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Asaf Aharoni

Publications and source records attributed to Asaf Aharoni.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

cs.CL

Block Verification Accelerates Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding is an effective method for lossless acceleration of large language models during inference. It uses a fast model to draft a block of tokens which are then verified in parallel by the target model, and provides a guarantee that the output is distributed identically to a sample from the target model. In prior works, draft verification is performed independently token-by-token. Surprisingly, we show that this approach is not optimal. We propose Block Verification, a simple draft verification algorithm that verifies the entire block jointly and provides additional wall-clock speedup. We prove that the proposed mechanism is optimal in the expected number of tokens produced each iteration and specifically is never worse than the standard token-level verification. Empirically, block verification provides modest but consistent wall-clock speedups over the standard token verification algorithm of 5%-8% in a range of tasks and datasets. Given that block verification does not increase code complexity, maintains the strong lossless guarantee of the standard speculative decoding verification algorithm, cannot deteriorate performance, and, in fact, consistently improves it, it can be used as a good default in speculative decoding implementations.

cs.LG

Interaction of scanning probes with semiconductor nanocrystals; Physical mechanism and basis for near field optical imaging

We investigate the modification of photoluminescence (PL) from single semiconductor nanocrystal quantum dots (NCs) in proximity of metal and semiconducting Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) tips. The presence of the tip alters the radiative decay rate of an emitter via interference and opens efficient non radiative decay channels via energy transfer to the tip material. These effects cause quenching (or enhancement) of the emitter's PL intensity, as a function of its distance from the interacting tip. We take advantage of this highly distance dependent effect to realize a contrast mechanism for high resolution optical imaging. AFM tips are optimized as energy acceptors by chemical functionalization with InAs NCs to achieve optical resolution down to 30 nm. The presented experimental scheme offers high resolution optical information while maintaining the benefits of traditional AFM imaging. We directly measure the PL intensity of single NCs as a function of the tip distance. Our results are in good agreement to calculation made by a classical theoretical model describing an oscillating dipole interacting with a planar mirror.

physics.chem-ph