The Climb Carves Wisdom Deeper Than the Summit: On the Noisy Rewards in Learning to Reason

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research investigates the impact of reward noise, a more practical consideration for real-world scenarios involving the post-training of LLMs using reward models. We found that LLMs demonstrate strong robustness to substantial reward noise. For example, manually flipping 40% of the reward function's outputs in math tasks still allows a Qwen-2.5-7B model to achieve rapid convergence, improving its performance on math tasks from 5% to 72%, compared to the 75% accuracy achieved by a model trained with noiseless rewards. Surprisingly, by only rewarding the appearance of key reasoning phrases (namely reasoning pattern reward, RPR), such as ``first, I need to''-without verifying the correctness of answers, the model achieved peak downstream performance (over 70% accuracy for Qwen-2.5-7B) comparable to models trained with strict correctness verification and accurate rewards. Recognizing the importance of the reasoning process over the final results, we combined RPR with noisy reward models. RPR helped calibrate the noisy reward models, mitigating potential false negatives and enhancing the LLM's performance on open-ended tasks. These findings suggest the importance of improving models' foundational abilities during the pre-training phase while providing insights for advancing post-training techniques. Our code and scripts are available at https://github.com/trestad/Noisy-Rewards-in-Learning-to-Reason.

Hunyuan-TurboS: Advancing Large Language Models through Mamba-Transformer Synergy and Adaptive Chain-of-Thought

As Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly advance, we introduce Hunyuan-TurboS, a novel large hybrid Transformer-Mamba Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. It synergistically combines Mamba's long-sequence processing efficiency with Transformer's superior contextual understanding. Hunyuan-TurboS features an adaptive long-short chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism, dynamically switching between rapid responses for simple queries and deep "thinking" modes for complex problems, optimizing computational resources. Architecturally, this 56B activated (560B total) parameter model employs 128 layers (Mamba2, Attention, FFN) with an innovative AMF/MF block pattern. Faster Mamba2 ensures linear complexity, Grouped-Query Attention minimizes KV cache, and FFNs use an MoE structure. Pre-trained on 16T high-quality tokens, it supports a 256K context length and is the first industry-deployed large-scale Mamba model. Our comprehensive post-training strategy enhances capabilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (3M instructions), a novel Adaptive Long-short CoT Fusion method, Multi-round Deliberation Learning for iterative improvement, and a two-stage Large-scale Reinforcement Learning process targeting STEM and general instruction-following. Evaluations show strong performance: overall top 7 rank on LMSYS Chatbot Arena with a score of 1356, outperforming leading models like Gemini-2.0-Flash-001 (1352) and o4-mini-2025-04-16 (1345). TurboS also achieves an average of 77.9% across 23 automated benchmarks. Hunyuan-TurboS balances high performance and efficiency, offering substantial capabilities at lower inference costs than many reasoning models, establishing a new paradigm for efficient large-scale pre-trained models.

QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models

In typical multimodal tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), adversarial attacks targeting a specific image and question can lead large vision-language models (LVLMs) to provide incorrect answers. However, it is common for a single image to be associated with multiple questions, and LVLMs may still answer other questions correctly even for an adversarial image attacked by a specific question. To address this, we introduce the query-agnostic visual attack (QAVA), which aims to create robust adversarial examples that generate incorrect responses to unspecified and unknown questions. Compared to traditional adversarial attacks focused on specific images and questions, QAVA significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of attacks on images when the question is unknown, achieving performance comparable to attacks on known target questions. Our research broadens the scope of visual adversarial attacks on LVLMs in practical settings, uncovering previously overlooked vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of visual adversarial threats. The code is available at https://github.com/btzyd/qava.

Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Meets All-domain Continual Pre-Training

Recent research efforts have investigated how to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into recommendation, capitalizing on their semantic comprehension and open-world knowledge for user behavior understanding. These approaches predominantly employ supervised fine-tuning on single-domain user interactions to adapt LLMs for specific recommendation tasks. However, they typically encounter dual challenges: the mismatch between general language representations and domain-specific preference patterns, as well as the limited adaptability to multi-domain recommendation scenarios. To bridge these gaps, we introduce CPRec -- an All-domain Continual Pre-Training framework for Recommendation -- designed to holistically align LLMs with universal user behaviors through the continual pre-training paradigm. Specifically, we first design a unified prompt template and organize users' multi-domain behaviors into domain-specific behavioral sequences and all-domain mixed behavioral sequences that emulate real-world user decision logic. To optimize behavioral knowledge infusion, we devise a Warmup-Stable-Annealing learning rate schedule tailored for the continual pre-training paradigm in recommendation to progressively enhance the LLM's capability in knowledge adaptation from open-world knowledge to universal recommendation tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of our CPRec, we implement it on a large-scale dataset covering seven domains and conduct extensive experiments on five real-world datasets from two distinct platforms. Experimental results confirm that our continual pre-training paradigm significantly mitigates the semantic-behavioral discrepancy and achieves state-of-the-art performance in all recommendation scenarios. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

TransMamba: Flexibly Switching between Transformer and Mamba

Transformers are the cornerstone of modern large language models, but their quadratic computational complexity limits efficiency in long-sequence processing. Recent advancements in Mamba, a state space model (SSM) with linear complexity, offer promising efficiency gains but suffer from unstable contextual learning and multitask generalization. This paper proposes TransMamba, a novel framework that unifies Transformer and Mamba through shared parameter matrices (e.g., QKV and CBx), and thus could dynamically switch between attention and SSM mechanisms at different token lengths and layers. We design the Memory converter to bridge Transformer and Mamba by converting attention outputs into SSM-compatible states, ensuring seamless information flow at TransPoints where the transformation happens. The TransPoint scheduling is also thoroughly explored for further improvements. We conducted extensive experiments demonstrating that TransMamba achieves superior training efficiency and performance compared to baselines, and validated the deeper consistency between Transformer and Mamba paradigms, offering a scalable solution for next-generation sequence modeling.

PatchRec: Multi-Grained Patching for Efficient LLM-based Sequential Recommendation

Large Language Models for sequential recommendation (LLM4SR), which transform user-item interactions into language modeling, have shown promising results. However, due to the limitations of context window size and the computational costs associated with Large Language Models (LLMs), current approaches primarily truncate user history by only considering the textual information of items from the most recent interactions in the input prompt. This truncation fails to fully capture the long-term behavioral patterns of users. To address this, we propose a multi-grained patching framework -- PatchRec. It compresses the textual tokens of an item title into a compact item patch, and further compresses multiple item patches into a denser session patch, with earlier interactions being compressed to a greater degree. The framework consists of two stages: (1) Patch Pre-training, which familiarizes LLMs with item-level compression patterns, and (2) Patch Fine-tuning, which teaches LLMs to model sequences at multiple granularities. Through this simple yet effective approach, empirical results demonstrate that PatchRec outperforms existing methods, achieving significant performance gains with fewer tokens fed to the LLM. Specifically, PatchRec shows up to a 32% improvement in HR@20 on the Goodreads dataset over uncompressed baseline, while using only 7% of the tokens. This multi-grained sequence modeling paradigm, with an adjustable compression ratio, enables LLMs to be efficiently deployed in real-world recommendation systems that handle extremely long user behavior sequences.

Scaling Laws for Floating Point Quantization Training

Low-precision training is considered an effective strategy for reducing both training and downstream inference costs. Previous scaling laws for precision mainly focus on integer quantization, which pay less attention to the constituents in floating-point quantization and thus cannot well fit the LLM losses in this scenario. In contrast, while floating-point quantization training is more commonly implemented in production, the research on it has been relatively superficial. In this paper, we thoroughly explore the effects of floating-point quantization targets, exponent bits, mantissa bits, and the calculation granularity of the scaling factor in floating-point quantization training performance of LLM models. While presenting an accurate floating-point quantization unified scaling law, we also provide valuable suggestions for the community: (1) Exponent bits contribute slightly more to the model performance than mantissa bits. We provide the optimal exponent-mantissa bit ratio for different bit numbers, which is available for future reference by hardware manufacturers; (2) We discover the formation of the critical data size in low-precision LLM training. Too much training data exceeding the critical data size will inversely bring in degradation of LLM performance; (3) The optimal floating-point quantization precision is directly proportional to the computational power, but within a wide computational power range, we estimate that the best cost-performance precision lies between 4-8 bits.

Enhancing Contrastive Learning Inspired by the Philosophy of "The Blind Men and the Elephant"

Contrastive learning is a prevalent technique in self-supervised vision representation learning, typically generating positive pairs by applying two data augmentations to the same image. Designing effective data augmentation strategies is crucial for the success of contrastive learning. Inspired by the story of the blind men and the elephant, we introduce JointCrop and JointBlur. These methods generate more challenging positive pairs by leveraging the joint distribution of the two augmentation parameters, thereby enabling contrastive learning to acquire more effective feature representations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to explicitly incorporate the joint distribution of two data augmentation parameters into contrastive learning. As a plug-and-play framework without additional computational overhead, JointCrop and JointBlur enhance the performance of SimCLR, BYOL, MoCo v1, MoCo v2, MoCo v3, SimSiam, and Dino baselines with notable improvements.

DHCP: Detecting Hallucinations by Cross-modal Attention Pattern in Large Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on complex multimodal tasks. However, they continue to suffer from significant hallucination issues, including object, attribute, and relational hallucinations. To accurately detect these hallucinations, we investigated the variations in cross-modal attention patterns between hallucination and non-hallucination states. Leveraging these distinctions, we developed a lightweight detector capable of identifying hallucinations. Our proposed method, Detecting Hallucinations by Cross-modal Attention Patterns (DHCP), is straightforward and does not require additional LVLM training or extra LVLM inference steps. Experimental results show that DHCP achieves remarkable performance in hallucination detection. By offering novel insights into the identification and analysis of hallucinations in LVLMs, DHCP contributes to advancing the reliability and trustworthiness of these models.

Mitigating Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Model via Hallucination-targeted Direct Preference Optimization

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are known to hallucinate, which limits their practical applications. Recent works have attempted to apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the performance of MLLMs, but have shown inconsistent improvements in mitigating hallucinations. To address this issue more effectively, we introduce Hallucination-targeted Direct Preference Optimization (HDPO) to reduce hallucinations in MLLMs. Unlike previous approaches, our method tackles hallucinations from their diverse forms and causes. Specifically, we develop three types of preference pair data targeting the following causes of MLLM hallucinations: (1) insufficient visual capabilities, (2) long context generation, and (3) multimodal conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across multiple hallucination evaluation datasets, surpassing most state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and highlighting the potential of our approach. Ablation studies and in-depth analyses further confirm the effectiveness of our method and suggest the potential for further improvements through scaling up.