Incentivizing Inclusive Contributions in Model Sharing Markets

While data plays a crucial role in training contemporary AI models, it is acknowledged that valuable public data will be exhausted in a few years, directing the world's attention towards the massive decentralized private data. However, the privacy-sensitive nature of raw data and lack of incentive mechanism prevent these valuable data from being fully exploited. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes inclusive and incentivized personalized federated learning (iPFL), which incentivizes data holders with diverse purposes to collaboratively train personalized models without revealing raw data. iPFL constructs a model-sharing market by solving a graph-based training optimization and incorporates an incentive mechanism based on game theory principles. Theoretical analysis shows that iPFL adheres to two key incentive properties: individual rationality and truthfulness. Empirical studies on eleven AI tasks (e.g., large language models' instruction-following tasks) demonstrate that iPFL consistently achieves the highest economic utility, and better or comparable model performance compared to baseline methods. We anticipate that our iPFL can serve as a valuable technique for boosting future AI models on decentralized private data while making everyone satisfied.

Combatting Dimensional Collapse in LLM Pre-Training Data via Diversified File Selection

Selecting high-quality pre-training data for large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing their overall performance under limited computation budget, improving both training and sample efficiency. Recent advancements in file selection primarily rely on using an existing or trained proxy model to assess the similarity of samples to a target domain, such as high quality sources BookCorpus and Wikipedia. However, upon revisiting these methods, the domain-similarity selection criteria demonstrates a diversity dilemma, i.e.dimensional collapse in the feature space, improving performance on the domain-related tasks but causing severe degradation on generic performance. To prevent collapse and enhance diversity, we propose a DiverSified File selection algorithm (DiSF), which selects the most decorrelated text files in the feature space. We approach this with a classical greedy algorithm to achieve more uniform eigenvalues in the feature covariance matrix of the selected texts, analyzing its approximation to the optimal solution under a formulation of $\gamma$-weakly submodular optimization problem. Empirically, we establish a benchmark and conduct extensive experiments on the TinyLlama architecture with models from 120M to 1.1B parameters. Evaluating across nine tasks from the Harness framework, DiSF demonstrates a significant improvement on overall performance. Specifically, DiSF saves 98.5% of 590M training files in SlimPajama, outperforming the full-data pre-training within a 50B training budget, and achieving about 1.5x training efficiency and 5x data efficiency.

ChestX-Reasoner: Advancing Radiology Foundation Models with Reasoning through Step-by-Step Verification

Recent advances in reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance in complex tasks, yet medical AI models often overlook the structured reasoning processes inherent in clinical practice. In this work, we present ChestX-Reasoner, a radiology diagnosis MLLM designed to leverage process supervision mined directly from clinical reports, reflecting the step-by-step reasoning followed by radiologists. We construct a large dataset by extracting and refining reasoning chains from routine radiology reports. Our two-stage training framework combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning guided by process rewards to better align model reasoning with clinical standards. We introduce RadRBench-CXR, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 59K visual question answering samples with 301K clinically validated reasoning steps, and propose RadRScore, a metric evaluating reasoning factuality, completeness, and effectiveness. ChestX-Reasoner outperforms existing medical and general-domain MLLMs in both diagnostic accuracy and reasoning ability, achieving 16%, 5.9%, and 18% improvements in reasoning ability compared to the best medical MLLM, the best general MLLM, and its base model, respectively, as well as 3.3%, 24%, and 27% improvements in outcome accuracy. All resources are open-sourced to facilitate further research in medical reasoning MLLMs.

VocalNet: Speech LLM with Multi-Token Prediction for Faster and High-Quality Generation

Speech large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a prominent research focus in speech processing. We propose VocalNet-1B and VocalNet-8B, a series of high-performance, low-latency speech LLMs enabled by a scalable and model-agnostic training framework for real-time voice interaction. Departing from the conventional next-token prediction (NTP), we introduce multi-token prediction (MTP), a novel approach optimized for speech LLMs that simultaneously improves generation speed and quality. Experiments show that VocalNet outperforms mainstream Omni LLMs despite using significantly less training data, while also surpassing existing open-source speech LLMs by a substantial margin. To support reproducibility and community advancement, we will open-source all model weights, inference code, training data, and framework implementations upon publication.

COST: Contrastive One-Stage Transformer for Vision-Language Small Object Tracking

Transformer has recently demonstrated great potential in improving vision-language (VL) tracking algorithms. However, most of the existing VL trackers rely on carefully designed mechanisms to perform the multi-stage multi-modal fusion. Additionally, direct multi-modal fusion without alignment ignores distribution discrepancy between modalities in feature space, potentially leading to suboptimal representations. In this work, we propose COST, a contrastive one-stage transformer fusion framework for VL tracking, aiming to learn semantically consistent and unified VL representations. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive alignment strategy that maximizes mutual information (MI) between a video and its corresponding language description. This enables effective cross-modal alignment, yielding semantically consistent features in the representation space. By leveraging a visual-linguistic transformer, we establish an efficient multi-modal fusion and reasoning mechanism, empirically demonstrating that a simple stack of transformer encoders effectively enables unified VL representations. Moreover, we contribute a newly collected VL tracking benchmark dataset for small object tracking, named VL-SOT500, with bounding boxes and language descriptions. Our dataset comprises two challenging subsets, VL-SOT230 and VL-SOT270, dedicated to evaluating generic and high-speed small object tracking, respectively. Small object tracking is notoriously challenging due to weak appearance and limited features, and this dataset is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to explore the usage of language cues to enhance visual representation for small object tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that COST achieves state-of-the-art performance on five existing VL tracking datasets, as well as on our proposed VL-SOT500 dataset. Source codes and dataset will be made publicly available.

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Modeling

Domain-specific intelligence demands specialized knowledge and sophisticated reasoning for problem-solving, posing significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) that struggle with knowledge hallucination and inadequate reasoning capabilities under constrained parameter budgets. Inspired by Bloom's Taxonomy in educational theory, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Modeling (RARE), a novel paradigm that decouples knowledge storage from reasoning optimization. RARE externalizes domain knowledge to retrievable sources and internalizes domain-specific reasoning patterns during training. Specifically, by injecting retrieved knowledge into training prompts, RARE transforms learning objectives from rote memorization to contextualized reasoning application. It enables models to bypass parameter-intensive memorization and prioritize the development of higher-order cognitive processes. Our experiments demonstrate that lightweight RARE-trained models (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B) could achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing retrieval-augmented GPT-4 and Deepseek-R1 distilled counterparts. RARE establishes a paradigm shift where maintainable external knowledge bases synergize with compact, reasoning-optimized models, collectively driving more scalable domain-specific intelligence. Repo: https://github.com/Open-DataFlow/RARE

Learning to Instruct for Visual Instruction Tuning

We propose LIT, an advancement of visual instruction tuning (VIT). While VIT equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with promising multimodal capabilities, the current design choices for VIT often result in overfitting and shortcut learning, potentially degrading performance. This gap arises from an overemphasis on instruction-following abilities, while neglecting the proactive understanding of visual information. Inspired by this, LIT adopts a simple yet effective approach by incorporating the loss function into both the instruction and response sequences. It seamlessly expands the training data, and regularizes the MLLMs from overly relying on language priors. Based on this merit, LIT achieves a significant relative improvement of up to 9% on comprehensive multimodal benchmarks, requiring no additional training data and incurring negligible computational overhead. Surprisingly, LIT attains exceptional fundamental visual capabilities, yielding up to an 18% improvement in captioning performance, while simultaneously alleviating hallucination in MLLMs.

ChatBEV: A Visual Language Model that Understands BEV Maps

Traffic scene understanding is essential for intelligent transportation systems and autonomous driving, ensuring safe and efficient vehicle operation. While recent advancements in VLMs have shown promise for holistic scene understanding, the application of VLMs to traffic scenarios, particularly using BEV maps, remains under explored. Existing methods often suffer from limited task design and narrow data amount, hindering comprehensive scene understanding. To address these challenges, we introduce ChatBEV-QA, a novel BEV VQA benchmark contains over 137k questions, designed to encompass a wide range of scene understanding tasks, including global scene understanding, vehicle-lane interactions, and vehicle-vehicle interactions. This benchmark is constructed using an novel data collection pipeline that generates scalable and informative VQA data for BEV maps. We further fine-tune a specialized vision-language model ChatBEV, enabling it to interpret diverse question prompts and extract relevant context-aware information from BEV maps. Additionally, we propose a language-driven traffic scene generation pipeline, where ChatBEV facilitates map understanding and text-aligned navigation guidance, significantly enhancing the generation of realistic and consistent traffic scenarios. The dataset, code and the fine-tuned model will be released.

FedMABench: Benchmarking Mobile Agents on Decentralized Heterogeneous User Data

Mobile agents have attracted tremendous research participation recently. Traditional approaches to mobile agent training rely on centralized data collection, leading to high cost and limited scalability. Distributed training utilizing federated learning offers an alternative by harnessing real-world user data, providing scalability and reducing costs. However, pivotal challenges, including the absence of standardized benchmarks, hinder progress in this field. To tackle the challenges, we introduce FedMABench, the first benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile agents, specifically designed for heterogeneous scenarios. FedMABench features 6 datasets with 30+ subsets, 8 federated algorithms, 10+ base models, and over 800 apps across 5 categories, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating mobile agents across diverse environments. Through extensive experiments, we uncover several key insights: federated algorithms consistently outperform local training; the distribution of specific apps plays a crucial role in heterogeneity; and, even apps from distinct categories can exhibit correlations during training. FedMABench is publicly available at: https://github.com/wwh0411/FedMABench with the datasets at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/wwh0411/FedMABench.

Quantifying the Reasoning Abilities of LLMs on Real-world Clinical Cases

The latest reasoning-enhanced large language models (reasoning LLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o3, have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the application of such reasoning enhancements to the highly professional medical domain has not been clearly evaluated, particularly regarding with not only assessing the final generation but also examining the quality of their reasoning processes. In this study, we present MedR-Bench, a reasoning-focused medical evaluation benchmark comprising 1,453 structured patient cases with reasoning references mined from case reports. Our benchmark spans 13 body systems and 10 specialty disorders, encompassing both common and rare diseases. In our evaluation, we introduce a versatile framework consisting of three critical clinical stages: assessment recommendation, diagnostic decision-making, and treatment planning, comprehensively capturing the LLMs' performance across the entire patient journey in healthcare. For metrics, we propose a novel agentic system, Reasoning Evaluator, designed to automate and objectively quantify free-text reasoning responses in a scalable manner from the perspectives of efficiency, factuality, and completeness by dynamically searching and performing cross-referencing checks. As a result, we assess five state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, including DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI-o3-mini, and others. Our results reveal that current LLMs can handle relatively simple diagnostic tasks with sufficient critical assessment results, achieving accuracy generally over 85%. However, they still struggle with more complex tasks, such as assessment recommendation and treatment planning. In reasoning, their reasoning processes are generally reliable, with factuality scores exceeding 90%, though they often omit critical reasoning steps. Our study clearly reveals further development directions for current clinical LLMs.