Grove MoE: Towards Efficient and Superior MoE LLMs with Adjugate Experts

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture is a cornerstone of modern state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language models (LLMs). MoE models facilitate scalability by enabling sparse parameter activation. However, traditional MoE architecture uses homogeneous experts of a uniform size, activating a fixed number of parameters irrespective of input complexity and thus limiting computational efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Grove MoE, a novel architecture incorporating experts of varying sizes, inspired by the heterogeneous big.LITTLE CPU architecture. This architecture features novel adjugate experts with a dynamic activation mechanism, enabling model capacity expansion while maintaining manageable computational overhead. Building on this architecture, we present GroveMoE-Base and GroveMoE-Inst, 33B-parameter LLMs developed by applying an upcycling strategy to the Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base model during mid-training and post-training. GroveMoE models dynamically activate 3.14-3.28B parameters based on token complexity and achieve performance comparable to SOTA open-source models of similar or even larger size.

SPA++: Generalized Graph Spectral Alignment for Versatile Domain Adaptation

Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain under domain shifts. Most prior works focus on capturing the inter-domain transferability but largely overlook rich intra-domain structures, which empirically results in even worse discriminability. To tackle this tradeoff, we propose a generalized graph SPectral Alignment framework, SPA++. Its core is briefly condensed as follows: (1)-by casting the DA problem to graph primitives, it composes a coarse graph alignment mechanism with a novel spectral regularizer toward aligning the domain graphs in eigenspaces; (2)-we further develop a fine-grained neighbor-aware propagation mechanism for enhanced discriminability in the target domain; (3)-by incorporating data augmentation and consistency regularization, SPA++ can adapt to complex scenarios including most DA settings and even challenging distribution scenarios. Furthermore, we also provide theoretical analysis to support our method, including the generalization bound of graph-based DA and the role of spectral alignment and smoothing consistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPA++ consistently outperforms existing cutting-edge methods, achieving superior robustness and adaptability across various challenging adaptation scenarios.

Ring-lite: Scalable Reasoning via C3PO-Stabilized Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

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.

RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for challenging benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities in handling complex tabular data. However, existing benchmarks are either based on outdated data setups or focus solely on simple, flat table structures. In this paper, we introduce RealHiTBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of both LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. RealHiTBench also includes a diverse collection of tables with intricate structures, spanning a wide range of task types. Our experimental results, using 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrate that RealHiTBench is indeed a challenging benchmark. Moreover, we also develop TreeThinker, a tree-based pipeline that organizes hierarchical headers into a tree structure for enhanced tabular reasoning, validating the importance of improving LLMs' perception of table hierarchies. We hope that our work will inspire further research on tabular data reasoning and the development of more robust models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cspzyy/RealHiTBench.

Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. Due to the inherent uncertainty within LLMs, they often produce incorrect labels for difficult samples, severely compromising the data quality for downstream applications. Motivated by ambiguity aversion in human behaviors, we propose a novel candidate annotation paradigm wherein large language models are encouraged to output all possible labels when incurring uncertainty. To ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks, we develop a teacher-student framework CanDist that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM). We further provide a rigorous justification demonstrating that distilling candidate annotations from the teacher LLM offers superior theoretical guarantees compared to directly using single annotations. Extensive experiments across six text classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/MingxuanXia/CanDist.

ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Alignment of Large Language Models

Aligning general-purpose large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks often incurs significant costs, including constructing task-specific instruction pairs and extensive training adjustments. Prior research has explored various avenues to enhance alignment efficiency, primarily through minimal-data training or data-driven activations to identify key attention heads. However, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. To address this issue and enhance model alignment efficiency, we propose the \textit{\textbf{A}ttention \textbf{L}ocalization and \textbf{P}runing \textbf{S}trategy (\textbf{ALPS})}, an efficient algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method activates only \textbf{10\%} of attention parameters during fine-tuning while achieving a \textbf{2\%} performance improvement over baselines on three tasks. Moreover, the identified task-specific heads are transferable across datasets and mitigate knowledge forgetting. Our work and findings provide a novel perspective on efficient LLM alignment.

LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning with the emergence of reasoning models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, while the correctness of intermediate think-and-search steps is usually neglected. To address this issue, we design a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. Grounded on this, we propose Learning to Think-and-Search (LeTS), a novel framework that hybridizes stepwise process reward and outcome-based reward to current RL methods for RAG. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization and inference efficiency of LeTS across various RAG benchmarks. In addition, these results reveal the potential of process- and outcome-level reward hybridization in boosting LLMs' reasoning ability via RL under other scenarios. The code will be released soon.

Ming-Lite-Uni: Advancements in Unified Architecture for Natural Multimodal Interaction

We introduce Ming-Lite-Uni, an open-source multimodal framework featuring a newly designed unified visual generator and a native multimodal autoregressive model tailored for unifying vision and language. Specifically, this project provides an open-source implementation of the integrated MetaQueries and M2-omni framework, while introducing the novel multi-scale learnable tokens and multi-scale representation alignment strategy. By leveraging a fixed MLLM and a learnable diffusion model, Ming-Lite-Uni enables native multimodal AR models to perform both text-to-image generation and instruction based image editing tasks, expanding their capabilities beyond pure visual understanding. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of Ming-Lite-Uni and illustrate the impressive fluid nature of its interactive process. All code and model weights are open-sourced to foster further exploration within the community. Notably, this work aligns with concurrent multimodal AI milestones - such as ChatGPT-4o with native image generation updated in March 25, 2025 - underscoring the broader significance of unified models like Ming-Lite-Uni on the path toward AGI. Ming-Lite-Uni is in alpha stage and will soon be further refined.

Pi-GPS: Enhancing Geometry Problem Solving by Unleashing the Power of Diagrammatic Information

Geometry problem solving has garnered increasing attention due to its potential applications in intelligent education field. Inspired by the observation that text often introduces ambiguities that diagrams can clarify, this paper presents Pi-GPS, a novel framework that unleashes the power of diagrammatic information to resolve textual ambiguities, an aspect largely overlooked in prior research. Specifically, we design a micro module comprising a rectifier and verifier: the rectifier employs MLLMs to disambiguate text based on the diagrammatic context, while the verifier ensures the rectified output adherence to geometric rules, mitigating model hallucinations. Additionally, we explore the impact of LLMs in theorem predictor based on the disambiguated formal language. Empirical results demonstrate that Pi-GPS surpasses state-of-the-art models, achieving a nearly 10\% improvement on Geometry3K over prior neural-symbolic approaches. We hope this work highlights the significance of resolving textual ambiguity in multimodal mathematical reasoning, a crucial factor limiting performance.

DataMan: Data Manager for Pre-training Large Language Models

The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspired by ``reverse thinking'' -- prompting LLMs to self-identify which criteria benefit its performance. As its pre-training capabilities are related to perplexity (PPL), we derive 14 quality criteria from the causes of text perplexity anomalies and introduce 15 common application domains to support domain mixing. In this paper, we train a Data Manager (DataMan) to learn quality ratings and domain recognition from pointwise rating, and use it to annotate a 447B token pre-training corpus with 14 quality ratings and domain type. Our experiments validate our approach, using DataMan to select 30B tokens to train a 1.3B-parameter language model, demonstrating significant improvements in in-context learning (ICL), perplexity, and instruction-following ability over the state-of-the-art baseline. The best-performing model, based on the Overall Score l=5 surpasses a model trained with 50% more data using uniform sampling. We continue pre-training with high-rated, domain-specific data annotated by DataMan to enhance domain-specific ICL performance and thus verify DataMan's domain mixing ability. Our findings emphasize the importance of quality ranking, the complementary nature of quality criteria, and their low correlation with perplexity, analyzing misalignment between PPL and ICL performance. We also thoroughly analyzed our pre-training dataset, examining its composition, the distribution of quality ratings, and the original document sources.