arXiv subjects

Mingliang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Mingliang Li.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

StepAudio 2.5 Technical Report

Unified audio-language modeling has emerged as a prominent trend in modern speech systems, promising to bring the reasoning capabilities of large language models to auditory tasks. However, existing unified foundations often struggle to match the depth of specialized systems across automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and realtime spoken interaction. Bridging this gap remains an open challenge. This report presents StepAudio 2.5, a unified audio-language foundation model that matches or exceeds specialized systems across all three capabilities. Rather than treating these tasks as architecturally distinct, we operate on the premise that once text and audio share a multimodal representational space, task specialization becomes a matter of operational regimes: data construction, optimization targets, and decoding constraints. Guided by this insight, we advance the post-training paradigm from standard supervised learning to task-tailored Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using it as the primary mechanism to define complex optimization targets. We leverage this RLHF-centric alignment, alongside specialized decoding, to shape a shared backbone into three distinct operational modes. Concretely, the ASR branch advances transcription efficiency via verifiable multi-token decoding; the TTS branch achieves controllable, expressive synthesis through preference-based RLHF and context-rich supervision; and the Realtime branch realizes low-latency, persona-consistent dialogue via generative reward modeling within an RLHF framework. On standard benchmarks, StepAudio 2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across ASR, TTS, and Realtime, demonstrating that a singular audio-language foundation can successfully internalize the distinct deployment objectives of speech understanding, generation, and live interaction.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

STEP3-VL-10B Technical Report

We present STEP3-VL-10B, a lightweight open-source foundation model designed to redefine the trade-off between compact efficiency and frontier-level multimodal intelligence. STEP3-VL-10B is realized through two strategic shifts: first, a unified, fully unfrozen pre-training strategy on 1.2T multimodal tokens that integrates a language-aligned Perception Encoder with a Qwen3-8B decoder to establish intrinsic vision-language synergy; and second, a scaled post-training pipeline featuring over 1k iterations of reinforcement learning. Crucially, we implement Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) to scale test-time compute, allocating resources to scalable perceptual reasoning that explores and synthesizes diverse visual hypotheses. Consequently, despite its compact 10B footprint, STEP3-VL-10B rivals or surpasses models 10$\times$-20$\times$ larger (e.g., GLM-4.6V-106B, Qwen3-VL-235B) and top-tier proprietary flagships like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Seed-1.5-VL. Delivering best-in-class performance, it records 92.2% on MMBench and 80.11% on MMMU, while excelling in complex reasoning with 94.43% on AIME2025 and 75.95% on MathVision. We release the full model suite to provide the community with a powerful, efficient, and reproducible baseline.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CoHalLo: code hallucination localization via probing hidden layer vector

The localization of code hallucinations aims to identify specific lines of code containing hallucinations, helping developers to improve the reliability of AI-generated code more efficiently. Although recent studies have adopted several methods to detect code hallucination, most of these approaches remain limited to coarse-grained detection and lack specialized techniques for fine-grained hallucination localization. This study introduces a novel method, called CoHalLo, which achieves line-level code hallucination localization by probing the hidden-layer vectors from hallucination detection models. CoHalLo uncovers the key syntactic information driving the model's hallucination judgments and locates the hallucinating code lines accordingly. Specifically, we first fine-tune the hallucination detection model on manually annotated datasets to ensure that it learns features pertinent to code syntactic information. Subsequently, we designed a probe network that projects high-dimensional latent vectors onto a low-dimensional syntactic subspace, generating vector tuples and reconstructing the predicted abstract syntax tree (P-AST). By comparing P-AST with the original abstract syntax tree (O-AST) extracted from the input AI-generated code, we identify the key syntactic structures associated with hallucinations. This information is then used to pinpoint hallucinated code lines. To evaluate CoHalLo's performance, we manually collected a dataset of code hallucinations. The experimental results show that CoHalLo achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 0.4253, Top-3 accuracy of 0.6149, Top-5 accuracy of 0.7356, Top-10 accuracy of 0.8333, IFA of 5.73, Recall@1% Effort of 0.052721, and Effort@20% Recall of 0.155269, which outperforms the baseline methods.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Step-DeepResearch Technical Report

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A Novel Local Focusing Mechanism for Deepfake Detection Generalization

The rapid advancement of deepfake generation techniques has intensified the need for robust and generalizable detection methods. Existing approaches based on reconstruction learning typically leverage deep convolutional networks to extract differential features. However, these methods show poor generalization across object categories (e.g., from faces to cars) and generation domains (e.g., from GANs to Stable Diffusion), due to intrinsic limitations of deep CNNs. First, models trained on a specific category tend to overfit to semantic feature distributions, making them less transferable to other categories, especially as network depth increases. Second, Global Average Pooling (GAP) compresses critical local forgery cues into a single vector, thus discarding discriminative patterns vital for real-fake classification. To address these issues, we propose a novel Local Focus Mechanism (LFM) that explicitly attends to discriminative local features for differentiating fake from real images. LFM integrates a Salience Network (SNet) with a task-specific Top-K Pooling (TKP) module to select the K most informative local patterns. To mitigate potential overfitting introduced by Top-K pooling, we introduce two regularization techniques: Rank-Based Linear Dropout (RBLD) and Random-K Sampling (RKS), which enhance the model's robustness. LFM achieves a 3.7 improvement in accuracy and a 2.8 increase in average precision over the state-of-the-art Neighboring Pixel Relationships (NPR) method, while maintaining exceptional efficiency at 1789 FPS on a single NVIDIA A6000 GPU. Our approach sets a new benchmark for cross-domain deepfake detection. The source code are available in https://github.com/lmlpy/LFM.git

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Self-Navigated Residual Mamba for Universal Industrial Anomaly Detection

In this paper, we propose Self-Navigated Residual Mamba (SNARM), a novel framework for universal industrial anomaly detection that leverages ``self-referential learning'' within test images to enhance anomaly discrimination. Unlike conventional methods that depend solely on pre-trained features from normal training data, SNARM dynamically refines anomaly detection by iteratively comparing test patches against adaptively selected in-image references. Specifically, we first compute the ``inter-residuals'' features by contrasting test image patches with the training feature bank. Patches exhibiting small-norm residuals (indicating high normality) are then utilized as self-generated reference patches to compute ``intra-residuals'', amplifying discriminative signals. These inter- and intra-residual features are concatenated and fed into a novel Mamba module with multiple heads, which are dynamically navigated by residual properties to focus on anomalous regions. Finally, AD results are obtained by aggregating the outputs of a self-navigated Mamba in an ensemble learning paradigm. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD, MVTec 3D, and VisA benchmarks demonstrate that SNARM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with notable improvements in all metrics, including Image-AUROC, Pixel-AURC, PRO, and AP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Step-3 is Large yet Affordable: Model-system Co-design for Cost-effective Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Step-Audio 2 Technical Report

This paper presents Step-Audio 2, an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. By integrating a latent audio encoder and reasoning-centric reinforcement learning (RL), Step-Audio 2 achieves promising performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio understanding. To facilitate genuine end-to-end speech conversation, Step-Audio 2 incorporates the generation of discrete audio tokens into language modeling, significantly enhancing its responsiveness to paralinguistic information such as speaking styles and emotions. To effectively leverage the rich textual and acoustic knowledge in real-world data, Step-Audio 2 integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is able to call external tools such as web search to mitigate hallucination and audio search to switch timbres. Trained on millions of hours of speech and audio data, Step-Audio 2 delivers intelligence and expressiveness across diverse conversational scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various audio understanding and conversational benchmarks compared to other open-source and commercial solutions. Please visit https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2 for more information.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

How to Promote Autonomous Driving with Evolving Technology: Business Strategy and Pricing Decision

Recently, autonomous driving system (ADS) has been widely adopted due to its potential to enhance travel convenience and alleviate traffic congestion, thereby improving the driving experience for consumers and creating lucrative opportunities for manufacturers. With the advancement of data sensing and control technologies, the reliability of ADS and the purchase intentions of consumers are continually evolving, presenting challenges for manufacturers in promotion and pricing decisions. To address this issue, we develop a two-stage game-theoretical model to characterize the decision-making processes of manufacturers and consumers before and after a technology upgrade. Considering the unique structural characteristics of ADS, which consists of driving software and its supporting hardware (SSH), we propose different business strategies for SSH (bundle or unbundle with the vehicle) and driving software (perpetual licensing or subscription) from the manufacturer's perspective. We find that, first, SSH strategies influence the optimal software strategies by changing the consumers' entry barriers to the ADS market. Specifically, for manufacturers with mature ADS technology, the bundle strategy provides consumers with a lower entry barrier by integrating SSH, making the flexible subscription model a dominant strategy; while perpetual licensing outperforms under the unbundle strategy. Second, the software strategies influence the optimal SSH strategy by altering consumers' exit barriers. Perpetual licensing imposes higher exit barriers; when combined with a bundle strategy that lowers entry barriers, it becomes a more advantageous choice for manufacturers with mature ADS technology. In contrast, the subscription strategy allows consumers to easily exit the market, making the bundle strategy advantageous only when a substantial proportion of consumers are compatible with ADS.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Step-Video-T2V Technical Report: The Practice, Challenges, and Future of Video Foundation Model

We present Step-Video-T2V, a state-of-the-art text-to-video pre-trained model with 30B parameters and the ability to generate videos up to 204 frames in length. A deep compression Variational Autoencoder, Video-VAE, is designed for video generation tasks, achieving 16x16 spatial and 8x temporal compression ratios, while maintaining exceptional video reconstruction quality. User prompts are encoded using two bilingual text encoders to handle both English and Chinese. A DiT with 3D full attention is trained using Flow Matching and is employed to denoise input noise into latent frames. A video-based DPO approach, Video-DPO, is applied to reduce artifacts and improve the visual quality of the generated videos. We also detail our training strategies and share key observations and insights. Step-Video-T2V's performance is evaluated on a novel video generation benchmark, Step-Video-T2V-Eval, demonstrating its state-of-the-art text-to-video quality when compared with both open-source and commercial engines. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of current diffusion-based model paradigm and outline future directions for video foundation models. We make both Step-Video-T2V and Step-Video-T2V-Eval available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-T2V. The online version can be accessed from https://yuewen.cn/videos as well. Our goal is to accelerate the innovation of video foundation models and empower video content creators.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

DOI: Divergence-based Out-of-Distribution Indicators via Deep Generative Models

To ensure robust and reliable classification results, OoD (out-of-distribution) indicators based on deep generative models are proposed recently and are shown to work well on small datasets. In this paper, we conduct the first large collection of benchmarks (containing 92 dataset pairs, which is 1 order of magnitude larger than previous ones) for existing OoD indicators and observe that none perform well. We thus advocate that a large collection of benchmarks is mandatory for evaluating OoD indicators. We propose a novel theoretical framework, DOI, for divergence-based Out-of-Distribution indicators (instead of traditional likelihood-based) in deep generative models. Following this framework, we further propose a simple and effective OoD detection algorithm: Single-shot Fine-tune. It significantly outperforms past works by 5~8 in AUROC, and its performance is close to optimal. In recent, the likelihood criterion is shown to be ineffective in detecting OoD. Single-shot Fine-tune proposes a novel fine-tune criterion to detect OoD, by whether the likelihood of the testing sample is improved after fine-tuning a well-trained model on it. Fine-tune criterion is a clear and easy-following criterion, which will lead the OoD domain into a new stage.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2011

Driving conditions dependence of magneto-electroluminescence in tri-(8-hydroxyquinoline)-aluminum based organic light emitting diodes

we investigated the magneto-electroluminescence (MEL) in tri-(8-hydroxyquinoline)-aluminum based organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) through the steady-state and transient method simultaneously. The MELs show the great different behaviors when we turn the driving condition from a constant voltage to a pulse voltage. For devices driven by the constant voltage, the MELs are similar with the literature data; for devices driven by the pulse voltage, the MELs are quite different, they firstly increase to a maximum then decrease as the magnetic field increases continuously. Negative MELs can be seen when both the magnetic field and driving voltage are high enough.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2011

Investigation of the magnetic field effects on the electron mobility in tri-(8-hydroxyquinoline)-aluminum based light-emitting devices

We investigated the mganetic field effects (MFEs) on electron mobility in tri-(8-hydroxyquinoline)-aluminum based light-emitting devices by transient-electroluminescence method upon application of various offset voltages. It is found the rising edges of EL pulses are well overlapped and the falling edges of EL pulses are separated for the magnetic field on and off when Voffset=0 V and Voffset>Vturnon of the devices. The results suggest the bipolaron model and the triplet-polaron interaction model related to the carriers mobilities are not the dominant mechanisms to explain the MFEs under our experimental conditions, and the magnetic field affects the carriers recombination process is confirmed.

physics.optics↗