Large Language Model
TANDEM: Bi-Level Data Mixture Optimization with Twin Networks
The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) significantly depend on training data drawn from various domains. Optimizing domain-specific mixture ratios can be modeled as a bi-level optimization problem, which we simplify into a single-level penalized form and solve with twin networks: a proxy model trained on primary data and a dynamically updated reference model trained with additional data. Our proposed method, Twin Networks for bi-level DatA mixturE optiMization (TANDEM), measures the data efficacy through the difference between the twin models and up-weights domains that benefit more from the additional data. TANDEM provides theoretical guarantees and wider applicability, compared to prior approaches. Furthermore, our bi-level perspective suggests new settings to study domain reweighting such as data-restricted scenarios and supervised fine-tuning, where optimized mixture ratios significantly improve the performance.
Geometry of Decision Making in Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong generalization across diverse tasks, yet the internal decision-making processes behind their predictions remain opaque. In this work, we study the geometry of hidden representations in LLMs through the lens of intrinsic dimension (ID), focusing specifically on decision-making dynamics in a multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) setting. We perform a large-scale study, with 28 open-weight transformer models and estimate ID across layers using multiple estimators, while also quantifying per-layer performance on MCQA tasks. Our findings reveal a consistent ID pattern across models: early layers operate on low-dimensional manifolds, middle layers expand this space, and later layers compress it again, converging to decision-relevant representations. Together, these results suggest LLMs implicitly learn to project linguistic inputs onto structured, low-dimensional manifolds aligned with task-specific decisions, providing new geometric insights into how generalization and reasoning emerge in language models.
Recurrent Attention-based Token Selection for Efficient Streaming Video-LLMs
Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel at understanding videos in-context, assuming full access to the video when answering queries. However, these models face challenges in streaming scenarios where hour-long videos must be processed online, and questions need timely responses. In this work, we propose a training-free approach compatible with standard Video-LLMs, leveraging three key concepts: 1) LLM-informed selection of visual tokens to identify those that the LLM has attended to and contributed to its understanding of each short clip. Our attention-based selection allows us to discard up to ~95\% of unimportant visual tokens with minimal performance loss; 2) Hierarchical selection of tokens combined with natural language understanding of each processed clip; 3) Caption-based question answering for lightweight and accurate responses. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on streaming video benchmarks, striking a balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
DartQuant: Efficient Rotational Distribution Calibration for LLM Quantization
Quantization plays a crucial role in accelerating the inference of large-scale models, and rotational matrices have been shown to effectively improve quantization performance by smoothing outliers. However, end-to-end fine-tuning of rotational optimization algorithms incurs high computational costs and is prone to overfitting. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient distribution-aware rotational calibration method, DartQuant, which reduces the complexity of rotational optimization by constraining the distribution of the activations after rotation. This approach also effectively reduces reliance on task-specific losses, thereby mitigating the risk of overfitting. Additionally, we introduce the QR-Orth optimization scheme, which replaces expensive alternating optimization with a more efficient solution. In a variety of model quantization experiments, DartQuant demonstrates superior performance. Compared to existing methods, it achieves 47$\times$ acceleration and 10$\times$ memory savings for rotational optimization on a 70B model. Furthermore, it is the first to successfully complete rotational calibration for a 70B model on a single 3090 GPU, making quantization of large language models feasible in resource-constrained environments.
MMIG-Bench: Towards Comprehensive and Explainable Evaluation of Multi-Modal Image Generation Models
Recent multimodal image generators such as GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro excel at following complex instructions, editing images and maintaining concept consistency. However, they are still evaluated by disjoint toolkits: text-to-image (T2I) benchmarks that lacks multi-modal conditioning, and customized image generation benchmarks that overlook compositional semantics and common knowledge.
Bag of Tricks for Inference-time Computation of LLM Reasoning
With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), solving complex tasks (e.g., math problems, code generation, etc.) has garnered increasing attention. Inference-time computation methods (e.g., Best-of-N, MCTS, etc.) are of significant importance, as they have the potential to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs without requiring external training computation. However, due to the inherent challenges of this technique, most existing methods remain proof-of-concept and are not yet sufficiently effective. In this paper, we investigate and benchmark strategies for improving inference-time computation across a wide range of reasoning tasks. Since most current methods rely on a pipeline that first generates candidate solutions (e.g., generating chain-of-thought candidate solutions) and then selects them based on specific reward signals (e.g., RLHF reward, process reward, etc.), our research focuses on strategies for both candidate solution generation (e.g., instructing prompts, hyperparameters: temperature and top-p, etc.) and reward mechanisms (e.g., self-evaluation, reward types, etc.). The experimental results reveal that several previously overlooked strategies can be critical for the success of inference-time computation (e.g., simplifying the temperature can improve general reasoning task performance by up to 5%). Based on extensive experiments (more than 20,000 A100-80G GPU hours with over 1,000 experiments) across a variety of models (e.g., Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families) of various sizes, our proposed strategies outperform the baseline by a substantial margin in most cases, providing a stronger foundation for future research.
Co-Evolving LLM Coder and Unit Tester via Reinforcement Learning
Mathematical reasoning in large language models has been successfully incentivized through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, leading to improved one-shot precision. In this work, we turn our focus to the coding domain. Beyond one-shot precision, we highlight unit test generation as another key factor for enhancing coding ability, since accurate unit tests are essential for enabling self-checking and self-correction during inference. Traditional approaches for fine-tuning LLMs on unit test generation rely heavily on ground-truth code solutions in the training data. We propose CURE, a novel reinforcement learning framework with a dedicated reward design that co-evolves coding and unit test generation capabilities based on their interaction outcomes--without any ground-truth code as supervision.
NaDRO: Leveraging Dual-Reward Strategies for LLMs Training on Noisy Data
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) fine-tuning has demonstrated significant enhancements in reasoning tasks. However, it often relies on high quality labeled dataset, which is typically difficult to obtain. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{N}oise-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{R}eward \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{NaDRO}) to effectively enhances the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) under noisy or ambiguous supervision. NaDRO operates through two key components: \textbf{(1) Preference-based Outcome Reward (POR)},which makes a principled bias-variance tradeoff, reducing training variance by learning from robust preference rankings instead of overfitting to single-best estimates; and \textbf{(2) Context Perception Reward (CPR) mechanism}, which ensures that LLMs conduct necessary qualitative assessment of the current problem state to foster deeper situational understanding prior to decision-making.