Pangu Embedded: An Efficient Dual-system LLM Reasoner with Metacognition

This work presents Pangu Embedded, an efficient Large Language Model (LLM) reasoner developed on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs), featuring flexible fast and slow thinking capabilities. Pangu Embedded addresses the significant computational costs and inference latency challenges prevalent in existing reasoning-optimized LLMs. We propose a two-stage training framework for its construction. In Stage 1, the model is finetuned via an iterative distillation process, incorporating inter-iteration model merging to effectively aggregate complementary knowledge. This is followed by reinforcement learning on Ascend clusters, optimized by a latency-tolerant scheduler that combines stale synchronous parallelism with prioritized data queues. The RL process is guided by a Multi-source Adaptive Reward System (MARS), which generates dynamic, task-specific reward signals using deterministic metrics and lightweight LLM evaluators for mathematics, coding, and general problem-solving tasks. Stage 2 introduces a dual-system framework, endowing Pangu Embedded with a "fast" mode for routine queries and a deeper "slow" mode for complex inference. This framework offers both manual mode switching for user control and an automatic, complexity-aware mode selection mechanism that dynamically allocates computational resources to balance latency and reasoning depth. Experimental results on benchmarks including AIME 2024, GPQA, and LiveCodeBench demonstrate that Pangu Embedded with 7B parameters, outperforms similar-size models like Qwen3-8B and GLM4-9B. It delivers rapid responses and state-of-the-art reasoning quality within a single, unified model architecture, highlighting a promising direction for developing powerful yet practically deployable LLM reasoners.

Pangu Pro MoE: Mixture of Grouped Experts for Efficient Sparsity

The surgence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) in Large Language Models promises a small price of execution cost for a much larger model parameter count and learning capacity, because only a small fraction of parameters are activated for each input token. However, it is commonly observed that some experts are activated far more often than others, leading to system inefficiency when running the experts on different devices in parallel. Therefore, we introduce Mixture of Grouped Experts (MoGE), which groups the experts during selection and balances the expert workload better than MoE in nature. It constrains tokens to activate an equal number of experts within each predefined expert group. When a model execution is distributed on multiple devices, this architectural design ensures a balanced computational load across devices, significantly enhancing throughput, particularly for the inference phase. Further, we build Pangu Pro MoE on Ascend NPUs, a sparse model based on MoGE with 72 billion total parameters, 16 billion of which are activated for each token. The configuration of Pangu Pro MoE is optimized for Ascend 300I Duo and 800I A2 through extensive system simulation studies. Our experiments indicate that MoGE indeed leads to better expert load balancing and more efficient execution for both model training and inference on Ascend NPUs. The inference performance of Pangu Pro MoE achieves 1148 tokens/s per card and can be further improved to 1528 tokens/s per card by speculative acceleration, outperforming comparable 32B and 72B Dense models. Furthermore, we achieve an excellent cost-to-performance ratio for model inference on Ascend 300I Duo. Our studies show that Ascend NPUs are capable of training Pangu Pro MoE with massive parallelization to make it a leading model within the sub-100B total parameter class, outperforming prominent open-source models like GLM-Z1-32B and Qwen3-32B.

Pangu Light: Weight Re-Initialization for Pruning and Accelerating LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver state-of-the-art capabilities across numerous tasks, but their immense size and inference costs pose significant computational challenges for practical deployment. While structured pruning offers a promising avenue for model compression, existing methods often struggle with the detrimental effects of aggressive, simultaneous width and depth reductions, leading to substantial performance degradation. This paper argues that a critical, often overlooked, aspect in making such aggressive joint pruning viable is the strategic re-initialization and adjustment of remaining weights to improve the model post-pruning training accuracies. We introduce Pangu Light, a framework for LLM acceleration centered around structured pruning coupled with novel weight re-initialization techniques designed to address this ``missing piece''. Our framework systematically targets multiple axes, including model width, depth, attention heads, and RMSNorm, with its effectiveness rooted in novel re-initialization methods like Cross-Layer Attention Pruning (CLAP) and Stabilized LayerNorm Pruning (SLNP) that mitigate performance drops by providing the network a better training starting point. Further enhancing efficiency, Pangu Light incorporates specialized optimizations such as absorbing Post-RMSNorm computations and tailors its strategies to Ascend NPU characteristics. The Pangu Light models consistently exhibit a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, outperforming prominent baseline pruning methods like Nemotron and established LLMs like Qwen3 series. For instance, on Ascend NPUs, Pangu Light-32B's 81.6 average score and 2585 tokens/s throughput exceed Qwen3-32B's 80.9 average score and 2225 tokens/s.

Medical Large Vision Language Models with Multi-Image Visual Ability

Medical large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated promising performance across various single-image question answering (QA) benchmarks, yet their capability in processing multi-image clinical scenarios remains underexplored. Unlike single image based tasks, medical tasks involving multiple images often demand sophisticated visual understanding capabilities, such as temporal reasoning and cross-modal analysis, which are poorly supported by current medical LVLMs. To bridge this critical gap, we present the Med-MIM instruction dataset, comprising 83.2K medical multi-image QA pairs that span four types of multi-image visual abilities (temporal understanding, reasoning, comparison, co-reference). Using this dataset, we fine-tune Mantis and LLaVA-Med, resulting in two specialized medical VLMs: MIM-LLaVA-Med and Med-Mantis, both optimized for multi-image analysis. Additionally, we develop the Med-MIM benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the medical multi-image understanding capabilities of LVLMs. We assess eight popular LVLMs, including our two models, on the Med-MIM benchmark. Experimental results show that both Med-Mantis and MIM-LLaVA-Med achieve superior performance on the held-in and held-out subsets of the Med-MIM benchmark, demonstrating that the Med-MIM instruction dataset effectively enhances LVLMs' multi-image understanding capabilities in the medical domain.

SpatialLLM: From Multi-modality Data to Urban Spatial Intelligence

We propose SpatialLLM, a novel approach advancing spatial intelligence tasks in complex urban scenes. Unlike previous methods requiring geographic analysis tools or domain expertise, SpatialLLM is a unified language model directly addressing various spatial intelligence tasks without any training, fine-tuning, or expert intervention. The core of SpatialLLM lies in constructing detailed and structured scene descriptions from raw spatial data to prompt pre-trained LLMs for scene-based analysis. Extensive experiments show that, with our designs, pretrained LLMs can accurately perceive spatial distribution information and enable zero-shot execution of advanced spatial intelligence tasks, including urban planning, ecological analysis, traffic management, etc. We argue that multi-field knowledge, context length, and reasoning ability are key factors influencing LLM performances in urban analysis. We hope that SpatialLLM will provide a novel viable perspective for urban intelligent analysis and management. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/SpatialLLM.

Pangu Ultra MoE: How to Train Your Big MoE on Ascend NPUs

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

Dolphin: A Large-Scale Automatic Speech Recognition Model for Eastern Languages

This report introduces Dolphin, a large-scale multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that extends the Whisper architecture to support a wider range of languages. Our approach integrates in-house proprietary and open-source datasets to refine and optimize Dolphin's performance. The model is specifically designed to achieve notable recognition accuracy for 40 Eastern languages across East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, while also supporting 22 Chinese dialects. Experimental evaluations show that Dolphin significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art open-source models across various languages. To promote reproducibility and community-driven innovation, we are making our trained models and inference source code publicly available.

MedHallTune: An Instruction-Tuning Benchmark for Mitigating Medical Hallucination in Vision-Language Models

The increasing use of vision-language models (VLMs) in healthcare applications presents great challenges related to hallucinations, in which the models may generate seemingly plausible results that are in fact incorrect. Such hallucinations can jeopardize clinical decision making, potentially harming the diagnosis and treatments. In this work, we propose MedHallTune, a large-scale benchmark designed specifically to evaluate and mitigate hallucinations in medical VLMs. Comprising over 100,000 images and 1,000,000 instruction pairs, MedHallTune includes both hallucination and non-hallucination samples, each with ground-truth annotations. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of current medical and general VLMs using MedHallTune, assessing their performance across key metrics, including clinical accuracy, relevance, detail level, and risk level. The experimental results show that fine-tuning with MedHallTune successfully improves the ability of several existing models to manage hallucinations and boost their zero-shot performance on downstream visual-question-answering (VQA) tasks, making them more reliable for practical medical applications. Our work contributes to the development of more trustworthy VLMs. Codes and dataset will be available at \href{https://github.com/russellyq/MedHallTune}{MedHallTune}.

FIRP: Faster LLM inference via future intermediate representation prediction

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. Despite this, the auto-regressive nature of LLM decoding, which generates only a single token per forward propagation, fails to fully exploit the parallel computational power of GPUs, leading to considerable latency. To address this, we introduce a novel speculative decoding method named FIRP which generates multiple tokens instead of one at each decoding step. We achieve this by predicting the intermediate hidden states of future tokens (tokens have not been decoded yet) and then using these pseudo hidden states to decode future tokens, specifically, these pseudo hidden states are predicted with simple linear transformation in intermediate layers of LLMs. Once predicted, they participate in the computation of all the following layers, thereby assimilating richer semantic information. As the layers go deeper, the semantic gap between pseudo and real hidden states is narrowed and it becomes feasible to decode future tokens with high accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of FIRP, we conduct extensive experiments, showing a speedup ratio of 1.9x-3x in several models and datasets, analytical experiments also prove our motivations.