Large Language Model
Speculate Deep and Accurate: Lossless and Training-Free Acceleration for Offloaded LLMs via Substitute Speculative Decoding
Wang, Pei-Shuo, Chen, Jian-Jia, Yang, Chun-Che, Chang, Chi-Chih, Huang, Ning-Chi, Abdelfattah, Mohamed S., Wu, Kai-Chiang
The immense model sizes of large language models (LLMs) challenge deployment on memory-limited consumer GPUs. Although model compression and parameter offloading are common strategies to address memory limitations, compression can degrade quality, and offloading maintains quality but suffers from slow inference. Speculative decoding presents a promising avenue to accelerate parameter offloading, utilizing a fast draft model to propose multiple draft tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM in parallel with a single forward pass. This method reduces the time-consuming data transfers in forward passes that involve offloaded weight transfers. Existing methods often rely on pretrained weights of the same family, but require additional training to align with custom-trained models. Moreover, approaches that involve draft model training usually yield only modest speedups. This limitation arises from insufficient alignment with the target model, preventing higher token acceptance lengths. To address these challenges and achieve greater speedups, we propose SubSpec, a plug-and-play method to accelerate parameter offloading that is lossless and training-free. SubSpec constructs a highly aligned draft model by generating low-bit quantized substitute layers from offloaded target LLM portions. Additionally, our method shares the remaining GPU-resident layers and the KV-Cache, further reducing memory overhead and enhance alignment. SubSpec achieves a high average acceptance length, delivering 9.1x speedup for Qwen2.5 7B on MT-Bench (8GB VRAM limit) and an average of 12.5x speedup for Qwen2.5 32B on popular generation benchmarks (24GB VRAM limit).
Evaluating LLM-Generated Versus Human-Authored Responses in Role-Play Dialogues
Lu, Dongxu, Jeuring, Johan, Gatt, Albert
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in long-form, knowledge-grounded role-play dialogues remains challenging. This study compares LLM-generated and human-authored responses in multi-turn professional training simulations through human evaluation ($N=38$) and automated LLM-as-a-judge assessment. Human evaluation revealed significant degradation in LLM-generated response quality across turns, particularly in naturalness, context maintenance and overall quality, while human-authored responses progressively improved. In line with this finding, participants also indicated a consistent preference for human-authored dialogue. These human judgements were validated by our automated LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, where Gemini 2.0 Flash achieved strong alignment with human evaluators on both zero-shot pairwise preference and stochastic 6-shot construct ratings, confirming the widening quality gap between LLM and human responses over time. Our work contributes a multi-turn benchmark exposing LLM degradation in knowledge-grounded role-play dialogues and provides a validated hybrid evaluation framework to guide the reliable integration of LLMs in training simulations.
Audio-Conditioned Diffusion LLMs for ASR and Deliberation Processing
Wang, Mengqi, Liu, Zhan, Jin, Zengrui, Sun, Guangzhi, Zhang, Chao, Woodland, Philip C.
Diffusion-based large language models (DLLMs) have recently attracted growing interest as an alternative to autoregressive decoders. In this work, we present an empirical study on using the diffusion-based large language model LLaDA for automatic speech recognition (ASR). We first investigate its use as an external deliberation-based processing module for Whisper-LLaMA transcripts. By leveraging the bidirectional attention and denoising capabilities of LLaDA, we explore random masking, low-confidence masking, and semi-autoregressive strategies, showing that Whisper-LLaDA substantially reduces WER compared with the baseline. On LibriSpeech, the best cascade system achieves 2.25%/4.94% WER on test-clean/test-other, representing a 12.3% relative improvement over the Whisper-LLaMA baseline on the test-other split. In contrast, a plain-text LLaDA without acoustic features fails to improve accuracy, highlighting the importance of audio-conditioned embeddings. We further evaluate Whisper-LLaDA as a standalone decoder for ASR with diffusion-based and semi-autoregressive decoding. Most experimental configurations achieve faster inference than the Whisper-LLaMA baseline, although recognition accuracy is slightly lower. These findings offer an empirical view of diffusion-based LLMs for ASR and point to promising directions for improvements.
DNA-DetectLLM: Unveiling AI-Generated Text via a DNA-Inspired Mutation-Repair Paradigm
Zhu, Xiaowei, Ren, Yubing, Fang, Fang, Tan, Qingfeng, Wang, Shi, Cao, Yanan
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has blurred the line between AI-generated and human-written text. This progress brings societal risks such as misinformation, authorship ambiguity, and intellectual property concerns, highlighting the urgent need for reliable AI-generated text detection methods. However, recent advances in generative language modeling have resulted in significant overlap between the feature distributions of human-written and AI-generated text, blurring classification boundaries and making accurate detection increasingly challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose a DNA-inspired perspective, leveraging a repair-based process to directly and interpretably capture the intrinsic differences between human-written and AI-generated text. Building on this perspective, we introduce DNA-DetectLLM, a zero-shot detection method for distinguishing AI-generated and human-written text. The method constructs an ideal AI-generated sequence for each input, iteratively repairs non-optimal tokens, and quantifies the cumulative repair effort as an interpretable detection signal. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and exhibits strong robustness against various adversarial attacks and input lengths. Specifically, DNA-DetectLLM achieves relative improvements of 5.55% in AUROC and 2.08% in F1 score across multiple public benchmark datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xiaoweizhu57/DNA-DetectLLM.
From Correction to Mastery: Reinforced Distillation of Large Language Model Agents
Lyu, Yuanjie, Wang, Chengyu, Huang, Jun, Xu, Tong
Large Language Model agents excel at solving complex tasks through iterative reasoning and tool use, but typically depend on ultra-large, costly backbones. Existing distillation approaches train smaller students to imitate full teacher trajectories, yet reasoning and knowledge gaps between the teacher and student can cause compounding errors. We propose SCoRe, a student-centered framework in which the student generates training trajectories and the teacher corrects only the earliest error, producing training data matched to the student's ability and exposing specific weaknesses. The student is first fine-tuned on corrected trajectories. Subsequently, short-horizon reinforcement learning starts from the verified prefix preceding the earliest error, with target rewards assigned at that step. This design encourages autonomous problem-solving beyond imitation and enhances training stability. On 12 challenging benchmarks, a 7B-parameter student distilled with SCoRe matches the agentic performance of a 72B-parameter teacher. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the rise of "agents" (Xi et al., 2025). Unlike traditional single-pass generation, LLM agents solve complex problems through an iterative reasoning-action-observation loop, using frameworks such as ReAct (Y ao et al., 2023). Specifically, LLM agents decompose tasks into sub-goals (Reasoning), execute them via external tools such as code interpreters (Action) (Gao et al., 2023), and then refine their plans based on feedback from tool execution (Observation). By combining LLM planning with the precision of external tools, agents mitigate flaws of LLMs such as hallucinations, outdated knowledge, and weak numerical reasoning, achieving strong performance on real-world interactive tasks (Liu et al., 2023).
TalkPlayData 2: An Agentic Synthetic Data Pipeline for Multimodal Conversational Music Recommendation
Choi, Keunwoo, Doh, Seungheon, Nam, Juhan
We present TalkPlayData 2, a synthetic dataset for multimodal conversational music recommendation generated by an agentic data pipeline. In the proposed pipeline, multiple large language model (LLM) agents are created under various roles with specialized prompts and access to different parts of information, and the chat data is acquired by logging the conversation between the Listener LLM and the Recsys LLM. To cover various conversation scenarios, for each conversation, the Listener LLM is conditioned on a finetuned conversation goal. Finally, all the LLMs are multimodal with audio and images, allowing a simulation of multimodal recommendation and conversation. In the LLM-as-a-judge and subjective evaluation experiments, TalkPlayData 2 achieved the proposed goal in various aspects related to training a generative recommendation model for music. TalkPlayData 2 and its generation code are released at https://talkpl.ai/talkplaydata2.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models
Zhang, Kaiyan, Zuo, Yuxin, He, Bingxiang, Sun, Youbang, Liu, Runze, Jiang, Che, Fan, Yuchen, Tian, Kai, Jia, Guoli, Li, Pengfei, Fu, Yu, Lv, Xingtai, Zhang, Yuchen, Zeng, Sihang, Qu, Shang, Li, Haozhan, Wang, Shijie, Wang, Yuru, Long, Xinwei, Liu, Fangfu, Xu, Xiang, Ma, Jiaze, Zhu, Xuekai, Hua, Ermo, Liu, Yihao, Li, Zonglin, Chen, Huayu, Qu, Xiaoye, Li, Yafu, Chen, Weize, Yuan, Zhenzhao, Gao, Junqi, Li, Dong, Ma, Zhiyuan, Cui, Ganqu, Liu, Zhiyuan, Qi, Biqing, Ding, Ning, Zhou, Bowen
In this paper, we survey recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). RL has achieved remarkable success in advancing the frontier of LLM capabilities, particularly in addressing complex logical tasks such as mathematics and coding. As a result, RL has emerged as a foundational methodology for transforming LLMs into LRMs. With the rapid progress of the field, further scaling of RL for LRMs now faces foundational challenges not only in computational resources but also in algorithm design, training data, and infrastructure. To this end, it is timely to revisit the development of this domain, reassess its trajectory, and explore strategies to enhance the scalability of RL toward Artificial SuperIntelligence (ASI). In particular, we examine research applying RL to LLMs and LRMs for reasoning abilities, especially since the release of DeepSeek-R1, including foundational components, core problems, training resources, and downstream applications, to identify future opportunities and directions for this rapidly evolving area. We hope this review will promote future research on RL for broader reasoning models. Github: https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/Awesome-RL-for-LRMs
X-Teaming Evolutionary M2S: Automated Discovery of Multi-turn to Single-turn Jailbreak Templates
Kim, Hyunjun, Ha, Junwoo, Yu, Sangyoon, Park, Haon
Multi-turn-to-single-turn (M2S) compresses iterative red-teaming into one structured prompt, but prior work relied on a handful of manually written templates. We present X-Teaming Evolutionary M2S, an automated framework that discovers and optimizes M2S templates through language-model-guided evolution. The system pairs smart sampling from 12 sources with an LLM-as-judge inspired by StrongREJECT and records fully auditable logs. Maintaining selection pressure by setting the success threshold to $ฮธ= 0.70$, we obtain five evolutionary generations, two new template families, and 44.8% overall success (103/230) on GPT-4.1. A balanced cross-model panel of 2,500 trials (judge fixed) shows that structural gains transfer but vary by target; two models score zero at the same threshold. We also find a positive coupling between prompt length and score, motivating length-aware judging. Our results demonstrate that structure-level search is a reproducible route to stronger single-turn probes and underscore the importance of threshold calibration and cross-model evaluation. Code, configurations, and artifacts are available at https://github.com/hyunjun1121/M2S-x-teaming.
Bringing Graphs to the Table: Zero-shot Node Classification via Tabular Foundation Models
Hayler, Adrian, Huang, Xingyue, Ceylan, ฤฐsmail ฤฐlkan, Bronstein, Michael, Finkelshtein, Ben
Graph foundation models (GFMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving broad generalization across various graph data. However, existing GFMs are often trained on datasets that may not fully reflect real-world graphs, limiting their generalization performance. In contrast, tabular foundation models (TFMs) not only excel at classical tabular prediction tasks but have also shown strong applicability in other domains such as time series forecasting, natural language processing, and computer vision. Motivated by this, we take an alternative view to the standard perspective of GFMs and reformulate node classification as a tabular problem. In this reformulation, each node is represented as a row with feature, structure, and label information as columns, enabling TFMs to directly perform zero-shot node classification via in-context learning. In this work, we introduce TAG, a tabular approach for graph learning that first converts a graph into a table via feature and structural encoders, applies multiple TFMs to diversely subsampled tables, and then aggregates their outputs through ensemble selection. Experiments on 28 real-world datasets demonstrate that TAG consistently improves upon task-specific GNNs and state-of-the-art GFMs, highlighting the potential of the tabular reformulation for scalable and generalizable graph learning.
Scaling up Multi-Turn Off-Policy RL and Multi-Agent Tree Search for LLM Step-Provers
Xin, Ran, Zheng, Zeyu, Nie, Yanchen, Yuan, Kun, Xiao, Xia
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated theorem proving has shown immense promise, yet is fundamentally constrained by challenges in scaling up both training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and inference-time compute. This paper introduces \texttt{BFS-Prover-V2}, a system designed to address this dual scaling problem. We present two primary innovations. The first is a novel multi-turn off-policy RL framework for continually improving the performance of LLM step-prover at training time. This framework, inspired by the principles of AlphaZero, utilizes a multi-stage expert iteration pipeline featuring adaptive tactic-level data filtering and periodic retraining to surmount the performance plateaus that typically curtail long-term RL in LLM-based agents. The second innovation is a planner-enhanced multi-agent search architecture that scales reasoning capabilities at inference time. This architecture employs a general reasoning model as a high-level planner to iteratively decompose complex theorems into a sequence of simpler subgoals. This hierarchical approach substantially reduces the search space, enabling a team of parallel prover agents to collaborate efficiently by leveraging a shared proof cache. We demonstrate that this dual approach to scaling yields state-of-the-art results on established formal mathematics benchmarks. \texttt{BFS-Prover-V2} achieves 95.08\% and 41.4\% on the MiniF2F and ProofNet test sets respectively. While demonstrated in the domain of formal mathematics, the RL and inference techniques presented in this work are of broader interest and may be applied to other domains requiring long-horizon multi-turn reasoning and complex search.