Huang, Chengen, Keung, Jacky, Chen, Bei, Lin, Junyang
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have led to strong performance in open-domain question answering (QA). However, existing models still struggle with questions that admit multiple valid answers. Standard QA benchmarks, which typically assume a single gold answer, overlook this reality and thus produce inappropriate training signals. Existing attempts to handle ambiguity often rely on costly manual annotation, which is difficult to scale to multi-hop datasets such as HotpotQA and MuSiQue. In this paper, we present A$^2$Search, an annotation-free, end-to-end training framework to recognize and handle ambiguity. At its core is an automated pipeline that detects ambiguous questions and gathers alternative answers via trajectory sampling and evidence verification. The model is then optimized with RL using a carefully designed $\mathrm{AnsF1}$ reward, which naturally accommodates multiple answers. Experiments on eight open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that A$^2$Search achieves new state-of-the-art performance. With only a single rollout, A$^2$Search-7B yields an average $\mathrm{AnsF1}@1$ score of $48.4\%$ across four multi-hop benchmarks, outperforming all strong baselines, including the substantially larger ReSearch-32B ($46.2\%$). Extensive analyses further show that A$^2$Search resolves ambiguity and generalizes across benchmarks, highlighting that embracing ambiguity is essential for building more reliable QA systems. Our code, data, and model weights can be found at https://github.com/zfj1998/A2Search