The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has brought significant attention to speech models, particularly recent progress in speech2speech protocols supporting speech input and output. However, the existing benchmarks adopt automatic text-based evaluators for evaluating the instruction following ability of these models lack consideration for paralinguistic information in both speech understanding and generation. To address these issues, we introduce S2S-Arena, a novel arena-style S2S benchmark that evaluates instruction-following capabilities with paralinguistic information in both speech-in and speech-out across real-world tasks. We design 154 samples that fused TTS and live recordings in four domains with 21 tasks and manually evaluate existing popular speech models in an arena-style manner. The experimental results show that: (1) in addition to the superior performance of GPT-4o, the speech model of cascaded ASR, LLM, and TTS outperforms the jointly trained model after text-speech alignment in speech2speech protocols; (2) considering paralinguistic information, the knowledgeability of the speech model mainly depends on the LLM backbone, and the multilingual support of that is limited by the speech module; (3) excellent speech models can already understand the paralinguistic information in speech input, but generating appropriate audio with paralinguistic information is still a challenge.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption. Even with recent simplifications, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Advantage Leftover Lunch (A-LoL), the problems of over-fitting and training instability remain hindering the alignment process from the expected optimal performance. To address the existing challenges, we propose a novel simplification of RLHF from the perspective of variational inference, called $\textbf{V}$ariational $\textbf{A}$lignment with $\textbf{R}$e-weighting ($\textbf{VAR}$). More specifically, by directly minimizing the distribution gap between the learning LLM policy and the optimal solution of RLHF, we transform the alignment objective into a reward-driven re-weighted supervised fine-tuning (SFT) form, which only requires minor adjustment on the SFT loss to obtain noticeable improvement on training stability and effectiveness. On comprehensive alignment and generation benchmarks, our VAR method has numerically achieved competitive performance in LLM alignment helpfulness and harmlessness.

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains an underexplored area, despite their remarkable advancements in other domains. In this paper, we present BlenderLLM, a novel framework for training LLMs specifically for CAD tasks leveraging a self-improvement methodology. To support this, we developed a bespoke training dataset, BlendNet, and introduced a comprehensive evaluation suite, CADBench. Our results reveal that existing models demonstrate significant limitations in generating accurate CAD scripts. However, through minimal instruction-based fine-tuning and iterative self-improvement, BlenderLLM significantly surpasses these models in both functionality and accuracy of CAD script generation. This research establishes a strong foundation for the application of LLMs in CAD while demonstrating the transformative potential of self-improving models in advancing CAD automation. We encourage further exploration and adoption of these methodologies to drive innovation in the field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/BlenderLLM

This paper addresses the critical need for democratizing large language models (LLM) in the Arab world, a region that has seen slower progress in developing models comparable to state-of-the-art offerings like GPT-4 or ChatGPT 3.5, due to a predominant focus on mainstream languages (e.g., English and Chinese). One practical objective for an Arabic LLM is to utilize an Arabic-specific vocabulary for the tokenizer that could speed up decoding. However, using a different vocabulary often leads to a degradation of learned knowledge since many words are initially out-of-vocabulary (OOV) when training starts. Inspired by the vocabulary learning during Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition for humans, the released AraLLaMA employs progressive vocabulary expansion, which is implemented by a modified BPE algorithm that progressively extends the Arabic subwords in its dynamic vocabulary during training, thereby balancing the OOV ratio at every stage. The ablation study demonstrated the effectiveness of Progressive Vocabulary Expansion. Moreover, AraLLaMA achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across a variety of Arabic benchmarks. Models, training data, benchmarks, and codes will be all open-sourced.

Traffic simulation provides interactive data for the optimization of traffic control policies. However, existing traffic simulators are limited by their lack of scalability and shortage in input data, which prevents them from generating interactive data from traffic simulation in the scenarios of real large-scale city road networks. In this paper, we present \textbf{C}ity \textbf{B}rain \textbf{Lab}, a toolkit for scalable traffic simulation. CBLab consists of three components: CBEngine, CBData, and CBScenario. CBEngine is a highly efficient simulator supporting large-scale traffic simulation. CBData includes a traffic dataset with road network data of 100 cities all around the world. We also develop a pipeline to conduct a one-click transformation from raw road networks to input data of our traffic simulation. Combining CBEngine and CBData allows researchers to run scalable traffic simulations in the road network of real large-scale cities. Based on that, CBScenario implements an interactive environment and a benchmark for two scenarios of traffic control policies respectively, with which traffic control policies adaptable for large-scale urban traffic can be trained and tuned. To the best of our knowledge, CBLab is the first infrastructure supporting traffic control policy optimization in large-scale urban scenarios. CBLab has supported the City Brain Challenge @ KDD CUP 2021. The project is available on GitHub:~\url{https://github.com/CityBrainLab/CityBrainLab.git}.