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 Large Language Model


Writing-Zero: Bridge the Gap Between Non-verifiable Tasks and Verifiable Rewards

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has enabled large language models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable breakthroughs in reasoning tasks with objective ground-truth answers, such as mathematics and code generation. However, a significant gap remains for non-verifiable tasks, like creative writing and open-ended dialogue, where quality assessment is inherently subjective and lacks definitive references. Existing approaches for these domains often rely on scalar reward models trained with human preferences, which suffer from limited generalization and are prone to reward hacking, such as over-explanation and length bias. In this work, we propose a unified RLVR-based training paradigm that bridges the gap between non-verifiable tasks and verifiable rewards. We introduce a writing-principle-based pairwise Generative Reward Model (GenRM) and a novel Bootstrapped Relative Policy Optimization (BRPO) algorithm. The pairwise writing GenRM leverages self-principled critique to transform subjective assessments into reliable, verifiable rewards, while BRPO enables dynamic, reference-free pairwise comparison by leveraging a bootstrapped response as temporary reference from within group rollouts during RL training. Our approach empowers LLMs to develop robust writing capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by Writing-Zero, which shows consistent improvement and strong resistance to reward hacking compared to scalar reward baselines. Furthermore, our method achieves competitive results on both in-house and open-source writing benchmarks. Our findings suggest the potential to unify rule-based, reference-based, and reference-free reward modeling under the RLVR framework, thus paving the way for a comprehensive and scalable RL training paradigm applicable across all language tasks.


Decoding Knowledge Attribution in Mixture-of-Experts: A Framework of Basic-Refinement Collaboration and Efficiency Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The interpretability of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, especially those with heterogeneous designs, remains underexplored. Existing attribution methods for dense models fail to capture dynamic routing-expert interactions in sparse MoE architectures. To address this issue, we propose a cross-level attribution algorithm to analyze sparse MoE architectures (Qwen 1.5-MoE, OLMoE, Mixtral-8x7B) against dense models (Qwen 1.5-7B, Llama-7B, Mistral-7B). Results show MoE models achieve 37% higher per-layer efficiency via a "mid-activation, late-amplification" pattern: early layers screen experts, while late layers refine knowledge collaboratively. Ablation studies reveal a "basic-refinement" framework--shared experts handle general tasks (entity recognition), while routed experts specialize in domain-specific processing (geographic attributes). Semantic-driven routing is evidenced by strong correlations between attention heads and experts (r=0.68), enabling task-aware coordination. Notably, architectural depth dictates robustness: deep Qwen 1.5-MoE mitigates expert failures (e.g., 43% MRR drop in geographic tasks when blocking top-10 experts) through shared expert redundancy, whereas shallow OLMoE suffers severe degradation (76% drop). Task sensitivity further guides design: core-sensitive tasks (geography) require concentrated expertise, while distributed-tolerant tasks (object attributes) leverage broader participation. These insights advance MoE interpretability, offering principles to balance efficiency, specialization, and robustness.


Logits-Based Finetuning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, developing compact and efficient large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a thriving area of research. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which relies on singular ground truth labels, often fails to capture token-level dependencies and linguistic diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a logits-based fine-tuning framework that integrates the strengths of supervised learning and knowledge distillation. Our approach constructs enriched training targets by combining teacher logits with ground truth labels, preserving both correctness and linguistic diversity. This ensures more reliable and effective training. We constructed a large-scale 1.2M logits dataset and trained a series of science-focused models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements, with accuracy gains of 18% on Mawps and 22.7% on TabMWP. Across nine widely used mathematical benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms prior SFT models, achieving an average improvement of 7.28%. Codes are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Logits-Based-Finetuning.


OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce Workforce, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities. This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases: During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents; For training, we introduce Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL), which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks. Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance (69.70%), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by 2.34%. More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves 52.73% accuracy (+16.37%) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks. To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants.


Agentic Robot: A Brain-Inspired Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models in Embodied Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Long-horizon robotic manipulation poses significant challenges for autonomous systems, requiring extended reasoning, precise execution, and robust error recovery across complex sequential tasks. Current approaches, whether based on static planning or end-to-end visuomotor policies, suffer from error accumulation and lack effective verification mechanisms during execution, limiting their reliability in real-world scenarios. We present Agentic Robot, a brain-inspired framework that addresses these limitations through Standardized Action Procedure (SAP)--a novel coordination protocol governing component interactions throughout manipulation tasks. Drawing inspiration from Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs) in human organizations, SAP establishes structured workflows for planning, execution, and verification phases. Our architecture comprises three specialized components: (1) a large reasoning model that decomposes high-level instructions into semantically coherent subgoals, (2) a vision-language-action executor that generates continuous control commands from real-time visual inputs, and (3) a temporal verifier that enables autonomous progression and error recovery through introspective assessment. This SAP-driven closed-loop design supports dynamic self-verification without external supervision. On the LIBERO benchmark, Agentic Robot achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average success rate of 79.6%, outperforming SpatialVLA by 6.1% and OpenVLA by 7.4% on long-horizon tasks. These results demonstrate that SAP-driven coordination between specialized components enhances both performance and interpretability in sequential manipulation, suggesting significant potential for reliable autonomous systems. Project Github: https://agentic-robot.github.io.


Discovering Forbidden Topics in Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Refusal discovery is the task of identifying the full set of topics that a language model refuses to discuss. We introduce this new problem setting and develop a refusal discovery method, Iterated Prefill Crawler (IPC), that uses token prefilling to find forbidden topics. We benchmark IPC on Tulu-3-8B, an open-source model with public safety tuning data. Our crawler manages to retrieve 31 out of 36 topics within a budget of 1000 prompts. Next, we scale the crawler to a frontier model using the prefilling option of Claude-Haiku. Finally, we crawl three widely used open-weight models: Llama-3.3-70B and two of its variants finetuned for reasoning: DeepSeek-R1-70B and Perplexity-R1-1776-70B. DeepSeek-R1-70B reveals patterns consistent with censorship tuning: The model exhibits "thought suppression" behavior that indicates memorization of CCP-aligned responses. Although Perplexity-R1-1776-70B is robust to censorship, IPC elicits CCP-aligned refusals answers in the quantized model. Our findings highlight the critical need for refusal discovery methods to detect biases, boundaries, and alignment failures of AI systems.


LIFEBench: Evaluating Length Instruction Following in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While large language models (LLMs) can solve PhD-level reasoning problems over long context inputs, they still struggle with a seemingly simpler task: following explicit length instructions-e.g., write a 10,000-word novel. Additionally, models often generate far too short outputs, terminate prematurely, or even refuse the request. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on evaluating generations quality, but often overlook whether the generations meet length constraints. To this end, we introduce Length Instruction Following Evaluation Benchmark (LIFEBench) to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' ability to follow length instructions across diverse tasks and a wide range of specified lengths. LIFEBench consists of 10,800 instances across 4 task categories in both English and Chinese, covering length constraints ranging from 16 to 8192 words. We evaluate 26 widely-used LLMs and find that most models reasonably follow short-length instructions but deteriorate sharply beyond a certain threshold. Surprisingly, almost all models fail to reach the vendor-claimed maximum output lengths in practice, as further confirmed by our evaluations extending up to 32K words. Even long-context LLMs, despite their extended input-output windows, counterintuitively fail to improve length-instructions following. Notably, Reasoning LLMs outperform even specialized long-text generation models, achieving state-of-the-art length following. Overall, LIFEBench uncovers fundamental limitations in current LLMs' length instructions following ability, offering critical insights for future progress.


Unify Graph Learning with Text: Unleashing LLM Potentials for Session Search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Session search involves a series of interactive queries and actions to fulfill user's complex information need. Current strategies typically prioritize sequential modeling for deep semantic understanding, overlooking the graph structure in interactions. While some approaches focus on capturing structural information, they use a generalized representation for documents, neglecting the word-level semantic modeling. In this paper, we propose Symbolic Graph Ranker (SGR), which aims to take advantage of both text-based and graph-based approaches by leveraging the power of recent Large Language Models (LLMs). Concretely, we first introduce a set of symbolic grammar rules to convert session graph into text. This allows integrating session history, interaction process, and task instruction seamlessly as inputs for the LLM. Moreover, given the natural discrepancy between LLMs pre-trained on textual corpora, and the symbolic language we produce using our graph-to-text grammar, our objective is to enhance LLMs' ability to capture graph structures within a textual format. To achieve this, we introduce a set of self-supervised symbolic learning tasks including link prediction, node content generation, and generative contrastive learning, to enable LLMs to capture the topological information from coarse-grained to fine-grained. Experiment results and comprehensive analysis on two benchmark datasets, AOL and Tiangong-ST, confirm the superiority of our approach. Our paradigm also offers a novel and effective methodology that bridges the gap between traditional search strategies and modern LLMs.


DecIF: Improving Instruction-Following through Meta-Decomposition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Instruction-following has emerged as a crucial capability for large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on pre-existing documents or external resources to synthesize instruction-following data, which limits their flexibility and generalizability. In this paper, we introduce DecIF, a fully autonomous, meta-decomposition guided framework that generates diverse and high-quality instruction-following data using only LLMs. DecIF is grounded in the principle of decomposition. For instruction generation, we guide LLMs to iteratively produce various types of meta-information, which are then combined with response constraints to form well-structured and semantically rich instructions. We further utilize LLMs to detect and resolve potential inconsistencies within the generated instructions. Regarding response generation, we decompose each instruction into atomic-level evaluation criteria, enabling rigorous validation and the elimination of inaccurate instruction-response pairs. Extensive experiments across a wide range of scenarios and settings demonstrate DecIF's superior performance on instruction-following tasks. Further analysis highlights its strong flexibility, scalability, and generalizability in automatically synthesizing high-quality instruction data.


MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPO

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent text-to-image systems face limitations in handling multimodal inputs and complex reasoning tasks. We introduce MindOmni, a unified multimodal large language model that addresses these challenges by incorporating reasoning generation through reinforcement learning. MindOmni leverages a three-phase training strategy: i) design of a unified vision language model with a decoder-only diffusion module, ii) supervised fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) instruction data, and iii) our proposed Reasoning Generation Policy Optimization (RGPO) algorithm, utilizing multimodal feedback to effectively guide policy updates. Experimental results demonstrate that MindOmni outperforms existing models, achieving impressive performance on both understanding and generation benchmarks, meanwhile showcasing advanced fine-grained reasoning generation capabilities, especially with mathematical reasoning instruction. All codes will be made public at https://github.com/TencentARC/MindOmni