Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

Exploring a Principled Framework for Deep Subspace Clustering

Subspace clustering is a classical unsupervised learning task, built on a basic assumption that high-dimensional data can be approximated by a union of subspaces (UoS). Nevertheless, the real-world data are often deviating from the UoS assumption. To address this challenge, state-of-the-art deep subspace clustering algorithms attempt to jointly learn UoS representations and self-expressive coefficients. However, the general framework of the existing algorithms suffers from a catastrophic feature collapse and lacks a theoretical guarantee to learn desired UoS representation. In this paper, we present a Principled fRamewOrk for Deep Subspace Clustering (PRO-DSC), which is designed to learn structured representations and self-expressive coefficients in a unified manner. Specifically, in PRO-DSC, we incorporate an effective regularization on the learned representations into the self-expressive model, prove that the regularized self-expressive model is able to prevent feature space collapse, and demonstrate that the learned optimal representations under certain condition lie on a union of orthogonal subspaces. Moreover, we provide a scalable and efficient approach to implement our PRO-DSC and conduct extensive experiments to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed deep subspace clustering approach. The code is available at https://github.com/mengxianghan123/PRO-DSC.

SemEval-2025 Task 1: AdMIRe -- Advancing Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation

Idiomatic expressions present a unique challenge in NLP, as their meanings are often not directly inferable from their constituent words. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), idiomaticity remains a significant obstacle to robust semantic representation. We present datasets and tasks for SemEval-2025 Task 1: AdMiRe (Advancing Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation), which challenges the community to assess and improve models' ability to interpret idiomatic expressions in multimodal contexts and in multiple languages. Participants competed in two subtasks: ranking images based on their alignment with idiomatic or literal meanings, and predicting the next image in a sequence. The most effective methods achieved human-level performance by leveraging pretrained LLMs and vision-language models in mixture-of-experts settings, with multiple queries used to smooth over the weaknesses in these models' representations of idiomaticity.

Degradation Alchemy: Self-Supervised Unknown-to-Known Transformation for Blind Hyperspectral Image Fusion

Hyperspectral image (HSI) fusion is an efficient technique that combines low-resolution HSI (LR-HSI) and high-resolution multispectral images (HR-MSI) to generate high-resolution HSI (HR-HSI). Existing supervised learning methods (SLMs) can yield promising results when test data degradation matches the training ones, but they face challenges in generalizing to unknown degradations. To unleash the potential and generalization ability of SLMs, we propose a novel self-supervised unknown-to-known degradation transformation framework (U2K) for blind HSI fusion, which adaptively transforms unknown degradation into the same type of degradation as those handled by pre-trained SLMs. Specifically, the proposed U2K framework consists of: (1) spatial and spectral Degradation Wrapping (DW) modules that map HR-HSI to unknown degraded HR-MSI and LR-HSI, and (2) Degradation Transformation (DT) modules that convert these wrapped data into predefined degradation patterns. The transformed HR-MSI and LR-HSI pairs are then processed by a pre-trained network to reconstruct the target HR-HSI. We train the U2K framework in a self-supervised manner using consistency loss and greedy alternating optimization, significantly improving the flexibility of blind HSI fusion. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed U2K framework in boosting the adaptability of five existing SLMs under various degradation settings and surpassing state-of-the-art blind methods.

Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Iterative DPO: A Comprehensive Empirical Investigation

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with RL-based approaches have led to growing interest in alternative paradigms, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of DPO in facilitating self-improvement for LLMs through iterative preference-based learning. We demonstrate that a single round of DPO with coarse filtering significantly enhances mathematical reasoning performance, particularly for strong base model. Furthermore, we design an iterative enhancement framework for both the generator and the reward model (RM), enabling their mutual improvement through online interaction across multiple rounds of DPO. Finally, with simple verifiable rewards, our model DPO-VP achieves RL-level performance with significantly lower computational overhead. These findings highlight DPO as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to RL, offering a practical solution for enhancing LLM reasoning in resource-constrained situations.

MP-HSIR: A Multi-Prompt Framework for Universal Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) often suffer from diverse and unknown degradations during imaging, leading to severe spectral and spatial distortions. Existing HSI restoration methods typically rely on specific degradation assumptions, limiting their effectiveness in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose MP-HSIR, a novel multi-prompt framework that effectively integrates spectral, textual, and visual prompts to achieve universal HSI restoration across diverse degradation types and intensities. Specifically, we develop a prompt-guided spatial-spectral transformer, which incorporates spatial self-attention and a prompt-guided dual-branch spectral self-attention. Since degradations affect spectral features differently, we introduce spectral prompts in the local spectral branch to provide universal low-rank spectral patterns as prior knowledge for enhancing spectral reconstruction. Furthermore, the text-visual synergistic prompt fuses high-level semantic representations with fine-grained visual features to encode degradation information, thereby guiding the restoration process. Extensive experiments on 9 HSI restoration tasks, including all-in-one scenarios, generalization tests, and real-world cases, demonstrate that MP-HSIR not only consistently outperforms existing all-in-one methods but also surpasses state-of-the-art task-specific approaches across multiple tasks. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/ZhehuiWu/MP-HSIR.

Neural Normalized Cut: A Differential and Generalizable Approach for Spectral Clustering

Spectral clustering, as a popular tool for data clustering, requires an eigen-decomposition step on a given affinity to obtain the spectral embedding. Nevertheless, such a step suffers from the lack of generalizability and scalability. Moreover, the obtained spectral embeddings can hardly provide a good approximation to the ground-truth partition and thus a k-means step is adopted to quantize the embedding. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective scalable and generalizable approach, called Neural Normalized Cut (NeuNcut), to learn the clustering membership for spectral clustering directly. In NeuNcut, we properly reparameterize the unknown cluster membership via a neural network, and train the neural network via stochastic gradient descent with a properly relaxed normalized cut loss. As a result, our NeuNcut enjoys a desired generalization ability to directly infer clustering membership for out-of-sample unseen data and hence brings us an efficient way to handle clustering task with ultra large-scale data. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic data and benchmark datasets and experimental results validate the effectiveness and the superiority of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hewei98/NeuNcut.

LangTime: A Language-Guided Unified Model for Time Series Forecasting with Proximal Policy Optimization

Recent research has shown an increasing interest in utilizing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for a variety of time series applications. However, there are three main challenges when using LLMs as foundational models for time series forecasting: (1) Cross-domain generalization. (2) Cross-modality alignment. (3) Error accumulation in autoregressive frameworks. To address these challenges, we proposed LangTime, a language-guided unified model for time series forecasting that incorporates cross-domain pre-training with reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning. Specifically, LangTime constructs Temporal Comprehension Prompts (TCPs), which include dataset-wise and channel-wise instructions, to facilitate domain adaptation and condense time series into a single token, enabling LLMs to understand better and align temporal data. To improve autoregressive forecasting, we introduce TimePPO, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning algorithm. TimePPO mitigates error accumulation by leveraging a multidimensional rewards function tailored for time series and a repeat-based value estimation strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LangTime achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain forecasting performance, while TimePPO fine-tuning effectively enhances the stability and accuracy of autoregressive forecasting.

Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals

Process supervision, i.e., evaluating each step, is critical for complex large language model (LLM) reasoning and test-time searching with increased inference compute. Existing approaches, represented by process reward models (PRMs), primarily focus on rewarding signals up to the current step, exhibiting a one-directional nature and lacking a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from the A* algorithm, which states that an effective supervisory signal should simultaneously consider the incurred cost and the estimated cost for reaching the target. Building on this key insight, we introduce BiRM, a novel process supervision model that not only evaluates the correctness of previous steps but also models the probability of future success. We conduct extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks and demonstrate that BiRM provides more precise evaluations of LLM reasoning steps, achieving an improvement of 3.1% on Gaokao2023 over PRM under the Best-of-N sampling method. Besides, in search-based strategies, BiRM provides more comprehensive guidance and outperforms ORM by 5.0% and PRM by 3.8% respectively on MATH-500.

LDGen: Enhancing Text-to-Image Synthesis via Large Language Model-Driven Language Representation

In this paper, we introduce LDGen, a novel method for integrating large language models (LLMs) into existing text-to-image diffusion models while minimizing computational demands. Traditional text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, exhibit limitations in multilingual processing, hindering image generation across diverse languages. We address these challenges by leveraging the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Our approach employs a language representation strategy that applies hierarchical caption optimization and human instruction techniques to derive precise semantic information,. Subsequently, we incorporate a lightweight adapter and a cross-modal refiner to facilitate efficient feature alignment and interaction between LLMs and image features. LDGen reduces training time and enables zero-shot multilingual image generation. Experimental results indicate that our method surpasses baseline models in both prompt adherence and image aesthetic quality, while seamlessly supporting multiple languages. Project page: https://zrealli.github.io/LDGen.