Sherman
Abstract:We present VibeVoice-ASR-BitNet, a compressed variant of VibeVoice-ASR optimized for real-time inference on edge CPUs. We apply heterogeneous quantization tailored to the computational characteristics of each stage: the VAE acoustic tokenizer uses full-pipeline INT8 quantization (I8_S) with kernel fusion and SIMD optimization, while the autoregressive language model adopts BitNet-style ternary weights (I2_S). To preserve accuracy under aggressive compression, we employ a progressive quantization-aware training strategy. For inference, we implement custom SIMD kernels and fused operators within the ggml framework targeting both ARM and x86 platforms, achieving real-time recognition (RTF < 1) on low-thread-count CPUs. VibeVoice-ASR-BitNet is 1.6--2.3x faster than Whisper.cpp at comparable model sizes (~1.6 GB), with only modest accuracy degradation compared to the FP16 baseline.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) on open-ended tasks compresses an LLM's rubric-based evaluation into a scalar reward, discarding rich textual feedback and conflating responses with distinct quality profiles. We propose Experiential Learning (EL), which repurposes the feedback model from an LLM-as-a-Judge into an LLM-as-a-Coach. The coach distills its assessment of each on-policy response into transferable experiential knowledge, which conditions a teacher model and is internalized by the policy through on-policy context distillation. Compared with scalar rewards, this higher-bandwidth feedback channel provides dense supervision and preserves fine-grained preferences among high-quality responses. Across two policy families, with feedback from the policy itself or a proprietary model, EL consistently outperforms rubric-based RL on held-out and unseen open-ended tasks. Notably, EL generalizes better beyond the training distribution, and mitigates reward hacking. These findings establish experiential knowledge as a richer and more generalizable learning signal for post-training on non-verifiable tasks.
Abstract:We study on-policy distillation (OPD) for agentic tasks, where an LLM agent interacts with an environment over multiple turns and a student imitates a teacher over these multi-turn interaction histories. Fully online OPD is costly because each update requires fresh student rollouts through the environment and teacher queries at visited histories. We propose Replayed-Prefix On-Policy Distillation (ReOPD), an off-environment alternative that reuses pre-collected teacher trajectories as replayed prefixes: the student acts at selected steps, while the teacher provides dense per-step supervision without executing new environment interactions. We show that multi-turn OPD introduces a prefix trap: making histories more student-on-policy improves relevance to the student, but can query the teacher on histories where its target is unreliable. This creates a two-sided distribution shift between student occupancy and teacher reliability. ReOPD addresses this by treating multi-turn OPD as a reliability-aware prefix distribution design and implements it with a simple step-decaying sampling schedule that emphasizes early, lower-shift prefixes. Across mathematical reasoning with Python and search environments over multiple teacher and student model scales, ReOPD preserves or improves OPD-level accuracy, uses zero tool calls during student training, and is at least 4$\times$ faster per training step than OPD. ReOPD therefore turns expensive agent-environment interaction into a reusable offline resource, enabling scalable distillation across tools, tasks, and environments.
Abstract:Can a vision model truly see an object, or does it only fit surface-level visual cues? Following Wittgenstein's view that the limits of language are the limits of the world, we view a model's recognition ability as bounded by the descriptive system it has learned. In current vision models, this system is often realized through learned feature representations that exploit local statistical cues. We therefore ask whether a model can still classify correctly when such local cues provide no stable basis for distinction. We formalize this question with syntactic distance, which measures class separability through the symmetry of the operations mapping one class to the other: positive distance exposes exploitable local features, whereas zero distance requires global semantics rather than local rules. We construct a visual self-referential task in maximum-variance binary noise: positive samples contain a closed square, while negative samples contain an otherwise identical square with one flipped boundary pixel. The two classes differ in global semantics but have zero syntactic distance, making local statistical shortcuts unreliable. Experiments on ResNets and Vision Transformers reveal a consistent phase-transition phenomenon, with accuracy collapsing to random guessing once the image scale crosses a critical point and does not recover within the tested range. Larger training sets and models only delay this collapse, while globally attentive ViTs reach it earlier. These results reveal a structural capability boundary of current architectures on global-concept tasks, suggesting that general intelligence may require creating new language, not reusing an existing one.
Abstract:The integration of Foundation Models (FMs) and wireless communications is driving the evolution of image communication from bit-accurate transmission toward task-oriented transmission. However, existing task-oriented image communication methods still face three major challenges: insufficient task-oriented Token representation, inadequate collaboration between Visual Tokens and Task Tokens, and limited interpretability of task decisions. To address these challenges, we propose an Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication (ET-TokenCom) framework. By treating Tokens as unified units for information representation and transmission, the proposed framework constructs an end-to-end communication link that spans visual perception, wireless transmission, and task reasoning. At the transmitter, the ET-TokenCom framework extracts Visual Tokens from images to preserve low-level visual information. Meanwhile, Task Tokens generated by the FM are introduced to represent the target information and decision intent required by the current task. A Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) fusion mechanism is further designed, enabling Task Tokens to explicitly guide the selection, weighting, and transmission of Visual Tokens. At the receiver, the framework integrates Token decoding with an explainable output mechanism, where attention heatmaps are generated to highlight critical perceptual regions under different task objectives and reveal the influence of Task Tokens on the outputs. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed ET-TokenCom framework.
Abstract:The deployment of Large Language Model (LLM) agents for computer automation is accelerating, yet their ability to navigate complex, professional-grade productivity software is largely untested. We argue that Office automation is an ideal environment for benchmarking document-automation capability, as it requires long-horizon planning and reasoning, precise parameter configuration, and multi-application integration. To quantify this capability, we introduce an evaluation based on China's National Computer Rank Examination (NCRE), featuring 200 comprehensive practical-operation tasks across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each task is scored on a 100-point rubric scale using 7,118 machine-gradable criteria, and Score Rate (SR) denotes the mean percentage of rubric points earned across these tasks. We benchmark 7 frontier LLMs and observe stark limitations: single-turn models score a maximum of 36.6%. A stronger agentic system with execution feedback, iterative repair, and broader Office automation access reaches 68.8%, but remains below the 95.5% community-reference score used as a scoring sanity check. Ultimately, our experiments demonstrate that despite recent advancements in code generation, achieving reliable fine-grained Office document automation remains a significant challenge for current code-generating LLM and agent systems.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise as tool-using agents but remain limited in long-horizon tasks that require remembering, organizing, and reusing knowledge. Prior memory approaches aim to resolve the situation, but mainly focus on storing factual information. Recent work on procedural memory improves task reuse, yet often reduces to replaying past successes without addressing failure cases or online scalability. We introduce a unified and automatic memory framework that integrates semantic, episodic, and procedural memory in a bi-level design combining short-term and long-term stores. A multi-agent architecture with actor, memory, and critic agents enables automatic memory generation, reward annotation, and adaptive retrieval. Long-term memory is managed through reward-based evaluation, merging, and pruning, ensuring scalability and continual improvement. Experiments across various environments show that our approach improves robustness and success on long multi-turn tasks compared to existing baselines. This work highlights the importance of comprehensive, adaptive memory for advancing LLM-based agents.
Abstract:Long-context inference in modern LLMs is increasingly constrained by decoding efficiency, especially in reasoning-heavy settings where models generate long intermediate chains of thought. Existing sparse attention methods often face a practical efficiency-quality trade-off. Structured block sparse methods typically provide stronger acceleration but incur noticeable quality loss, while token sparse methods are usually more accurate yet deliver limited end-to-end speedup because top-k routing over the full cache remains expensive. In this work, we propose cross-layer sparse attention (CLSA), which is built on top of KV-sharing architectures such as YOCO. The core idea is to share not only the KV cache across cross-decoder layers, but also the routing index. A single indexer computes token-level top-k selection once and reuses the resulting index across layers, thereby preserving the fine-grained selectivity of token sparse attention while amortizing the routing overhead. The resulting architecture improves all major inference bottlenecks jointly, including pre-filling, KV-cache storage, and long-context decoding. Experiments across short-context and long-context benchmarks show that CLSA is both accurate and efficient, achieving up to 7.6x decoding speedup and 17.1x overall throughput improvement at 128K context. These results suggest a more complete architectural solution for long-context LLMs that jointly advances model quality and inference efficiency.
Abstract:The rise of test-time scaling has remarkably boosted the reasoning and agentic proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, standard Transformers struggle to scale inference-time compute efficiently, as conventional looping strategies suffer from high computational overhead and a KV cache that inflates alongside model depth. We present Universal YOCO (YOCO-U), which combines the YOCO decoder-decoder architecture with recursive computation to achieve a synergistic effect greater than either alone. Built on the YOCO framework, YOCO-U implements a Universal Self-Decoder that performs multiple iterations via parameter sharing, while confining the iterative process to shallow, efficient-attention layers. This combination yields a favorable capability-efficiency tradeoff that neither YOCO nor recursion achieves independently. The YOCO architecture provides a constant global KV cache and linear pre-filling, while partial recursion enhances representational depth with limited overhead. Together, YOCO-U improves token utility and scaling behavior while maintaining efficient inference. Empirical results confirm that YOCO-U remains highly competitive in general and long-context benchmarks, demonstrating that the integration of efficient-attention architectures and recursive computation is a promising direction for scalable LLMs.
Abstract:While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on complex reasoning tasks such as competitive programming (CP), existing methods predominantly focus on single-attempt settings, overlooking their capacity for iterative refinement. In this paper, we present RefineRL, a novel approach designed to unleash the self-refinement capabilities of LLMs for CP problem solving. RefineRL introduces two key innovations: (1) Skeptical-Agent, an iterative self-refinement agent equipped with local execution tools to validate generated solutions against public test cases of CP problems. This agent always maintains a skeptical attitude towards its own outputs and thereby enforces rigorous self-refinement even when validation suggests correctness. (2) A reinforcement learning (RL) solution to incentivize LLMs to self-refine with only standard RLVR data (i.e., problems paired with their verifiable answers). Extensive experiments on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-4B-2507 demonstrate that our method yields substantial gains: after our RL training, these compact 4B models integrated with the Skeptical-Agent not only outperform much larger 32B models but also approach the single-attempt performance of 235B models. These findings suggest that self-refinement holds considerable promise for scaling LLM reasoning, with significant potential for further advancement.