100 Days After DeepSeek-R1: A Survey on Replication Studies and More Directions for Reasoning Language Models

The recent development of reasoning language models (RLMs) represents a novel evolution in large language models. In particular, the recent release of DeepSeek-R1 has generated widespread social impact and sparked enthusiasm in the research community for exploring the explicit reasoning paradigm of language models. However, the implementation details of the released models have not been fully open-sourced by DeepSeek, including DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and the distilled small models. As a result, many replication studies have emerged aiming to reproduce the strong performance achieved by DeepSeek-R1, reaching comparable performance through similar training procedures and fully open-source data resources. These works have investigated feasible strategies for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), focusing on data preparation and method design, yielding various valuable insights. In this report, we provide a summary of recent replication studies to inspire future research. We primarily focus on SFT and RLVR as two main directions, introducing the details for data construction, method design and training procedure of current replication studies. Moreover, we conclude key findings from the implementation details and experimental results reported by these studies, anticipating to inspire future research. We also discuss additional techniques of enhancing RLMs, highlighting the potential of expanding the application scope of these models, and discussing the challenges in development. By this survey, we aim to help researchers and developers of RLMs stay updated with the latest advancements, and seek to inspire new ideas to further enhance RLMs.

FBRT-YOLO: Faster and Better for Real-Time Aerial Image Detection

Embedded flight devices with visual capabilities have become essential for a wide range of applications. In aerial image detection, while many existing methods have partially addressed the issue of small target detection, challenges remain in optimizing small target detection and balancing detection accuracy with efficiency. These issues are key obstacles to the advancement of real-time aerial image detection. In this paper, we propose a new family of real-time detectors for aerial image detection, named FBRT-YOLO, to address the imbalance between detection accuracy and efficiency. Our method comprises two lightweight modules: Feature Complementary Mapping Module (FCM) and Multi-Kernel Perception Unit(MKP), designed to enhance object perception for small targets in aerial images. FCM focuses on alleviating the problem of information imbalance caused by the loss of small target information in deep networks. It aims to integrate spatial positional information of targets more deeply into the network,better aligning with semantic information in the deeper layers to improve the localization of small targets. We introduce MKP, which leverages convolutions with kernels of different sizes to enhance the relationships between targets of various scales and improve the perception of targets at different scales. Extensive experimental results on three major aerial image datasets, including Visdrone, UAVDT, and AI-TOD,demonstrate that FBRT-YOLO outperforms various real-time detectors in terms of performance and speed.

Virtual-mask Informed Prior for Sparse-view Dual-Energy CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view sampling in dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) significantly reduces radiation dose and increases imaging speed, yet is highly prone to artifacts. Although diffusion models have demonstrated potential in effectively handling incomplete data, most existing methods in this field focus on the image do-main and lack global constraints, which consequently leads to insufficient reconstruction quality. In this study, we propose a dual-domain virtual-mask in-formed diffusion model for sparse-view reconstruction by leveraging the high inter-channel correlation in DECT. Specifically, the study designs a virtual mask and applies it to the high-energy and low-energy data to perform perturbation operations, thus constructing high-dimensional tensors that serve as the prior information of the diffusion model. In addition, a dual-domain collaboration strategy is adopted to integrate the information of the randomly selected high-frequency components in the wavelet domain with the information in the projection domain, for the purpose of optimizing the global struc-tures and local details. Experimental results indicated that the present method exhibits excellent performance across multiple datasets.

Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling Preference Optimization

Iterative data generation and model retraining are widely used to align large language models (LLMs). It typically involves a policy model to generate on-policy responses and a reward model to guide training data selection. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) further enhances this process by constructing preference pairs of chosen and rejected responses. In this work, we aim to \emph{scale up} the number of on-policy samples via repeated random sampling to improve alignment performance. Conventional practice selects the sample with the highest reward as chosen and the lowest as rejected for DPO. However, our experiments reveal that this strategy leads to a \emph{decline} in performance as the sample size increases. To address this, we investigate preference data construction through the lens of underlying normal distribution of sample rewards. We categorize the reward space into seven representative points and systematically explore all 21 ($C_7^2$) pairwise combinations. Through evaluations on four models using AlpacaEval 2, we find that selecting the rejected response at reward position $\mu - 2\sigma$ rather than the minimum reward, is crucial for optimal performance. We finally introduce a scalable preference data construction strategy that consistently enhances model performance as the sample scale increases.

Decoder-Only LLMs are Better Controllers for Diffusion Models

Groundbreaking advancements in text-to-image generation have recently been achieved with the emergence of diffusion models. These models exhibit a remarkable ability to generate highly artistic and intricately detailed images based on textual prompts. However, obtaining desired generation outcomes often necessitates repetitive trials of manipulating text prompts just like casting spells on a magic mirror, and the reason behind that is the limited capability of semantic understanding inherent in current image generation models. Specifically, existing diffusion models encode the text prompt input with a pre-trained encoder structure, which is usually trained on a limited number of image-caption pairs. The state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) based on the decoder-only structure have shown a powerful semantic understanding capability as their architectures are more suitable for training on very large-scale unlabeled data. In this work, we propose to enhance text-to-image diffusion models by borrowing the strength of semantic understanding from large language models, and devise a simple yet effective adapter to allow the diffusion models to be compatible with the decoder-only structure. Meanwhile, we also provide a supporting theoretical analysis with various architectures (e.g., encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only), and conduct extensive empirical evaluations to verify its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the enhanced models with our adapter module are superior to the stat-of-the-art models in terms of text-to-image generation quality and reliability.

Reasoning based on symbolic and parametric knowledge bases: a survey

Reasoning is fundamental to human intelligence, and critical for problem-solving, decision-making, and critical thinking. Reasoning refers to drawing new conclusions based on existing knowledge, which can support various applications like clinical diagnosis, basic education, and financial analysis. Though a good number of surveys have been proposed for reviewing reasoning-related methods, none of them has systematically investigated these methods from the viewpoint of their dependent knowledge base. Both the scenarios to which the knowledge bases are applied and their storage formats are significantly different. Hence, investigating reasoning methods from the knowledge base perspective helps us better understand the challenges and future directions. To fill this gap, this paper first classifies the knowledge base into symbolic and parametric ones. The former explicitly stores information in human-readable symbols, and the latter implicitly encodes knowledge within parameters. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of reasoning methods using symbolic knowledge bases, parametric knowledge bases, and both of them. Finally, we identify the future direction toward enhancing reasoning capabilities to bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence.

General Geospatial Inference with a Population Dynamics Foundation Model

Supporting the health and well-being of dynamic populations around the world requires governmental agencies, organizations and researchers to understand and reason over complex relationships between human behavior and local contexts in order to identify high-risk groups and strategically allocate limited resources. Traditional approaches to these classes of problems often entail developing manually curated, task-specific features and models to represent human behavior and the natural and built environment, which can be challenging to adapt to new, or even, related tasks. To address this, we introduce a Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) that aims to capture the relationships between diverse data modalities and is applicable to a broad range of geospatial tasks. We first construct a geo-indexed dataset for postal codes and counties across the United States, capturing rich aggregated information on human behavior from maps, busyness, and aggregated search trends, and environmental factors such as weather and air quality. We then model this data and the complex relationships between locations using a graph neural network, producing embeddings that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks using relatively simple models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by benchmarking it on 27 downstream tasks spanning three distinct domains: health indicators, socioeconomic factors, and environmental measurements. The approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 27 geospatial interpolation tasks, and on 25 out of the 27 extrapolation and super-resolution tasks. We combined the PDFM with a state-of-the-art forecasting foundation model, TimesFM, to predict unemployment and poverty, achieving performance that surpasses fully supervised forecasting. The full set of embeddings and sample code are publicly available for researchers.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Few-shot RAW Image Denoising: Methods and Results

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Few-shot RAW Image Denoising track on MIPI 2024. In total, 165 participants were successfully registered, and 7 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art erformance on Few-shot RAW Image Denoising. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipichallenge.org/MIPI2024.

Towards Better Adversarial Purification via Adversarial Denoising Diffusion Training

Recently, diffusion-based purification (DBP) has emerged as a promising approach for defending against adversarial attacks. However, previous studies have used questionable methods to evaluate the robustness of DBP models, their explanations of DBP robustness also lack experimental support. We re-examine DBP robustness using precise gradient, and discuss the impact of stochasticity on DBP robustness. To better explain DBP robustness, we assess DBP robustness under a novel attack setting, Deterministic White-box, and pinpoint stochasticity as the main factor in DBP robustness. Our results suggest that DBP models rely on stochasticity to evade the most effective attack direction, rather than directly countering adversarial perturbations. To improve the robustness of DBP models, we propose Adversarial Denoising Diffusion Training (ADDT). This technique uses Classifier-Guided Perturbation Optimization (CGPO) to generate adversarial perturbation through guidance from a pre-trained classifier, and uses Rank-Based Gaussian Mapping (RBGM) to convert adversarial pertubation into a normal Gaussian distribution. Empirical results show that ADDT improves the robustness of DBP models. Further experiments confirm that ADDT equips DBP models with the ability to directly counter adversarial perturbations.

Region-Based Representations Revisited

We investigate whether region-based representations are effective for recognition. Regions were once a mainstay in recognition approaches, but pixel and patch-based features are now used almost exclusively. We show that recent class-agnostic segmenters like SAM can be effectively combined with strong unsupervised representations like DINOv2 and used for a wide variety of tasks, including semantic segmentation, object-based image retrieval, and multi-image analysis. Once the masks and features are extracted, these representations, even with linear decoders, enable competitive performance, making them well suited to applications that require custom queries. The compactness of the representation also makes it well-suited to video analysis and other problems requiring inference across many images.