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Deyang Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Deyang Kong.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Every Coin Has Two Sides: On the Dual Nature of Generalization in On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models

On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising trajectories sampled from the student's own policy, yet its generalization behavior remains poorly understood, as most studies evaluate OPD on a single domain and on benchmarks close to the training data. We present a controlled study that varies one generalization factor at a time, from in-domain distribution shifts to cross-domain transfer and the multi-teacher setting. We find that OPD transfers a teacher's reasoning behavior rather than its answers to particular problems: training difficulty barely matters, and even problems the teacher never solves are useful. Transfer depends strongly on the origin relationship between teacher and student: same-origin pairs bring the student close to the teacher across languages, reasoning horizons, and even other domains, whereas cross-origin pairs mostly fit the trained distribution. This broad reach is a double-edged sword: since routing prompts to domain experts cannot confine each teacher's influence, combining them yields a mixture-dependent seesaw among their capabilities. These results clarify when OPD generalizes and offer a useful perspective for diagnosing multi-teacher OPD.

cs.CL

OSOR: One-Step Diffusion Inpainting for Effect-Aware Object Removal

Real-world object removal is challenging due to two key difficulties: the target object's non-local effects, such as shadows and reflections, which are difficult to model, and the fact that user-provided masks are often inaccurate or incomplete. With billions of parameters and tens of denoising steps, diffusion-based models achieve strong removal performance at the expense of substantial computational cost, limiting their use in interactive applications and on edge devices. To address these challenges, we present OSOR (One-Step Object Removal), which simultaneously achieves efficient, effect-aware, and mask-robust object removal. Concretely, OSOR introduces: (1) an occupancy-guided discriminator for precise boundary supervision, enabling stable single-step diffusion training; (2) an alpha head that leverages knowledge from pretrained diffusion models to predict appropriate removal regions with minimal overhead, thereby handling imperfect masks; and (3) a semantic-anchored verification pipeline (SAVP) that filters noisy instruction-based triplets to produce effect-aware supervision at scale. Using SAVP, we curate CORNE, which contains 280K verified removal pairs, and further annotate AnimeEraseBench and TextEraseBench to evaluate performance on more complex removal tasks. Experiments show that OSOR surpasses strong multi-step diffusion baselines in perceptual quality while achieving $4\times$ to $30\times$ faster inference.

cs.CV

Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation for Block Diffusion Language Models in Complex Reasoning

Recent advances in block diffusion language models have demonstrated competitive performance and strong scalability on reasoning tasks. However, their test-time compute allocation remains largely unexplored, leaving a critical speed-effectiveness trade-off unresolved in long Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To address this, we propose a unified test-time compute allocation framework that introduces adaptivity in both step-wise decoding and blockwise generation. At the decoding level, we propose Bounded Adaptive Confidence Decoding (BACD), a difficulty-aware sampling strategy that dynamically adjusts denoising based on model confidence, accelerating inference while controlling error accumulation. Beyond step-wise adaptivity, we introduce the Think Coarse, Critic Fine (TCCF) paradigm that allocates large block sizes for exploratory thinking and smaller block sizes for precise refinement. To stabilize training under varying block configurations, we adopt Progressive Block Size Extension, which mitigates quality degradation when scaling up block sizes. Extensive evaluations on six benchmarks show that our TDAR-8B model with BACD and TCCF achieves a 2.38$\times$ speedup and +3.4% average accuracy over the strong TraDo-8B baseline, unlocking the potential of block diffusion in complex reasoning.

cs.CL

OPE: Overcoming Information Saturation in Parallel Thinking via Outline-Guided Path Exploration

Parallel thinking has emerged as a new paradigm for large reasoning models (LRMs) in tackling complex problems. Recent methods leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance parallel thinking, aiming to address the limitations in computational resources and effectiveness encountered with supervised fine-tuning. However, most existing studies primarily focus on optimizing the aggregation phase, with limited attention to the path exploration stage. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the optimization of parallel thinking under the Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) setting, and identify that the mutual information bottleneck among exploration paths fundamentally restricts overall performance. To address this, we propose Outline-Guided Path Exploration (OPE), which explicitly partitions the solution space by generating diverse reasoning outlines prior to parallel path reasoning, thereby reducing information redundancy and improving the diversity of information captured across exploration paths. We implement OPE with an iterative RL strategy that optimizes outline planning and outline-guided reasoning independently. Extensive experiments across multiple challenging mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that OPE effectively improves reasoning performance in different aggregation strategies, enabling LRMs to more reliably discover correct solutions.

cs.AI

Rethinking the Sampling Criteria in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning: A Competence-Difficulty Alignment Perspective

Reinforcement learning exhibits potential in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet it is hard to scale for the low sample efficiency during the rollout phase. Existing methods attempt to improve efficiency by scheduling problems based on problem difficulties. However, these approaches suffer from unstable and biased estimations of problem difficulty and fail to capture the alignment between model competence and problem difficulty in RL training, leading to suboptimal results. To tackle these limitations, this paper introduces $\textbf{C}$ompetence-$\textbf{D}$ifficulty $\textbf{A}$lignment $\textbf{S}$ampling ($\textbf{CDAS}$), which enables accurate and stable estimation of problem difficulties by aggregating historical performance discrepancies of problems. Then the model competence is quantified to adaptively select problems whose difficulty is in alignment with the model's current competence using a fixed-point system. Experimental results across a range of challenging mathematical benchmarks show that CDAS achieves great improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. CDAS attains the highest average accuracy against baselines and exhibits significant speed advantages compared to Dynamic Sampling, a competitive strategy in DAPO, which is 2.33 times slower than CDAS.

cs.LG

FreqCa: Accelerating Diffusion Models via Frequency-Aware Caching

The application of diffusion transformers is suffering from their significant inference costs. Recently, feature caching has been proposed to solve this problem by reusing features from previous timesteps, thereby skipping computation in future timesteps. However, previous feature caching assumes that features in adjacent timesteps are similar or continuous, which does not always hold in all settings. To investigate this, this paper begins with an analysis from the frequency domain, which reveal that different frequency bands in the features of diffusion models exhibit different dynamics across timesteps. Concretely, low-frequency components, which decide the structure of images, exhibit higher similarity but poor continuity. In contrast, the high-frequency bands, which decode the details of images, show significant continuity but poor similarity. These interesting observations motivate us to propose Frequency-aware Caching (FreqCa) which directly reuses features of low-frequency components based on their similarity, while using a second-order Hermite interpolator to predict the volatile high-frequency ones based on its continuity. Besides, we further propose to cache Cumulative Residual Feature (CRF) instead of the features in all the layers, which reduces the memory footprint of feature caching by 99%. Extensive experiments on FLUX.1-dev, FLUX.1-Kontext-dev, Qwen-Image, and Qwen-Image-Edit demonstrate its effectiveness in both generation and editing. Codes are available in the supplementary materials and will be released on GitHub.

cs.LG

Autoformalizer with Tool Feedback

Autoformalization addresses the scarcity of data for Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) by translating mathematical problems from natural language into formal statements. Efforts in recent work shift from directly prompting large language models to training an end-to-end formalizer model from scratch, achieving remarkable advancements. However, existing formalizer still struggles to consistently generate valid statements that meet syntactic validity and semantic consistency. To address this issue, we propose the Autoformalizer with Tool Feedback (ATF), a novel approach that incorporates syntactic and consistency information as tools into the formalization process. By integrating Lean 4 compilers for syntax corrections and employing a multi-LLMs-as-judge approach for consistency validation, the model is able to adaptively refine generated statements according to the tool feedback, enhancing both syntactic validity and semantic consistency. The training of ATF involves a cold-start phase on synthetic tool-calling data, an expert iteration phase to improve formalization capabilities, and Direct Preference Optimization to alleviate ineffective revisions. Experimental results show that ATF markedly outperforms a range of baseline formalizer models, with its superior performance further validated by human evaluations. Subsequent analysis reveals that ATF demonstrates excellent inference scaling properties. Moreover, we open-source Numina-ATF, a dataset containing 750K synthetic formal statements to facilitate advancements in autoformalization and ATP research.

cs.AI

LongCat-Flash Technical Report

We introduce LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed for both computational efficiency and advanced agentic capabilities. Stemming from the need for scalable efficiency, LongCat-Flash adopts two novel designs: (a) Zero-computation Experts, which enables dynamic computational budget allocation and activates 18.6B-31.3B (27B on average) per token depending on contextual demands, optimizing resource usage. (b) Shortcut-connected MoE, which enlarges the computation-communication overlap window, demonstrating notable gains in inference efficiency and throughput compared to models of a comparable scale. We develop a comprehensive scaling framework for large models that combines hyperparameter transfer, model-growth initialization, a multi-pronged stability suite, and deterministic computation to achieve stable and reproducible training. Notably, leveraging the synergy among scalable architectural design and infrastructure efforts, we complete model training on more than 20 trillion tokens within 30 days, while achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference at a cost of \$0.70 per million output tokens. To cultivate LongCat-Flash towards agentic intelligence, we conduct a large-scale pre-training on optimized mixtures, followed by targeted mid- and post-training on reasoning, code, and instructions, with further augmentation from synthetic data and tool use tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, as a non-thinking foundation model, LongCat-Flash delivers highly competitive performance among other leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. The model checkpoint of LongCat-Flash is open-sourced to foster community research. LongCat Chat: https://longcat.ai Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat

cs.CL

SampleMix: A Sample-wise Pre-training Data Mixing Strategey by Coordinating Data Quality and Diversity

Existing pretraining data mixing methods for large language models (LLMs) typically follow a domain-wise methodology, a top-down process that first determines domain weights and then performs uniform data sampling across each domain. However, these approaches neglect significant inter-domain overlaps and commonalities, failing to control the global diversity of the constructed training dataset. Further, uniform sampling within domains ignores fine-grained sample-specific features, potentially leading to suboptimal data distribution. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel sample-wise data mixture approach based on a bottom-up paradigm. This method performs global cross-domain sampling by systematically evaluating the quality and diversity of each sample, thereby dynamically determining the optimal domain distribution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple downstream tasks and perplexity assessments demonstrate that SampleMix surpasses existing domain-based methods. Meanwhile, SampleMix requires 1.4x to 2.1x training steps to achieves the baselines' performance, highlighting the substantial potential of SampleMix to optimize pre-training data.

cs.CL

Demonstration of Time-reversal Symmetric Two-Dimensional Photonic Topological Anderson Insulator

Recently, the impact of disorder on topological properties has attracted significant attention in photonics, especially the intriguing disorder-induced topological phase transitions in photonic topological Anderson insulators (PTAIs). However, the reported PTAIs are based on time-reversal symmetry broken systems or quasi-three-dimensional time-reversal invariant system, both of which would limit the applications in integrated optics. Here, we realize a time-reversal symmetric two-dimensional PTAI on silicon platform within the near-IR wavelength range, taking the advantageous valley degree of freedom of photonic crystal. A low-threshold topological Anderson phase transition is observed by applying disorder to the critical topologically trivial phase. Conversely, we have also realized extremely robust topologically protected edge states based on the stable topological phase. Both two phenomena are validated through theoretical Dirac Hamiltonian analysis, numerical simulations, and experimental measurements. Our proposed structure holds promise to achieve near-zero topological phase transition thresholds, which breaks the conventional cognition that strong disorder is required to induce the phase transition. It significantly alleviates the difficulty of manipulating disorder and could be extended to other systems, such as condensed matter systems where strong disorder is hard to implement. This work is also beneficial to construct highly robust photonic integrated circuits serving for on-chip photonic and quantum optic information processing. Moreover, this work also provides an outstanding platform to investigate on-chip integrated disordered systems.

physics.optics

On-demand Photonic Ising Machine with Simplified Hamiltonian Calculation by Phase encoding and Intensity Detection

The photonic Ising machine is a new paradigm of optical computing that takes advantage of the unique properties of light wave propagation, parallel processing, and low-loss transmission. Thus, the process of solving combinatorial optimization problems can be accelerated through photonic/optoelectronic devices, but implementing photonic Ising machines that can solve arbitrary large-scale Ising problems with fast speed remains challenging. In this work, we have proposed and demonstrated the Phase Encoding and Intensity Detection Ising Annealer (PEIDIA) capable of solving arbitrary Ising problems on demand. The PEIDIA employs the heuristic algorithm and requires only one step of optical linear transformation with simplified Hamiltonian calculation by encoding the Ising spins on the phase term of the optical field and performing intensity detection during the solving process. As a proof of principle, several 20 and 30-spin Ising problems have been solved with high ground state probability (>0.97/0.85 for the 20/30-spin Ising model).

cs.ET