Large Reasoning Models(LRMs) such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute and generating long Chain-of-Thought(CoT). Distillation--post-training on LRMs-generated data--is a straightforward yet effective method to enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller models, but faces a critical bottleneck: we found that distilled long CoT data poses learning difficulty for small models and leads to the inheritance of biases (i.e. over-thinking) when using Supervised Fine-tuning(SFT) and Reinforcement Learning(RL) methods. To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose constructing tree-based CoT data from scratch via Monte Carlo Tree Search(MCTS). We then exploit a set of CoT-aware approaches, including Thoughts Length Balance, Fine-grained DPO, and Joint Post-training Objective, to enhance SFT and RL on the construted data.

Although Transformers-based architectures excel at processing textual information, their naive adaptation for tabular data often involves flattening the table structure. This simplification can lead to the loss of essential inter-dependencies between rows, columns, and cells, while also posing scalability challenges for large tables. To address these issues, prior works have explored special tokens, structured embeddings, and sparse attention patterns. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of tabular encoding techniques, which highlights the crucial role of attention sparsity in preserving structural information of tables. We also introduce a set of novel sparse attention mask designs for tabular data, that not only enhance computational efficiency but also preserve structural integrity, leading to better overall performance.

Textual data from social platforms captures various aspects of mental health through discussions around and across issues, while users reach out for help and others sympathize and offer support. We propose a comprehensive framework that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI techniques to identify and assess mental health disorders, detect their severity, and create recommendations for behavior change and therapeutic interventions based on users' posts on Reddit. To classify the disorders, we use rule-based labeling methods as well as advanced pre-trained NLP models to extract nuanced semantic features from the data. We fine-tune domain-adapted and generic pre-trained NLP models based on predictions from specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve classification accuracy. Our hybrid approach combines the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models with the domain-specific insights captured by LLMs, providing an improved understanding of mental health discourse. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of each model, offering valuable insights into their practical applicability. This research potentially facilitates early detection and personalized care to aid practitioners and aims to facilitate timely interventions and improve overall well-being, thereby contributing to the broader field of mental health surveillance and digital health analytics.

Research is a fundamental process driving the advancement of human civilization, yet it demands substantial time and effort from researchers. In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. To monitor relevant advancements, this paper presents a systematic review of the progress in this domain. Specifically, we organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. Hypothesis formulation involves knowledge synthesis and hypothesis generation. Hypothesis validation includes the verification of scientific claims, theorem proving, and experiment validation. Manuscript publication encompasses manuscript writing and the peer review process. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the current challenges faced in these areas, as well as potential future directions for research. Finally, we also offer a comprehensive overview of existing benchmarks and tools across various domains that support the integration of AI into the research process. We hope this paper serves as an introduction for beginners and fosters future research. Resources have been made publicly available at https://github.com/zkzhou126/AI-for-Research.

Test-time scaling improves large language model performance by adding extra compute during decoding. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling serves as a common scaling technique, broadening the search space for finding better solutions from the model distribution. However, traditional BoN requires N full generations, leading to high GPU memory overhead and time latency. Moreover, some methods depend on reward models, adding computational cost and limiting domain generalization. In this paper, we propose Self-Truncation Best-of-N (ST-BoN), a novel decoding method that avoids fully generating all samplings and eliminates the need for reward models. ST-BoN introduces early sampling consistency to estimate the most promising sample, truncating suboptimal ones to free memory and accelerate inference. This pushes the sampling-efficient test-time scaling. Compared to traditional BoN, ST-BoN can reduce dynamic GPU memory overhead by over 90% and time latency by 50%, while achieving comparable or even better performance across reasoning and open-ended domains.

Large language model (LLM) is considered a milestone towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With its advanced emergent capabilities, it adapt to a wide range of specific applications. Fine-tuning LLMs for various downstream tasks has become a new paradigm. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is well-known for its parameter efficiency. It can reduce the number of parameters needed to fine-tune LLMs by several orders of magnitude. However, LoRA-based approaches encounter a significant limitation due to the bottleneck imposed by rank one decomposition. As the parameters count in LLMs increase, even rank one decomposition might surpass the number of parameters truly necessary for handling more downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new method for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via deconvolution in subspace, dubbed as DCFT. We innovatively use deconvolution to complete details and enhance knowledge in subspace incremental matrices, and dynamically control parameters by adjusting the kernel size, unconstrained by rank-one decomposition. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of DCFT. Results show that compared to LoRA, DCFT achieve an 8$\times$ reduction in parameters, and still achieves highly impressive performance. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Godz-z/DCFT.

Question answering (QA) requires accurately aligning user questions with structured queries, a process often limited by the scarcity of high-quality query-natural language (Q-NL) pairs. To overcome this, we present Q-NL Verifier, an approach to generating high-quality synthetic pairs of queries and NL translations. Our approach relies on large language models (LLMs) to generate semantically precise natural language paraphrases of structured queries. Building on these synthetic Q-NL pairs, we introduce a learned verifier component that automatically determines whether a generated paraphrase is semantically equivalent to the original query. Our experiments with the well-known LC-QuAD 2.0 benchmark show that Q-NL Verifier generalizes well to paraphrases from other models and even human-authored translations. Our approach strongly aligns with human judgments across varying query complexities and outperforms existing NLP metrics in assessing semantic correctness. We also integrate the verifier into QA pipelines, showing that verifier-filtered synthetic data has significantly higher quality in terms of translation correctness and enhances NL to Q translation accuracy. Lastly, we release an updated version of the LC-QuAD 2.0 benchmark containing our synthetic Q-NL pairs and verifier scores, offering a new resource for robust and scalable QA.

CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive T ask Solving and Reasoning in UA Vs Artem Lykov, V alerii Serpiva, Muhammad Haris Khan, Oleg Sautenkov, Artyom Myshlyaev, Grik Tadevosyan, Y asheerah Y aqoot, and Dzmitry Tsetserukou Abstract -- This paper introduces CognitiveDrone, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model tailored for complex Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs) tasks that demand advanced cognitive abilities. Trained on a dataset comprising over 8,000 simulated flight trajectories across three key categories--Human Recognition, Symbol Understanding, and Reasoning--the model generates real-time 4D action commands based on first-person visual inputs and textual instructions. T o further enhance performance in intricate scenarios, we propose CognitiveDrone-R1, which integrates an additional Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning module to simplify task directives prior to high-frequency control. Experimental evaluations using our open-source benchmark, CognitiveDroneBench, reveal that while a racing-oriented model (RaceVLA) achieves an overall success rate of 31.3%, the base CognitiveDrone model reaches 59.6%, and CognitiveDrone-R1 attains a success rate of 77.2%. These results demonstrate improvements of up to 30% in critical cognitive tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities into UA V control systems. Our contributions include the development of a state-of-the-art VLA model for UA V control and the introduction of the first dedicated benchmark for assessing cognitive tasks in drone operations.

In Switzerland legal translation is uniquely important due to the country's four official languages and requirements for multilingual legal documentation. However, this process traditionally relies on professionals who must be both legal experts and skilled translators -- creating bottlenecks and impacting effective access to justice. To address this challenge, we introduce SwiLTra-Bench, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark of over 180K aligned Swiss legal translation pairs comprising laws, headnotes, and press releases across all Swiss languages along with English, designed to evaluate LLM-based translation systems. Our systematic evaluation reveals that frontier models achieve superior translation performance across all document types, while specialized translation systems excel specifically in laws but under-perform in headnotes. Through rigorous testing and human expert validation, we demonstrate that while fine-tuning open SLMs significantly improves their translation quality, they still lag behind the best zero-shot prompted frontier models such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Additionally, we present SwiLTra-Judge, a specialized LLM evaluation system that aligns best with human expert assessments.

Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have shown great potential in various tasks by converting the original Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers in pre-trained dense models into MoE layers. However, these models still suffer from significant parameter inefficiency due to the introduction of multiple experts. In this work, we propose a novel DeRS (Decompose, Replace, and Synthesis) paradigm to overcome this shortcoming, which is motivated by our observations about the unique redundancy mechanisms of upcycled MoE experts. Specifically, DeRS decomposes the experts into one expert-shared base weight and multiple expert-specific delta weights, and subsequently represents these delta weights in lightweight forms. Our proposed DeRS paradigm can be applied to enhance parameter efficiency in two different scenarios, including: 1) DeRS Compression for inference stage, using sparsification or quantization to compress vanilla upcycled MoE models; and 2) DeRS Upcycling for training stage, employing lightweight sparse or low-rank matrixes to efficiently upcycle dense models into MoE models. Extensive experiments across three different tasks show that the proposed methods can achieve extreme parameter efficiency while maintaining the performance for both training and compression of upcycled MoE models.