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How to Allocate Your Tokens? Scaling Laws with Training Steps and Batch Size
We propose a scaling law that takes into account model size and training data while explicitly splitting the latter into training steps and batch size (called three-term law). Fitting the proposed law on a large set of training runs, we find that it correctly recovers the scaling of the optimal batch size. Moreover, because it makes use of training runs with suboptimal batch size, our proposed law can be robustly fit with a significantly smaller amount of training runs. We further show that the three-term law can be used to derive scaling laws for suboptimal batch sizes, and that it matches previous empirical findings related to the critical batch size.
Online Safety Monitoring for LLMs
Schirmer, Mona, Jazbec, Metod, Timans, Alexander, Naesseth, Christian, Waldron, Maja, Nalisnick, Eric
We deploy a simple into our everyday lives as search engines (Jin et al., 2025; statistical framework based on risk control (Angelopoulos Xiong et al., 2024), coding assistants (Zhao et al., 2023), et al., 2022) that converts any safety signal into a binary and companions (Zhang et al., 2025a). As their applicability grows, so does the potential harm caused by malicious decision rule, and offers statistical guarantees on the false LLM outputs. Despite remarkable performance across a alarm or missed detection rate. The framework is universally applicable to different monitoring purposes and can leverage wide range of tasks, LLMs remain prone to generating halarbitrary proxy signals. Through experiments on mathematlucinated, factually incorrect (Ravichander et al., 2025), or ical problem solving and red teaming conversations, we harmful output (Yu et al., 2025) when deployed.
Safe + Safe = Unsafe? Exploring How Safe Images Can Be Exploited to Jailbreak Large Vision-Language Models
Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have showcased strong reasoning abilities across multiple modalities, achieving significant breakthroughs in various real-world applications. Despite this great success, the safety guardrail of LVLMs may not cover the unforeseen domains introduced by the visual modality. Existing studies primarily focus on eliciting LVLMs to generate harmful responses via carefully crafted image-based jailbreaks designed to bypass alignment defenses. In this study, we reveal that a safe image can be exploited to achieve the same jailbreak consequence when combined with additional safe images and prompts. This stems from two fundamental properties of LVLMs: universal reasoning capabilities and safety snowball effect. Building on these insights, we propose Safety Snowball Agent (SSA), a novel agent-based framework leveraging agents' autonomous and tool-using abilities to jailbreak LVLMs. SSA operates through two principal stages: (1) initial response generation, where tools generate or retrieve jailbreak images based on potential harmful intents, and (2) harmful snowballing, where refined subsequent prompts induce progressively harmful outputs. Our experiments demonstrate that SSA can use nearly any image to induce LVLMs to produce unsafe content, achieving high success jailbreaking rates against the latest LVLMs. Unlike prior works that exploit alignment flaws, SSA leverages the inherent properties of LVLMs, presenting a profound challenge for enforcing safety in generative multimodal systems.
INFUSER: Influence-Guided Self-Evolution Improves Reasoning
Chen, Siyu, Lu, Miao, Wu, Beining, Sheen, Heejune, Zhang, Fengzhuo, Li, Shuangning, Li, Zhiyuan, Blanchet, Jose, Wang, Tianhao, Yang, Zhuoran
Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision. Yet existing methods either depend on extensively curated or teacher-generated training data, or, when the generator runs unsupervised, reward it by a difficulty heuristic that need not improve the solver. We introduce INFUSER, an iterative co-training framework with two co-evolving roles: a Generator that drafts questions and reference golden answers from a pool of unstructured, automatically collected documents, and a Solver that improves by training on them. The solver is trained with standard correctness rewards against the generator-provided answers, while the generator is rewarded by an optimizer-aware influence score that measures whether each proposed question would actually improve the solver on the target distribution. Because this continuous, noisy influence score is poorly served by standard GRPO, we propose DuGRPO, a dual-normalized variant of GRPO, for generator training. Together, these turn the document pool into an adaptive curriculum that favors questions useful to the current solver, not just hard ones. On Qwen3-8B-Base, INFUSER outperforms strong self-evolution baselines with over 20% relative improvement on Olympiad and SuperGPQA benchmarks, and an 8B INFUSER co-evolving generator outperforms a frozen 32B thinking generator on math and coding. Ablations confirm each design choice is necessary, and two extensions, applying INFUSER to an instruction-finetuned anchor and augmenting it with rule-verifiable RLVR data, further demonstrate the flexibility and generalizability of the framework. Code is available at https://github.com/FFishy-git/INFUSER.
When Is a Draft Accepted? A Theory of Acceptance in Speculative Decoding
Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by using a fast drafter to propose candidate tokens that are then verified by a larger target model. Existing theory largely studies the stochastic, distribution-preserving setting, where the goal is to exactly sample from the target distribution. In contrast, many practical systems use greedy decoding, relaxed acceptance rules, or tree-based candidate sets, where success is governed by local ranking and threshold events rather than exact distributional equality. We develop a theory for these regimes. We identify that many common acceptance criteria have rejection regions that can be characterized as lower level sets of the target distribution. For these, we characterize the exact KL divergence required for rejection yielding exact certificates and sharp margin-based bounds for strict greedy decoding, additive and multiplicative relaxed acceptance, top-(m) relaxed criteria, and entropy-thresholded acceptance. We then extend the framework to greedy tree decoding, deriving exact and margin-only certificates for when the target greedy token remains covered by the drafter's top-(m) candidates. Finally, we evaluate the resulting certificates on Qwen3 models, showing that relaxed and tree-based criteria substantially enlarge the region of certified acceptance, especially on decoding steps with low target model distribution margin. These results complement existing distribution-preserving analyses of speculative decoding by characterizing the deterministic local acceptance events common in practical inference systems.
Toward Engineering AGI: Benchmarking the Engineering Design Capabilities of LLMs
Modern engineering, spanning electrical, mechanical, aerospace, civil, and computer disciplines, stands as a cornerstone of human civilization and the foundation of our society. However, engineering design poses a fundamentally different challenge for large language models (LLMs) compared with traditional textbook-style problem solving or factual question answering. Although existing benchmarks have driven progress in areas such as language understanding, code synthesis, and scientific problem solving, real-world engineering design demands the synthesis of domain knowledge, navigation of complex trade-offs, and management of the tedious processes that consume much of practicing engineers' time. Despite these shared challenges across engineering disciplines, no benchmark currently captures the unique demands of engineering design work. In this work, we introduce EngDesign, an Engineering Design benchmark that evaluates LLMs' abilities to perform practical design tasks across nine engineering domains. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on factual recall or question answering, EngDesign uniquely emphasizes LLMs' ability to synthesize domain knowledge, reason under constraints, and generate functional, objective-oriented engineering designs. Each task in EngDesign represents a real-world engineering design problem, accompanied by a detailed task description specifying design goals, constraints, and performance requirements. EngDesign pioneers a simulation-based evaluation paradigm that moves beyond textbook knowledge to assess genuine engineering design capabilities and shifts evaluation from static answer checking to dynamic, simulation-driven functional verification, marking a crucial step toward realizing the vision of engineering Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Structured Spectral Reasoning for Frequency-Adaptive Multimodal Recommendation
Multimodal recommendation aims to integrate collaborative signals with heterogeneous content such as visual and textual information, but remains challenged by modality-specific noise, semantic inconsistency, and unstable propagation over user-item graphs. These issues are often exacerbated by naive fusion or shallow modeling strategies, leading to degraded generalization and poor robustness. While recent work has explored the frequency domain as a lens to separate stable from noisy signals, most methods rely on static filtering or reweighting, lacking the ability to reason over spectral structure or adapt to modality-specific reliability. To address these challenges, we propose a Structured Spectral Reasoning (SSR) framework for frequency-aware multimodal recommendation. Our method follows a four-stage pipeline: (i) Decompose graph-based multimodal signals into spectral bands via graph-guided transformations to isolate semantic granularity; (ii) Modulate band-level reliability with spectral band masking, a training-time masking with representation-consistency objective that suppresses brittle frequency components; (iii) Fuse complementary frequency cues using hyperspectral reasoning with low-rank cross-band interaction; and (iv) Align modality-specific spectral features via contrastive regularization to promote semantic and structural consistency. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, particularly under sparse and cold-start settings. Additional analyses indicate that structured spectral modeling improves robustness and provides clearer diagnostics of how different bands contribute to performance. The code is available at https://github.com/llm-ml/SSR.git.
Topology of Reasoning: Understanding Large Reasoning Models through Reasoning Graph Properties
Recent large-scale reasoning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical benchmarks, yet the internal mechanisms underlying their success remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce the notion of a reasoning graph, extracted by clustering hidden-state representations at each reasoning step, and systematically analyze three key graph-theoretic properties: cyclicity, diameter, and small-world index, across multiple tasks (GSM8K, MATH500, AIME 2024). Our findings reveal that distilled reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeekR1-Distill-Qwen-32B) exhibit significantly more recurrent cycles (about 5 per sample), substantially larger graph diameters, and pronounced small-world characteristics (about 6x) compared to their base counterparts. Notably, these structural advantages grow with task difficulty and model capacity, with cycle detection peaking at the 14B scale and exploration diameter maximized in the 32B variant, correlating positively with accuracy. Furthermore, we show that supervised fine-tuning on an improved dataset systematically expands reasoning graph diameters in tandem with performance gains, offering concrete guidelines for dataset design aimed at boosting reasoning capabilities.
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