Can We Trust LLMs on Memristors? Diving into Reasoning Ability under Non-Ideality

Memristor-based analog compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures provide a promising substrate for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), owing to superior energy efficiency and computational density. However, these architectures suffer from precision issues caused by intrinsic non-idealities of memristors. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive investigation into the impact of such typical non-idealities on LLM reasoning. Empirical results indicate that reasoning capability decreases significantly but varies for distinct benchmarks. Subsequently, we systematically appraise three training-free strategies, including thinking mode, in-context learning, and module redundancy. We thus summarize valuable guidelines, i.e., shallow layer redundancy is particularly effective for improving robustness, thinking mode performs better under low noise levels but degrades at higher noise, and in-context learning reduces output length with a slight performance trade-off. Our findings offer new insights into LLM reasoning under non-ideality and practical strategies to improve robustness.

A Survey of Reasoning in Autonomous Driving Systems: Open Challenges and Emerging Paradigms

The development of high-level autonomous driving (AD) is shifting from perception-centric limitations to a more fundamental bottleneck, namely, a deficit in robust and generalizable reasoning. Although current AD systems manage structured environments, they consistently falter in long-tail scenarios and complex social interactions that require human-like judgment. Meanwhile, the advent of large language and multimodal models (LLMs and MLLMs) presents a transformative opportunity to integrate a powerful cognitive engine into AD systems, moving beyond pattern matching toward genuine comprehension. However, a systematic framework to guide this integration is critically lacking. To bridge this gap, we provide a comprehensive review of this emerging field and argue that reasoning should be elevated from a modular component to the system's cognitive core. Specifically, we first propose a novel Cognitive Hierarchy to decompose the monolithic driving task according to its cognitive and interactive complexity. Building on this, we further derive and systematize seven core reasoning challenges, such as the responsiveness-reasoning trade-off and social-game reasoning. Furthermore, we conduct a dual-perspective review of the state-of-the-art, analyzing both system-centric approaches to architecting intelligent agents and evaluation-centric practices for their validation. Our analysis reveals a clear trend toward holistic and interpretable "glass-box" agents. In conclusion, we identify a fundamental and unresolved tension between the high-latency, deliberative nature of LLM-based reasoning and the millisecond-scale, safety-critical demands of vehicle control. For future work, a primary objective is to bridge the symbolic-to-physical gap by developing verifiable neuro-symbolic architectures, robust reasoning under uncertainty, and scalable models for implicit social negotiation.

The Art of Efficient Reasoning: Data, Reward, and Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking trajectories, typically through reward shaping with Reinforcement Learning (RL). In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanics of efficient reasoning for LLMs. For comprehensive evaluation, we advocate for more fine-grained metrics, including length distribution conditioned on correctness and performance across a wide spectrum of token budgets ranging from 2k to 32k. First, we reveal that the training process follows a two-stage paradigm: length adaptation and reasoning refinement. After that, we conduct extensive experiments (about 0.2 million GPU hours) in a unified protocol, deconstructing training prompts and rollouts, reward shaping, and optimization strategies. In particular, a key finding is to train on relatively easier prompts, ensuring the density of positive reward signals and thus avoiding the length collapse. Meanwhile, the learned length bias can be generalized across domains. We distill all findings into valuable insights and practical guidelines, and further validate them across the Qwen3 series, ranging from 0.6B to 30B, demonstrating the robustness and generalization.

BPDQ: Bit-Plane Decomposition Quantization on a Variable Grid for Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) inference is often bounded by memory footprint and memory bandwidth in resource-constrained deployments, making quantization a fundamental technique for efficient serving. While post-training quantization (PTQ) maintains high fidelity at 4-bit, it deteriorates at 2-3 bits. Fundamentally, existing methods enforce a shape-invariant quantization grid (e.g., the fixed uniform intervals of UINT2) for each group, severely restricting the feasible set for error minimization. To address this, we propose Bit-Plane Decomposition Quantization (BPDQ), which constructs a variable quantization grid via bit-planes and scalar coefficients, and iteratively refines them using approximate second-order information while progressively compensating quantization errors to minimize output discrepancy. In the 2-bit regime, BPDQ enables serving Qwen2.5-72B on a single RTX 3090 with 83.85% GSM8K accuracy (vs. 90.83% at 16-bit). Moreover, we provide theoretical analysis showing that the variable grid expands the feasible set, and that the quantization process consistently aligns with the optimization objective in Hessian-induced geometry. Code: github.com/KingdalfGoodman/BPDQ.

LINA: Linear Autoregressive Image Generative Models with Continuous Tokens

Autoregressive models with continuous tokens form a promising paradigm for visual generation, especially for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, but they suffer from high computational cost. We study how to design compute-efficient linear attention within this framework. Specifically, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of scaling behavior with respect to parameter counts under different design choices, focusing on (1) normalization paradigms in linear attention (division-based vs. subtraction-based) and (2) depthwise convolution for locality augmentation. Our results show that although subtraction-based normalization is effective for image classification, division-based normalization scales better for linear generative transformers. In addition, incorporating convolution for locality modeling plays a crucial role in autoregressive generation, consistent with findings in diffusion models. We further extend gating mechanisms, commonly used in causal linear attention, to the bidirectional setting and propose a KV gate. By introducing data-independent learnable parameters to the key and value states, the KV gate assigns token-wise memory weights, enabling flexible memory management similar to forget gates in language models. Based on these findings, we present LINA, a simple and compute-efficient T2I model built entirely on linear attention, capable of generating high-fidelity 1024x1024 images from user instructions. LINA achieves competitive performance on both class-conditional and T2I benchmarks, obtaining 2.18 FID on ImageNet (about 1.4B parameters) and 0.74 on GenEval (about 1.5B parameters). A single linear attention module reduces FLOPs by about 61 percent compared to softmax attention. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/techmonsterwang/LINA.

ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single reference answer, leading to the model overfitting to non-core expressions. Although our empirical analysis suggests that introducing multiple reference answers can mitigate this issue, the prohibitive data and computational costs necessitate a strategic shift: prioritizing the mitigation of single-reference overfitting over the costly pursuit of answer diversity. To achieve this, we reveal the intrinsic connection between token probability and semantic importance: high-probability tokens carry the core logical framework, while low-probability tokens are mostly replaceable expressions. Based on this insight, we propose ProFit, which selectively masks low-probability tokens to prevent surface-level overfitting. Extensive experiments confirm that ProFit consistently outperforms traditional SFT baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks.

MMFormalizer: Multimodal Autoformalization in the Wild

Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into formal statements to enable machine reasoning, faces fundamental challenges in the wild due to the multimodal nature of the physical world, where physics requires inferring hidden constraints (e.g., mass or energy) from visual elements. To address this, we propose MMFormalizer, which extends autoformalization beyond text by integrating adaptive grounding with entities from real-world mathematical and physical domains. MMFormalizer recursively constructs formal propositions from perceptually grounded primitives through recursive grounding and axiom composition, with adaptive recursive termination ensuring that every abstraction is supported by visual evidence and anchored in dimensional or axiomatic grounding. We evaluate MMFormalizer on a new benchmark, PhyX-AF, comprising 115 curated samples from MathVerse, PhyX, Synthetic Geometry, and Analytic Geometry, covering diverse multimodal autoformalization tasks. Results show that frontier models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro achieve the highest compile and semantic accuracy, with GPT-5 excelling in physical reasoning, while geometry remains the most challenging domain. Overall, MMFormalizer provides a scalable framework for unified multimodal autoformalization, bridging perception and formal reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multimodal autoformalization method capable of handling classical mechanics (derived from the Hamiltonian), as well as relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. More details are available on our project page: MMFormalizer.github.io

QuadINR: Hardware-Efficient Implicit Neural Representations Through Quadratic Activation

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) encode discrete signals continuously while addressing spectral bias through activation functions (AFs). Previous approaches mitigate this bias by employing complex AFs, which often incur significant hardware overhead. To tackle this challenge, we introduce QuadINR, a hardware-efficient INR that utilizes piecewise quadratic AFs to achieve superior performance with dramatic reductions in hardware consumption. The quadratic functions encompass rich harmonic content in their Fourier series, delivering enhanced expressivity for high-frequency signals, as verified through Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) analysis. We develop a unified $N$-stage pipeline framework that facilitates efficient hardware implementation of various AFs in INRs. We demonstrate FPGA implementations on the VCU128 platform and an ASIC implementation in a 28nm process. Experiments across images and videos show that QuadINR achieves up to 2.06dB PSNR improvement over prior work, with an area of only 1914$\mu$m$^2$ and a dynamic power of 6.14mW, reducing resource and power consumption by up to 97\% and improving latency by up to 93\% vs existing baselines.

SwingArena: Competitive Programming Arena for Long-context GitHub Issue Solving

We present SwingArena, a competitive evaluation framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) that closely mirrors real-world software development workflows. Unlike traditional static benchmarks, SwingArena models the collaborative process of software iteration by pairing LLMs as submitters, who generate patches, and reviewers, who create test cases and verify the patches through continuous integration (CI) pipelines. To support these interactive evaluations, we introduce a retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) module that efficiently handles long-context challenges by providing syntactically and semantically relevant code snippets from large codebases, supporting multiple programming languages (C++, Python, Rust, and Go). This enables the framework to scale across diverse tasks and contexts while respecting token limitations. Our experiments, using over 400 high-quality real-world GitHub issues selected from a pool of 2,300 issues, show that models like GPT-4o excel at aggressive patch generation, whereas DeepSeek and Gemini prioritize correctness in CI validation. SwingArena presents a scalable and extensible methodology for evaluating LLMs in realistic, CI-driven software development settings. More details are available on our project page: swing-bench.github.io

PhyX: Does Your Model Have the "Wits" for Physical Reasoning?

Existing benchmarks fail to capture a crucial aspect of intelligence: physical reasoning, the integrated ability to combine domain knowledge, symbolic reasoning, and understanding of real-world constraints. To address this gap, we introduce PhyX: the first large-scale benchmark designed to assess models capacity for physics-grounded reasoning in visual scenarios. PhyX includes 3K meticulously curated multimodal questions spanning 6 reasoning types across 25 sub-domains and 6 core physics domains: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, mechanics, modern physics, optics, and wave\&acoustics. In our comprehensive evaluation, even state-of-the-art models struggle significantly with physical reasoning. GPT-4o, Claude3.7-Sonnet, and GPT-o4-mini achieve only 32.5\%, 42.2\%, and 45.8\% accuracy respectively-performance gaps exceeding 29\% compared to human experts. Our analysis exposes critical limitations in current models: over-reliance on memorized disciplinary knowledge, excessive dependence on mathematical formulations, and surface-level visual pattern matching rather than genuine physical understanding. We provide in-depth analysis through fine-grained statistics, detailed case studies, and multiple evaluation paradigms to thoroughly examine physical reasoning capabilities. To ensure reproducibility, we implement a compatible evaluation protocol based on widely-used toolkits such as VLMEvalKit, enabling one-click evaluation.