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Yao Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Yao Xiao.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

MiroMind-M1: An Open-Source Advancement in Mathematical Reasoning via Context-Aware Multi-Stage Policy Optimization

Large language models have recently evolved from fluent text generation to advanced reasoning across diverse domains, giving rise to reasoning language models. Among these domains, mathematical reasoning serves as a representative benchmark as it requires precise multi-step logic and abstract reasoning, which can be generalized to other tasks. While closed-source RLMs such as GPT-o3 demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, their proprietary nature limits transparency and reproducibility. Although many open-source projects aim to close this gap, most of them lack sufficient openness by omitting critical resources such as datasets and detailed training configurations, which hinders reproducibility. To contribute toward greater transparency in RLM development, we introduce the MiroMind-M1 series, a set of fully open-source RLMs built on the Qwen-2.5 backbone that match or exceed the performance of existing open-source RLMs. Specifically, our models are trained in two stages: SFT on a carefully curated corpus of 719K math-reasoning problems with verified CoT trajectories, followed by RLVR on 62K challenging and verifiable problems. To enhance the robustness and efficiency of the RLVR process, we introduce Context-Aware Multi-Stage Policy Optimization, an algorithm that integrates length-progressive training with an adaptive repetition penalty to encourage context-aware RL training. Our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance and superior token efficiency among Qwen-2.5-based open-source 7B and 32B models on the AIME24, AIME25, and MATH benchmarks. To facilitate reproducibility, we release the complete stack: models (MiroMind-M1-SFT-7B, MiroMind-M1-RL-7B, MiroMind-M1-RL-32B); datasets (MiroMind-M1-SFT-719K, MiroMind-M1-RL-62K); and all training and evaluation configurations. We hope these resources will support further research and foster community advancement.

cs.CL↗

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 $μ- 2σ$ 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.

cs.CL↗

A new sparsity promoting residual transform operator for Lasso regression

Lasso regression is a widely employed approach within the $\ell_1$ regularization framework used to promote sparsity and recover piecewise smooth signals $f:[a,b) \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ when the given observations are obtained from noisy, blurred, and/or incomplete data environments. In choosing the regularizing sparsity-promoting operator, it is assumed that the particular type of variability of the underlying signal, for example, piecewise constant or piecewise linear behavior across the entire domain, is both known and fixed. Such an assumption is problematic in more general cases, e.g.~when a signal exhibits piecewise oscillatory behavior with varying wavelengths and magnitudes. To address the limitations of assuming a fixed (and typically low order) variability when choosing a sparsity-promoting operator, this investigation proposes a novel residual transform operator that can be used within the Lasso regression formulation. In a nutshell, the idea is that for a general piecewise smooth signal $f$, it is possible to design two operators $\mathcal L_1$ and $\mathcal L_2$ such that $\mathcal L_1{\boldsymbol f} \approx \mathcal L_2{\boldsymbol f}$, where ${\boldsymbol f} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a discretized approximation of $f$, but $\mathcal L_1 \not\approx \mathcal L_2$. The corresponding residual transform operator, $\mathcal L = \mathcal L_1- \mathcal L_2$, yields a result that (1) effectively reduces the variability dependent error that occurs when applying either $\mathcal L_1$ or $\mathcal L_2$ to ${\boldsymbol f}$, a property that holds even when $\mathcal L_1{\boldsymbol f} \approx \mathcal L_2{\boldsymbol f}$ is not a good approximation to the true sparse domain vector of ${\boldsymbol f}$, and (2) does not require $\mathcal L_1$ or $\mathcal L_2$ to have prior information regarding the variability of the underlying signal.

math.NA↗

On Path to Multimodal Historical Reasoning: HistBench and HistAgent

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable progress across domains, yet their capabilities in the humanities, particularly history, remain underexplored. Historical reasoning poses unique challenges for AI, involving multimodal source interpretation, temporal inference, and cross-linguistic analysis. While general-purpose agents perform well on many existing benchmarks, they lack the domain-specific expertise required to engage with historical materials and questions. To address this gap, we introduce HistBench, a new benchmark of 414 high-quality questions designed to evaluate AI's capacity for historical reasoning and authored by more than 40 expert contributors. The tasks span a wide range of historical problems-from factual retrieval based on primary sources to interpretive analysis of manuscripts and images, to interdisciplinary challenges involving archaeology, linguistics, or cultural history. Furthermore, the benchmark dataset spans 29 ancient and modern languages and covers a wide range of historical periods and world regions. Finding the poor performance of LLMs and other agents on HistBench, we further present HistAgent, a history-specific agent equipped with carefully designed tools for OCR, translation, archival search, and image understanding in History. On HistBench, HistAgent based on GPT-4o achieves an accuracy of 27.54% pass@1 and 36.47% pass@2, significantly outperforming LLMs with online search and generalist agents, including GPT-4o (18.60%), DeepSeek-R1(14.49%) and Open Deep Research-smolagents(20.29% pass@1 and 25.12% pass@2). These results highlight the limitations of existing LLMs and generalist agents and demonstrate the advantages of HistAgent for historical reasoning.

cs.AI↗

Alzheimer's Dementia Detection Using Perplexity from Paired Large Language Models

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with cognitive decline that commonly impacts language ability. This work extends the paired perplexity approach to detecting AD by using a recent large language model (LLM), the instruction-following version of Mistral-7B. We improve accuracy by an average of 3.33% over the best current paired perplexity method and by 6.35% over the top-ranked method from the ADReSS 2020 challenge benchmark. Our further analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach can effectively detect AD with a clear and interpretable decision boundary in contrast to other methods that suffer from opaque decision-making processes. Finally, by prompting the fine-tuned LLMs and comparing the model-generated responses to human responses, we illustrate that the LLMs have learned the special language patterns of AD speakers, which opens up possibilities for novel methods of model interpretation and data augmentation.

cs.CL↗

Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Structure-Aware Generative Framework

While large language models (LLMs) show great potential in temporal reasoning, most existing work focuses heavily on enhancing performance, often neglecting the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of temporal granularities, designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' capabilities in explainable temporal reasoning. Furthermore, our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to deliver convincing explanations when relying solely on textual information. To address challenge, we propose GETER, a novel structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage temporal knowledge graphs to develop a temporal encoder that captures structural information for the query. Subsequently, we introduce a structure-text prefix adapter to map graph structure features into the text embedding space. Finally, LLMs generate explanation text by seamlessly integrating the soft graph token with instruction-tuning prompt tokens. Experimental results indicate that GETER achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating its effectiveness as well as strong generalization capabilities. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/carryTatum/GETER.

cs.CL↗

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.

cs.CL↗

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.

cs.CV↗

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.

eess.IV↗

Towards Understanding the Robustness of Diffusion-Based Purification: A Stochastic Perspective

Diffusion-Based Purification (DBP) has emerged as an effective defense mechanism against adversarial attacks. The success of DBP is often attributed to the forward diffusion process, which reduces the distribution gap between clean and adversarial images by adding Gaussian noise. While this explanation is theoretically sound, the exact role of this mechanism in enhancing robustness remains unclear. In this paper, through empirical analysis, we propose that the intrinsic stochasticity in the DBP process is the primary factor driving robustness. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a novel Deterministic White-Box (DW-box) setting to assess robustness in the absence of stochasticity, and we analyze attack trajectories and loss landscapes. Our results suggest that DBP models primarily rely on stochasticity to avoid effective attack directions, while their ability to purify adversarial perturbations may be limited. To further enhance the robustness of DBP models, we propose Adversarial Denoising Diffusion Training (ADDT), which incorporates classifier-guided adversarial perturbations into the diffusion training process, thereby strengthening the models' ability to purify adversarial perturbations. Additionally, we propose Rank-Based Gaussian Mapping (RBGM) to improve the compatibility of perturbations with diffusion models. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of ADDT. In conclusion, our study suggests that future research on DBP can benefit from a clearer distinction between stochasticity-driven and purification-driven robustness.

cs.CV↗

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.

cs.CL↗

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.

cs.CV↗

Exploiting Application-to-Architecture Dependencies for Designing Scalable OS

With the advent of hundreds of cores on a chip to accelerate applications, the operating system (OS) needs to exploit the existing parallelism provided by the underlying hardware resources to determine the right amount of processes to be mapped on the multi-core systems. However, the existing OS is not scalable and is oblivious to applications. We address these issues by adopting a multi-layer network representation of the dynamic application-to OS-to-architecture dependencies, namely the NetworkedOS. We adopt a compile-time analysis and construct a network representing the dependencies between dynamic instructions translated from the applications and the kernel and services. We propose an overlapping partitioning scheme to detect the clusters or processes that can potentially run in parallel to be mapped onto cores while reducing the number of messages transferred. At run time, processes are mapped onto the multi-core systems, taking into consideration the process affinity. Our experimental results indicate that NetworkedOS achieves performance improvement as high as 7.11x compared to Linux running on a 128-core system and 2.01x to Barrelfish running on a 64-core system.

cs.OS↗

Early Dementia Detection Using Multiple Spontaneous Speech Prompts: The PROCESS Challenge

Dementia is associated with various cognitive impairments and typically manifests only after significant progression, making intervention at this stage often ineffective. To address this issue, the Prediction and Recognition of Cognitive Decline through Spontaneous Speech (PROCESS) Signal Processing Grand Challenge invites participants to focus on early-stage dementia detection. We provide a new spontaneous speech corpus for this challenge. This corpus includes answers from three prompts designed by neurologists to better capture the cognition of speakers. Our baseline models achieved an F1-score of 55.0% on the classification task and an RMSE of 2.98 on the regression task.

cs.SD↗

Codebook Configuration for RIS-aided Systems via Implicit Neural Representations

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is envisioned to be an enabling technique in 6G wireless communications. By configuring the reflection beamforming codebook, RIS focuses signals on target receivers to enhance signal strength. In this paper, we investigate the codebook configuration for RIS-aided communication systems. We formulate an implicit relationship between user's coordinates information and the codebook from the perspective of signal radiation mechanisms, and introduce a novel learning-based method, implicit neural representations (INRs), to solve this implicit coordinates-to-codebook mapping problem. Our approach requires only user's coordinates, avoiding reliance on channel models. Additionally, given the significant practical applications of the 1-bit RIS, we formulate the 1-bit codebook configuration as a multi-label classification problem, and propose an encoding strategy for 1-bit RIS to reduce the codebook dimension, thereby improving learning efficiency. Experimental results from simulations and measured data demonstrate significant advantages of our method.

cs.IT↗

Continual Learning in Open-vocabulary Classification with Complementary Memory Systems

We introduce a method for flexible and efficient continual learning in open-vocabulary image classification, drawing inspiration from the complementary learning systems observed in human cognition. Specifically, we propose to combine predictions from a CLIP zero-shot model and the exemplar-based model, using the zero-shot estimated probability that a sample's class is within the exemplar classes. We also propose a "tree probe" method, an adaption of lazy learning principles, which enables fast learning from new examples with competitive accuracy to batch-trained linear models. We test in data incremental, class incremental, and task incremental settings, as well as ability to perform flexible inference on varying subsets of zero-shot and learned categories. Our proposed method achieves a good balance of learning speed, target task effectiveness, and zero-shot effectiveness. Code will be available at https://github.com/jessemelpolio/TreeProbe.

cs.CV↗

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.

cs.CV↗

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.

cs.CV↗