Empirical scaling laws have driven the evolution of large language models (LLMs), yet their coefficients shift whenever the model architecture or data pipeline changes. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, now standard in state-of-the-art systems, introduce a new sparsity dimension that current dense-model frontiers overlook. We investigate how MoE sparsity influences two distinct capability regimes: memorization skills and reasoning skills. By training MoE families that vary total parameters, active parameters, and top-k routing under fixed compute budgets, we disentangle pre-training loss from downstream accuracy. Our results reveal two principles. First, Active FLOPs: models with identical training loss but greater active compute achieve higher reasoning accuracy. Second, T otal tokens per parameter (TPP): memorization tasks improve with more parameters, while reasoning tasks benefit from optimal TPP, indicating that reasoning is data-hungry. Neither reinforcement learning post-training (GRPO) nor increased test-time compute alters these trends. We therefore argue that optimal MoE sparsity must be determined jointly by active FLOPs and TPP, revising the classical picture of compute-optimal scaling. The recent evolution of large language models (LLMs) has been driven by empirical scaling laws (Hestness et al., 2017) that link training loss to model size, dataset size, and compute budget. Kaplan et al. (2020) showed that these laws hold across seven orders of magnitude, establishing them as a reliable extrapolation tool for dense Transformers. Subsequent work by Hoffmann et al. (2022) demonstrated that scaling curves can be inverted to choose the compute-optimal combination of parameters and tokens for a fixed budget. Together, these results have made scaling analysis a cornerstone of model planning at both academic and industrial labs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated success across many benchmarks. However, they still exhibit limitations in long-context scenarios, primarily due to their short effective context length, quadratic computational complexity, and high memory overhead when processing lengthy inputs. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel context compression pipeline, called Intermediate Layer Retrieval (ILRe), which determines one intermediate decoder layer offline, encodes context by streaming chunked prefill only up to that layer, and recalls tokens by the attention scores between the input query and full key cache in that specified layer. In particular, we propose a multi-pooling kernels allocating strategy in the token recalling process to maintain the completeness of semantics. Our approach not only reduces the prefilling complexity from $O(L^2)$ to $O(L)$ and trims the memory footprint to a few tenths of that required for the full context, but also delivers performance comparable to or superior to the full-context setup in long-context scenarios. Without additional post training or operator development, ILRe can process a single $1M$ tokens request in less than half a minute (speedup $\approx 180\times$) and scores RULER-$1M$ benchmark of $\approx 79.8$ with model Llama-3.1-UltraLong-8B-1M-Instruct on a Huawei Ascend 910B NPU.

Modern large language model (LLM) serving systems face challenges from highly variable requests with diverse lengths, priorities, and stage-specific service-level objectives (SLOs). Meeting these requires real-time scheduling, rapid and cost-effective scaling, and support for both collocated and disaggregated Prefill/Decode (P/D) architectures. We present HyperFlexis, a unified LLM serving system that integrates algorithmic and system-level innovations to jointly optimize scheduling and scaling under multiple SLOs. It features a multi-SLO-aware scheduler that leverages budget estimation and request prioritization to ensure proactive SLO compliance for both new and ongoing requests. The system supports prefill- and decode-stage multi-SLO scheduling for P/D-disaggregated architectures and KV cache transfers. It also enables cost-effective scaling decisions, prefill-decode instance linking during scaling, and rapid P/D role transitions. To accelerate scaling and reduce cold-start latency, a device-to-device (D2D) weight transfer mechanism is proposed that lowers weight loading overhead by up to 19.39$\times$. These optimizations allow the system to achieve up to 4.44$\times$ higher SLO attainment, 65.82% lower request latency, and cost parity with state-of-the-art baselines. The code will be released soon.

Diffusion language models, as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive (AR) models, enable faster generation and richer conditioning on bidirectional context. However, they suffer from a key discrepancy between training and inference: during inference, MDLMs progressively reveal the structure of the generated sequence by producing fewer and fewer masked tokens, whereas this structure is ignored in training as tokens are masked at random. Although this discrepancy between training and inference can lead to suboptimal performance, it has been largely overlooked by previous works, leaving closing this gap between the two stages an open problem. To address this, we frame the problem of learning effective denoising trajectories as a sequential decision-making problem and use the resulting framework to apply reinforcement learning. We propose a novel Masked Diffusion Policy Optimization (MDPO) to exploit the Markov property diffusion possesses and explicitly train the model under the same progressive refining schedule used at inference. MDPO matches the performance of the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method with 60x fewer gradient updates, while achieving average improvements of 9.6% on MATH500 and 54.2% on Countdown over SOTA when trained within the same number of weight updates. Additionally, we improve the remasking strategy of MDLMs as a plug-in inference replacement to overcome the limitation that the model cannot refine tokens flexibly. This training-free method, termed Running Confidence Remasking (RCR), consistently enhances performance and provides further improvements when used with MDPO. Our findings establish great potential for investigating the discrepancy between pre-training and inference of MDLMs. Code: https://github.com/autonomousvision/mdpo. Project Page: https://cli212.github.io/MDPO/.

The widespread deployment of LLM-based agents is likely to introduce a critical privacy threat: malicious agents that proactively engage others in multi-turn interactions to extract sensitive information. However, the evolving nature of such dynamic dialogues makes it challenging to anticipate emerging vulnerabilities and design effective defenses. To tackle this problem, we present a search-based framework that alternates between improving attack and defense strategies through the simulation of privacy-critical agent interactions. Specifically, we employ LLMs as optimizers to analyze simulation trajectories and iteratively propose new agent instructions. To explore the strategy space more efficiently, we further utilize parallel search with multiple threads and cross-thread propagation. Through this process, we find that attack strategies escalate from direct requests to sophisticated tactics, such as impersonation and consent forgery, while defenses evolve from simple rule-based constraints to robust identity-verification state machines. The discovered attacks and defenses transfer across diverse scenarios and backbone models, demonstrating strong practical utility for building privacy-aware agents.

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplified this paradigm by establishing a direct mapping between the optimal policy and a reward function, eliminating the need for an explicit reward model. However, we argue that the DPO loss function is theoretically misaligned with its own derivation, as it promotes the indefinite maximization of a logits difference, which can lead to training instability and reward hacking. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function derived directly from the RLHF optimality condition. Our proposed loss targets a specific, finite value for the logits difference, which is dictated by the underlying reward, rather than its maximization. We provide a theoretical analysis, including a gradient-based comparison, to demonstrate that our method avoids the large gradients that plague DPO when the probability of dispreferred responses approaches zero. This inherent stability prevents reward hacking and leads to more effective alignment. We validate our approach by fine-tuning a Qwen2.5-7B model, showing significant win-rate improvements over a standard DPO baseline and achieving competitive performance against larger models like Llama-3.1-8B.

Although unified MLLMs aim to unify generation and understanding, they are considered to exhibit an internal gap, with understanding outperforming generation. Through large-scale evaluation across multiple MLLMs and tasks, we confirm the widespread non-unification of MLLMs, and demonstrate that it indeed stems from weak generation rather than misunderstanding. This finding motivates us to propose a simple yet effective internal gap-based self-improvement framework, which mitigates internal gaps by leveraging stronger understanding to guide weaker generation without relying on any external signals. We validate this strategy through comprehensive experiments: scoring generations with understanding to construct image data for post-training (e.g., SFT and DPO) significantly improves generation while promoting unification. Furthermore, we empirically discover a co-improvement effect of such self-improvement, a phenomenon well known in pre-training but underexplored in post-training. Specifically, as generation improves, understanding becomes more effective at detecting false positives that were previously misclassified as prompt-aligned. To explain this effect, we extend learning dynamic theory to the MLLM setting, showing that the shared empirical neural tangent kernel between generation and understanding encourages aligned learning dynamics, thereby driving co-improvement. This interplay between generation and understanding further motivates a curriculum learning approach for stronger self-improvement: progressively enhanced understanding and generation revisit samples underutilized by pre-trained MLLMs, dynamically expanding post-training data and leading to improved performance and unification.

Recent advances in generative modeling enable image editing assistants that follow natural language instructions without additional user input. Their supervised training requires millions of triplets (original image, instruction, edited image), yet mining pixel-accurate examples is hard. Each edit must affect only prompt-specified regions, preserve stylistic coherence, respect physical plausibility, and retain visual appeal. The lack of robust automated edit-quality metrics hinders reliable automation at scale. We present an automated, modular pipeline that mines high-fidelity triplets across domains, resolutions, instruction complexities, and styles. Built on public generative models and running without human intervention, our system uses a task-tuned Gemini validator to score instruction adherence and aesthetics directly, removing any need for segmentation or grounding models. Inversion and compositional bootstrapping enlarge the mined set by approx. 2.6x, enabling large-scale high-fidelity training data. By automating the most repetitive annotation steps, the approach allows a new scale of training without human labeling effort. To democratize research in this resource-intensive area, we release NHR-Edit, an open dataset of 720k high-quality triplets, curated at industrial scale via millions of guided generations and validator passes, and we analyze the pipeline's stage-wise survival rates, providing a framework for estimating computational effort across different model stacks. In the largest cross-dataset evaluation, it surpasses all public alternatives. We also release Bagel-NHR-Edit, a fine-tuned Bagel model with state-of-the-art metrics.

As robots become increasingly capable of operating over extended periods -- spanning days, weeks, and even months -- they are expected to accumulate knowledge of their environments and leverage this experience to assist humans more effectively. This paper studies the problem of Long-term Active Embodied Question Answering (LA-EQA), a new task in which a robot must both recall past experiences and actively explore its environment to answer complex, temporally-grounded questions. Unlike traditional EQA settings, which typically focus either on understanding the present environment alone or on recalling a single past observation, LA-EQA challenges an agent to reason over past, present, and possible future states, deciding when to explore, when to consult its memory, and when to stop gathering observations and provide a final answer. Standard EQA approaches based on large models struggle in this setting due to limited context windows, absence of persistent memory, and an inability to combine memory recall with active exploration. To address this, we propose a structured memory system for robots, inspired by the mind palace method from cognitive science. Our method encodes episodic experiences as scene-graph-based world instances, forming a reasoning and planning algorithm that enables targeted memory retrieval and guided navigation. To balance the exploration-recall trade-off, we introduce value-of-information-based stopping criteria that determines when the agent has gathered sufficient information. We evaluate our method on real-world experiments and introduce a new benchmark that spans popular simulation environments and actual industrial sites. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding substantial gains in both answer accuracy and exploration efficiency.

Existing post-training techniques for large language models are broadly categorized into Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data but can lead to problematic generalization as a form of behavior cloning. Conversely, RFT can significantly enhance a model's performance but is prone to learn unexpected behaviors, and its performance is highly sensitive to the initial policy. In this paper, we propose a unified view of these methods and introduce Prefix-RFT, a hybrid approach that synergizes learning from both demonstration and exploration. Using mathematical reasoning problems as a testbed, we empirically demonstrate that Prefix-RFT is both simple and effective. It not only surpasses the performance of standalone SFT and RFT but also outperforms parallel mixed-policy RFT methods. A key advantage is its seamless integration into existing open-source frameworks, requiring only minimal modifications to the standard RFT pipeline. Our analysis highlights the complementary nature of SFT and RFT, and validates that Prefix-RFT effectively harmonizes these two learning paradigms. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the method's robustness to variations in the quality and quantity of demonstration data. We hope this work offers a new perspective on LLM post-training, suggesting that a unified paradigm that judiciously integrates demonstration and exploration could be a promising direction for future research.