Tsinghua University
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal trade-offs between imitation and exploration. Recent single-stage methods attempt to unify SFT and RL using heuristics, but lack a principled mechanism for dynamically balancing the two paradigms. In this paper, we reframe this challenge through the theoretical lens of \textbf{implicit rewards}, viewing SFT and RL not as distinct methods but as complementary reward signals. We introduce \textbf{Adaptive Meta Fine-Tuning (AMFT)}, a novel single-stage algorithm that learns the optimal balance between SFT's implicit, path-level reward and RL's explicit, outcome-based reward. The core of AMFT is a \textbf{meta-gradient adaptive weight controller} that treats the SFT-RL balance as a learnable parameter, dynamically optimizing it to maximize long-term task performance. This forward-looking approach, regularized by policy entropy for stability, autonomously discovers an effective training curriculum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, abstract visual reasoning (General Points), and vision-language navigation (V-IRL). AMFT consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art and demonstrats superior generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. Ablation studies and training dynamic analysis confirm that the meta-learning controller is crucial for AMFT's stability, sample efficiency, and performance, offering a more principled and effective paradigm for LLM alignment. Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/hlxtsyj/AMFT.
Abstract:Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning and role-playing capabilities, opening new opportunities for agent-based social simulations. However, most existing agents' implementations are scenario-tailored, without a unified framework to guide the design. This lack of a general social agent limits their ability to generalize across different social contexts and to produce consistent, realistic behaviors. To address this challenge, we propose a theory-informed framework that provides a systematic design process for LLM-based social agents. Our framework is grounded in principles from Social Cognition Theory and introduces three key modules: motivation, action planning, and learning. These modules jointly enable agents to reason about their goals, plan coherent actions, and adapt their behavior over time, leading to more flexible and contextually appropriate responses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our theory-driven agents reproduce realistic human behavior patterns under complex conditions, achieving up to 75% lower deviation from real-world behavioral data across multiple fidelity metrics compared to classical generative baselines. Ablation studies further show that removing motivation, planning, or learning modules increases errors by 1.5 to 3.2 times, confirming their distinct and essential contributions to generating realistic and coherent social behaviors.
Abstract:The rise of LLMs poses new possibilities in modeling opinion evolution, a long-standing task in simulation, by leveraging advanced reasoning abilities to recreate complex, large-scale human cognitive trends. While most prior works focus on opinion evolution surrounding specific isolated events or the views within a country, ours is the first to model the large-scale attitude evolution of a population representing an entire country towards another -- US citizens' perspectives towards China. To tackle the challenges of this broad scenario, we propose a framework that integrates media data collection, user profile creation, and cognitive architecture for opinion updates to successfully reproduce the real trend of US attitudes towards China over a 20-year period from 2005 to today. We also leverage LLMs' capabilities to introduce debiased media exposure, extracting neutral events from typically subjective news contents, to uncover the roots of polarized opinion formation, as well as a devils advocate agent to help explain the rare reversal from negative to positive attitudes towards China, corresponding with changes in the way Americans obtain information about the country. The simulation results, beyond validating our framework architecture, also reveal the impact of biased framing and selection bias in shaping attitudes. Overall, our work contributes to a new paradigm for LLM-based modeling of cognitive behaviors in a large-scale, long-term, cross-border social context, providing insights into the formation of international biases and offering valuable implications for media consumers to better understand the factors shaping their perspectives, and ultimately contributing to the larger social need for bias reduction and cross-cultural tolerance.
Abstract:Human mobility prediction is vital for urban planning, transportation optimization, and personalized services. However, the inherent randomness, non-uniform time intervals, and complex patterns of human mobility, compounded by the heterogeneity introduced by varying city structures, infrastructure, and population densities, present significant challenges in modeling. Existing solutions often require training separate models for each city due to distinct spatial representations and geographic coverage. In this paper, we propose UniMove, a unified model for multi-city human mobility prediction, addressing two challenges: (1) constructing universal spatial representations for effective token sharing across cities, and (2) modeling heterogeneous mobility patterns from varying city characteristics. We propose a trajectory-location dual-tower architecture, with a location tower for universal spatial encoding and a trajectory tower for sequential mobility modeling. We also design MoE Transformer blocks to adaptively select experts to handle diverse movement patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets from diverse cities demonstrate that UniMove truly embodies the essence of a unified model. By enabling joint training on multi-city data with mutual data enhancement, it significantly improves mobility prediction accuracy by over 10.2\%. UniMove represents a key advancement toward realizing a true foundational model with a unified architecture for human mobility. We release the implementation at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UniMove/.
Abstract:Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in large-scale urban environments requires embodied agents to ground linguistic instructions in complex scenes and recall relevant experiences over extended time horizons. Prior modular pipelines offer interpretability but lack unified memory, while end-to-end (M)LLM agents excel at fusing vision and language yet remain constrained by fixed context windows and implicit spatial reasoning. We introduce \textbf{Mem4Nav}, a hierarchical spatial-cognition long-short memory system that can augment any VLN backbone. Mem4Nav fuses a sparse octree for fine-grained voxel indexing with a semantic topology graph for high-level landmark connectivity, storing both in trainable memory tokens embedded via a reversible Transformer. Long-term memory (LTM) compresses and retains historical observations at both octree and graph nodes, while short-term memory (STM) caches recent multimodal entries in relative coordinates for real-time obstacle avoidance and local planning. At each step, STM retrieval sharply prunes dynamic context, and, when deeper history is needed, LTM tokens are decoded losslessly to reconstruct past embeddings. Evaluated on Touchdown and Map2Seq across three backbones (modular, state-of-the-art VLN with prompt-based LLM, and state-of-the-art VLN with strided-attention MLLM), Mem4Nav yields 7-13 pp gains in Task Completion, sufficient SPD reduction, and >10 pp nDTW improvement. Ablations confirm the indispensability of both the hierarchical map and dual memory modules. Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Mem4Nav.
Abstract:Effective decision-making on networks often relies on learning from graph-structured data, where Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) play a central role, but they take efforts to configure and tune. In this demo, we propose LLMNet, showing how to design GNN automated through Large Language Models. Our system develops a set of agents that construct graph-related knowlege bases and then leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to support automated configuration and refinement of GNN models through a knowledge-guided evolution process. These agents, equipped with specialized knowledge bases, extract insights into tasks and graph structures by interacting with the knowledge bases. Empirical results show LLMNet excels in twelve datasets across three graph learning tasks, validating its effectiveness of GNN model designing.
Abstract:Human mobility simulation plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Recently, to address the limitations of traditional data-driven approaches, researchers have explored leveraging the commonsense knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to accelerate human mobility simulation. However, these methods suffer from several critical shortcomings, including inadequate modeling of urban spaces and poor integration with both individual mobility patterns and collective mobility distributions. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{C}ityGPT-Powered \textbf{A}gentic framework for \textbf{M}obility \textbf{S}imulation (\textbf{CAMS}), an agentic framework that leverages the language based urban foundation model to simulate human mobility in urban space. \textbf{CAMS} comprises three core modules, including MobExtractor to extract template mobility patterns and synthesize new ones based on user profiles, GeoGenerator to generate anchor points considering collective knowledge and generate candidate urban geospatial knowledge using an enhanced version of CityGPT, TrajEnhancer to retrieve spatial knowledge based on mobility patterns and generate trajectories with real trajectory preference alignment via DPO. Experiments on real-world datasets show that \textbf{CAMS} achieves superior performance without relying on externally provided geospatial information. Moreover, by holistically modeling both individual mobility patterns and collective mobility constraints, \textbf{CAMS} generates more realistic and plausible trajectories. In general, \textbf{CAMS} establishes a new paradigm that integrates the agentic framework with urban-knowledgeable LLMs for human mobility simulation.
Abstract:Troubleshooting performance problems of large model training (LMT) is immensely challenging, due to unprecedented scales of modern GPU clusters, the complexity of software-hardware interactions, and the data intensity of the training process. Existing troubleshooting approaches designed for traditional distributed systems or datacenter networks fall short and can hardly apply to real-world training systems. In this paper, we present PerfTracker, the first online troubleshooting system utilizing fine-grained profiling, to diagnose performance issues of large-scale model training in production. PerfTracker can diagnose performance issues rooted in both hardware (e.g., GPUs and their interconnects) and software (e.g., Python functions and GPU operations). It scales to LMT on modern GPU clusters. PerfTracker effectively summarizes runtime behavior patterns of fine-grained LMT functions via online profiling, and leverages differential observability to localize the root cause with minimal production impact. PerfTracker has been deployed as a production service for large-scale GPU clusters of O(10, 000) GPUs (product homepage https://help.aliyun.com/zh/pai/user-guide/perftracker-online-performance-analysis-diagnostic-tool). It has been used to diagnose a variety of difficult performance issues.
Abstract:A major challenge for modern AI is to learn to understand the world and learn to act largely by observation. This paper explores a self-supervised approach that combines internet-scale video data with a small amount of interaction data (robot trajectories), to develop models capable of understanding, predicting, and planning in the physical world. We first pre-train an action-free joint-embedding-predictive architecture, V-JEPA 2, on a video and image dataset comprising over 1 million hours of internet video. V-JEPA 2 achieves strong performance on motion understanding (77.3 top-1 accuracy on Something-Something v2) and state-of-the-art performance on human action anticipation (39.7 recall-at-5 on Epic-Kitchens-100) surpassing previous task-specific models. Additionally, after aligning V-JEPA 2 with a large language model, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on multiple video question-answering tasks at the 8 billion parameter scale (e.g., 84.0 on PerceptionTest, 76.9 on TempCompass). Finally, we show how self-supervised learning can be applied to robotic planning tasks by post-training a latent action-conditioned world model, V-JEPA 2-AC, using less than 62 hours of unlabeled robot videos from the Droid dataset. We deploy V-JEPA 2-AC zero-shot on Franka arms in two different labs and enable picking and placing of objects using planning with image goals. Notably, this is achieved without collecting any data from the robots in these environments, and without any task-specific training or reward. This work demonstrates how self-supervised learning from web-scale data and a small amount of robot interaction data can yield a world model capable of planning in the physical world.
Abstract:Foundation models have revolutionized fields such as natural language processing and computer vision by enabling general-purpose learning across diverse tasks and datasets. However, building analogous models for human mobility remains challenging due to the privacy-sensitive nature of mobility data and the resulting data silos across institutions. To bridge this gap, we propose MoveGCL, a scalable and privacy-preserving framework for training mobility foundation models via generative continual learning. Without sharing raw data, MoveGCL enables decentralized and progressive model evolution by replaying synthetic trajectories generated from a frozen teacher model, and reinforces knowledge retention through a tailored distillation strategy that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. To address the heterogeneity of mobility patterns, MoveGCL incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer with a mobility-aware expert routing mechanism, and employs a layer-wise progressive adaptation strategy to stabilize continual updates. Experiments on six real-world urban datasets demonstrate that MoveGCL achieves performance comparable to joint training and significantly outperforms federated learning baselines, while offering strong privacy protection. MoveGCL marks a crucial step toward unlocking foundation models for mobility, offering a practical blueprint for open, scalable, and privacy-preserving model development in the era of foundation models.