Modern large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws achieve emergent intelligence in large model sizes. Recently, the increasing concerns about cloud costs, latency and privacy make it an urgent requirement to develop compact edge language models. Distinguished from direct pretraining that bounded by parameter scaling law, this work proposes the unified pruning-aware pretraining, focusing on pretraining compact models while preserving performance of much larger source models, termed EfficientLLM. It features following characteristics: 1) Pruning in Pretraining Corpus: we introduce minimal parameter groups to decouple LLMs and continuously optimize model architecture with classic pruning methods like LLM-Pruner and SparseGPT during pretraining. We reveal that it achieves top-quality compact language models to scale up LLM pruning to large scale pretraining. 2) Auto-Designed Architecture: the LLM architecture is auto-designed during saliency-driven pruning, unifying pretraining, architectural design, and parameter pruning into a single process. Based on these, EfficientLLM significantly outperforms directly pretrained baselines with 100M ∼ 1B parameters, such as MobileLLM, SmolLM, Qwen2.5-0.5B, OLMo-1B, Llama3.2-1B in commen sense benchmarks, which bridges the performance gap between traditional LLM compression and direct pretraining. We open source on https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing2/EfficientLLM.

Remarkable progress on large language models (LLMs), particularly in English, has facilitated impressive capabilities in following human instructions. However, there remains a noticeable gap in instruction fine-tuning for Chinese, where the complex linguistic features pose significant challenges. Existing datasets, generally distilled from English-centric LLMs, are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. To bridge this gap, we introduce COIG-CQIA, a new Chinese instruction tuning dataset derived from various real-world data resources and undergoing comprehensive human verification. We conduct extensive experiments on COIG-CQIA, and compare them with strong baseline models and datasets. The experimental results show that models trained on COIG-CQIA achieve highly competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. Additionally, our findings offer several insights for designing effective Chinese instruction-tuning datasets and data mixing strategies. Our dataset are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/COIG-CQIA.

The curse of multilinguality phenomenon is a fundamental problem of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), where the competition between massive languages results in inferior performance. It mainly comes from limited capacity and negative transfer between dissimilar languages. To address this issue, we propose a method to dynamically group and scale up the parameters of multilingual LLM while boosting positive transfer among similar languages. Specifically, the model is first tuned on monolingual corpus to determine the parameter deviation in each layer and quantify the similarity between languages. Layers with more deviations are extended to mixture-of-experts layers to reduce competition between languages, where one expert module serves one group of similar languages. Experimental results on 18 to 128 languages show that our method reduces the negative transfer between languages and significantly boosts multilingual performance with fewer parameters. Such language group specialization on experts benefits the new language adaptation and reduces the inference on the previous multilingual knowledge learned.

Recent progress in o1-like models has significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), empowering them to tackle increasingly complex tasks through reflection capabilities, such as making assumptions, backtracking, and self-refinement. However, effectively evaluating such reflection capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of appropriate benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce LR²Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of LLMs. LR²Bench comprises 850 samples across six Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) where reflective reasoning is crucial for deriving solutions that meet all given constraints. Each type of task focuses on distinct constraint patterns, such as knowledge-based, logical, and spatial constraints, providing a comprehensive evaluation of diverse problem-solving scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluation on both conventional models and o1-like models. Our experimental results reveal that even the most advanced reasoning-specific models, such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1-preview, struggle with tasks in LR²Bench, achieving an average Exact Match score of only 20.0% and 23.6%, respectively. These findings underscore the significant room for improvement in the reflective reasoning capabilities of current LLMs.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a prominent method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. While DPO has enabled significant progress in aligning English LLMs, multilingual preference alignment is hampered by data scarcity. To address this, we propose a novel approach that captures learned preferences from well-aligned English models by implicit rewards and transfers them to other languages through iterative training. Specifically, we derive an implicit reward model from the logits of an English DPO-aligned model and its corresponding reference model. This reward model is then leveraged to annotate preference relations in cross-lingual instruction-following pairs, using English instructions to evaluate multilingual responses. The annotated data is subsequently used for multilingual DPO fine-tuning, facilitating preference knowledge transfer from English to other languages. Fine-tuning Llama3 for two iterations resulted in a 12.72% average improvement in Win Rate and a 5.97% increase in Length Control Win Rate across all training languages on the X-AlpacaEval leaderboard. Our findings demonstrate that leveraging existing English-aligned models can enable efficient and effective multilingual preference alignment, significantly reducing the need for extensive multilingual preference data.

Complex multi-step reasoning remains challenging for large language models (LLMs). While parallel inference-time scaling methods, such as step-level beam search, offer a promising solution, existing approaches typically depend on either domain-specific external verifiers, or self-evaluation which is brittle and prompt-sensitive. To address these issues, we propose Collaborative Beam Search (CBS), an iterative framework that harnesses the collective intelligence of multiple LLMs across both generation and verification stages. For generation, CBS leverages multiple LLMs to explore a broader search space, resulting in more diverse candidate steps. For verifications, CBS employs a perplexity-based collective consensus among these models, eliminating reliance on an external verifier or complex prompts. Between iterations, CBS leverages a dynamic quota allocation strategy that reassigns generation budget based on each model’s past performance, striking a balance between candidate diversity and quality. Experimental results on six tasks across arithmetic, logical, and commonsense reasoning show that CBS outperforms single‐model scaling and multi-model ensemble baselines by over 4 percentage points in average accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness and general applicability.

Recent advances in text-only “slow-thinking” reasoning have prompted efforts to transfer this capability to vision-language models (VLMs), for training visual reasoning models (VRMs). However, such transfer faces critical challenges: Effective “slow thinking” in VRMs requires visual reflection, the ability to check the reasoning process based on visual information. Through quantitative analysis, we observe that current VRMs exhibit limited visual reflection, as their attention to visual information diminishes rapidly with longer generated responses. To address this challenge, we propose a new VRM Reflection-V, which enhances visual reflection based on reasoning data construction for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning (RL). Firstly, we construct vision-centered reasoning data by leveraging an agent that interacts between VLMs and reasoning LLMs, enabling cold-start learning of visual reflection patterns. Secondly, a visual attention based reward model is employed during RL to encourage reasoning based on visual information. Therefore, Reflection-V demonstrates significant improvements across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Reflection-V maintains a stronger and more consistent reliance on visual information during visual reasoning, indicating effective enhancement in visual reflection capabilities.

Empathetic interaction is a cornerstone of human-machine communication, due to the need for understanding speech enriched with paralinguistic cues and generating emotional and expressive responses. However, the most powerful empathetic LSLMs are increasingly closed off, leaving the crucial details about the architecture, data and development opaque to researchers. Given the critical need for transparent research into the LSLMs and empathetic behavior, we present OpenS2S, a fully open-source, transparent and end-to-end LSLM designed to enable empathetic speech interactions. Based on our empathetic speech-to-text model BLSP-Emo, OpenS2S further employs a streaming interleaved decoding architecture to achieve low-latency speech generation. To facilitate end-to-end training, OpenS2S incorporates an automated data construction pipeline that synthesizes diverse, high-quality empathetic speech dialogues at low cost. By leveraging large language models to generate empathetic content and controllable text-to-speech systems to introduce speaker and emotional variation, we construct a scalable training corpus with rich paralinguistic diversity and minimal human supervision. We release the fully open-source OpenS2S model, including the dataset, model weights, pre-training and fine-tuning codes, to empower the broader research community and accelerate innovation in empathetic speech systems.

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is of great scientific and practical significance. Researchers typically employ process-supervised reward models (PRMs) to guide the reasoning process, effectively improving the models’ reasoning abilities. However, existing methods for constructing process supervision training data, such as manual annotation and per-step Monte Carlo estimation, are often costly or suffer from poor quality. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a framework called EpicPRM (Efficient, Precise, Cheap), which annotates each intermediate reasoning step based on its quantified contribution and uses an adaptive binary search algorithm to enhance both annotation precision and efficiency. Using this approach, we efficiently construct a high-quality process supervision training dataset named Epic50k, consisting of 50k annotated intermediate steps. Compared to other publicly available datasets, the PRM trained on Epic50k demonstrates significantly superior performance.

Tokenization serves as a foundational step for Large Language Models (LLMs) to process text. In new domains or languages, the inefficiency of the tokenizer will slow down the training and generation of LLM. The mismatch in vocabulary also hinders deep knowledge transfer between LLMs like token-level distillation. To mitigate this gap, we propose an efficient method named TokAlign to replace the vocabulary of LLM from the token co-occurrences view, and further transfer the token-level knowledge between models. It first aligns the source vocabulary to the target one by learning a one-to-one mapping matrix for token IDs. Model parameters, including embeddings, are rearranged and progressively fine-tuned for the new vocabulary. Our method significantly improves multilingual text compression rates and vocabulary initialization for LLMs, decreasing the perplexity from 3.4e² of strong baseline methods to 1.2e² after initialization. Experimental results on models across multiple parameter scales demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of TokAlign, which costs as few as 5k steps to restore the performance of the vanilla model. After unifying vocabularies between LLMs, token-level distillation can remarkably boost (+4.4% than sentence-level distillation) the base model, costing only 235M tokens.

In visual question answering (VQA) context, users often pose ambiguous questions to visual language models (VLMs) due to varying expression habits. Existing research addresses such ambiguities primarily by rephrasing questions. These approaches neglect the inherently interactive nature of user interactions with VLMs, where ambiguities can be clarified through user feedback. However, research on interactive clarification faces two major challenges: (1) Benchmarks are absent to assess VLMs’ capacity for resolving ambiguities through interaction; (2) VLMs are trained to prefer answering rather than asking, preventing them from seeking clarification. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ClearVQA benchmark, which targets three common categories of ambiguity in VQA context, and encompasses various VQA scenarios. Furthermore, we propose an automated pipeline to generate ambiguity-clarification question pairs, enabling VLMs to ask reasonable clarification questions and generate more accurate and specific answers based on user feedback, as demonstrated by experimental results.

Long-context modeling has drawn more and more attention in the area of Large Language Models (LLMs). Continual training with long-context data becomes the de-facto method to equip LLMs with the ability to process long inputs. However, it still remains an open challenge to measure the quality of long-context training data. To address this issue, we propose a Long-context data selection framework with Attention-based Dependency Measurement (LADM), which can efficiently identify high-quality long-context data from a large-scale, multi-domain pre-training corpus. LADM leverages the retrieval capabilities of the attention mechanism to capture contextual dependencies, ensuring a comprehensive quality measurement of long-context data. Experimental results show that our LADM framework significantly boosts the performance of LLMs on multiple long-context tasks with only 1B tokens for continual training.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the ability to generalize across a wide range of unseen natural language processing (NLP) tasks through instruction-following.Yet, their effectiveness often diminishes in low-resource languages like Chinese, exacerbated by biased evaluations from data leakage, casting doubt on their true generalizability to new linguistic territories. In response, we introduce the Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark (CIF-Bench), designed to evaluate the zero-shot generalizability of LLMs to the Chinese language. CIF-Bench comprises 150 tasks and 15,000 input-output pairs, developed by native speakers to test complex reasoning and Chinese cultural nuances across 20 categories. To mitigate data contamination, we release only half of the dataset publicly, with the remainder kept private, and introduce diversified instructions to minimize score variance, totaling 45,000 data instances.Our evaluation of 28 selected LLMs reveals a noticeable performance gap, with the best model scoring only 52.9%, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in less familiar language and task contexts.This work not only uncovers the current limitations of LLMs in handling Chinese language tasks but also sets a new standard for future LLM generalizability research, pushing towards the development of more adaptable, culturally informed, and linguistically diverse models.

Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.

Visual question answering (VQA) tasks, often performed by visual language model (VLM), face challenges with long-tail knowledge. Recent retrieval-augmented VQA (RA-VQA) systems address this by retrieving and integrating external knowledge sources. However, these systems still suffer from redundant visual information irrelevant to the question during retrieval. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose LLM-RA, a novel method leveraging the reasoning capability of a large language model (LLM) to identify key visual entities, thus minimizing the impact of irrelevant information in the query of retriever. Furthermore, key visual entities are independently encoded for multimodal joint retrieval, preventing cross-entity interference. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong RA-VQA systems. In two knowledge-intensive VQA benchmarks, our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance among those with similar scale of parameters and even performs comparably to models with 1-2 orders larger parameters.

The recent release of GPT-4o showcased the potential of end-to-end multimodal models, not just in terms of low latency but also in their ability to understand and generate expressive speech with rich emotions. While the details are unknown to the open research community, it likely involves significant amounts of curated data and compute, neither of which is readily accessible. In this paper, we present BLSP-Emo (Bootstrapped Language-Speech Pretraining with Emotion support), a novel approach to developing an end-to-end speech-language model capable of understanding both semantics and emotions in speech and generate empathetic responses. BLSP-Emo utilizes existing speech recognition (ASR) and speech emotion recognition (SER) datasets through a two-stage process. The first stage focuses on semantic alignment, following recent work on pretraining speech-language models using ASR data. The second stage performs emotion alignment with the pretrained speech-language model on an emotion-aware continuation task constructed from SER data. Our experiments demonstrate that the BLSP-Emo model excels in comprehending speech and delivering empathetic responses, both in instruction-following tasks and conversations.

Decoding language from non-invasive brain activity has attracted increasing attention from both researchers in neuroscience and natural language processing. Due to the noisy nature of brain recordings, existing work has simplified brain-to-word decoding as a binary classification task which is to discriminate a brain signal between its corresponding word and a wrong one. This pairwise classification task, however, cannot promote the development of practical neural decoders for two reasons. First, it has to enumerate all pairwise combinations in the test set, so it is inefficient to predict a word in a large vocabulary. Second, a perfect pairwise decoder cannot guarantee the performance on direct classification. To overcome these and go a step further to a realistic neural decoder, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Cloze (CMC) task which is to predict the target word encoded in the neural image with a context as prompt. Furthermore, to address this task, we propose a general approach that leverages the pre-trained language model to predict the target word. To validate our method, we perform experiments on more than 20 participants from two brain imaging datasets. Our method achieves 28.91% top-1 accuracy and 54.19% top-5 accuracy on average across all participants, significantly outperforming several baselines. This result indicates that our model can serve as a state-of-the-art baseline for the CMC task. More importantly, it demonstrates that it is feasible to decode a certain word within a large vocabulary from its neural brain activity.

Role-oriented dialogue summarization is to generate summaries for different roles in the dialogue, e.g., merchants and consumers. Existing methods handle this task by summarizing each role’s content separately and thus are prone to ignore the information from other roles. However, we believe that other roles’ content could benefit the quality of summaries, such as the omitted information mentioned by other roles. Therefore, we propose a novel role interaction enhanced method for role-oriented dialogue summarization. It adopts cross attention and decoder self-attention interactions to interactively acquire other roles’ critical information. The cross attention interaction aims to select other roles’ critical dialogue utterances, while the decoder self-attention interaction aims to obtain key information from other roles’ summaries. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on two public role-oriented dialogue summarization datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that other roles’ content could help generate summaries with more complete semantics and correct topic structures.

Confidence estimation aims to quantify the confidence of the model prediction, providing an expectation of success. A well-calibrated confidence estimate enables accurate failure prediction and proper risk measurement when given noisy samples and out-of-distribution data in real-world settings. However, this task remains a severe challenge for neural machine translation (NMT), where probabilities from softmax distribution fail to describe when the model is probably mistaken. To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised confidence estimate learning jointly with the training of the NMT model. We explain confidence as how many hints the NMT model needs to make a correct prediction, and more hints indicate low confidence. Specifically, the NMT model is given the option to ask for hints to improve translation accuracy at the cost of some slight penalty. Then, we approximate their level of confidence by counting the number of hints the model uses. We demonstrate that our learned confidence estimate achieves high accuracy on extensive sentence/word-level quality estimation tasks. Analytical results verify that our confidence estimate can correctly assess underlying risk in two real-world scenarios: (1) discovering noisy samples and (2) detecting out-of-domain data. We further propose a novel confidence-based instance-specific label smoothing approach based on our learned confidence estimate, which outperforms standard label smoothing.