Large language models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of modern AI. However, the existing paradigm of next-token prediction fundamentally limits their ability to form coherent, high-level concepts, making it a critical barrier to human-like understanding and reasoning. Take the phrase "ribonucleic acid" as an example: an LLM will first decompose it into tokens, i.e., artificial text fragments ("rib", "on", ...), then learn each token sequentially, rather than grasping the phrase as a unified, coherent semantic entity. This fragmented representation hinders deeper conceptual understanding and, ultimately, the development of truly intelligent systems. In response, we introduce Concept-Aware Fine-Tuning (CAFT), a novel multi-token training method that redefines how LLMs are fine-tuned. By enabling the learning of sequences that span multiple tokens, this method fosters stronger concept-aware learning. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements compared to conventional next-token finetuning methods across diverse tasks, including traditional applications like text summarization and domain-specific ones like de novo protein design. Multi-token prediction was previously only possible in the prohibitively expensive pretraining phase; CAFT, to our knowledge, is the first to bring the multi-token setting to the post-training phase, thus effectively democratizing its benefits for the broader community of practitioners and researchers. Finally, the unexpected effectiveness of our proposed method suggests wider implications for the machine learning research community. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/caft-llm

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding common visual elements, largely due to their large-scale datasets and advanced training strategies. However, their effectiveness in medical applications remains limited due to the inherent discrepancies between data and tasks in medical scenarios and those in the general domain. Concretely, existing medical MLLMs face the following critical limitations: (1) limited coverage of medical knowledge beyond imaging, (2) heightened susceptibility to hallucinations due to suboptimal data curation processes, (3) lack of reasoning capabilities tailored for complex medical scenarios. To address these challenges, we first propose a comprehensive data curation procedure that (1) efficiently acquires rich medical knowledge data not only from medical imaging but also from extensive medical texts and general-domain data; and (2) synthesizes accurate medical captions, visual question answering (VQA), and reasoning samples. As a result, we build a multimodal dataset enriched with extensive medical knowledge. Building on the curated data, we introduce our medical-specialized MLLM: Lingshu. Lingshu undergoes multi-stage training to embed medical expertise and enhance its task-solving capabilities progressively. Besides, we preliminarily explore the potential of applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards paradigm to enhance Lingshu's medical reasoning ability. Additionally, we develop MedEvalKit, a unified evaluation framework that consolidates leading multimodal and textual medical benchmarks for standardized, fair, and efficient model assessment. We evaluate the performance of Lingshu on three fundamental medical tasks, multimodal QA, text-based QA, and medical report generation. The results show that Lingshu consistently outperforms the existing open-source multimodal models on most tasks ...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) increasingly depend on advanced AI techniques to operate in critical applications. However, traditional verification and validation methods often struggle to handle the unpredictable and dynamic nature of AI components. In this paper, we introduce DURA-CPS, a novel framework that employs multi-role orchestration to automate the iterative assurance process for AI-powered CPS. By assigning specialized roles (e.g., safety monitoring, security assessment, fault injection, and recovery planning) to dedicated agents within a simulated environment, DURA-CPS continuously evaluates and refines AI behavior against a range of dependability requirements. We demonstrate the framework through a case study involving an autonomous vehicle navigating an intersection with an AI-based planner. Our results show that DURA-CPS effectively detects vulnerabilities, manages performance impacts, and supports adaptive recovery strategies, thereby offering a structured and extensible solution for rigorous V&V in safety- and security-critical systems.

Large language models are often used to answer queries grounded in large text corpora (e.g. codebases, legal documents, or chat histories) by placing the entire corpus in the context window and leveraging in-context learning (ICL). Although current models support contexts of 100K-1M tokens, this setup is costly to serve because the memory consumption of the KV cache scales with input length. We explore an alternative: training a smaller KV cache offline on each corpus. At inference time, we load this trained KV cache, which we call a Cartridge, and decode a response. Critically, the cost of training a Cartridge can be amortized across all the queries referencing the same corpus. However, we find that the naive approach of training the Cartridge with next-token prediction on the corpus is not competitive with ICL. Instead, we propose self-study, a training recipe in which we generate synthetic conversations about the corpus and train the Cartridge with a context-distillation objective. We find that Cartridges trained with self-study replicate the functionality of ICL, while being significantly cheaper to serve. On challenging long-context benchmarks, Cartridges trained with self-study match ICL performance while using 38.6x less memory and enabling 26.4x higher throughput. Self-study also extends the model's effective context length (e.g. from 128k to 484k tokens on MTOB) and surprisingly, leads to Cartridges that can be composed at inference time without retraining.

Reasoning models represented by the Deepseek-R1-Distill series have been widely adopted by the open-source community due to their strong performance in mathematics, science, programming, and other domains. However, our study reveals that their benchmark evaluation results are subject to significant fluctuations caused by various factors. Subtle differences in evaluation conditions can lead to substantial variations in results. Similar phenomena are observed in other open-source inference models fine-tuned based on the Deepseek-R1-Distill series, as well as in the QwQ-32B model, making their claimed performance improvements difficult to reproduce reliably. Therefore, we advocate for the establishment of a more rigorous paradigm for model performance evaluation and present our empirical assessments of the Deepseek-R1-Distill series models.

Medical benchmarks are indispensable for evaluating the capabilities of language models in healthcare for non-English-speaking communities,therefore help ensuring the quality of real-life applications. However, not every community has sufficient resources and standardized methods to effectively build and design such benchmark, and available non-English medical data is normally fragmented and difficult to verify. We developed an approach to tackle this problem and applied it to create the first Vietnamese medical question benchmark, featuring 14,000 multiple-choice questions across 34 medical specialties. Our benchmark was constructed using various verifiable sources, including carefully curated medical exams and clinical records, and eventually annotated by medical experts. The benchmark includes four difficulty levels, ranging from foundational biological knowledge commonly found in textbooks to typical clinical case studies that require advanced reasoning. This design enables assessment of both the breadth and depth of language models' medical understanding in the target language thanks to its extensive coverage and in-depth subject-specific expertise. We release the benchmark in three parts: a sample public set (4k questions), a full public set (10k questions), and a private set (2k questions) used for leaderboard evaluation. Each set contains all medical subfields and difficulty levels. Our approach is scalable to other languages, and we open-source our data construction pipeline to support the development of future multilingual benchmarks in the medical domain.

This study addresses the challenges in intelligent processing of Chinese ancient mathematical classics by constructing Guji_MATH, a benchmark for evaluating classical texts based on Suanjing Shishu. It systematically assesses the mathematical problem-solving capabilities of mainstream reasoning models under the unique linguistic constraints of classical Chinese. Through machine-assisted annotation and manual verification, 538 mathematical problems were extracted from 8 canonical texts, forming a structured dataset centered on the "Question-Answer-Solution" framework, supplemented by problem types and difficulty levels. Dual evaluation modes--closed-book (autonomous problem-solving) and open-book (reproducing classical solution methods)--were designed to evaluate the performance of six reasoning models on ancient Chinese mathematical problems. Results indicate that reasoning models can partially comprehend and solve these problems, yet their overall performance remains inferior to benchmarks on modern mathematical tasks. Enhancing models' classical Chinese comprehension and cultural knowledge should be prioritized for optimization. This study provides methodological support for mining mathematical knowledge from ancient texts and disseminating traditional culture, while offering new perspectives for evaluating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural capabilities of reasoning models.

The rise of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Planning has leveraged advanced frameworks to enable autonomous and collaborative task execution. Some systems rely on platforms like review sites and social media, which are prone to fraudulent information, such as fake reviews or misleading descriptions. This reliance poses risks, potentially causing financial losses and harming user experiences. To evaluate the risk of planning systems in real-world applications, we introduce \textbf{WandaPlan}, an evaluation environment mirroring real-world data and injected with deceptive content. We assess system performance across three fraud cases: Misinformation Fraud, Team-Coordinated Multi-Person Fraud, and Level-Escalating Multi-Round Fraud. We reveal significant weaknesses in existing frameworks that prioritize task efficiency over data authenticity. At the same time, we validate WandaPlan's generalizability, capable of assessing the risks of real-world open-source planning frameworks. To mitigate the risk of fraud, we propose integrating an anti-fraud agent, providing a solution for reliable planning.

Tables present unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions, necessitating specialized approaches for effective comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in table reasoning through prompting and techniques like chain-of-thought (CoT) and program-of-thought (PoT), optimizing their performance for table question answering remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce region-based Table-R1, a novel reinforcement learning approach that enhances LLM table understanding by integrating region evidence into reasoning steps. Our method employs Region-Enhanced Supervised Fine-Tuning (RE-SFT) to guide models in identifying relevant table regions before generating answers, incorporating textual, symbolic, and program-based reasoning. Additionally, Table-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (TARPO) introduces a mixed reward system to dynamically balance region accuracy and answer correctness, with decaying region rewards and consistency penalties to align reasoning steps. Experiments show that Table-R1 achieves an average performance improvement of 14.36 points across multiple base models on three benchmark datasets, even outperforming baseline models with ten times the parameters, while TARPO reduces response token consumption by 67.5% compared to GRPO, significantly advancing LLM capabilities in efficient tabular reasoning.

The rapid expansion of chemistry literature poses significant challenges for researchers seeking to efficiently access domain-specific knowledge. To support advancements in chemistry-focused natural language processing (NLP), we present ChemRxivQuest, a curated dataset of 970 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs derived from 155 ChemRxiv preprints across 17 subfields of chemistry. Each QA pair is explicitly linked to its source text segment to ensure traceability and contextual accuracy. ChemRxivQuest was constructed using an automated pipeline that combines optical character recognition (OCR), GPT-4o-based QA generation, and a fuzzy matching technique for answer verification. The dataset emphasizes conceptual, mechanistic, applied, and experimental questions, enabling applications in retrieval-based QA systems, search engine development, and fine-tuning of domain-adapted large language models. We analyze the dataset's structure, coverage, and limitations, and outline future directions for expansion and expert validation. ChemRxivQuest provides a foundational resource for chemistry NLP research, education, and tool development.