Large Language Model
One SPACE to Rule Them All: Jointly Mitigating Factuality and Faithfulness Hallucinations in LLMs
LLMs have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in natural language processing, yet their practical deployment remains hindered by persistent factuality and faithfulness hallucinations. While existing methods address these hallucination types independently, they inadvertently induce performance trade-offs, as interventions targeting one type often exacerbate the other. Through empirical and theoretical analysis of activation space dynamics in LLMs, we reveal that these hallucination categories share overlapping subspaces within neural representations, presenting an opportunity for concurrent mitigation. To harness this insight, we propose SPACE, a unified framework that jointly enhances factuality and faithfulness by editing shared activation subspaces. SPACE establishes a geometric foundation for shared subspace existence through dual-task feature modeling, then identifies and edits these subspaces via a hybrid probe strategy combining spectral clustering and attention head saliency scoring. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Training a Scientific Reasoning Model for Chemistry
Reasoning models are large language models that emit a long chain-of-thought before answering, providing both higher accuracy and explicit reasoning for their response. A major question has been whether language model reasoning generalizes beyond mathematics, programming, and logic, where most previous work has focused. We demonstrate that reasoning models can be post-trained for chemistry without additional domain pretraining, and require substantially less data compared to contemporary domain-specific models. We report ether0, a 24B parameter LLM (based on Mistral-Small-24B) that can reason in natural language and respond with chemical structures. This reasoning model was trained with reinforcement learning on 640,730 experimentally-grounded chemistry problems across 375 tasks ranging from synthesizability, to blood-brain barrier permeability, to human receptor activity, to scent. Our model exceeds general-purpose chemistry models, frontier models, and human experts on molecular design tasks. It is also more data efficient relative to specialized models. We anticipate that this method can be applied to train data-efficient language models specialized for tasks across a wide variety of scientific domains.
LongVPO: From Anchored Cues to Self-Reasoning for Long-Form Video Preference Optimization
We present LongVPO, a novel two-stage Direct Preference Optimization framework that enables short-context vision-language models to robustly understand ultra-long videos without any long-video annotations. In Stage 1, we synthesize preference triples by anchoring questions to individual short clips, interleaving them with distractors, and applying visual-similarity and question-specificity filtering to mitigate positional bias and ensure unambiguous supervision.
Large Language Models for Lossless Image Compression: Next-Pixel Prediction in Language Space is All You Need
We have recently witnessed that "Intelligence" and " Compression" are the two sides of the same coin, where the language large model (LLM) with unprecedented intelligence is a general-purpose lossless compressor for various data modalities. This attribute particularly appeals to the lossless image compression community, given the increasing need to compress high-resolution images in the current streaming media era. Consequently, a spontaneous envision emerges: Can the compression performance of the LLM elevate lossless image compression to new heights? However, our findings indicate that the naive application of LLM-based lossless image compressors suffers from a considerable performance gap compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) codecs on common benchmark datasets. In light of this, we are dedicated to fulfilling the unprecedented intelligence (compression) capacity of the LLM for lossless image compression tasks, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical and practical compression performance. Specifically, we propose P2-LLM, a next-pixel prediction-based LLM, which integrates various elaborated insights and methodologies, e.g., pixel-level priors, the in-context ability of LLM, and a pixel-level semantic preservation strategy, to enhance the understanding capacity of pixel sequences for better next-pixel predictions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that P2-LLM can beat SOTA classical and learned codecs.
Virus Infection Attack on LLMs: Your Poisoning Can Spread "VIA " Synthetic Data
Synthetic data refers to artificial samples generated by models. While it has been validated to significantly enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) during training and has been widely adopted in LLM development, potential security risks it may introduce remain uninvestigated. This paper systematically evaluates the resilience of synthetic-data-integrated training paradigm for LLMs against mainstream poisoning and backdoor attacks. We reveal that such a paradigm exhibits strong resistance to existing attacks, primarily thanks to the different distribution patterns between poisoning data and queries used to generate synthetic samples. To enhance the effectiveness of these attacks and further investigate the security risks introduced by synthetic data, we introduce a novel and universal attack framework, namely, Virus Infection Attack (VIA), which enables the propagation of current attacks through synthetic data even under purely clean queries. Inspired by the principles of virus design in cybersecurity, VIA conceals the poisoning payload within a protective "shell" and strategically searches for optimal hijacking points in benign samples to maximize the likelihood of generating malicious content. Extensive experiments on both data poisoning and backdoor attacks show that VIA significantly increases the presence of poisoning content in synthetic data and correspondingly raises the attack success rate (ASR) on downstream models to levels comparable to those observed in the poisoned upstream models.
FreshStack: Building Realistic Benchmarks for Evaluating Retrieval on Technical Documents
We introduce FreshStack, a holistic framework for automatically building information retrieval (IR) evaluation benchmarks by incorporating challenging questions and answers. FreshStack conducts the following steps: (1) automatic corpus collection from code and technical documentation, (2) nugget generation from community-asked questions and answers, and (3) nugget-level support, retrieving documents using a fusion of retrieval techniques and hybrid architectures. We use FreshStack to build five datasets on fast-growing, recent, and niche domains to ensure the tasks are sufficiently challenging. On FreshStack, existing retrieval models, when applied out-of-the-box, significantly underperform oracle approaches on all five domains, denoting plenty of headroom to improve IR quality. In addition, we identify cases where rerankers do not improve first-stage retrieval accuracy (two out of five domains) and oracle context helps an LLM generator generate a high-quality RAG answer. We hope FreshStack will facilitate future work toward constructing realistic, scalable, and uncontaminated IR and RAG evaluation benchmarks.
LIMOPro: Reasoning Refinement for Efficient and Effective Test-time Scaling
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling approaches, particularly when fine-tuned with chain-of-thought (CoT) data distilled from more powerful large reasoning models (LRMs). However, these reasoning chains often contain verbose elements that mirror human problem-solving, categorized as progressive reasoning (the essential solution development path) and functional elements (verification processes, alternative solution approaches, and error corrections). While progressive reasoning is crucial, the functional elements significantly increase computational demands during test-time inference. We introduce PIR (Perplexity-based Importance Refinement), a principled framework that quantitatively evaluates the importance of each reasoning step based on its impact on answer prediction confidence. PIR systematically identifies and selectively prunes only low-importance functional steps while preserving progressive reasoning components, creating optimized training data that maintains the integrity of the core solution path while reducing verbosity. Models fine-tuned on PIR-optimized data exhibit superior test-time scaling properties, generating more concise reasoning chains while achieving improved accuracy (+0.9% to +6.6%) with significantly reduced token usage (-3% to -41%) across challenging reasoning benchmarks (AIME, AMC, and GPQA Diamond). Our approach demonstrates strong generalizability across different model sizes, data sources, and token budgets, offering a practical solution for deploying reasoningcapable LLMs in scenarios where efficient test-time scaling, response time, and computational efficiency are valuable constraints. Code and dataset are available at the LIMOPro.
The Indra Representation Hypothesis for Multimodal Alignment
Recent studies have uncovered an interesting phenomenon: unimodal foundation models tend to learn convergent representations, regardless of differences in architecture, training objectives, or data modalities. However, these representations are essentially internal abstractions of samples that characterize samples independently, leading to limited expressiveness. In this paper, we propose The Indra Representation Hypothesis, inspired by the philosophical metaphor of Indra's Net. We argue that representations from unimodal foundation models are converging to implicitly reflect a shared relational structure underlying reality, akin to the relational ontology of Indra's Net.