Daily Papers

Extensive system scales (i.e. thousands of GPU/TPUs) and prolonged training periods (i.e. months of pretraining) significantly escalate the probability of failures when training large language models (LLMs). Thus, efficient and reliable fault-tolerance methods are in urgent need. Checkpointing is the primary fault-tolerance method to periodically save parameter snapshots from GPU memory to disks via CPU memory. In this paper, we identify the frequency of existing checkpoint-based fault-tolerance being significantly limited by the storage I/O overheads, which results in hefty re-training costs on restarting from the nearest checkpoint. In response to this gap, we introduce an in-memory fault-tolerance framework for large-scale LLM pretraining. The framework boosts the efficiency and reliability of fault tolerance from three aspects: (1) Reduced Data Transfer and I/O: By asynchronously caching parameters, i.e., sharded model parameters, optimizer states, and RNG states, to CPU volatile memory, Our framework significantly reduces communication costs and bypasses checkpoint I/O. (2) Enhanced System Reliability: Our framework enhances parameter protection with a two-layer hierarchy: snapshot management processes (SMPs) safeguard against software failures, together with Erasure Coding (EC) protecting against node failures. This double-layered protection greatly improves the survival probability of the parameters compared to existing checkpointing methods. (3) Improved Snapshotting Frequency: Our framework achieves more frequent snapshotting compared with asynchronous checkpointing optimizations under the same saving time budget, which improves the fault tolerance efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that Our framework minimizes the overhead of fault tolerance of LLM pretraining by effectively leveraging redundant CPU resources.

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved checkpoints are dispatched to evaluation tasks or transferred across different training stages (e.g., from pre-training to post-training). All these scenarios require resharding distributed checkpoints from one parallelism to another. In production environments, different LFMs are trained with various frameworks and storage backends, depending on model sizes and training scales. A high-performance checkpointing system is needed to enable efficient checkpoint management at scale throughout the lifecycle of LFM development. We introduce ByteCheckpoint, an industrial-grade checkpointing system for large-scale LFM training. ByteCheckpoint features: a parallelism-agnostic checkpoint representation that enables efficient load-time checkpoint resharding; a generic checkpoint saving/loading workflow to accommodate multiple training frameworks and support different storage backends; full-stack optimizations to ensure high I/O efficiency and scalability; a suite of monitoring tools to streamline large-scale performance analysis and bottleneck detection. Compared to existing open-source checkpointing systems [52, 58], ByteCheckpoint significantly reduces runtime checkpoint stalls, achieving an average reduction of 54.20x. For saving and loading times, ByteCheckpoint achieves improvements of up to 9.96x and 8.80x, respectively.

Leaf-lesion segmentation is topology-sensitive: small merges, splits, or false holes can be biologically meaningful descriptors of biochemical pathways, yet they are weakly penalized by standard pixel-wise losses in Euclidean latents. I explore HyperTopo-Adapters, a lightweight, parameter-efficient head trained on top of a frozen vision encoder, which embeds features on a product manifold -- hyperbolic + Euclidean + spherical (H + E + S) -- to encourage hierarchical separation (H), local linear detail (E), and global closure (S). A topology prior complements Dice/BCE in two forms: (i) persistent-homology (PH) distance for evaluation and selection, and (ii) a differentiable surrogate that combines a soft Euler-characteristic match with total variation regularization for stable training. I introduce warm-ups for both the hyperbolic contrastive term and the topology prior, per-sample evaluation of structure-aware metrics (Boundary-F1, Betti errors, PD distance), and a min-PD within top-K Dice rule for checkpoint selection. On a Kaggle leaf-lesion dataset (N=2,940), early results show consistent gains in boundary and topology metrics (reducing Delta beta_1 hole error by 9%) while Dice/IoU remain competitive. The study is diagnostic by design: I report controlled ablations (curvature learning, latent dimensions, contrastive temperature, surrogate settings), and ongoing tests varying encoder strength (ResNet-50, DeepLabV3, DINOv2/v3), input resolution, PH weight, and partial unfreezing of late blocks. The contribution is an open, reproducible train/eval suite (available at https://github.com/ChimdiWalter/HyperTopo-Adapters) that isolates geometric/topological priors and surfaces failure modes to guide stronger, topology-preserving architectures.

Modern Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) reduce the cost of customizing large language models (LLMs), yet still require a separate optimization run for every downstream dataset. We introduce Drag-and-Drop LLMs (\textit{DnD)}, a prompt-conditioned parameter generator that eliminates per-task training by mapping a handful of unlabeled task prompts directly to LoRA weight updates. A lightweight text encoder distills each prompt batch into condition embeddings, which are then transformed by a cascaded hyper-convolutional decoder into the full set of LoRA matrices. Once trained in a diverse collection of prompt-checkpoint pairs, DnD produces task-specific parameters in seconds, yielding i) up to 12,000times lower overhead than full fine-tuning, ii) average gains up to 30\% in performance over the strongest training LoRAs on unseen common-sense reasoning, math, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and iii) robust cross-domain generalization despite never seeing the target data or labels. Our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned parameter generation is a viable alternative to gradient-based adaptation for rapidly specializing LLMs. Our project is available at https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD{https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD}.

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse tasks are now well-established, yet their effective deployment necessitates careful hyperparameter optimization. Through extensive empirical studies involving grid searches across diverse configurations, we discover universal scaling laws governing these hyperparameters: optimal learning rate follows a power-law relationship with both model parameters and data sizes, while optimal batch size scales primarily with data sizes. Our analysis reveals a convex optimization landscape for hyperparameters under fixed models and data size conditions. This convexity implies an optimal hyperparameter plateau. We contribute a universal, plug-and-play optimal hyperparameter tool for the community. Its estimated values on the test set are merely 0.07\% away from the globally optimal LLM performance found via an exhaustive search. These laws demonstrate remarkable robustness across variations in model sparsity, training data distribution, and model shape. To our best known, this is the first work that unifies different model shapes and structures, such as Mixture-of-Experts models and dense transformers, as well as establishes optimal hyperparameter scaling laws across diverse data distributions. This exhaustive optimization process demands substantial computational resources, utilizing nearly one million NVIDIA H800 GPU hours to train 3,700 LLMs of varying sizes and hyperparameters from scratch and consuming approximately 100 trillion tokens in total. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we will progressively release all loss measurements and model checkpoints through our designated repository https://step-law.github.io/

Fine-tuning pre-trained models has become the standard approach to endow them with specialized knowledge, but it poses fundamental challenges. In particular, (i) fine-tuning often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where improvements on a target domain degrade generalization on other tasks, and (ii) merging fine-tuned checkpoints from disparate tasks can lead to significant performance loss. To address these challenges, we introduce LiNeS, Layer-increasing Network Scaling, a post-training editing technique designed to preserve pre-trained generalization while enhancing fine-tuned task performance. LiNeS scales parameter updates linearly based on their layer depth within the network, maintaining shallow layers close to their pre-trained values to preserve general features while allowing deeper layers to retain task-specific representations. In multi-task model merging scenarios, layer-wise scaling of merged parameters reduces negative task interference. LiNeS demonstrates significant improvements in both single-task and multi-task settings across various benchmarks in vision and natural language processing. It mitigates forgetting, enhances out-of-distribution generalization, integrates seamlessly with existing multi-task model merging baselines improving their performance across benchmarks and model sizes, and can boost generalization when merging LLM policies aligned with different rewards via RLHF. Our method is simple to implement, computationally efficient and complementary to many existing techniques. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wang-kee/LiNeS

Since DeepMind's AlphaZero, Zero learning quickly became the state-of-the-art method for many board games. It can be improved using a fully convolutional structure (no fully connected layer). Using such an architecture plus global pooling, we can create bots independent of the board size. The training can be made more robust by keeping track of the best checkpoints during the training and by training against them. Using these features, we release Polygames, our framework for Zero learning, with its library of games and its checkpoints. We won against strong humans at the game of Hex in 19x19, which was often said to be untractable for zero learning; and in Havannah. We also won several first places at the TAAI competitions.

Relative positional embeddings (RPE) have received considerable attention since RPEs effectively model the relative distance among tokens and enable length extrapolation. We propose KERPLE, a framework that generalizes relative position embedding for extrapolation by kernelizing positional differences. We achieve this goal using conditionally positive definite (CPD) kernels, a class of functions known for generalizing distance metrics. To maintain the inner product interpretation of self-attention, we show that a CPD kernel can be transformed into a PD kernel by adding a constant offset. This offset is implicitly absorbed in the Softmax normalization during self-attention. The diversity of CPD kernels allows us to derive various RPEs that enable length extrapolation in a principled way. Experiments demonstrate that the logarithmic variant achieves excellent extrapolation performance on three large language modeling datasets. Our implementation and pretrained checkpoints are released at https://github.com/chijames/KERPLE.git.

Pretrained multilingual large language models have typically used heuristic temperature-based sampling to balance between different languages. However previous work has not systematically evaluated the efficacy of different pretraining language distributions across model scales. In this paper, we propose a new sampling method, UniMax, that delivers more uniform coverage of head languages while mitigating overfitting on tail languages by explicitly capping the number of repeats over each language's corpus. We perform an extensive series of ablations testing a range of sampling strategies on a suite of multilingual benchmarks, while varying model scale. We find that UniMax outperforms standard temperature-based sampling, and the benefits persist as scale increases. As part of our contribution, we release: (i) an improved and refreshed mC4 multilingual corpus consisting of 29 trillion characters across 107 languages, and (ii) a suite of pretrained umT5 model checkpoints trained with UniMax sampling.

This document consolidates publicly reported technical details about Metas Llama 4 model family. It summarizes (i) released variants (Scout and Maverick) and the broader herd context including the previewed Behemoth teacher model, (ii) architectural characteristics beyond a high-level MoE description covering routed/shared-expert structure, early-fusion multimodality, and long-context design elements reported for Scout (iRoPE and length generalization strategies), (iii) training disclosures spanning pre-training, mid-training for long-context extension, and post-training methodology (lightweight SFT, online RL, and lightweight DPO) as described in release materials, (iv) developer-reported benchmark results for both base and instruction-tuned checkpoints, and (v) practical deployment constraints observed across major serving environments, including provider-specific context limits and quantization packaging. The manuscript also summarizes licensing obligations relevant to redistribution and derivative naming, and reviews publicly described safeguards and evaluation practices. The goal is to provide a compact technical reference for researchers and practitioners who need precise, source-backed facts about Llama 4.

We show that reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLMs) significantly boosts performance on complex coding and reasoning tasks. Additionally, we compare two general-purpose reasoning models - OpenAI o1 and an early checkpoint of o3 - with a domain-specific system, o1-ioi, which uses hand-engineered inference strategies designed for competing in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We competed live at IOI 2024 with o1-ioi and, using hand-crafted test-time strategies, placed in the 49th percentile. Under relaxed competition constraints, o1-ioi achieved a gold medal. However, when evaluating later models such as o3, we find that o3 achieves gold without hand-crafted domain-specific strategies or relaxed constraints. Our findings show that although specialized pipelines such as o1-ioi yield solid improvements, the scaled-up, general-purpose o3 model surpasses those results without relying on hand-crafted inference heuristics. Notably, o3 achieves a gold medal at the 2024 IOI and obtains a Codeforces rating on par with elite human competitors. Overall, these results indicate that scaling general-purpose reinforcement learning, rather than relying on domain-specific techniques, offers a robust path toward state-of-the-art AI in reasoning domains, such as competitive programming.

LLMs have seen rapid adoption in all domains. They need to be trained on high-end high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures and ingest massive amounts of input data. Unsurprisingly, at such a large scale, unexpected events (e.g., failures of components, instability of the software, undesirable learning patterns, etc.), are frequent and typically impact the training in a negative fashion. Thus, LLMs need to be checkpointed frequently so that they can be rolled back to a stable state and subsequently fine-tuned. However, given the large sizes of LLMs, a straightforward checkpointing solution that directly writes the model parameters and optimizer state to persistent storage (e.g., a parallel file system), incurs significant I/O overheads. To address this challenge, in this paper we study how to reduce the I/O overheads for enabling fast and scalable checkpointing for LLMs that can be applied at high frequency (up to the granularity of individual iterations) without significant impact on the training process. Specifically, we introduce a lazy asynchronous multi-level approach that takes advantage of the fact that the tensors making up the model and optimizer state shards remain immutable for extended periods of time, which makes it possible to copy their content in the background with minimal interference during the training process. We evaluate our approach at scales of up to 180 GPUs using different model sizes, parallelism settings, and checkpointing frequencies. The results show up to 48times faster checkpointing and 2.2times faster end-to-end training runtime compared with the state-of-art checkpointing approaches.

Sa2VA is a recent model for language-guided dense grounding in images and video that achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple segmentation benchmarks and that has become widely popular. However, we found that Sa2VA does not perform according to its full potential for referring video object segmentation tasks. We identify inconsistencies between training and inference procedures as the key factor holding it back. To mitigate this issue, we propose an improved version of Sa2VA, Sa2VA-i, that rectifies these issues and improves the results. In fact, Sa2VA-i sets a new state of the art for multiple video benchmarks and achieves improvements of up to +11.6 J&F on MeViS, +1.4 on Ref-YT-VOS, +3.3 on Ref-DAVIS and +4.1 on ReVOS using the same Sa2VA checkpoints. With our fixes, the Sa2VA-i-1B model even performs on par with the original Sa2VA-26B model on the MeViS benchmark. We hope that this work will show the importance of seemingly trivial implementation details and that it will provide valuable insights for the referring video segmentation field. We provide the code and updated models at https://github.com/kumuji/sa2va-i

Scaling laws research has focused overwhelmingly on English -- yet the most prominent AI models explicitly serve billions of international users. In this work, we undertake the largest multilingual scaling laws study to date, totaling 774 multilingual training experiments, spanning 10M-8B model parameters, 400+ training languages and 48 evaluation languages. We introduce the Adaptive Transfer Scaling Law (ATLAS) for both monolingual and multilingual pretraining, which outperforms existing scaling laws' out-of-sample generalization often by more than 0.3 R^2. Our analyses of the experiments shed light on multilingual learning dynamics, transfer properties between languages, and the curse of multilinguality. First, we derive a cross-lingual transfer matrix, empirically measuring mutual benefit scores between 38 x 38=1444 language pairs. Second, we derive a language-agnostic scaling law that reveals how to optimally scale model size and data when adding languages without sacrificing performance. Third, we identify the computational crossover points for when to pretrain from scratch versus finetune from multilingual checkpoints. We hope these findings provide the scientific foundation for democratizing scaling laws across languages, and enable practitioners to efficiently scale models -- beyond English-first AI.

Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for multi-task learning (MTL), offering a data-efficient alternative to conventional fine-tuning. However, with the rapid development of the open-source AI ecosystem and the increasing availability of fine-tuned foundation models, existing model merging methods face two key limitations: (i) They are primarily designed for in-house fine-tuned models, making them less adaptable to diverse model sources with partially unknown model and task information, (ii) They struggle to scale effectively when merging numerous model checkpoints. To address these challenges, we formulate model merging as a constrained optimization problem and introduce a novel approach: Frank-Wolfe Merging (FW-Merging). Inspired by Frank-Wolfe optimization, our approach iteratively selects the most relevant model in the pool to minimize a linear approximation of the objective function and then executes a local merging similar to the Frank-Wolfe update. The objective function is designed to capture the desired behavior of the target-merged model, while the fine-tuned candidate models define the constraint set. More importantly, FW-Merging serves as an orthogonal technique for existing merging methods, seamlessly integrating with them to further enhance accuracy performance. Our experiments show that FW-Merging scales across diverse model sources, remaining stable with 16 irrelevant models and improving by 15.3% with 16 relevant models on 20 CV tasks, while maintaining constant memory overhead, unlike the linear overhead of data-informed merging methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, FW-Merging surpasses the data-free merging method by 32.8% and outperforms the data-informed Adamerging by 8.39% when merging 20 ViT models. Our code is open-sourced at github.com/hmarkc/FW-Merging.

Model merging has shown great promise at combining expert models, but the benefit of merging is unclear when merging ``generalist'' models trained on many tasks. We explore merging in the context of large (sim100B) models, by recycling checkpoints that exhibit tradeoffs among different tasks. Such checkpoints are often created in the process of developing a frontier model, and many suboptimal ones are usually discarded. Given a pool of model checkpoints obtained from different training runs (e.g., different stages, objectives, hyperparameters, and data mixtures), which naturally show tradeoffs across different language capabilities (e.g., instruction following vs. code generation), we investigate whether merging can recycle such suboptimal models into a Pareto-optimal one. Our optimization algorithm tunes the weight of each checkpoint in a linear combination, resulting in a Pareto-optimal models that outperforms both individual models and merge-based baselines. Further analysis shows that good merges tend to include almost all checkpoints with with non-zero weights, indicating that even seemingly bad initial checkpoints can contribute to good final merges.

The rapidly increasing computational cost of pretraining Large Language Models necessitates more efficient approaches. Numerous computational costs have been invested in existing well-trained checkpoints, but many of them remain underutilized due to engineering constraints or limited model capacity. To efficiently reuse this "sunk" cost, we propose to recycle pretrained checkpoints by expanding their parameter counts and continuing training. We propose orthogonal growth method well-suited for converged Mixture-of-Experts model: interpositional layer copying for depth growth and expert duplication with injected noise for width growth. To determine the optimal timing for such growth across checkpoints sequences, we perform comprehensive scaling experiments revealing that the final accuracy has a strong positive correlation with the amount of sunk cost, indicating that greater prior investment leads to better performance. We scale our approach to models with 70B parameters and over 1T training tokens, achieving 10.66% accuracy gain over training from scratch under the same additional compute budget. Our checkpoint recycling approach establishes a foundation for economically efficient large language model pretraining.

This paper is dedicated to an efficient compression of weights and optimizer states (called checkpoints) obtained at different stages during a neural network training process. First, we propose a prediction-based compression approach, where values from the previously saved checkpoint are used for context modeling in arithmetic coding. Second, in order to enhance the compression performance, we also propose to apply pruning and quantization of the checkpoint values. Experimental results show that our approach achieves substantial bit size reduction, while enabling near-lossless training recovery from restored checkpoints, preserving the model's performance and making it suitable for storage-limited environments.

Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP and multimodal tasks. Despite these successes, their development faces two main challenges: (i) high computational cost; and (ii) difficulty in conducting fair and objective evaluations. LLMs are prohibitively expensive, making it feasible for only a few major players to undertake their training, thereby constraining both research and application opportunities. This underscores the importance of cost-effective LLM training. In this paper, we utilize a growth strategy to significantly reduce LLM training cost. We demonstrate that an LLM with 101B parameters and 0.31TB tokens can be trained on a 100K budget. We also adopt a systematic evaluation paradigm for the IQ evaluation of LLMs, in complement to existing evaluations that focus more on knowledge-oriented abilities. We introduce our benchmark including evaluations on important aspects of intelligence including symbolic mapping, itrule understanding, pattern mining, and anti-interference. Such evaluations minimize the potential impact of memorization. Experimental results show that our model FLM-101B, trained with a budget of 100K, achieves comparable performance to powerful and well-known models, eg GPT-3 and GLM-130B, especially in the IQ benchmark evaluations with contexts unseen in training data. The checkpoint of FLM-101B will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B.

In this paper, we introduce Hunyuan-Large, which is currently the largest open-source Transformer-based mixture of experts model, with a total of 389 billion parameters and 52 billion activation parameters, capable of handling up to 256K tokens. We conduct a thorough evaluation of Hunyuan-Large's superior performance across various benchmarks including language understanding and generation, logical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, coding, long-context, and aggregated tasks, where it outperforms LLama3.1-70B and exhibits comparable performance when compared to the significantly larger LLama3.1-405B model. Key practice of Hunyuan-Large include large-scale synthetic data that is orders larger than in previous literature, a mixed expert routing strategy, a key-value cache compression technique, and an expert-specific learning rate strategy. Additionally, we also investigate the scaling laws and learning rate schedule of mixture of experts models, providing valuable insights and guidances for future model development and optimization. The code and checkpoints of Hunyuan-Large are released to facilitate future innovations and applications. Codes: https://github.com/Tencent/Hunyuan-Large Models: https://huggingface.co/tencent/Tencent-Hunyuan-Large

We conducted extensive experiments on domain adaptation of the Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct model on SEC data, exploring its performance on both general and domain-specific benchmarks. Our focus included continual pre-training (CPT) and model merging, aiming to enhance the model's domain-specific capabilities while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Through this study, we evaluated the impact of integrating financial regulatory data into a robust language model and examined the effectiveness of our model merging techniques in preserving and improving the model's instructive abilities. The model is accessible at hugging face: https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Llama-3-SEC-Base, arcee-ai/Llama-3-SEC-Base. This is an intermediate checkpoint of our final model, which has seen 20B tokens so far. The full model is still in the process of training. This is a preprint technical report with thorough evaluations to understand the entire process.

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have been shown to effectively encode positional information in transformer-based language models. However, these models fail to generalize past the sequence length they were trained on. We present YaRN (Yet another RoPE extensioN method), a compute-efficient method to extend the context window of such models, requiring 10x less tokens and 2.5x less training steps than previous methods. Using YaRN, we show that LLaMA models can effectively utilize and extrapolate to context lengths much longer than their original pre-training would allow, while also surpassing previous the state-of-the-art at context window extension. In addition, we demonstrate that YaRN exhibits the capability to extrapolate beyond the limited context of a fine-tuning dataset. We publish the checkpoints of Llama 2 7B/13B fine-tuned using YaRN with 64k and 128k context windows at https://github.com/jquesnelle/yarn

Model merging is an effective post-training strategy for composing capabilities in large language models without joint retraining. We study this in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, where multiple capability-based SFT checkpoints -- spanning math, code, precise instruction following, general instruction following, and knowledge recall -- must be consolidated into a single model. We introduce Optimization Trajectory Aware (OTA) Merging, a curvature-aware aggregation that leverages optimizer second-moment statistics as a diagonal curvature proxy to reweight parameter edits and mitigate interference. Complementing OTA, we propose Fast Fisher Grafting (FFG), a curvature-driven task-localization step that sparsifies conflicting or low-importance edits. FFG induces extremely low-rank masks concentrated in early attention query/key projections and token embeddings, exploiting shared curvature across capabilities. We further develop a memory-light compression of the second moments that preserves OTA's effect. Across diverse capability-based SFT checkpoints, OTA+FFG improves merged-model quality over strong weight-space baselines, reduces negative transfer, and remains robust across sparsity levels. Analyses reveal substantial curvature overlap between checkpoints, offering a novel lens on why simple linear merging can be effective in practice. Ablations confirm that FFG is critical for reducing task interference and that the compressed second moments retain the gains of the full formulation. To facilitate reproducibility, we open-source all code, training and evaluation scripts, visualization artifacts, and capability-specific SFT checkpoints at https://github.com/pmahdavi/ota-merge.

Building open-domain conversational systems (or chatbots) that produce convincing responses is a recognized challenge. Recent state-of-the-art (SoTA) transformer-based models for the generation of natural language dialogue have demonstrated impressive performance in simulating human-like, single-turn conversations in English. This work investigates, by an empirical study, the potential for transfer learning of such models to Swedish language. DialoGPT, an English language pre-trained model, is adapted by training on three different Swedish language conversational datasets obtained from publicly available sources. Perplexity score (an automated intrinsic language model metric) and surveys by human evaluation were used to assess the performances of the fine-tuned models, with results that indicate that the capacity for transfer learning can be exploited with considerable success. Human evaluators asked to score the simulated dialogue judged over 57% of the chatbot responses to be human-like for the model trained on the largest (Swedish) dataset. We provide the demos and model checkpoints of our English and Swedish chatbots on the HuggingFace platform for public use.

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task of transcribing audio recordings into symbolic representations. Recently, neural network-based methods have been applied to AMT, and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many previous systems only detect the onset and offset of notes frame-wise, so the transcription resolution is limited to the frame hop size. There is a lack of research on using different strategies to encode onset and offset targets for training. In addition, previous AMT systems are sensitive to the misaligned onset and offset labels of audio recordings. Furthermore, there are limited researches on sustain pedal transcription on large-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a high-resolution AMT system trained by regressing precise onset and offset times of piano notes. At inference, we propose an algorithm to analytically calculate the precise onset and offset times of piano notes and pedal events. We show that our AMT system is robust to the misaligned onset and offset labels compared to previous systems. Our proposed system achieves an onset F1 of 96.72% on the MAESTRO dataset, outperforming previous onsets and frames system of 94.80%. Our system achieves a pedal onset F1 score of 91.86\%, which is the first benchmark result on the MAESTRO dataset. We have released the source code and checkpoints of our work at https://github.com/bytedance/piano_transcription.

In this technical report, we introduce the training methodologies implemented in the development of Skywork-MoE, a high-performance mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language model (LLM) with 146 billion parameters and 16 experts. It is initialized from the pre-existing dense checkpoints of our Skywork-13B model. We explore the comparative effectiveness of upcycling versus training from scratch initializations. Our findings suggest that the choice between these two approaches should consider both the performance of the existing dense checkpoints and the MoE training budget. We highlight two innovative techniques: gating logit normalization, which improves expert diversification, and adaptive auxiliary loss coefficients, allowing for layer-specific adjustment of auxiliary loss coefficients. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of these methods. Leveraging these techniques and insights, we trained our upcycled Skywork-MoE on a condensed subset of our SkyPile corpus. The evaluation results demonstrate that our model delivers strong performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

Accurate coding of tumor diagnoses with ICD-10-GM and ICD-O-3 is essential for structured cancer documentation in Germany. Smaller open-weight LLMs are appealing for privacy-preserving automation but often struggle with coding accuracy in German-language contexts. This study investigates whether instruction-based fine-tuning on public datasets improves the coding accuracy of open-weight LLMs for German tumor diagnosis texts. The evaluation uses coded diagnoses from the local tumor documentation system as test data. In a systematic data quality assessment, the upper limit for ICD-10 coding performance was estimated at 60-79% for exact and 81-94% for partial (three-character codes only) derivation. As training data, over 500,000 question-answer pairs were created based on the ICD-10-GM, ICD-O-3, and OPS catalogues. Eight open-weight models from the Qwen, Llama, and Mistral families (7-70 B parameters) were fine-tuned. ICD-10-GM accuracy rose from 1.4-24% to 41-58%, and partial accuracy from 31-74% to 73-83%. The accuracy of ICD-O-3 topography coding also improved but started and remained considerably lower with an exact accuracy of 22-40% and a partial accuracy of 56-67% after fine-tuning. Malformed code outputs dropped to 0% for all models. Tumor-diagnosis recognition reached 99%. Accuracy correlated positively with model size, but gaps between small and large models narrowed after fine-tuning. The reasoning mode in Qwen3 generally yielded a lower performance than fine-tuning and was over 100 times slower. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging public catalogues to build instruction datasets that improve LLMs in medical documentation tasks. The complete training dataset and the best-performing checkpoints of the fine-tuned models are available from https://huggingface.co/datasets/stefan-m-lenz/ICDOPS-QA-2024.

AI technologies for Natural Languages have made tremendous progress recently. However, commensurate progress has not been made on Sign Languages, in particular, in recognizing signs as individual words or as complete sentences. We introduce OpenHands, a library where we take four key ideas from the NLP community for low-resource languages and apply them to sign languages for word-level recognition. First, we propose using pose extracted through pretrained models as the standard modality of data to reduce training time and enable efficient inference, and we release standardized pose datasets for 6 different sign languages - American, Argentinian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, and Turkish. Second, we train and release checkpoints of 4 pose-based isolated sign language recognition models across all 6 languages, providing baselines and ready checkpoints for deployment. Third, to address the lack of labelled data, we propose self-supervised pretraining on unlabelled data. We curate and release the largest pose-based pretraining dataset on Indian Sign Language (Indian-SL). Fourth, we compare different pretraining strategies and for the first time establish that pretraining is effective for sign language recognition by demonstrating (a) improved fine-tuning performance especially in low-resource settings, and (b) high crosslingual transfer from Indian-SL to few other sign languages. We open-source all models and datasets in OpenHands with a hope that it makes research in sign languages more accessible, available here at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/OpenHands .

When training deep learning models, the performance depends largely on the selected hyperparameters. However, hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is often one of the most expensive parts of model design. Classical HPO methods treat this as a black-box optimization problem. However, gray-box HPO methods, which incorporate more information about the setup, have emerged as a promising direction for more efficient optimization. For example, using intermediate loss evaluations to terminate bad selections. In this work, we propose an HPO method for neural networks using logged checkpoints of the trained weights to guide future hyperparameter selections. Our method, Forecasting Model Search (FMS), embeds weights into a Gaussian process deep kernel surrogate model, using a permutation-invariant graph metanetwork to be data-efficient with the logged network weights. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/forecasting-model-search.

Post-training quantization is the leading method for addressing memory-related bottlenecks in LLM inference, but unfortunately, it suffers from significant performance degradation below 4-bit precision. An alternative approach involves training compressed models directly at a low bitwidth (e.g., binary or ternary models). However, the performance, training dynamics, and scaling trends of such models are not yet well understood. To address this issue, we train and openly release the Spectra LLM suite consisting of 54 language models ranging from 99M to 3.9B parameters, trained on 300B tokens. Spectra includes FloatLMs, post-training quantized QuantLMs (3, 4, 6, and 8 bits), and ternary LLMs (TriLMs) - our improved architecture for ternary language modeling, which significantly outperforms previously proposed ternary models of a given size (in bits), matching half-precision models at scale. For example, TriLM 3.9B is (bit-wise) smaller than the half-precision FloatLM 830M, but matches half-precision FloatLM 3.9B in commonsense reasoning and knowledge benchmarks. However, TriLM 3.9B is also as toxic and stereotyping as FloatLM 3.9B, a model six times larger in size. Additionally, TriLM 3.9B lags behind FloatLM in perplexity on validation splits and web-based corpora but performs better on less noisy datasets like Lambada and PennTreeBank. To enhance understanding of low-bitwidth models, we are releasing 500+ intermediate checkpoints of the Spectra suite at https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite{https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite}.

We present Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model. Nemotron 3 Nano was pretrained on 25 trillion text tokens, including more than 3 trillion new unique tokens over Nemotron 2, followed by supervised fine tuning and large-scale RL on diverse environments. Nemotron 3 Nano achieves better accuracy than our previous generation Nemotron 2 Nano while activating less than half of the parameters per forward pass. It achieves up to 3.3x higher inference throughput than similarly-sized open models like GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, while also being more accurate on popular benchmarks. Nemotron 3 Nano demonstrates enhanced agentic, reasoning, and chat abilities and supports context lengths up to 1M tokens. We release both our pretrained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B Base and post-trained Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B checkpoints on Hugging Face.

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves state of the art performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs.

In this report, we introduce Falcon-H1, a new series of large language models (LLMs) featuring hybrid architecture designs optimized for both high performance and efficiency across diverse use cases. Unlike earlier Falcon models built solely on Transformer or Mamba architectures, Falcon-H1 adopts a parallel hybrid approach that combines Transformer-based attention with State Space Models (SSMs), known for superior long-context memory and computational efficiency. We systematically revisited model design, data strategy, and training dynamics, challenging conventional practices in the field. Falcon-H1 is released in multiple configurations, including base and instruction-tuned variants at 0.5B, 1.5B, 1.5B-deep, 3B, 7B, and 34B parameters. Quantized instruction-tuned models are also available, totaling over 30 checkpoints on Hugging Face Hub. Falcon-H1 models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and exceptional parameter and training efficiency. The flagship Falcon-H1-34B matches or outperforms models up to 70B scale, such as Qwen3-32B, Qwen2.5-72B, and Llama3.3-70B, while using fewer parameters and less data. Smaller models show similar trends: the Falcon-H1-1.5B-Deep rivals current leading 7B-10B models, and Falcon-H1-0.5B performs comparably to typical 7B models from 2024. These models excel across reasoning, mathematics, multilingual tasks, instruction following, and scientific knowledge. With support for up to 256K context tokens and 18 languages, Falcon-H1 is suitable for a wide range of applications. All models are released under a permissive open-source license, underscoring our commitment to accessible and impactful AI research.

We present DeepSeek-Coder-V2, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) code language model that achieves performance comparable to GPT4-Turbo in code-specific tasks. Specifically, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 is further pre-trained from an intermediate checkpoint of DeepSeek-V2 with additional 6 trillion tokens. Through this continued pre-training, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 substantially enhances the coding and mathematical reasoning capabilities of DeepSeek-V2, while maintaining comparable performance in general language tasks. Compared to DeepSeek-Coder-33B, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 demonstrates significant advancements in various aspects of code-related tasks, as well as reasoning and general capabilities. Additionally, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 expands its support for programming languages from 86 to 338, while extending the context length from 16K to 128K. In standard benchmark evaluations, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 achieves superior performance compared to closed-source models such as GPT4-Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro in coding and math benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have demonstrated outstanding performance on various natural language processing tasks. This report presents OpenBA, an open-sourced 15B bilingual asymmetric seq2seq model, to contribute an LLM variant to the Chinese-oriented open-source model community. We enhance OpenBA with effective and efficient techniques as well as adopt a three-stage training strategy to train the model from scratch. Our solution can also achieve very competitive performance with only 380B tokens, which is better than LLaMA-70B on the BELEBELE benchmark, BLOOM-176B on the MMLU benchmark, GLM-130B on the C-Eval (hard) benchmark. This report provides the main details to pre-train an analogous model, including pre-training data processing, Bilingual Flan data collection, the empirical observations that inspire our model architecture design, training objectives of different stages, and other enhancement techniques. We have refactored our code to follow the design principles of the Huggingface Transformers Library, making it more convenient for developers to use, and released checkpoints of different training stages at https://huggingface.co/openBA. More details of our project are available at https://github.com/OpenNLG/openBA.git.

Large language models (LLMs) enable strong text generation, and in general there is a practical tradeoff between fine-tuning and prompt engineering. We introduce Simplify-This, a comparative study evaluating both paradigms for text simplification with encoder-decoder LLMs across multiple benchmarks, using a range of evaluation metrics. Fine-tuned models consistently deliver stronger structural simplification, whereas prompting often attains higher semantic similarity scores yet tends to copy inputs. A human evaluation favors fine-tuned outputs overall. We release code, a cleaned derivative dataset used in our study, checkpoints of fine-tuned models, and prompt templates to facilitate reproducibility and future work.

During the last stage of RLHF, a large language model is aligned to human intents via PPO training, a process that generally requires large-scale computational resources. In this technical report, we empirically investigate an efficient implementation of RLHF using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which allows us to align the LLaMA 7B checkpoint on the Alpaca dataset using only two A100 GPUs instead of the eight required for full model fine-tuning. Despite tuning only 0.2% of LLaMA 7B's parameters, our implementation achieves better performance than the publicly-released AlpacaFarm checkpoint with full model fine-tuning. Next, we analyze several configurations of our LoRA-based PPO implementation, varying the form of the KL regularization term in the training objective. We find that (1) removing this penalty term does not harm performance on the AlpacaFarm evaluation set under our LoRA setup; (2) other regularizers, such as Jensen-Shannon divergence, lead to improved performance; and (3) while PPO training negatively impacts the factuality of model-generated responses, training with LoRA largely mitigates this effect. We release our code and pretrained checkpoints to facilitate future research on more efficient RLHF.

Instruction fine-tuning pretrained LLMs for diverse downstream tasks has demonstrated remarkable success and has captured the interest of both academics and practitioners. To ensure such fine-tuned LLMs align with human preferences, techniques such as RLHF and DPO have emerged. At the same time, there is increasing interest in smaller parameter counts for models. In this work, using OpenLLaMA 3Bv2 as a base model, we describe the recipe used to fine-tune the OpenBezoar family of models. In this recipe: We first generate synthetic instruction fine-tuning data using an open and commercially non-restrictive instruction fine-tuned variant of the Falcon-40B model under three schemes based on: LaMini-LM, WizardLM/Evol-Instruct (with databricks-dolly-15k as a seed dataset) and Orca (with the Flan Collection as a seed dataset), then filter these generations using GPT-4 as a human proxy. We then perform cost-effective QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning sequentially with each scheme. The resulting checkpoint is further fine-tuned with a subset of the HH-RLHF dataset to minimize distribution shift prior to using the DPO loss to obtain the final checkpoint. Evaluation is done with the LM Eval Harness tasks/metrics as well as on MT-Bench using the "LLM-as-a-judge" framework with Claude 2.1, with the finding that the final checkpoint, "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO", demonstrates superior performance over many models at the 3B parameter scale, even outperforming the top model in one of the categories on the Huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard. We release "OpenBezoar-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO" checkpoints, alongside our generated datasets on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/SurgeGlobal/open-bezoar-6620a24923e12127e9e2b9cc and our codebase at https://bitbucket.org/paladinanalytics/workspace/projects/OP.

Despite the recent advances of the artificial intelligence, building social intelligence remains a challenge. Among social signals, laughter is one of the distinctive expressions that occurs during social interactions between humans. In this work, we tackle a new challenge for machines to understand the rationale behind laughter in video, Video Laugh Reasoning. We introduce this new task to explain why people laugh in a particular video and a dataset for this task. Our proposed dataset, SMILE, comprises video clips and language descriptions of why people laugh. We propose a baseline by leveraging the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs) with textual video representation. Experiments show that our baseline can generate plausible explanations for laughter. We further investigate the scalability of our baseline by probing other video understanding tasks and in-the-wild videos. We release our dataset, code, and model checkpoints on https://github.com/SMILE-data/SMILE.

We reveal that low-bit quantization favors undertrained large language models (LLMs) by observing that models with larger sizes or fewer training tokens experience less quantization-induced degradation (QiD) when applying low-bit quantization, whereas smaller models with extensive training tokens suffer significant QiD. To gain deeper insights into this trend, we study over 1500 quantized LLM checkpoints of various sizes and at different training levels (undertrained or fully trained) in a controlled setting, deriving scaling laws for understanding the relationship between QiD and factors such as the number of training tokens, model size and bit width. With the derived scaling laws, we propose a novel perspective that we can use QiD to measure an LLM's training levels and determine the number of training tokens required for fully training LLMs of various sizes. Moreover, we use the scaling laws to predict the quantization performance of different-sized LLMs trained with 100 trillion tokens. Our projection shows that the low-bit quantization performance of future models, which are expected to be trained with over 100 trillion tokens, may NOT be desirable. This poses a potential challenge for low-bit quantization in the future and highlights the need for awareness of a model's training level when evaluating low-bit quantization research. To facilitate future research on this problem, we release all the 1500+ quantized checkpoints used in this work at https://huggingface.co/Xu-Ouyang.

We introduce LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed for both computational efficiency and advanced agentic capabilities. Stemming from the need for scalable efficiency, LongCat-Flash adopts two novel designs: (a) Zero-computation Experts, which enables dynamic computational budget allocation and activates 18.6B-31.3B (27B on average) per token depending on contextual demands, optimizing resource usage. (b) Shortcut-connected MoE, which enlarges the computation-communication overlap window, demonstrating notable gains in inference efficiency and throughput compared to models of a comparable scale. We develop a comprehensive scaling framework for large models that combines hyperparameter transfer, model-growth initialization, a multi-pronged stability suite, and deterministic computation to achieve stable and reproducible training. Notably, leveraging the synergy among scalable architectural design and infrastructure efforts, we complete model training on more than 20 trillion tokens within 30 days, while achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference at a cost of \$0.70 per million output tokens. To cultivate LongCat-Flash towards agentic intelligence, we conduct a large-scale pre-training on optimized mixtures, followed by targeted mid- and post-training on reasoning, code, and instructions, with further augmentation from synthetic data and tool use tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, as a non-thinking foundation model, LongCat-Flash delivers highly competitive performance among other leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. The model checkpoint of LongCat-Flash is open-sourced to foster community research. LongCat Chat: https://longcat.ai Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat

Recent state-of-the-art approaches to summarization utilize large pre-trained Transformer models. Distilling these models to smaller student models has become critically important for practical use; however there are many different distillation methods proposed by the NLP literature. Recent work on distilling BERT for classification and regression tasks shows strong performance using direct knowledge distillation. Alternatively, machine translation practitioners distill using pseudo-labeling, where a small model is trained on the translations of a larger model. A third, simpler approach is to 'shrink and fine-tune' (SFT), which avoids any explicit distillation by copying parameters to a smaller student model and then fine-tuning. We compare these three approaches for distillation of Pegasus and BART, the current and former state of the art, pre-trained summarization models, and find that SFT outperforms knowledge distillation and pseudo-labeling on the CNN/DailyMail dataset, but under-performs pseudo-labeling on the more abstractive XSUM dataset. PyTorch Code and checkpoints of different sizes are available through Hugging Face transformers here http://tiny.cc/4iy0tz.

Although diffusion language models (DLMs) are evolving quickly, many recent models converge on a set of shared components. These components, however, are distributed across ad-hoc research codebases or lack transparent implementations, making them difficult to reproduce or extend. As the field accelerates, there is a clear need for a unified framework that standardizes these common components while remaining flexible enough to support new methods and architectures. To address this gap, we introduce dLLM, an open-source framework that unifies the core components of diffusion language modeling -- training, inference, and evaluation -- and makes them easy to customize for new designs. With dLLM, users can reproduce, finetune, deploy, and evaluate open-source large DLMs such as LLaDA and Dream through a standardized pipeline. The framework also provides minimal, reproducible recipes for building small DLMs from scratch with accessible compute, including converting any BERT-style encoder or autoregressive LM into a DLM. We also release the checkpoints of these small DLMs to make DLMs more accessible and accelerate future research.

The development of state-of-the-art large language models is commonly understood as a two-stage process involving pre-training and post-training. We point out the need for an additional intermediate stage called reinforcement mid-training with potential for strong performance gains. In this paper, we formally define the problem and identify three key challenges: (1) inefficient training due to excessive reasoning steps, (2) disregard of the imbalanced token entropy distribution, and (3) underutilization of token information. To address these challenges, we propose RMT, a framework for efficient, adaptive, and unified reinforcement mid-training with various innovative components. In particular, we first introduce a dynamic token budget mechanism that constrains unnecessary reasoning steps and mitigates model overthinking. Next, we design a curriculum-based adaptive sampling method that fosters a progressive learning trajectory from easy to hard tokens. Finally, we present a dual training strategy that combines reinforcement learning with next-token prediction, ensuring targeted learning on key tokens and full exploitation of all token information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of RMT over state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to +64.91% performance improvement with only 21% of the reasoning length in language modeling. We also show that checkpoints obtained after reinforcement mid-training can benefit the subsequent post-training, yielding up to +18.76% improvement in the mathematical domain.

We investigate the performance of a state-of-the art (SoTA) architecture T5 (available on the SuperGLUE) and compare with it 3 other previous SoTA architectures across 5 different tasks from 2 relatively diverse datasets. The datasets are diverse in terms of the number and types of tasks they have. To improve performance, we augment the training data by using an autoregressive model. We achieve near-SoTA results on a couple of the tasks - macro F1 scores of 81.66% for task A of the OLID 2019 dataset and 82.54% for task A of the hate speech and offensive content (HASOC) 2021 dataset, where SoTA are 82.9% and 83.05%, respectively. We perform error analysis and explain why one of the models (Bi-LSTM) makes the predictions it does by using a publicly available algorithm: Integrated Gradient (IG). This is because explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is essential for earning the trust of users. The main contributions of this work are the implementation method of T5, which is discussed; the data augmentation using a new conversational AI model checkpoint, which brought performance improvements; and the revelation on the shortcomings of HASOC 2021 dataset. It reveals the difficulties of poor data annotation by using a small set of examples where the T5 model made the correct predictions, even when the ground truth of the test set were incorrect (in our opinion). We also provide our model checkpoints on the HuggingFace hub1 to foster transparency.

There remain many open questions pertaining to the scaling behaviour of Transformer architectures. These scaling decisions and findings can be critical, as training runs often come with an associated computational cost which have both financial and/or environmental impact. The goal of this paper is to present scaling insights from pretraining and finetuning Transformers. While Kaplan et al. presents a comprehensive study of the scaling behaviour of Transformer language models, the scope is only on the upstream (pretraining) loss. Therefore, it is still unclear if these set of findings transfer to downstream task within the context of the pretrain-finetune paradigm. The key findings of this paper are as follows: (1) we show that aside from only the model size, model shape matters for downstream fine-tuning, (2) scaling protocols operate differently at different compute regions, (3) widely adopted T5-base and T5-large sizes are Pareto-inefficient. To this end, we present improved scaling protocols whereby our redesigned models achieve similar downstream fine-tuning quality while having 50\% fewer parameters and training 40\% faster compared to the widely adopted T5-base model. We publicly release over 100 pretrained checkpoints of different T5 configurations to facilitate future research and analysis.

This paper presents LongCat-Audio-Codec, an audio tokenizer and detokenizer solution designed for industrial grade end-to-end speech large language models. By leveraging a decoupled model architecture and a multistage training strategy, LongCat-Audio-Codec exhibits robust semantic modeling capabilities, flexible acoustic feature extraction capabilities, and low-latency streaming synthesis capabilities. It encodes speech at an ultra-low frame rate of 16.67 Hz, with a minimum bitrate of 0.43 kbps and a maximum bitrate of 0.87 kbps. Evaluation results demonstrate that LongCat-Audio-Codec achieves strong speech intelligibility and is capable of synthesizing highquality speech at low bitrate, thus effectively balancing coding efficiency and decoding quality. The inference code and model checkpoints of LongCat-Audio-Codec are available at: https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Audio-Codec.

Uniform-state discrete diffusion models hold the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent ability to self-correct. However, they are typically outperformed by autoregressive models and masked diffusion models. In this work, we narrow this performance gap by leveraging a key insight: Uniform-state diffusion processes naturally emerge from an underlying Gaussian diffusion. Our method, Duo, transfers powerful techniques from Gaussian diffusion to improve both training and sampling. First, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy guided by the Gaussian process, doubling training speed by reducing variance. Models trained with curriculum learning surpass autoregressive models in zero-shot perplexity on 3 of 7 benchmarks. Second, we present Discrete Consistency Distillation, which adapts consistency distillation from the continuous to the discrete setting. This algorithm unlocks few-step generation in diffusion language models by accelerating sampling by two orders of magnitude. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: http://s-sahoo.github.io/duo

Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Among this family of models, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) achieve the strongest performance but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficiency features--most notably, KV caching. In this work, we introduce Eso-LMs, a new family of models that fuses AR and MDM paradigms, enabling smooth interpolation between their perplexities while overcoming their respective limitations. Eso-LMs set a new state of the art on standard language modeling benchmarks. Crucially, we are the **first to introduce KV caching for MDMs** while preserving parallel generation, significantly improving inference efficiency. Combined with an optimized sampling schedule, our method achieves up to **65x** faster inference than standard MDMs and **4x** faster inference than prior semi-autoregressive approaches. We provide the code and model checkpoints on the project page: [http://s-sahoo.github.io/Eso-LMs](http://s-sahoo.github.io/Eso-LMs)

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success for their general knowledge and ability to solve a wide spectrum of tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Due to their impressive abilities, LLMs have shed light on potential inter-discipline applications to foster scientific discoveries of a specific domain by using artificial intelligence (AI for science, AI4S). In the meantime, utilizing NLP techniques in geoscience research and practice is wide and convoluted, contributing from knowledge extraction and document classification to question answering and knowledge discovery. In this work, we take the initial step to leverage LLM for science, through a rather straightforward approach. We try to specialize an LLM into geoscience, by further pre-training the model with a vast amount of texts in geoscience, as well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) the resulting model with our custom collected instruction tuning dataset. These efforts result in a model GeoGalactica consisting of 30 billion parameters. To our best knowledge, it is the largest language model for the geoscience domain. More specifically, GeoGalactica is from further pre-training of Galactica. We train GeoGalactica over a geoscience-related text corpus containing 65 billion tokens curated from extensive data sources in the big science project Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), preserving as the largest geoscience-specific text corpus. Then we fine-tune the model with 1 million pairs of instruction-tuning data consisting of questions that demand professional geoscience knowledge to answer. In this technical report, we will illustrate in detail all aspects of GeoGalactica, including data collection, data cleaning, base model selection, pre-training, SFT, and evaluation. We open-source our data curation tools and the checkpoints of GeoGalactica during the first 3/4 of pre-training.

Scaling laws predict the loss of a target machine learning model by extrapolating from easier-to-train models with fewer parameters or smaller training sets. This provides an efficient way for practitioners and researchers alike to compare pretraining decisions involving optimizers, datasets, and model architectures. Despite the widespread use of scaling laws to model the dynamics of language model training, there has been little work on understanding how to best estimate and interpret them. We collect (and release) a large-scale dataset containing losses and downstream evaluations for 485 previously published pretrained models. We use these to estimate more than 1000 scaling laws, then derive a set of best practices for estimating scaling laws in new model families. We find that fitting scaling laws to intermediate checkpoints of training runs (and not just their final losses) substantially improves accuracy, and that -- all else equal -- estimates of performance are generally most accurate when derived from other models of similar sizes. However, because there is a significant degree of variability across model seeds, training multiple small models is sometimes more useful than training a single large one. Moreover, while different model families differ scaling behavior, they are often similar enough that a target model's behavior can be predicted from a single model with the same architecture, along with scaling parameter estimates derived from other model families.

Model merging is an efficient post-training strategy for integrating knowledge from multiple finetuned checkpoints of a shared foundation model. Existing methods operate in the parameter space, combining task vectors to mitigate conflicts, but remain constrained by parameter inconsistencies. We propose Functional Dual Anchors (FDAs), a framework that instead models the input-representation space. FDAs are synthetic inputs whose induced gradients align with task vectors, capturing task-specific functional shifts relative to the pretrained model. This perspective bridges joint multi-task training and post-hoc merging, offering both robustness and flexibility. We further introduce a principled initialization scheme and show that FDAs are complementary to parameter-space model merging. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FDAs in model merging.

Many recent advances in robotic manipulation have come through imitation learning, yet these rely largely on mimicking a particularly hard-to-acquire form of demonstrations: those collected on the same robot in the same room with the same objects as the trained policy must handle at test time. In contrast, large pre-recorded human video datasets demonstrating manipulation skills in-the-wild already exist, which contain valuable information for robots. Is it possible to distill a repository of useful robotic skill policies out of such data without any additional requirements on robot-specific demonstrations or exploration? We present the first such system ZeroMimic, that generates immediately deployable image goal-conditioned skill policies for several common categories of manipulation tasks (opening, closing, pouring, pick&place, cutting, and stirring) each capable of acting upon diverse objects and across diverse unseen task setups. ZeroMimic is carefully designed to exploit recent advances in semantic and geometric visual understanding of human videos, together with modern grasp affordance detectors and imitation policy classes. After training ZeroMimic on the popular EpicKitchens dataset of ego-centric human videos, we evaluate its out-of-the-box performance in varied real-world and simulated kitchen settings with two different robot embodiments, demonstrating its impressive abilities to handle these varied tasks. To enable plug-and-play reuse of ZeroMimic policies on other task setups and robots, we release software and policy checkpoints of our skill policies.

Recent Diffusion Transformers (e.g., DiT) have demonstrated their powerful effectiveness in generating high-quality 2D images. However, it is still being determined whether the Transformer architecture performs equally well in 3D shape generation, as previous 3D diffusion methods mostly adopted the U-Net architecture. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Diffusion Transformer for 3D shape generation, namely DiT-3D, which can directly operate the denoising process on voxelized point clouds using plain Transformers. Compared to existing U-Net approaches, our DiT-3D is more scalable in model size and produces much higher quality generations. Specifically, the DiT-3D adopts the design philosophy of DiT but modifies it by incorporating 3D positional and patch embeddings to adaptively aggregate input from voxelized point clouds. To reduce the computational cost of self-attention in 3D shape generation, we incorporate 3D window attention into Transformer blocks, as the increased 3D token length resulting from the additional dimension of voxels can lead to high computation. Finally, linear and devoxelization layers are used to predict the denoised point clouds. In addition, our transformer architecture supports efficient fine-tuning from 2D to 3D, where the pre-trained DiT-2D checkpoint on ImageNet can significantly improve DiT-3D on ShapeNet. Experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset demonstrate that the proposed DiT-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity and diverse 3D point cloud generation. In particular, our DiT-3D decreases the 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy of the state-of-the-art method by 4.59 and increases the Coverage metric by 3.51 when evaluated on Chamfer Distance.

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.

The interest in linear complexity models for large language models is on the rise, although their scaling capacity remains uncertain. In this study, we present the scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability. Specifically, we examine the scaling behaviors of three efficient linear architectures. These include TNL, a linear attention model with data-independent decay; HGRN2, a linear RNN with data-dependent decay; and cosFormer2, a linear attention model without decay. We also include LLaMA as a baseline architecture for softmax attention for comparison. These models were trained with six variants, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters on a 300B-token corpus, and evaluated with a total of 1,376 intermediate checkpoints on various downstream tasks. These tasks include validation loss, commonsense reasoning, and information retrieval and generation. The study reveals that existing linear complexity language models exhibit similar scaling capabilities as conventional transformer-based models while also demonstrating superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention.

Transformers have been established as the de-facto backbones for most recent advances in sequence modeling, mainly due to their growing memory capacity that scales with the context length. While plausible for retrieval tasks, it causes quadratic complexity and so has motivated recent studies to explore viable subquadratic recurrent alternatives. Despite showing promising preliminary results in diverse domains, such recurrent architectures underperform Transformers in recall-intensive tasks, often attributed to their fixed-size memory. In this paper, we introduce Memory Caching (MC), a simple yet effective technique that enhances recurrent models by caching checkpoints of their memory states (a.k.a. hidden states). Memory Caching allows the effective memory capacity of RNNs to grow with sequence length, offering a flexible trade-off that interpolates between the fixed memory (i.e., O(L) complexity) of RNNs and the growing memory (i.e., O(L^2) complexity) of Transformers. We propose four variants of MC, including gated aggregation and sparse selective mechanisms, and discuss their implications on both linear and deep memory modules. Our experimental results on language modeling, and long-context understanding tasks show that MC enhances the performance of recurrent models, supporting its effectiveness. The results of in-context recall tasks indicate that while Transformers achieve the best accuracy, our MC variants show competitive performance, close the gap with Transformers, and performs better than state-of-the-art recurrent models.

While WangchanBERTa has become the de facto standard in transformer-based Thai language modeling, it still has shortcomings in regard to the understanding of foreign words, most notably English words, which are often borrowed without orthographic assimilation into Thai in many contexts. We identify the lack of foreign vocabulary in WangchanBERTa's tokenizer as the main source of these shortcomings. We then expand WangchanBERTa's vocabulary via vocabulary transfer from XLM-R's pretrained tokenizer and pretrain a new model using the expanded tokenizer, starting from WangchanBERTa's checkpoint, on a new dataset that is larger than the one used to train WangchanBERTa. Our results show that our new pretrained model, PhayaThaiBERT, outperforms WangchanBERTa in many downstream tasks and datasets.

Checkpoint merging is a technique for combining multiple model snapshots into a single superior model, potentially reducing training time for large language models. This paper explores checkpoint merging in the context of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), where only small adapter modules (e.g. LoRA) are trained. We propose Metrics-Weighted Averaging (MWA), a simple yet effective method to merge model checkpoints by weighting their parameters according to performance metrics. In particular, we investigate weighting by training loss and by training steps, under the intuition that lower-loss or later-step checkpoints are more valuable. We introduce a formula with a penalty factor to adjust weight distribution, requiring only one hyperparameter regardless of the number of checkpoints. Experiments on three fine-tuning tasks (mathematical reasoning, preference alignment, and general instruction tuning) show that MWA consistently produces merged models that outperform the naive uniform average of checkpoints. Notably, loss-weighted merging often yields the best results, delivering up to 5% higher task accuracy than the baseline uniform merge and even surpassing the final individual checkpoint's performance. These findings validate checkpoint merging for PEFT and demonstrate that a metric-driven weighting heuristic can efficiently boost model performance with minimal computational overhead.

Transcriptomic foundation models (TFMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for analyzing gene expression in cells and tissues, supporting key tasks such as cell-type annotation, batch correction, and perturbation prediction. However, the diversity of model implementations and training strategies across recent TFMs, though promising, makes it challenging to isolate the contribution of individual design choices or evaluate their potential synergies. This hinders the field's ability to converge on best practices and limits the reproducibility of insights across studies. We present BMFM-RNA, an open-source, modular software package that unifies diverse TFM pretraining and fine-tuning objectives within a single framework. Leveraging this capability, we introduce a novel training objective, whole cell expression decoder (WCED), which captures global expression patterns using an autoencoder-like CLS bottleneck representation. In this paper, we describe the framework, supported input representations, and training objectives. We evaluated four model checkpoints pretrained on CELLxGENE using combinations of masked language modeling (MLM), WCED and multitask learning. Using the benchmarking capabilities of BMFM-RNA, we show that WCED-based models achieve performance that matches or exceeds state-of-the-art approaches like scGPT across more than a dozen datasets in both zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. BMFM-RNA, available as part of the biomed-multi-omics project ( https://github.com/BiomedSciAI/biomed-multi-omic ), offers a reproducible foundation for systematic benchmarking and community-driven exploration of optimal TFM training strategies, enabling the development of more effective tools to leverage the latest advances in AI for understanding cell biology.

We present Video Pre-trained Transformer. VPT uses four SOTA encoder models from prior work to convert a video into a sequence of compact embeddings. Our backbone, based on a reference Flan-T5-11B architecture, learns a universal representation of the video that is a non-linear sum of the encoder models. It learns using an autoregressive causal language modeling loss by predicting the words spoken in YouTube videos. Finally, we evaluate on standard downstream benchmarks by training fully connected prediction heads for each task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of multiple frozen SOTA models as encoders in an "embedding -> backbone -> prediction head" design pattern - all others have trained their own joint encoder models. Additionally, we include more modalities than the current SOTA, Merlot Reserve, by adding explicit Scene Graph information. For these two reasons, we believe it could combine the world's best open-source models to achieve SOTA performance. Initial experiments demonstrate the model is learning appropriately, but more experimentation and compute is necessary, and already in progress, to realize our loftier goals. Alongside this work, we build on the YT-20M dataset, reproducing it and adding 25,000 personally selected YouTube videos to its corpus. All code and model checkpoints are open sourced under a standard MIT license.

Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first high-quality dialogue datasets for 6 African languages: Swahili, Wolof, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin English, Kinyarwanda & Yor\`ub\'a. These datasets consist of 1,500 turns each, which we translate from a portion of the English multi-domain MultiWOZ dataset. Subsequently, we investigate & analyze the effectiveness of modelling through transfer learning by utilziing state-of-the-art (SoTA) deep monolingual models: DialoGPT and BlenderBot. We compare the models with a simple seq2seq baseline using perplexity. Besides this, we conduct human evaluation of single-turn conversations by using majority votes and measure inter-annotator agreement (IAA). We find that the hypothesis that deep monolingual models learn some abstractions that generalize across languages holds. We observe human-like conversations, to different degrees, in 5 out of the 6 languages. The language with the most transferable properties is the Nigerian Pidgin English, with a human-likeness score of 78.1%, of which 34.4% are unanimous. We freely provide the datasets and host the model checkpoints/demos on the HuggingFace hub for public access.

In this report, we introduce Xiaomi-Robotics-0, an advanced vision-language-action (VLA) model optimized for high performance and fast and smooth real-time execution. The key to our method lies in a carefully designed training recipe and deployment strategy. Xiaomi-Robotics-0 is first pre-trained on large-scale cross-embodiment robot trajectories and vision-language data, endowing it with broad and generalizable action-generation capabilities while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of the visual-semantic knowledge of the underlying pre-trained VLM. During post-training, we propose several techniques for training the VLA model for asynchronous execution to address the inference latency during real-robot rollouts. During deployment, we carefully align the timesteps of consecutive predicted action chunks to ensure continuous and seamless real-time rollouts. We evaluate Xiaomi-Robotics-0 extensively in simulation benchmarks and on two challenging real-robot tasks that require precise and dexterous bimanual manipulation. Results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all simulation benchmarks. Moreover, Xiaomi-Robotics-0 can roll out fast and smoothly on real robots using a consumer-grade GPU, achieving high success rates and throughput on both real-robot tasks. To facilitate future research, code and model checkpoints are open-sourced at https://xiaomi-robotics-0.github.io

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning to DLMs remains an open challenge because of the intractable likelihood. Pioneering work such as diffu-GRPO estimated token-level likelihoods via one-step unmasking. While computationally efficient, this approach is severely biased. A more principled foundation lies in sequence-level likelihoods, where the evidence lower bound (ELBO) serves as a surrogate. Yet, despite this clean mathematical connection, ELBO-based methods have seen limited adoption due to the prohibitive cost of likelihood evaluation. In this work, we revisit ELBO estimation and disentangle its sources of variance. This decomposition motivates reducing variance through fast, deterministic integral approximations along a few pivotal dimensions. Building on this insight, we introduce Group Diffusion Policy Optimization (GDPO), a new RL algorithm tailored for DLMs. GDPO leverages simple yet effective Semi-deterministic Monte Carlo schemes to mitigate the variance explosion of ELBO estimators under vanilla double Monte Carlo sampling, yielding a provably lower-variance estimator under tight evaluation budgets. Empirically, GDPO achieves consistent gains over pretrained checkpoints and outperforms diffu-GRPO, one of the state-of-the-art baselines, on the majority of math, reasoning, and coding benchmarks.

We propose a pre-training pipeline for audio spectrogram transformers for frame-level sound event detection tasks. On top of common pre-training steps, we add a meticulously designed training routine on AudioSet frame-level annotations. This includes a balanced sampler, aggressive data augmentation, and ensemble knowledge distillation. For five transformers, we obtain a substantial performance improvement over previously available checkpoints both on AudioSet frame-level predictions and on frame-level sound event detection downstream tasks, confirming our pipeline's effectiveness. We publish the resulting checkpoints that researchers can directly fine-tune to build high-performance models for sound event detection tasks.

Test-time training (TTT) adapts language models through gradient-based updates at inference. But is adaptation the right strategy? We study compute-optimal test-time strategies for verifiable execution-grounded (VEG) tasks, domains like GPU kernel optimization where a deterministic evaluator provides dense, continuous reward signals. Using KernelBench as our testbed and a 120B-parameter model (GPT-OSS-120B with LoRA adaptation), we find that search outperforms minimal adaptation (1-5 gradient steps): Best-of-N sampling achieves 90% task success (18/20 tasks) at K=64 across the full KernelBench L1 eval set while TTT's best checkpoint reaches only 30.6% (3-seed mean), with TTT's "equivalent K" falling below 1, worse than single-sample inference. The failure mode is over-sharpening: gradient updates collapse diversity toward mediocre solutions rather than discovering optimal ones. Our main contribution is surprisal-guided selection: selecting the highest-surprisal (lowest-confidence) correct sample yields 80% success vs. 50% for most-confident selection, a 30% improvement. Extending to surprisal-guided-top3 matches oracle performance at 100%. This zero-cost strategy, validated through length-controlled analysis, recovers oracle performance. For dense-reward VEG tasks, compute should be allocated to sample diversity and intelligent selection rather than gradient adaptation. The surprisal-guided selection principle may generalize to other execution-grounded domains where optimal solutions occupy the distribution tail.

The recent widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning in general has sparked research interest in exploring the possibilities of deploying these models on smaller devices such as laptops and mobile phones. This creates a need for frameworks and approaches that are capable of taking advantage of on-device hardware. The MLX framework was created to address this need. It is a framework optimized for machine learning (ML) computations on Apple silicon devices, facilitating easier research, experimentation, and prototyping. This paper presents a performance evaluation of MLX, focusing on inference latency of transformer models. We compare the performance of different transformer architecture implementations in MLX with their Pytorch counterparts. For this research we create a framework called MLX-transformers which includes different transformer implementations in MLX and downloads the model checkpoints in pytorch and converts it to the MLX format. By leveraging the advanced architecture and capabilities of Apple Silicon, MLX-Transformers enables seamless execution of transformer models directly sourced from Hugging Face, eliminating the need for checkpoint conversion often required when porting models between frameworks. Our study benchmarks different transformer models on two Apple Silicon macbook devices against an NVIDIA CUDA GPU. Specifically, we compare the inference latency performance of models with the same parameter sizes and checkpoints. We evaluate the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa models, with the intention of extending future work to include models of different modalities, thus providing a more comprehensive assessment of MLX's capabilities. The results highlight MLX's potential in enabling efficient and more accessible on-device ML applications within Apple's ecosystem.

Outlier detection (OD) has a vast literature as it finds numerous real-world applications. Being an unsupervised task, model selection is a key bottleneck for OD without label supervision. Despite a long list of available OD algorithms with tunable hyperparameters, the lack of systematic approaches for unsupervised algorithm and hyperparameter selection limits their effective use in practice. In this paper, we present FoMo-0D, a pre-trained Foundation Model for zero/0-shot OD on tabular data, which bypasses the hurdle of model selection altogether. Having been pre-trained on synthetic data, FoMo-0D can directly predict the (outlier/inlier) label of test samples without parameter fine-tuning -- requiring no labeled data, and no additional training or hyperparameter tuning when given a new task. Extensive experiments on 57 real-world datasets against 26 baselines show that FoMo-0D is highly competitive; outperforming the majority of the baselines with no statistically significant difference from the 2nd best method. Further, FoMo-0D is efficient in inference time requiring only 7.7 ms per sample on average, with at least 7x speed-up compared to previous methods. To facilitate future research, our implementations for data synthesis and pre-training as well as model checkpoints are openly available at https://github.com/A-Chicharito-S/FoMo-0D.

Model merging and task arithmetic have emerged as promising scalable approaches to merge multiple single-task checkpoints to one multi-task model, but their applicability is reduced by significant performance loss. Previous works have linked these drops to interference in the weight space and erasure of important task-specific features. Instead, in this work we show that the information required to solve each task is still preserved after merging as different tasks mostly use non-overlapping sets of weights. We propose TALL-masks, a method to identify these task supports given a collection of task vectors and show that one can retrieve >99% of the single task accuracy by applying our masks to the multi-task vector, effectively compressing the individual checkpoints. We study the statistics of intersections among constructed masks and reveal the existence of selfish and catastrophic weights, i.e., parameters that are important exclusively to one task and irrelevant to all tasks but detrimental to multi-task fusion. For this reason, we propose Consensus Merging, an algorithm that eliminates such weights and improves the general performance of existing model merging approaches. Our experiments in vision and NLP benchmarks with up to 20 tasks, show that Consensus Merging consistently improves existing approaches. Furthermore, our proposed compression scheme reduces storage from 57Gb to 8.2Gb while retaining 99.7% of original performance.

Reliable evaluation is fundamental to the progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the evaluation process during pre-training is plagued by significant instability that obscures true learning dynamics. In this work, we systematically diagnose this instability, attributing it to two distinct sources: Parameter Instability from training stochasticity and Evaluation Instability from noisy measurement protocols. To counteract both sources of noise, we introduce MaP, a dual-pronged framework that synergistically integrates checkpoint Merging and the Pass@k metric. Checkpoint merging smooths the parameter space by averaging recent model weights, while Pass@k provides a robust, low-variance statistical estimate of model capability. Extensive experiments show that MaP yields significantly smoother performance curves, reduces inter-run variance, and ensures more consistent model rankings. Ultimately, MaP provides a more reliable and faithful lens for observing LLM training dynamics, laying a crucial empirical foundation for LLM research.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs significant cost; hence, any strategy that accelerates model convergence is helpful. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a simple idea checkpoint averaging along the trajectory of a training run to improve both convergence and generalization quite early on during training. Here we show that models trained with high learning rates observe higher gains due to checkpoint averaging. Furthermore, these gains are amplified when checkpoints are sampled with considerable spacing in training steps. Our training recipe outperforms conventional training and popular checkpoint averaging baselines such as exponential moving average (EMA) and stochastic moving average (SWA). We evaluate our training recipe by pre-training LLMs, where high learning rates are inherently preferred due to extremely large batch sizes. Specifically, we pre-trained nanoGPT-2 models of varying sizes, small (125M), medium (335M), and large (770M)on the OpenWebText dataset, comprised of 9B tokens. Additionally, we present results for publicly available Pythia LLMs, ranging from 1B to 12B, which were trained on the PILE-deduped dataset containing 207B tokens.

Recent years have witnessed the success of foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) in various music informatics understanding tasks, including music tagging, instrument classification, key detection, and more. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised music representation learning model for music understanding. Distinguished from previous studies adopting random projection or existing neural codec, the proposed model, named MuQ, is trained to predict tokens generated by Mel Residual Vector Quantization (Mel-RVQ). Our Mel-RVQ utilizes residual linear projection structure for Mel spectrum quantization to enhance the stability and efficiency of target extraction and lead to better performance. Experiments in a large variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MuQ outperforms previous self-supervised music representation models with only 0.9K hours of open-source pre-training data. Scaling up the data to over 160K hours and adopting iterative training consistently improve the model performance. To further validate the strength of our model, we present MuQ-MuLan, a joint music-text embedding model based on contrastive learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot music tagging task on the MagnaTagATune dataset. Code and checkpoints are open source in https://github.com/tencent-ailab/MuQ.

Standard Autoregressive Video LLMs inevitably suffer from causal masking biases that hinder global spatiotemporal modeling, leading to suboptimal understanding efficiency. We propose VidLaDA, a Video LLM based on Diffusion Language Model utilizing bidirectional attention to capture bidirectional dependencies. To further tackle the inference bottleneck of diffusion decoding on massive video tokens, we introduce MARS-Cache. This framework accelerates inference by combining asynchronous visual cache refreshing with frame-wise chunk attention, effectively pruning redundancy while preserving global connectivity via anchor tokens. Extensive experiments show VidLaDA outperforms diffusion baselines and rivals state-of-the-art autoregressive models (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA-Video), with MARS-Cache delivering over 12x speedup without compromising reasoning accuracy. Code and checkpoints are open-sourced at https://github.com/ziHoHe/VidLaDA.

Diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, have made significant strides in visual generation, yet their paradigm remains fundamentally different from autoregressive language models, complicating the development of unified language-vision models. Recent efforts like LlamaGen have attempted autoregressive image generation using discrete VQVAE tokens, but the large number of tokens involved renders this approach inefficient and slow. In this work, we present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive masked image modeling (MIM) text-to-image to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL. By incorporating a comprehensive suite of architectural innovations, advanced positional encoding strategies, and optimized sampling conditions, Meissonic substantially improves MIM's performance and efficiency. Additionally, we leverage high-quality training data, integrate micro-conditions informed by human preference scores, and employ feature compression layers to further enhance image fidelity and resolution. Our model not only matches but often exceeds the performance of existing models like SDXL in generating high-quality, high-resolution images. Extensive experiments validate Meissonic's capabilities, demonstrating its potential as a new standard in text-to-image synthesis. We release a model checkpoint capable of producing 1024 times 1024 resolution images.

Diffusion models achieved great success in image synthesis, but still face challenges in high-resolution generation. Through the lens of discrete cosine transformation, we find the main reason is that the same noise level on a higher resolution results in a higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the frequency domain. In this work, we present Relay Diffusion Model (RDM), which transfers a low-resolution image or noise into an equivalent high-resolution one for diffusion model via blurring diffusion and block noise. Therefore, the diffusion process can continue seamlessly in any new resolution or model without restarting from pure noise or low-resolution conditioning. RDM achieves state-of-the-art FID on CelebA-HQ and sFID on ImageNet 256times256, surpassing previous works such as ADM, LDM and DiT by a large margin. All the codes and checkpoints are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/RelayDiffusion.

Training LLMs on decentralized and wimpy computation nodes, e.g., multiple on-spot instances, lowers the training cost and enables model democratization. The inevitable challenge here is the churn of nodes due to failures and the operator's scheduling policies, leading to losing a stage - a part of the model. The conventional approaches to recover from failures are to either use checkpointing, where periodically a copy of the entire model is sent to an additional storage, or redundant computation. These approaches yield significant communication and/or computation overhead even in non-failure cases and scale poorly in settings with large models. In this paper, we propose, CheckFree, an efficient recovery method where a failing stage is substituted by a weighted average of the closest neighboring stages. In contrast to the state of the art, CheckFree requires no additional computation or storage. However, because of the nature of averaging neighbouring stages, it can only recover failures of intermediate stages. We further extend our method to CheckFree+ with out-of-order pipeline execution to tolerate crashes of the first and last stages. Thanks to out-of-order pipelining, behaviour of those stages is mimicked by their neighboring ones, which allows CheckFree+ to recover them by simply copying the weights from the immediate neighbour. To be able to recover the (de)embedding layers, CheckFree+ copies those layers to the neighboring stages, which requires relatively small storage overhead. We extensively evaluate our method on LLaMa models of model sizes from 124M to 1.5B with varying failure frequencies. In the case of low and medium failure rates (5-10%), CheckFree and CheckFree+ outperform both checkpointing and redundant computation in terms of convergence in wall-clock time by over 12%. Both of our proposals can be run via our code available at: https://github.com/gensyn-ai/CheckFree.

We present Ring-lite, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based large language model optimized via reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and robust reasoning capabilities. Built upon the publicly available Ling-lite model, a 16.8 billion parameter model with 2.75 billion activated parameters, our approach matches the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) small-scale reasoning models on challenging benchmarks (e.g., AIME, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond) while activating only one-third of the parameters required by comparable models. To accomplish this, we introduce a joint training pipeline integrating distillation with RL, revealing undocumented challenges in MoE RL training. First, we identify optimization instability during RL training, and we propose Constrained Contextual Computation Policy Optimization(C3PO), a novel approach that enhances training stability and improves computational throughput via algorithm-system co-design methodology. Second, we empirically demonstrate that selecting distillation checkpoints based on entropy loss for RL training, rather than validation metrics, yields superior performance-efficiency trade-offs in subsequent RL training. Finally, we develop a two-stage training paradigm to harmonize multi-domain data integration, addressing domain conflicts that arise in training with mixed dataset. We will release the model, dataset, and code.

Grokking, i.e., test performance keeps improving long after training loss converged, has been recently witnessed in neural network training, making the mechanism of generalization and other emerging capabilities such as reasoning mysterious. While prior studies usually train small models on a few toy or highly-specific tasks for thousands of epochs, we conduct the first study of grokking on checkpoints during one-pass pretraining of a 7B large language model (LLM), i.e., OLMoE. We compute the training loss and evaluate generalization on diverse benchmark tasks, including math reasoning, code generation, and commonsense/domain-specific knowledge retrieval tasks. Our study, for the first time, verifies that grokking still happens in the pretraining of large-scale foundation models, though different data may enter grokking stages asynchronously. We further demystify grokking's "emergence of generalization" by investigating LLM internal dynamics. Specifically, we find that training samples' pathways (i.e., expert choices across layers) evolve from random, instance-specific to more structured and shareable between samples during grokking. Also, the complexity of a sample's pathway reduces despite the converged loss. These indicate a memorization-to-generalization conversion, providing a mechanistic explanation of delayed generalization. In the study, we develop two novel metrics to quantify pathway distance and the complexity of a single pathway. We show their ability to predict the generalization improvement on diverse downstream tasks. They are efficient, simple to compute and solely dependent on training data. Hence, they have practical value for pretraining, enabling us to monitor the generalization performance without finetuning and test. Theoretically, we show that more structured pathways reduce model complexity and improve the generalization bound.

Despite the huge success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, these models struggle to understand the context present in the repository (e.g., imports, parent classes, files with similar names, etc.), thereby producing inaccurate code completions. This effect is more pronounced when using these assistants for repositories that the model has not seen during training, such as proprietary software or work-in-progress code projects. Recent work has shown the promise of using context from the repository during inference. In this work, we extend this idea and propose RepoFusion, a framework to train models to incorporate relevant repository context. Experiments on single-line code completion show that our models trained with repository context significantly outperform much larger code models as CodeGen-16B-multi (sim73times larger) and closely match the performance of the sim 70times larger StarCoderBase model that was trained with the Fill-in-the-Middle objective. We find these results to be a novel and compelling demonstration of the gains that training with repository context can bring. We carry out extensive ablation studies to investigate the impact of design choices such as context type, number of contexts, context length, and initialization within our framework. Lastly, we release Stack-Repo, a dataset of 200 Java repositories with permissive licenses and near-deduplicated files that are augmented with three types of repository contexts. Additionally, we are making available the code and trained checkpoints for our work. Our released resources can be found at https://huggingface.co/RepoFusion.

Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small set of simple toys and then applying that knowledge to more complex items. Inspired by this, we study if similar generalization capabilities can also be achieved by robots. Our results indicate robots can learn generalizable grasping using randomly assembled objects that are composed from just four shape primitives: spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. We show that training on these "toys" enables robust generalization to real-world objects, yielding strong zero-shot performance. Crucially, we find the key to this generalization is an object-centric visual representation induced by our proposed detection pooling mechanism. Evaluated in both simulation and on physical robots, our model achieves a 67% real-world grasping success rate on the YCB dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches that rely on substantially more in-domain data. We further study how zero-shot generalization performance scales by varying the number and diversity of training toys and the demonstrations per toy. We believe this work offers a promising path to scalable and generalizable learning in robotic manipulation. Demonstration videos, code, checkpoints and our dataset are available on our project page: https://lego-grasp.github.io/ .

Estimating global tree canopy height is crucial for forest conservation and climate change applications. However, capturing high-resolution ground truth canopy height using LiDAR is expensive and not available globally. An efficient alternative is to train a canopy height estimator to operate on single-view remotely sensed imagery. The primary obstacle to this approach is that these methods require significant training data to generalize well globally and across uncommon edge cases. Recent monocular depth estimation foundation models have show strong zero-shot performance even for complex scenes. In this paper we leverage the representations learned by these models to transfer to the remote sensing domain for measuring canopy height. Our findings suggest that our proposed Depth Any Canopy, the result of fine-tuning the Depth Anything v2 model for canopy height estimation, provides a performant and efficient solution, surpassing the current state-of-the-art with superior or comparable performance using only a fraction of the computational resources and parameters. Furthermore, our approach requires less than \$1.30 in compute and results in an estimated carbon footprint of 0.14 kgCO2. Code, experimental results, and model checkpoints are openly available at https://github.com/DarthReca/depth-any-canopy.

This paper presents T3: Transferable Tactile Transformers, a framework for tactile representation learning that scales across multi-sensors and multi-tasks. T3 is designed to overcome the contemporary issue that camera-based tactile sensing is extremely heterogeneous, i.e. sensors are built into different form factors, and existing datasets were collected for disparate tasks. T3 captures the shared latent information across different sensor-task pairings by constructing a shared trunk transformer with sensor-specific encoders and task-specific decoders. The pre-training of T3 utilizes a novel Foundation Tactile (FoTa) dataset, which is aggregated from several open-sourced datasets and it contains over 3 million data points gathered from 13 sensors and 11 tasks. FoTa is the largest and most diverse dataset in tactile sensing to date and it is made publicly available in a unified format. Across various sensors and tasks, experiments show that T3 pre-trained with FoTa achieved zero-shot transferability in certain sensor-task pairings, can be further fine-tuned with small amounts of domain-specific data, and its performance scales with bigger network sizes. T3 is also effective as a tactile encoder for long horizon contact-rich manipulation. Results from sub-millimeter multi-pin electronics insertion tasks show that T3 achieved a task success rate 25% higher than that of policies trained with tactile encoders trained from scratch, or 53% higher than without tactile sensing. Data, code, and model checkpoints are open-sourced at https://t3.alanz.info.

Model merging enables efficient multi-task models by combining task-specific fine-tuned checkpoints. However, storing multiple task-specific checkpoints requires significant memory, limiting scalability and restricting model merging to larger models and diverse tasks. In this paper, we propose quantizing task vectors (i.e., the difference between pre-trained and fine-tuned checkpoints) instead of quantizing fine-tuned checkpoints. We observe that task vectors exhibit a narrow weight range, enabling low precision quantization (up to 4 bit) within existing task vector merging frameworks. To further mitigate quantization errors within ultra-low bit precision (e.g., 2 bit), we introduce Residual Task Vector Quantization, which decomposes the task vector into a base vector and offset component. We allocate bits based on quantization sensitivity, ensuring precision while minimizing error within a memory budget. Experiments on image classification and dense prediction show our method maintains or improves model merging performance while using only 8% of the memory required for full-precision checkpoints.

The ever-growing diversity of pre-training text corpora has equipped language models with generalization capabilities across various downstream tasks. However, such diverse datasets are often too large for academic budgets; hence, most research on Transformer architectures, training procedures, optimizers, etc. gets conducted on smaller, homogeneous datasets. To this end, we present The MiniPile Challenge, where one pre-trains a language model on a diverse text corpus containing at most 1M documents. MiniPile is a 6GB subset of the deduplicated 825GB The Pile corpus. To curate MiniPile, we perform a simple, three-step data filtering process: we (1) infer embeddings for all documents of the Pile, (2) cluster the embedding space using k-means, and (3) filter out low-quality clusters. To verify MiniPile's suitability for language model pre-training, we use it to pre-train a BERT and T5 model, yielding a performance drop of only 1.9%/2.5% on the GLUE and SNI benchmarks compared to the original pre-trained checkpoints trained on 2.6x/745x the amount of data. MiniPile is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JeanKaddour/minipile.

We introduce StableLM 2 1.6B, the first in a new generation of our language model series. In this technical report, we present in detail the data and training procedure leading to the base and instruction-tuned versions of StableLM 2 1.6B. The weights for both models are available via Hugging Face for anyone to download and use. The report contains thorough evaluations of these models, including zero- and few-shot benchmarks, multilingual benchmarks, and the MT benchmark focusing on multi-turn dialogues. At the time of publishing this report, StableLM 2 1.6B was the state-of-the-art open model under 2B parameters by a significant margin. Given its appealing small size, we also provide throughput measurements on a number of edge devices. In addition, we open source several quantized checkpoints and provide their performance metrics compared to the original model.

Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our method, a 175B parameter 16/32-bit checkpoint can be loaded, converted to Int8, and used immediately without performance degradation. This is made possible by understanding and working around properties of highly systematic emergent features in transformer language models that dominate attention and transformer predictive performance. To cope with these features, we develop a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(). We first use vector-wise quantization with separate normalization constants for each inner product in the matrix multiplication, to quantize most of the features. However, for the emergent outliers, we also include a new mixed-precision decomposition scheme, which isolates the outlier feature dimensions into a 16-bit matrix multiplication while still more than 99.9% of values are multiplied in 8-bit. Using LLM.int8(), we show empirically it is possible to perform inference in LLMs with up to 175B parameters without any performance degradation. This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software.

Neural Information Retrieval has advanced rapidly in high-resource languages, but progress in lower-resource ones such as Japanese has been hindered by data scarcity, among other challenges. Consequently, multilingual models have dominated Japanese retrieval, despite their computational inefficiencies and inability to capture linguistic nuances. While recent multi-vector monolingual models like JaColBERT have narrowed this gap, they still lag behind multilingual methods in large-scale evaluations. This work addresses the suboptimal training methods of multi-vector retrievers in lower-resource settings, focusing on Japanese. We systematically evaluate and improve key aspects of the inference and training settings of JaColBERT, and more broadly, multi-vector models. We further enhance performance through a novel checkpoint merging step, showcasing it to be an effective way of combining the benefits of fine-tuning with the generalization capabilities of the original checkpoint. Building on our analysis, we introduce a novel training recipe, resulting in the JaColBERTv2.5 model. JaColBERTv2.5, with only 110 million parameters and trained in under 15 hours on 4 A100 GPUs, significantly outperforms all existing methods across all common benchmarks, reaching an average score of 0.754, significantly above the previous best of 0.720. To support future research, we make our final models, intermediate checkpoints and all data used publicly available.

We introduce Stable Code, the first in our new-generation of code language models series, which serves as a general-purpose base code language model targeting code completion, reasoning, math, and other software engineering-based tasks. Additionally, we introduce an instruction variant named Stable Code Instruct that allows conversing with the model in a natural chat interface for performing question-answering and instruction-based tasks. In this technical report, we detail the data and training procedure leading to both models. Their weights are available via Hugging Face for anyone to download and use at https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-code-3b and https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-code-instruct-3b. This report contains thorough evaluations of the models, including multilingual programming benchmarks, and the MT benchmark focusing on multi-turn dialogues. At the time of its release, Stable Code is the state-of-the-art open model under 3B parameters and even performs comparably to larger models of sizes 7 billion and 15 billion parameters on the popular Multi-PL benchmark. Stable Code Instruct also exhibits state-of-the-art performance on the MT-Bench coding tasks and on Multi-PL completion compared to other instruction tuned models. Given its appealing small size, we also provide throughput measurements on a number of edge devices. In addition, we open source several quantized checkpoints and provide their performance metrics compared to the original model.

Large language models deliver strong reasoning and tool-use skills, yet their computational demands make them impractical for edge or cost-sensitive deployments. We present Xmodel-2.5, a 1.3-billion-parameter small language model designed as a drop-in agent core. Training with maximal-update parameterization (μP) allows hyper-parameters tuned on a 20M-parameter proxy to transfer directly to the full model, even under the parameter-tied tie-word-embedding architecture. A 1.4T-token Warmup--Stable--Decay curriculum is used, and we further show that switching from AdamW to Muon during the decay phase improves the 13-task reasoning average by 4.58\,\% while keeping every other hyper-parameter fixed, verifying that early AdamW stability can be paired with late Muon sharpening for better downstream performance. FP8-mixed-precision training balances accuracy and throughput. All checkpoints, recipes, and evaluation code are released under the Apache-2.0 license.https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5 and https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5-history (training checkpoints). Training code and evaluation harness: https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5.

Compartmentalization effectively prevents initial corruption from turning into a successful attack. This paper presents O2C, a pioneering system designed to enforce OS kernel compartmentalization on the fly. It not only provides immediate remediation for sudden threats but also maintains consistent system availability through the enforcement process. O2C is empowered by the newest advancements of the eBPF ecosystem which allows to instrument eBPF programs that perform enforcement actions into the kernel at runtime. O2C takes the lead in embedding a machine learning model into eBPF programs, addressing unique challenges in on-the-fly compartmentalization. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that O2C effectively confines damage within the compartment. Further, we validate that decision tree is optimally suited for O2C owing to its advantages in processing tabular data, its explainable nature, and its compliance with the eBPF ecosystem. Last but not least, O2C is lightweight, showing negligible overhead and excellent sacalability system-wide.

Pretraining large language models is a complex endeavor influenced by multiple factors, including model architecture, data quality, training continuity, and hardware constraints. In this paper, we share insights gained from the experience of training DMaS-LLaMa-Lite, a fully open source, 1.7-billion-parameter, LLaMa-based model, on approximately 20 billion tokens of carefully curated data. We chronicle the full training trajectory, documenting how evolving validation loss levels and downstream benchmarks reflect transitions from incoherent text to fluent, contextually grounded output. Beyond standard quantitative metrics, we highlight practical considerations such as the importance of restoring optimizer states when resuming from checkpoints, and the impact of hardware changes on training stability and throughput. While qualitative evaluation provides an intuitive understanding of model improvements, our analysis extends to various performance benchmarks, demonstrating how high-quality data and thoughtful scaling enable competitive results with significantly fewer training tokens. By detailing these experiences and offering training logs, checkpoints, and sample outputs, we aim to guide future researchers and practitioners in refining their pretraining strategies. The training script is available on Github at https://github.com/McGill-DMaS/DMaS-LLaMa-Lite-Training-Code. The model checkpoints are available on Huggingface at https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-DMaS/dmas-llama-lite-6761d97ba903f82341954ceb.

While recent preference alignment algorithms for language models have demonstrated promising results, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains imperative for achieving successful convergence. In this paper, we study the crucial role of SFT within the context of preference alignment, emphasizing that a minor penalty for the disfavored generation style is sufficient for preference-aligned SFT. Building on this foundation, we introduce a straightforward and innovative reference model-free monolithic odds ratio preference optimization algorithm, ORPO, eliminating the necessity for an additional preference alignment phase. We demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, that the odds ratio is a sensible choice for contrasting favored and disfavored styles during SFT across the diverse sizes from 125M to 7B. Specifically, fine-tuning Phi-2 (2.7B), Llama-2 (7B), and Mistral (7B) with ORPO on the UltraFeedback alone surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art language models with more than 7B and 13B parameters: achieving up to 12.20% on AlpacaEval_{2.0} (Figure 1), 66.19% on IFEval (instruction-level loose, Table 6), and 7.32 in MT-Bench (Figure 12). We release code and model checkpoints for Mistral-ORPO-alpha (7B) and Mistral-ORPO-beta (7B).

Environment setup-the process of configuring the system to work with a specific software project-represents a persistent challenge in Software Engineering (SE). Automated environment setup methods could assist developers by providing fully configured environments for arbitrary repositories without manual effort. This also helps SE researchers to scale execution-based benchmarks. However, recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve limited success in automating this task. To address this limitation, we tune a specialized model for environment setup. We combine supervised fine-tuning for generating correct Bash scripts and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to adapt it to the task of environment setup. On EnvBench-Python, our method enables Qwen3-8B (a model runnable on consumer hardware) to perform on par with larger models-Qwen3-32B and GPT-4o. The training code and model checkpoints are available online: https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/PIPer.

The widespread availability of fine-tuned LoRA modules for open pre-trained models has led to an interest in methods that can adaptively merge LoRAs to improve performance. These methods typically include some way of selecting LoRAs from a pool and tune merging coefficients based on a task-specific dataset. While adaptive merging methods have demonstrated improvements in some settings, no past work has attempted to recycle LoRAs found "in the wild" on model repositories like the Hugging Face Hub. To address this gap, we consider recycling from a pool of nearly 1,000 user-contributed LoRAs trained from the Llama 3.1 8B-Instruct language model. Our empirical study includes a range of adaptive and non-adaptive merging methods in addition to a new method designed via a wide search over the methodological design space. We demonstrate that adaptive merging methods can improve performance over the base model but provide limited benefit over training a new LoRA on the same data used to set merging coefficients. We additionally find not only that the specific choice of LoRAs to merge has little importance, but that using LoRAs with randomly initialized parameter values yields similar performance. This raises the possibility that adaptive merging from recycled LoRAs primarily works via some kind of regularization effect, rather than by enabling positive cross-task transfer. To better understand why past work has proven successful, we confirm that positive transfer is indeed possible when there are highly relevant LoRAs in the pool. We release the model checkpoints and code online.

Program synthesis strives to generate a computer program as a solution to a given problem specification, expressed with input-output examples or natural language descriptions. The prevalence of large language models advances the state-of-the-art for program synthesis, though limited training resources and data impede open access to such models. To democratize this, we train and release a family of large language models up to 16.1B parameters, called CODEGEN, on natural language and programming language data, and open source the training library JAXFORMER. We show the utility of the trained model by demonstrating that it is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art on zero-shot Python code generation on HumanEval. We further investigate the multi-step paradigm for program synthesis, where a single program is factorized into multiple prompts specifying subproblems. To this end, we construct an open benchmark, Multi-Turn Programming Benchmark (MTPB), consisting of 115 diverse problem sets that are factorized into multi-turn prompts. Our analysis on MTPB shows that the same intent provided to CODEGEN in multi-turn fashion significantly improves program synthesis over that provided as a single turn. We make the training library JAXFORMER and model checkpoints available as open source contribution: https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various robotic tasks; however, its deployment in real-world scenarios, particularly in contact-rich environments, often overlooks critical safety and stability aspects. Policies without passivity guarantees can result in system instability, posing risks to robots, their environments, and human operators. In this work, we investigate the limitations of traditional RL policies when deployed in contact-rich tasks and explore the combination of energy-based passive control with safe RL in both training and deployment to answer these challenges. Firstly, we introduce energy-based constraints in our safe RL formulation to train passivity-aware RL agents. Secondly, we add a passivity filter on the agent output for passivity-ensured control during deployment. We conduct comparative studies on a contact-rich robotic maze exploration task, evaluating the effects of learning passivity-aware policies and the importance of passivity-ensured control. The experiments demonstrate that a passivity-agnostic RL policy easily violates energy constraints in deployment, even though it achieves high task completion in training. The results show that our proposed approach guarantees control stability through passivity filtering and improves the energy efficiency through passivity-aware training. A video of real-world experiments is available as supplementary material. We also release the checkpoint model and offline data for pre-training at https://huggingface.co/Anonymous998/passiveRL/tree/main{Hugging Face}

Currently many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the perception ability of the Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, most benchmarks conduct questions by selecting images from existing datasets, resulting in the potential data leakage. Besides, these benchmarks merely focus on evaluating LVLMs on the realistic style images and clean scenarios, leaving the multi-stylized images and noisy scenarios unexplored. In response to these challenges, we propose a dynamic and scalable benchmark named Dysca for evaluating LVLMs by leveraging synthesis images. Specifically, we leverage Stable Diffusion and design a rule-based method to dynamically generate novel images, questions and the corresponding answers. We consider 51 kinds of image styles and evaluate the perception capability in 20 subtasks. Moreover, we conduct evaluations under 4 scenarios (i.e., Clean, Corruption, Print Attacking and Adversarial Attacking) and 3 question types (i.e., Multi-choices, True-or-false and Free-form). Thanks to the generative paradigm, Dysca serves as a scalable benchmark for easily adding new subtasks and scenarios. A total of 8 advanced open-source LVLMs with 10 checkpoints are evaluated on Dysca, revealing the drawbacks of current LVLMs. The benchmark is released in https://github.com/Benchmark-Dysca/Dysca.

Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) build upon pretrained vision-language models and leverage diverse robot datasets to demonstrate strong task execution, language following ability, and semantic generalization. Despite these successes, VLAs struggle with novel robot setups and require fine-tuning to achieve good performance, yet how to most effectively fine-tune them is unclear given many possible strategies. In this work, we study key VLA adaptation design choices such as different action decoding schemes, action representations, and learning objectives for fine-tuning, using OpenVLA as our representative base model. Our empirical analysis informs an Optimized Fine-Tuning (OFT) recipe that integrates parallel decoding, action chunking, a continuous action representation, and a simple L1 regression-based learning objective to altogether improve inference efficiency, policy performance, and flexibility in the model's input-output specifications. We propose OpenVLA-OFT, an instantiation of this recipe, which sets a new state of the art on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, significantly boosting OpenVLA's average success rate across four task suites from 76.5% to 97.1% while increasing action generation throughput by 26times. In real-world evaluations, our fine-tuning recipe enables OpenVLA to successfully execute dexterous, high-frequency control tasks on a bimanual ALOHA robot and outperform other VLAs (pi_0 and RDT-1B) fine-tuned using their default recipes, as well as strong imitation learning policies trained from scratch (Diffusion Policy and ACT) by up to 15% (absolute) in average success rate. We release code for OFT and pretrained model checkpoints at https://openvla-oft.github.io/.

We propose a decoder-only language model, VoxtLM, that can perform four tasks: speech recognition, speech synthesis, text generation, and speech continuation. VoxtLM integrates text vocabulary with discrete speech tokens from self-supervised speech features and uses special tokens to enable multitask learning. Compared to a single-task model, VoxtLM exhibits a significant improvement in speech synthesis, with improvements in both speech intelligibility from 28.9 to 5.6 and objective quality from 2.68 to 3.90. VoxtLM also improves speech generation and speech recognition performance over the single-task counterpart. VoxtLM is trained with publicly available data and training recipes and model checkpoints will be open-sourced to make fully reproducible work.

Keeping large foundation models up to date on latest data is inherently expensive. To avoid the prohibitive costs of constantly retraining, it is imperative to continually train these models. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of any large scale continual learning benchmarks or baselines. We introduce the first set of web-scale Time-Continual (TiC) benchmarks for training vision-language models: TiC-DataCompt, TiC-YFCC, and TiC-RedCaps with over 12.7B timestamped image-text pairs spanning 9 years (2014--2022). We first use our benchmarks to curate various dynamic evaluations to measure temporal robustness of existing models. We show OpenAI's CLIP (trained on data up to 2020) loses approx 8% zero-shot accuracy on our curated retrieval task from 2021--2022 compared with more recently trained models in OpenCLIP repository. We then study how to efficiently train models on time-continuous data. We demonstrate that a simple rehearsal-based approach that continues training from the last checkpoint and replays old data reduces compute by 2.5times when compared to the standard practice of retraining from scratch.

Despite rapid recent progress in the terminal capabilities of large language models, the training data strategies behind state-of-the-art terminal agents remain largely undisclosed. We address this gap through a systematic study of data engineering practices for terminal agents, making two key contributions: (1) Terminal-Task-Gen, a lightweight synthetic task generation pipeline that supports seed-based and skill-based task construction, and (2) a comprehensive analysis of data and training strategies, including filtering, curriculum learning, long context training, and scaling behavior. Our pipeline yields Terminal-Corpus, a large-scale open-source dataset for terminal tasks. Using this dataset, we train Nemotron-Terminal, a family of models initialized from Qwen3(8B, 14B, 32B) that achieve substantial gains on Terminal-Bench 2.0: Nemotron-Terminal-8B improves from 2.5% to 13.0% Nemotron-Terminal-14B improves from 4.0% to 20.2%, and Nemotron-Terminal-32B improves from 3.4% to 27.4%, matching the performance of significantly larger models. To accelerate research in this domain, we open-source our model checkpoints and most of our synthetic datasets at https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-terminal.

Behavior cloning is enjoying a resurgence in popularity as scaling both model and data sizes proves to provide a strong starting point for many tasks of interest. In this work, we introduce an open recipe for training a video game playing foundation model designed for inference in realtime on a consumer GPU. We release all data (8300+ hours of high quality human gameplay), training and inference code, and pretrained checkpoints under an open license. We show that our best model is capable of playing a variety of 3D video games at a level competitive with human play. We use this recipe to systematically examine the scaling laws of behavior cloning to understand how the model's performance and causal reasoning varies with model and data scale. We first show in a simple toy problem that, for some types of causal reasoning, increasing both the amount of training data and the depth of the network results in the model learning a more causal policy. We then systematically study how causality varies with the number of parameters (and depth) and training steps in scaled models of up to 1.2 billion parameters, and we find similar scaling results to what we observe in the toy problem.

General-purpose sentence embedding models often struggle to capture specialized financial semantics, especially in low-resource languages like Korean, due to domain-specific jargon, temporal meaning shifts, and misaligned bilingual vocabularies. To address these gaps, we introduce NMIXX (Neural eMbeddings for Cross-lingual eXploration of Finance), a suite of cross-lingual embedding models fine-tuned with 18.8K high-confidence triplets that pair in-domain paraphrases, hard negatives derived from a semantic-shift typology, and exact Korean-English translations. Concurrently, we release KorFinSTS, a 1,921-pair Korean financial STS benchmark spanning news, disclosures, research reports, and regulations, designed to expose nuances that general benchmarks miss. When evaluated against seven open-license baselines, NMIXX's multilingual bge-m3 variant achieves Spearman's rho gains of +0.10 on English FinSTS and +0.22 on KorFinSTS, outperforming its pre-adaptation checkpoint and surpassing other models by the largest margin, while revealing a modest trade-off in general STS performance. Our analysis further shows that models with richer Korean token coverage adapt more effectively, underscoring the importance of tokenizer design in low-resource, cross-lingual settings. By making both models and the benchmark publicly available, we provide the community with robust tools for domain-adapted, multilingual representation learning in finance.

Generative modeling aims to transform random noise into structured outputs. In this work, we enhance video diffusion models by allowing motion control via structured latent noise sampling. This is achieved by just a change in data: we pre-process training videos to yield structured noise. Consequently, our method is agnostic to diffusion model design, requiring no changes to model architectures or training pipelines. Specifically, we propose a novel noise warping algorithm, fast enough to run in real time, that replaces random temporal Gaussianity with correlated warped noise derived from optical flow fields, while preserving the spatial Gaussianity. The efficiency of our algorithm enables us to fine-tune modern video diffusion base models using warped noise with minimal overhead, and provide a one-stop solution for a wide range of user-friendly motion control: local object motion control, global camera movement control, and motion transfer. The harmonization between temporal coherence and spatial Gaussianity in our warped noise leads to effective motion control while maintaining per-frame pixel quality. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate the advantages of our method, making it a robust and scalable approach for controlling motion in video diffusion models. Video results are available on our webpage: https://vgenai-netflix-eyeline-research.github.io/Go-with-the-Flow. Source code and model checkpoints are available on GitHub: https://github.com/VGenAI-Netflix-Eyeline-Research/Go-with-the-Flow.

How do large language models (LLMs) develop and evolve over the course of training? How do these patterns change as models scale? To answer these questions, we introduce Pythia, a suite of 16 LLMs all trained on public data seen in the exact same order and ranging in size from 70M to 12B parameters. We provide public access to 154 checkpoints for each one of the 16 models, alongside tools to download and reconstruct their exact training dataloaders for further study. We intend Pythia to facilitate research in many areas, and we present several case studies including novel results in memorization, term frequency effects on few-shot performance, and reducing gender bias. We demonstrate that this highly controlled setup can be used to yield novel insights toward LLMs and their training dynamics. Trained models, analysis code, training code, and training data can be found at https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia.