The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Abstract:RLVR is now a standard way to train LLMs on reasoning tasks with verifiable outcomes, but when rollout generation dominates the cost, efficiency depends heavily on which prompts you sample and when. In practice, prompt pools are often static or only loosely tied to the model's learning progress, so uniform sampling can't keep up with the shifting capability frontier and ends up wasting rollouts on prompts that are already solved or still out of reach. Existing approaches improve efficiency through filtering, curricula, adaptive rollout allocation, or teacher guidance, but they typically assume a fixed pool-which makes it hard to support stable on-policy pool growth-or they add extra teacher cost and latency. We introduce HeaPA (Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation), which maintains a bounded, evolving pool, tracks the frontier using heap-based boundary sampling, expands the pool via on-policy augmentation with lightweight asynchronous validation, and stabilizes correlated queries through topology-aware re-estimation of pool statistics and controlled reinsertion. Across two training corpora, two training recipes, and seven benchmarks, HeaPA consistently improves accuracy and reaches target performance with fewer computations while keeping wall-clock time comparable. Our analyses suggest these gains come from frontier-focused sampling and on-policy pool growth, with the benefits becoming larger as model scale increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/HeaPA.
Abstract:Determinism is indispensable for reproducibility in large language model (LLM) training, yet it often exacts a steep performance cost. In widely used attention implementations such as FlashAttention-3, the deterministic backward pass can incur up to a 37.9% throughput reduction relative to its non-deterministic counterpart, primarily because gradient accumulation operations must be serialized to guarantee numerical consistency. This performance loss stems from suboptimal scheduling of compute and gradient-reduction phases, leading to significant hardware underutilization. To address this challenge, we formulate the backward pass of deterministic attention as a scheduling problem on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and derive schedules that minimize the critical path length. Building on this formulation, we present DASH (Deterministic Attention Scheduling for High-Throughput), which encapsulates two complementary scheduling strategies: (i) Descending Q-Tile Iteration, a reversed query-block traversal that shrinks pipeline stalls in causal attention, and (ii) Shift Scheduling, a theoretically optimal schedule within our DAG model that reduces pipeline stalls for both full and causal masks. Our empirical evaluations on NVIDIA H800 GPUs demonstrate that DASH narrows the performance gap of deterministic attention. The proposed strategies improve the throughput of the attention backward pass by up to 1.28$\times$ compared to the baseline, significantly advancing the efficiency of reproducible LLM training. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SJTU-Liquid/deterministic-FA3.
Abstract:The success of CLIP has driven substantial progress in text-video retrieval. However, current methods often suffer from "blind" feature interaction, where the model struggles to discern key visual information from background noise due to the sparsity of textual queries. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from human cognitive behavior and propose the Human Vision-Driven (HVD) model. Our framework establishes a coarse-to-fine alignment mechanism comprising two key components: the Frame Features Selection Module (FFSM) and the Patch Features Compression Module (PFCM). FFSM mimics the human macro-perception ability by selecting key frames to eliminate temporal redundancy. Subsequently, PFCM simulates micro-perception by aggregating patch features into salient visual entities through an advanced attention mechanism, enabling precise entity-level matching. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that HVD not only captures human-like visual focus but also achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular interface for human-AI interaction, supporting information seeking and task assistance through natural, multi-turn dialogue. To respond to users within multi-turn dialogues, the context-dependent user intent evolves across interactions, requiring contextual interpretation, query reformulation, and dynamic coordination between retrieval and generation. Existing studies usually follow static rewrite, retrieve, and generate pipelines, which optimize different procedures separately and overlook the mixed-initiative action optimization simultaneously. Although the recent developments in deep search agents demonstrate the effectiveness in jointly optimizing retrieval and generation via reasoning, these approaches focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. We introduce a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. The experimental results across four widely used conversational benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods by surpassing several existing strong baselines.
Abstract:Discrete motion tokenization has recently enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as versatile backbones for motion understanding and motion-language reasoning. However, existing pipelines typically decouple motion quantization from semantic embedding learning, linking them solely via token IDs. This approach fails to effectively align the intrinsic geometry of the motion space with the embedding space, thereby hindering the LLM's capacity for nuanced motion reasoning. We argue that alignment is most effective when both modalities share a unified geometric basis. Therefore, instead of forcing the LLM to reconstruct the complex geometry among motion tokens from scratch, we present a novel framework that explicitly enforces orthogonality on both the motion codebook and the LLM embedding space, ensuring that their relational structures naturally mirror each other. Specifically, we employ a decoder-only quantizer with Gumbel-Softmax for differentiable training and balanced codebook usage. To bridge the modalities, we use a sparse projection that maps motion codes into the LLM embedding space while preserving orthogonality. Finally, a two-stage orthonormal regularization schedule enforces soft constraints during tokenizer training and LLM fine-tuning to maintain geometric alignment without hindering semantic adaptation. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D demonstrate that our framework achieves a 20% performance improvement over current state-of-the-art methods, validating that a unified geometric basis effectively empowers the LLM for nuanced motion reasoning.
Abstract:Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) achieve significant speed by generating multiple tokens in parallel. However, this parallel sampling approach, especially when using fewer inference steps, will introduce strong dependency errors and cause quality to deteriorate rapidly as the generation step size grows. As a result, reliable self-correction becomes essential for maintaining high-quality multi-token generation. To address this, we propose Decoupled Self-Correction (DSC), a novel two-stage methodology. DSC first fully optimizes the DLM's generative ability before freezing the model and training a specialized correction head. This decoupling preserves the model's peak SFT performance and ensures the generated errors used for correction head training are of higher quality. Additionally, we introduce Future-Context Augmentation (FCA) to maximize the correction head's accuracy. FCA generalizes the error training distribution by augmenting samples with ground-truth tokens, effectively training the head to utilize a richer, future-looking context. This mechanism is used for reliably detecting the subtle errors of the high-fidelity base model. Our DSC framework enables the model, at inference time, to jointly generate and revise tokens, thereby correcting errors introduced by multi-token generation and mitigating error accumulation across steps. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that our approach substantially reduces the quality degradation associated with larger generation steps, allowing DLMs to achieve both high generation speed and strong output fidelity.
Abstract:Handling missing node features is a key challenge for deploying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in real-world domains such as healthcare and sensor networks. Existing studies mostly address relatively benign scenarios, namely benchmark datasets with (a) high-dimensional but sparse node features and (b) incomplete data generated under Missing Completely At Random (MCAR) mechanisms. For (a), we theoretically prove that high sparsity substantially limits the information loss caused by missingness, making all models appear robust and preventing a meaningful comparison of their performance. To overcome this limitation, we introduce one synthetic and three real-world datasets with dense, semantically meaningful features. For (b), we move beyond MCAR and design evaluation protocols with more realistic missingness mechanisms. Moreover, we provide a theoretical background to state explicit assumptions on the missingness process and analyze their implications for different methods. Building on this analysis, we propose GNNmim, a simple yet effective baseline for node classification with incomplete feature data. Experiments show that GNNmim is competitive with respect to specialized architectures across diverse datasets and missingness regimes.
Abstract:The development of audio foundation models has accelerated rapidly since the emergence of GPT-4o. However, the lack of comprehensive evaluation has become a critical bottleneck for further progress in the field, particularly in audio generation. Current audio evaluation faces three major challenges: (1) audio evaluation lacks a unified framework, with datasets and code scattered across various sources, hindering fair and efficient cross-model comparison;(2) audio codecs, as a key component of audio foundation models, lack a widely accepted and holistic evaluation methodology; (3) existing speech benchmarks are heavily reliant on English, making it challenging to objectively assess models' performance on Chinese. To address the first issue, we introduce UltraEval-Audio, a unified evaluation framework for audio foundation models, specifically designed for both audio understanding and generation tasks. UltraEval-Audio features a modular architecture, supporting 10 languages and 14 core task categories, while seamlessly integrating 24 mainstream models and 36 authoritative benchmarks. To enhance research efficiency, the framework provides a one-command evaluation feature, accompanied by real-time public leaderboards. For the second challenge, UltraEval-Audio adopts a novel comprehensive evaluation scheme for audio codecs, evaluating performance across three key dimensions: semantic accuracy, timbre fidelity, and acoustic quality. To address the third issue, we propose two new Chinese benchmarks, SpeechCMMLU and SpeechHSK, designed to assess Chinese knowledge proficiency and language fluency. We wish that UltraEval-Audio will provide both academia and industry with a transparent, efficient, and fair platform for comparison of audio models. Our code, benchmarks, and leaderboards are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/UltraEval-Audio.




Abstract:Humans can efficiently extract knowledge and learn skills from the videos within only a few trials and errors. However, it poses a big challenge to replicate this learning process for autonomous agents, due to the complexity of visual input, the absence of action or reward signals, and the limitations of interaction steps. In this paper, we propose a novel, unsupervised, and sample-efficient framework to achieve imitation learning from videos (ILV), named Behavior Cloning from Videos via Latent Representations (BCV-LR). BCV-LR extracts action-related latent features from high-dimensional video inputs through self-supervised tasks, and then leverages a dynamics-based unsupervised objective to predict latent actions between consecutive frames. The pre-trained latent actions are fine-tuned and efficiently aligned to the real action space online (with collected interactions) for policy behavior cloning. The cloned policy in turn enriches the agent experience for further latent action finetuning, resulting in an iterative policy improvement that is highly sample-efficient. We conduct extensive experiments on a set of challenging visual tasks, including both discrete control and continuous control. BCV-LR enables effective (even expert-level on some tasks) policy performance with only a few interactions, surpassing state-of-the-art ILV baselines and reinforcement learning methods (provided with environmental rewards) in terms of sample efficiency across 24/28 tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work for the first time demonstrates that videos can support extremely sample-efficient visual policy learning, without the need to access any other expert supervision.
Abstract:Recent strides in video generation have paved the way for unified audio-visual generation. In this work, we present Seedance 1.5 pro, a foundational model engineered specifically for native, joint audio-video generation. Leveraging a dual-branch Diffusion Transformer architecture, the model integrates a cross-modal joint module with a specialized multi-stage data pipeline, achieving exceptional audio-visual synchronization and superior generation quality. To ensure practical utility, we implement meticulous post-training optimizations, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on high-quality datasets and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with multi-dimensional reward models. Furthermore, we introduce an acceleration framework that boosts inference speed by over 10X. Seedance 1.5 pro distinguishes itself through precise multilingual and dialect lip-syncing, dynamic cinematic camera control, and enhanced narrative coherence, positioning it as a robust engine for professional-grade content creation. Seedance 1.5 pro is now accessible on Volcano Engine at https://console.volcengine.com/ark/region:ark+cn-beijing/experience/vision?type=GenVideo.