Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward using one training example (1-shot RLVR) is effective in incentivizing the math reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Applying RLVR to the base model Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, we identify a single example that elevates model performance on MATH500 from 36.0% to 73.6%, and improves the average performance across six common mathematical reasoning benchmarks from 17.6% to 35.7%. This result matches the performance obtained using the 1.2k DeepScaleR subset (MATH500: 73.6%, average: 35.9%), which includes the aforementioned example. Similar substantial improvements are observed across various models (Qwen2.5-Math-7B, Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B), RL algorithms (GRPO and PPO), and different math examples (many of which yield approximately 30% or greater improvement on MATH500 when employed as a single training example). In addition, we identify some interesting phenomena during 1-shot RLVR, including cross-domain generalization, increased frequency of self-reflection, and sustained test performance improvement even after the training accuracy has saturated, a phenomenon we term post-saturation generalization. Moreover, we verify that the effectiveness of 1-shot RLVR primarily arises from the policy gradient loss, distinguishing it from the "grokking" phenomenon. We also show the critical role of promoting exploration (e.g., by adding entropy loss with an appropriate coefficient) in 1-shot RLVR training. As a bonus, we observe that applying entropy loss alone, without any outcome reward, significantly enhances Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B's performance on MATH500 by 27.4%. These findings can inspire future work on RLVR data efficiency and encourage a re-examination of both recent progress and the underlying mechanisms in RLVR. Our code, model, and data are open source at https://github.com/ypwang61/One-Shot-RLVR

Is Your World Simulator a Good Story Presenter? A Consecutive Events-Based Benchmark for Future Long Video Generation

The current state-of-the-art video generative models can produce commercial-grade videos with highly realistic details. However, they still struggle to coherently present multiple sequential events in the stories specified by the prompts, which is foreseeable an essential capability for future long video generation scenarios. For example, top T2V generative models still fail to generate a video of the short simple story 'how to put an elephant into a refrigerator.' While existing detail-oriented benchmarks primarily focus on fine-grained metrics like aesthetic quality and spatial-temporal consistency, they fall short of evaluating models' abilities to handle event-level story presentation. To address this gap, we introduce StoryEval, a story-oriented benchmark specifically designed to assess text-to-video (T2V) models' story-completion capabilities. StoryEval features 423 prompts spanning 7 classes, each representing short stories composed of 2-4 consecutive events. We employ advanced vision-language models, such as GPT-4V and LLaVA-OV-Chat-72B, to verify the completion of each event in the generated videos, applying a unanimous voting method to enhance reliability. Our methods ensure high alignment with human evaluations, and the evaluation of 11 models reveals its challenge, with none exceeding an average story-completion rate of 50%. StoryEval provides a new benchmark for advancing T2V models and highlights the challenges and opportunities in developing next-generation solutions for coherent story-driven video generation.

Mojito: Motion Trajectory and Intensity Control for Video Generation

Recent advancements in diffusion models have shown great promise in producing high-quality video content. However, efficiently training diffusion models capable of integrating directional guidance and controllable motion intensity remains a challenging and under-explored area. This paper introduces Mojito, a diffusion model that incorporates both \textbf{Mo}tion tra\textbf{j}ectory and \textbf{i}ntensi\textbf{t}y contr\textbf{o}l for text to video generation. Specifically, Mojito features a Directional Motion Control module that leverages cross-attention to efficiently direct the generated object's motion without additional training, alongside a Motion Intensity Modulator that uses optical flow maps generated from videos to guide varying levels of motion intensity. Extensive experiments demonstrate Mojito's effectiveness in achieving precise trajectory and intensity control with high computational efficiency, generating motion patterns that closely match specified directions and intensities, providing realistic dynamics that align well with natural motion in real-world scenarios.

ARL2: Aligning Retrievers for Black-box Large Language Models via Self-guided Adaptive Relevance Labeling

Retrieval-augmented generation enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating relevant information from external knowledge sources. This enables LLMs to adapt to specific domains and mitigate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing retrievers are often misaligned with LLMs due to their separate training processes and the black-box nature of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose ARL2, a retriever learning technique that harnesses LLMs as labelers. ARL2 leverages LLMs to annotate and score relevant evidence, enabling learning the retriever from robust LLM supervision. Furthermore, ARL2 uses an adaptive self-training strategy for curating high-quality and diverse relevance data, which can effectively reduce the annotation cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ARL2, achieving accuracy improvements of 5.4% on NQ and 4.6% on MMLU compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ARL2 exhibits robust transfer learning capabilities and strong zero-shot generalization abilities. Our code will be published at \url{https://github.com/zhanglingxi-cs/ARL2}.

Adapting LLM Agents Through Communication

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential for human-like agents. To help these agents adapt to new tasks without extensive human supervision, we propose the Learning through Communication (LTC) paradigm, a novel training approach enabling LLM agents to improve continuously through interactions with their environments and other agents. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential for human-like agents. To help these agents adapt to new tasks without extensive human supervision, we propose the Learning through Communication (LTC) paradigm, a novel training approach enabling LLM agents to improve continuously through interactions with their environments and other agents. Through iterative exploration and PPO training, LTC empowers the agent to assimilate short-term experiences into long-term memory. To optimize agent interactions for task-specific learning, we introduce three structured communication patterns: Monologue, Dialogue, and Analogue-tailored for common tasks such as decision-making, knowledge-intensive reasoning, and numerical reasoning. We evaluated LTC on three datasets: ALFWorld (decision-making), HotpotQA (knowledge-intensive reasoning), and GSM8k (numerical reasoning). On ALFWorld, it exceeds the instruction tuning baseline by 12% in success rate. On HotpotQA, LTC surpasses the instruction-tuned LLaMA-7B agent by 5.1% in EM score, and it outperforms the instruction-tuned 9x larger PaLM-62B agent by 0.6%. On GSM8k, LTC outperforms the CoT-Tuning baseline by 3.6% in accuracy. The results showcase the versatility and efficiency of the LTC approach across diverse domains. We will open-source our code to promote further development of the community.

ToolQA: A Dataset for LLM Question Answering with External Tools

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from challenges such as hallucination and weak numerical reasoning. To overcome these challenges, external tools can be used to enhance LLMs' question-answering abilities. However, current evaluation methods do not distinguish between questions that can be answered using LLMs' internal knowledge and those that require external information through tool use. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset called ToolQA, which is designed to faithfully evaluate LLMs' ability to use external tools for question answering. Our development of ToolQA involved a scalable, automated process for dataset curation, along with 13 specialized tools designed for interaction with external knowledge in order to answer questions. Importantly, we strive to minimize the overlap between our benchmark data and LLMs' pre-training data, enabling a more precise evaluation of LLMs' tool-use reasoning abilities. We conducted an in-depth diagnosis of existing tool-use LLMs to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements. Our findings set a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs and suggest new directions for future advancements. Our data and code are freely available to the broader scientific community on GitHub.

Generation-Augmented Query Expansion For Code Retrieval

Pre-trained language models have achieved promising success in code retrieval tasks, where a natural language documentation query is given to find the most relevant existing code snippet. However, existing models focus only on optimizing the documentation code pairs by embedding them into latent space, without the association of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose a generation-augmented query expansion framework. Inspired by the human retrieval process - sketching an answer before searching, in this work, we utilize the powerful code generation model to benefit the code retrieval task. Specifically, we demonstrate that rather than merely retrieving the target code snippet according to the documentation query, it would be helpful to augment the documentation query with its generation counterpart - generated code snippets from the code generation model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that leverages the code generation model to enhance the code retrieval task. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CodeSearchNet benchmark and surpass the baselines significantly.

GNN is a Counter? Revisiting GNN for Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) has been a long-standing research topic in AI and NLP fields, and a wealth of studies have been conducted to attempt to equip QA systems with human-level reasoning capability. To approximate the complicated human reasoning process, state-of-the-art QA systems commonly use pre-trained language models (LMs) to access knowledge encoded in LMs together with elaborately designed modules based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to perform reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs). However, many problems remain open regarding the reasoning functionality of these GNN-based modules. Can these GNN-based modules really perform a complex reasoning process? Are they under- or over-complicated for QA? To open the black box of GNN and investigate these problems, we dissect state-of-the-art GNN modules for QA and analyze their reasoning capability. We discover that even a very simple graph neural counter can outperform all the existing GNN modules on CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA, two popular QA benchmark datasets which heavily rely on knowledge-aware reasoning. Our work reveals that existing knowledge-aware GNN modules may only carry out some simple reasoning such as counting. It remains a challenging open problem to build comprehensive reasoning modules for knowledge-powered QA.

TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient and Scalable Video Understanding on Edge Device

The explosive growth in video streaming requires video understanding at high accuracy and low computation cost. Conventional 2D CNNs are computationally cheap but cannot capture temporal relationships; 3D CNN-based methods can achieve good performance but are computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose a generic and effective Temporal Shift Module (TSM) that enjoys both high efficiency and high performance. The key idea of TSM is to shift part of the channels along the temporal dimension, thus facilitate information exchanged among neighboring frames. It can be inserted into 2D CNNs to achieve temporal modeling at zero computation and zero parameters. TSM offers several unique advantages. Firstly, TSM has high performance; it ranks the first on the Something-Something leaderboard upon submission. Secondly, TSM has high efficiency; it achieves a high frame rate of 74fps and 29fps for online video recognition on Jetson Nano and Galaxy Note8. Thirdly, TSM has higher scalability compared to 3D networks, enabling large-scale Kinetics training on 1,536 GPUs in 15 minutes. Lastly, TSM enables action concepts learning, which 2D networks cannot model; we visualize the category attention map and find that spatial-temporal action detector emerges during the training of classification tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/temporal-shift-module.

How to Design Sample and Computationally Efficient VQA Models

In multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering (VQA), there have been many modeling and training paradigms tested. Previous models propose different methods for the vision and language tasks, but which ones perform the best while being sample and computationally efficient? Based on our experiments, we find that representing the text as probabilistic programs and images as object-level scene graphs best satisfy these desiderata. We extend existing models to leverage these soft programs and scene graphs to train on question answer pairs in an end-to-end manner. Empirical results demonstrate that this differentiable end-to-end program executor is able to maintain state-of-the-art accuracy while being sample and computationally efficient.