new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Mar 18

FireRedASR: Open-Source Industrial-Grade Mandarin Speech Recognition Models from Encoder-Decoder to LLM Integration

We present FireRedASR, a family of large-scale automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for Mandarin, designed to meet diverse requirements in superior performance and optimal efficiency across various applications. FireRedASR comprises two variants: FireRedASR-LLM: Designed to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and to enable seamless end-to-end speech interaction. It adopts an Encoder-Adapter-LLM framework leveraging large language model (LLM) capabilities. On public Mandarin benchmarks, FireRedASR-LLM (8.3B parameters) achieves an average Character Error Rate (CER) of 3.05%, surpassing the latest SOTA of 3.33% with an 8.4% relative CER reduction (CERR). It demonstrates superior generalization capability over industrial-grade baselines, achieving 24%-40% CERR in multi-source Mandarin ASR scenarios such as video, live, and intelligent assistant. FireRedASR-AED: Designed to balance high performance and computational efficiency and to serve as an effective speech representation module in LLM-based speech models. It utilizes an Attention-based Encoder-Decoder (AED) architecture. On public Mandarin benchmarks, FireRedASR-AED (1.1B parameters) achieves an average CER of 3.18%, slightly worse than FireRedASR-LLM but still outperforming the latest SOTA model with over 12B parameters. It offers a more compact size, making it suitable for resource-constrained applications. Moreover, both models exhibit competitive results on Chinese dialects and English speech benchmarks and excel in singing lyrics recognition. To advance research in speech processing, we release our models and inference code at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRedASR.

LaCon: Late-Constraint Diffusion for Steerable Guided Image Synthesis

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating photo-realistic and creative images. To offer more controllability for the generation process, existing studies, termed as early-constraint methods in this paper, leverage extra conditions and incorporate them into pre-trained diffusion models. Particularly, some of them adopt condition-specific modules to handle conditions separately, where they struggle to generalize across other conditions. Although follow-up studies present unified solutions to solve the generalization problem, they also require extra resources to implement, e.g., additional inputs or parameter optimization, where more flexible and efficient solutions are expected to perform steerable guided image synthesis. In this paper, we present an alternative paradigm, namely Late-Constraint Diffusion (LaCon), to simultaneously integrate various conditions into pre-trained diffusion models. Specifically, LaCon establishes an alignment between the external condition and the internal features of diffusion models, and utilizes the alignment to incorporate the target condition, guiding the sampling process to produce tailored results. Experimental results on COCO dataset illustrate the effectiveness and superior generalization capability of LaCon under various conditions and settings. Ablation studies investigate the functionalities of different components in LaCon, and illustrate its great potential to serve as an efficient solution to offer flexible controllability for diffusion models.

LLaSA: Large Language and E-Commerce Shopping Assistant

The e-commerce platform has evolved rapidly due to its widespread popularity and convenience. Developing an e-commerce shopping assistant for customers is crucial to aiding them in quickly finding desired products and recommending precisely what they need. However, most previous shopping assistants face two main problems: (1) task-specificity, which necessitates the development of different models for various tasks, thereby increasing development costs and limiting effectiveness; and (2) poor generalization, where the trained model performs inadequately on up-to-date products. To resolve these issues, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct an omnipotent assistant, leveraging their adeptness at handling multiple tasks and their superior generalization capability. Nonetheless, LLMs lack inherent knowledge of e-commerce concepts. To address this, we create an instruction dataset comprising 65,000 samples and diverse tasks, termed as EshopInstruct. Through instruction tuning on our dataset, the assistant, named LLaSA, demonstrates the potential to function as an omnipotent assistant. Additionally, we propose various inference optimization strategies to enhance performance with limited inference resources. In the Amazon KDD Cup 2024 Challenge, our proposed method, LLaSA, achieved an overall ranking of 3rd place on ShopBench, including 57 tasks and approximately 20,000 questions, and we secured top-5 rankings in each track, especially in track4, where we achieved the best performance result among all student teams. Our extensive practices fully demonstrate that LLMs possess the great potential to be competent e-commerce shopping assistants.

SAM-Med2D

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a state-of-the-art research advancement in natural image segmentation, achieving impressive results with input prompts such as points and bounding boxes. However, our evaluation and recent research indicate that directly applying the pretrained SAM to medical image segmentation does not yield satisfactory performance. This limitation primarily arises from significant domain gap between natural images and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM-Med2D, the most comprehensive studies on applying SAM to medical 2D images. Specifically, we first collect and curate approximately 4.6M images and 19.7M masks from public and private datasets, constructing a large-scale medical image segmentation dataset encompassing various modalities and objects. Then, we comprehensively fine-tune SAM on this dataset and turn it into SAM-Med2D. Unlike previous methods that only adopt bounding box or point prompts as interactive segmentation approach, we adapt SAM to medical image segmentation through more comprehensive prompts involving bounding boxes, points, and masks. We additionally fine-tune the encoder and decoder of the original SAM to obtain a well-performed SAM-Med2D, leading to the most comprehensive fine-tuning strategies to date. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation and analysis to investigate the performance of SAM-Med2D in medical image segmentation across various modalities, anatomical structures, and organs. Concurrently, we validated the generalization capability of SAM-Med2D on 9 datasets from MICCAI 2023 challenge. Overall, our approach demonstrated significantly superior performance and generalization capability compared to SAM.

SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

VLTSeg: Simple Transfer of CLIP-Based Vision-Language Representations for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Domain generalization (DG) remains a significant challenge for perception based on deep neural networks (DNN), where domain shifts occur due to lighting, weather, or geolocation changes. In this work, we propose VLTSeg to enhance domain generalization in semantic segmentation, where the network is solely trained on the source domain and evaluated on unseen target domains. Our method leverages the inherent semantic robustness of vision-language models. First, by substituting traditional vision-only backbones with pre-trained encoders from CLIP and EVA-CLIP as transfer learning setting we find that in the field of DG, vision-language pre-training significantly outperforms supervised and self-supervised vision pre-training. We thus propose a new vision-language approach for domain generalized segmentation, which improves the domain generalization SOTA by 7.6% mIoU when training on the synthetic GTA5 dataset. We further show the superior generalization capabilities of vision-language segmentation models by reaching 76.48% mIoU on the popular Cityscapes-to-ACDC benchmark, outperforming the previous SOTA approach by 6.9% mIoU on the test set at the time of writing. Additionally, our approach shows strong in-domain generalization capabilities indicated by 86.1% mIoU on the Cityscapes test set, resulting in a shared first place with the previous SOTA on the current leaderboard at the time of submission.

AdaMerging: Adaptive Model Merging for Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to empower a model to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. A recent development known as task arithmetic has revealed that several models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, can be directly merged into a single model to execute MTL without necessitating a retraining process using the initial training data. Nevertheless, this direct addition of models often leads to a significant deterioration in the overall performance of the merged model. This decline occurs due to potential conflicts and intricate correlations among the multiple tasks. Consequently, the challenge emerges of how to merge pre-trained models more effectively without using their original training data. This paper introduces an innovative technique called Adaptive Model Merging (AdaMerging). This approach aims to autonomously learn the coefficients for model merging, either in a task-wise or layer-wise manner, without relying on the original training data. Specifically, our AdaMerging method operates as an automatic, unsupervised task arithmetic scheme. It leverages entropy minimization on unlabeled test samples from the multi-task setup as a surrogate objective function to iteratively refine the merging coefficients of the multiple models. Our experimental findings across eight tasks demonstrate the efficacy of the AdaMerging scheme we put forth. Compared to the current state-of-the-art task arithmetic merging scheme, AdaMerging showcases a remarkable 11\% improvement in performance. Notably, AdaMerging also exhibits superior generalization capabilities when applied to unseen downstream tasks. Furthermore, it displays a significantly enhanced robustness to data distribution shifts that may occur during the testing phase.

Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

Ask One More Time: Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios

Although chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks, the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting usually causes the repetitiveness and local optimality. To address this shortcoming, ensemble-optimization tries to obtain multiple reasoning paths to get the final answer assembly. However, current ensemble-optimization methods either simply employ rule-based post-processing such as self-consistency, or train an additional model based on several task-related human annotations to select the best one among multiple reasoning paths, yet fail to generalize to realistic settings where the type of input questions is unknown or the answer format of reasoning paths is unknown. To avoid their limitations, we propose self-agreement, a generalizable ensemble-optimization method applying in almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and the answer format of reasoning paths may be known or unknown. Self-agreement firstly samples from language model's decoder to generate a diverse set of reasoning paths, and subsequently prompts the language model one more time to determine the optimal answer by selecting the most agreed answer among the sampled reasoning paths. Self-agreement simultaneously achieves remarkable performance on six public reasoning benchmarks and superior generalization capabilities.

Foundation Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future

We survey applications of pretrained foundation models in robotics. Traditional deep learning models in robotics are trained on small datasets tailored for specific tasks, which limits their adaptability across diverse applications. In contrast, foundation models pretrained on internet-scale data appear to have superior generalization capabilities, and in some instances display an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to problems that are not present in the training data. Foundation models may hold the potential to enhance various components of the robot autonomy stack, from perception to decision-making and control. For example, large language models can generate code or provide common sense reasoning, while vision-language models enable open-vocabulary visual recognition. However, significant open research challenges remain, particularly around the scarcity of robot-relevant training data, safety guarantees and uncertainty quantification, and real-time execution. In this survey, we study recent papers that have used or built foundation models to solve robotics problems. We explore how foundation models contribute to improving robot capabilities in the domains of perception, decision-making, and control. We discuss the challenges hindering the adoption of foundation models in robot autonomy and provide opportunities and potential pathways for future advancements. The GitHub project corresponding to this paper (Preliminary release. We are committed to further enhancing and updating this work to ensure its quality and relevance) can be found here: https://github.com/robotics-survey/Awesome-Robotics-Foundation-Models

Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize bidirectional context information during the inference stage. Furthermore, current bidirectional training methods are primarily designed for string decoders and cannot adequately generalize to tree decoders, which offer superior generalization capabilities and structural analysis capacity. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure. Our method extends the bidirectional training strategy to the tree decoder, allowing for more effective training by leveraging bidirectional information. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the visual and linguistic perception of the HMER model separately and introduce the Shared Language Modeling (SLM) mechanism. Through the SLM, we enhance the model's robustness and generalization when dealing with visual ambiguity, particularly in scenarios with abundant training data. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating its ability to achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CROHME 2014, 2016, and 2019 datasets, as well as the HME100K dataset. The code used in our experiments will be publicly available.

The Implicit Regularization of Dynamical Stability in Stochastic Gradient Descent

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius norm and trace of Hessian relate to different notions of stability. Notably, if a global minimum is linearly stable for SGD, then the trace of Hessian must be less than or equal to 2/eta, where eta denotes the learning rate. By contrast, for gradient descent (GD), the stability imposes a similar constraint but only on the largest eigenvalue of Hessian. We then turn to analyze the generalization properties of these stable minima, focusing specifically on two-layer ReLU networks and diagonal linear networks. Notably, we establish the {\em equivalence} between these metrics of sharpness and certain parameter norms for the two models, which allows us to show that the stable minima of SGD provably generalize well. By contrast, the stability-induced regularization of GD is provably too weak to ensure satisfactory generalization. This discrepancy provides an explanation of why SGD often generalizes better than GD. Note that the learning rate (LR) plays a pivotal role in the strength of stability-induced regularization. As the LR increases, the regularization effect becomes more pronounced, elucidating why SGD with a larger LR consistently demonstrates superior generalization capabilities. Additionally, numerical experiments are provided to support our theoretical findings.

SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuning

Recent development in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have leverage Attention-based Transformer architectures and achieved superior performance and generalization capabilities. They have since covered extensive areas of traditional learning tasks. For instance, text-based tasks such as text-classification and sequence-labeling, as well as multi-modal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which were previously addressed using different models, can now be tackled based on one foundation model. Consequently, the training and lightweight fine-tuning of LLMs and MLLMs, especially those based on Transformer architecture, has become particularly important. In recognition of these overwhelming needs, we develop SWIFT, a customizable one-stop infrastructure for large models. With support of over 300+ LLMs and 50+ MLLMs, SWIFT stands as the open-source framework that provide the most comprehensive support for fine-tuning large models. In particular, it is the first training framework that provides systematic support for MLLMs. In addition to the core functionalities of fine-tuning, SWIFT also integrates post-training processes such as inference, evaluation, and model quantization, to facilitate fast adoptions of large models in various application scenarios. With a systematic integration of various training techniques, SWIFT offers helpful utilities such as benchmark comparisons among different training techniques for large models. For fine-tuning models specialized in agent framework, we show that notable improvements on the ToolBench leader-board can be achieved by training with customized dataset on SWIFT, with an increase of 5.2%-21.8% in the Act.EM metric over various baseline models, a reduction in hallucination by 1.6%-14.1%, and an average performance improvement of 8%-17%.

Q-Eval-100K: Evaluating Visual Quality and Alignment Level for Text-to-Vision Content

Evaluating text-to-vision content hinges on two crucial aspects: visual quality and alignment. While significant progress has been made in developing objective models to assess these dimensions, the performance of such models heavily relies on the scale and quality of human annotations. According to Scaling Law, increasing the number of human-labeled instances follows a predictable pattern that enhances the performance of evaluation models. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset designed to Evaluate Visual quality and Alignment Level for text-to-vision content (Q-EVAL-100K), featuring the largest collection of human-labeled Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for the mentioned two aspects. The Q-EVAL-100K dataset encompasses both text-to-image and text-to-video models, with 960K human annotations specifically focused on visual quality and alignment for 100K instances (60K images and 40K videos). Leveraging this dataset with context prompt, we propose Q-Eval-Score, a unified model capable of evaluating both visual quality and alignment with special improvements for handling long-text prompt alignment. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Q-Eval-Score achieves superior performance on both visual quality and alignment, with strong generalization capabilities across other benchmarks. These findings highlight the significant value of the Q-EVAL-100K dataset. Data and codes will be available at https://github.com/zzc-1998/Q-Eval.

CapS-Adapter: Caption-based MultiModal Adapter in Zero-Shot Classification

Recent advances in vision-language foundational models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated significant strides in zero-shot classification. However, the extensive parameterization of models like CLIP necessitates a resource-intensive fine-tuning process. In response, TIP-Adapter and SuS-X have introduced training-free methods aimed at bolstering the efficacy of downstream tasks. While these approaches incorporate support sets to maintain data distribution consistency between knowledge cache and test sets, they often fall short in terms of generalization on the test set, particularly when faced with test data exhibiting substantial distributional variations. In this work, we present CapS-Adapter, an innovative method that employs a caption-based support set, effectively harnessing both image and caption features to exceed existing state-of-the-art techniques in training-free scenarios. CapS-Adapter adeptly constructs support sets that closely mirror target distributions, utilizing instance-level distribution features extracted from multimodal large models. By leveraging CLIP's single and cross-modal strengths, CapS-Adapter enhances predictive accuracy through the use of multimodal support sets. Our method achieves outstanding zero-shot classification results across 19 benchmark datasets, improving accuracy by 2.19\% over the previous leading method. Our contributions are substantiated through extensive validation on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior performance and robust generalization capabilities. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/WLuLi/CapS-Adapter.

Adversarial Data Collection: Human-Collaborative Perturbations for Efficient and Robust Robotic Imitation Learning

The pursuit of data efficiency, where quality outweighs quantity, has emerged as a cornerstone in robotic manipulation, especially given the high costs associated with real-world data collection. We propose that maximizing the informational density of individual demonstrations can dramatically reduce reliance on large-scale datasets while improving task performance. To this end, we introduce Adversarial Data Collection, a Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) framework that redefines robotic data acquisition through real-time, bidirectional human-environment interactions. Unlike conventional pipelines that passively record static demonstrations, ADC adopts a collaborative perturbation paradigm: during a single episode, an adversarial operator dynamically alters object states, environmental conditions, and linguistic commands, while the tele-operator adaptively adjusts actions to overcome these evolving challenges. This process compresses diverse failure-recovery behaviors, compositional task variations, and environmental perturbations into minimal demonstrations. Our experiments demonstrate that ADC-trained models achieve superior compositional generalization to unseen task instructions, enhanced robustness to perceptual perturbations, and emergent error recovery capabilities. Strikingly, models trained with merely 20% of the demonstration volume collected through ADC significantly outperform traditional approaches using full datasets. These advances bridge the gap between data-centric learning paradigms and practical robotic deployment, demonstrating that strategic data acquisition, not merely post-hoc processing, is critical for scalable, real-world robot learning. Additionally, we are curating a large-scale ADC-Robotics dataset comprising real-world manipulation tasks with adversarial perturbations. This benchmark will be open-sourced to facilitate advancements in robotic imitation learning.

VDC: Versatile Data Cleanser for Detecting Dirty Samples via Visual-Linguistic Inconsistency

The role of data in building AI systems has recently been emphasized by the emerging concept of data-centric AI. Unfortunately, in the real-world, datasets may contain dirty samples, such as poisoned samples from backdoor attack, noisy labels in crowdsourcing, and even hybrids of them. The presence of such dirty samples makes the DNNs vunerable and unreliable.Hence, it is critical to detect dirty samples to improve the quality and realiability of dataset. Existing detectors only focus on detecting poisoned samples or noisy labels, that are often prone to weak generalization when dealing with dirty samples from other domains.In this paper, we find a commonality of various dirty samples is visual-linguistic inconsistency between images and associated labels. To capture the semantic inconsistency between modalities, we propose versatile data cleanser (VDC) leveraging the surpassing capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLM) in cross-modal alignment and reasoning.It consists of three consecutive modules: the visual question generation module to generate insightful questions about the image; the visual question answering module to acquire the semantics of the visual content by answering the questions with MLLM; followed by the visual answer evaluation module to evaluate the inconsistency.Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and generalization to various categories and types of dirty samples.

Self-Knowledge Distillation with Progressive Refinement of Targets

The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization method named progressive self-knowledge distillation (PS-KD), which progressively distills a model's own knowledge to soften hard targets (i.e., one-hot vectors) during training. Hence, it can be interpreted within a framework of knowledge distillation as a student becomes a teacher itself. Specifically, targets are adjusted adaptively by combining the ground-truth and past predictions from the model itself. We show that PS-KD provides an effect of hard example mining by rescaling gradients according to difficulty in classifying examples. The proposed method is applicable to any supervised learning tasks with hard targets and can be easily combined with existing regularization methods to further enhance the generalization performance. Furthermore, it is confirmed that PS-KD achieves not only better accuracy, but also provides high quality of confidence estimates in terms of calibration as well as ordinal ranking. Extensive experimental results on three different tasks, image classification, object detection, and machine translation, demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of the state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/lgcnsai/PS-KD-Pytorch.

GraphFM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Foundation Model

Foundation Models (FMs) serve as a general class for the development of artificial intelligence systems, offering broad potential for generalization across a spectrum of downstream tasks. Despite extensive research into self-supervised learning as the cornerstone of FMs, several outstanding issues persist in Graph Foundation Models that rely on graph self-supervised learning, namely: 1) Homogenization. The extent of generalization capability on downstream tasks remains unclear. 2) Scalability. It is unknown how effectively these models can scale to large datasets. 3) Efficiency. The training time and memory usage of these models require evaluation. 4) Training Stop Criteria. Determining the optimal stopping strategy for pre-training across multiple tasks to maximize performance on downstream tasks. To address these questions, we have constructed a rigorous benchmark that thoroughly analyzes and studies the generalization and scalability of self-supervised Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. Regarding generalization, we have implemented and compared the performance of various self-supervised GNN models, trained to generate node representations, across tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and node clustering. For scalability, we have compared the performance of various models after training using full-batch and mini-batch strategies. Additionally, we have assessed the training efficiency of these models by conducting experiments to test their GPU memory usage and throughput. Through these experiments, we aim to provide insights to motivate future research. The code for this benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/NYUSHCS/GraphFM.

Specialist or Generalist? Instruction Tuning for Specific NLP Tasks

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method for transforming LLMs into such generalist models, their performance still lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating broad-coverage generalist instruction tuning can contribute to building a specialist model. We hypothesize that its efficacy depends on task specificity and skill requirements. Our experiments assess four target tasks with distinct coverage levels, revealing that integrating generalist instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance when the task coverage is broad. The effect is particularly pronounced when the amount of task-specific training data is limited. Further investigation into three target tasks focusing on different capabilities demonstrates that generalist instruction tuning improves understanding and reasoning abilities. However, for tasks requiring factual knowledge, generalist data containing hallucinatory information may negatively affect the model's performance. Overall, our work provides a systematic guide for developing specialist models with general instruction tuning. Our code and other related resources can be found at https://github.com/DavidFanzz/Generalist_or_Specialist.

Model-agnostic Measure of Generalization Difficulty

The measure of a machine learning algorithm is the difficulty of the tasks it can perform, and sufficiently difficult tasks are critical drivers of strong machine learning models. However, quantifying the generalization difficulty of machine learning benchmarks has remained challenging. We propose what is to our knowledge the first model-agnostic measure of the inherent generalization difficulty of tasks. Our inductive bias complexity measure quantifies the total information required to generalize well on a task minus the information provided by the data. It does so by measuring the fractional volume occupied by hypotheses that generalize on a task given that they fit the training data. It scales exponentially with the intrinsic dimensionality of the space over which the model must generalize but only polynomially in resolution per dimension, showing that tasks which require generalizing over many dimensions are drastically more difficult than tasks involving more detail in fewer dimensions. Our measure can be applied to compute and compare supervised learning, reinforcement learning and meta-learning generalization difficulties against each other. We show that applied empirically, it formally quantifies intuitively expected trends, e.g. that in terms of required inductive bias, MNIST < CIFAR10 < Imagenet and fully observable Markov decision processes (MDPs) < partially observable MDPs. Further, we show that classification of complex images < few-shot meta-learning with simple images. Our measure provides a quantitative metric to guide the construction of more complex tasks requiring greater inductive bias, and thereby encourages the development of more sophisticated architectures and learning algorithms with more powerful generalization capabilities.

Meta-DT: Offline Meta-RL as Conditional Sequence Modeling with World Model Disentanglement

A longstanding goal of artificial general intelligence is highly capable generalists that can learn from diverse experiences and generalize to unseen tasks. The language and vision communities have seen remarkable progress toward this trend by scaling up transformer-based models trained on massive datasets, while reinforcement learning (RL) agents still suffer from poor generalization capacity under such paradigms. To tackle this challenge, we propose Meta Decision Transformer (Meta-DT), which leverages the sequential modeling ability of the transformer architecture and robust task representation learning via world model disentanglement to achieve efficient generalization in offline meta-RL. We pretrain a context-aware world model to learn a compact task representation, and inject it as a contextual condition to the causal transformer to guide task-oriented sequence generation. Then, we subtly utilize history trajectories generated by the meta-policy as a self-guided prompt to exploit the architectural inductive bias. We select the trajectory segment that yields the largest prediction error on the pretrained world model to construct the prompt, aiming to encode task-specific information complementary to the world model maximally. Notably, the proposed framework eliminates the requirement of any expert demonstration or domain knowledge at test time. Experimental results on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks across various dataset types show that Meta-DT exhibits superior few and zero-shot generalization capacity compared to strong baselines while being more practical with fewer prerequisites. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/Meta-DT.

Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior - for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated safe outputs. However, future superhuman models will behave in complex ways too difficult for humans to reliably evaluate; humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models. We study an analogy to this problem: can weak model supervision elicit the full capabilities of a much stronger model? We test this using a range of pretrained language models in the GPT-4 family on natural language processing (NLP), chess, and reward modeling tasks. We find that when we naively finetune strong pretrained models on labels generated by a weak model, they consistently perform better than their weak supervisors, a phenomenon we call weak-to-strong generalization. However, we are still far from recovering the full capabilities of strong models with naive finetuning alone, suggesting that techniques like RLHF may scale poorly to superhuman models without further work. We find that simple methods can often significantly improve weak-to-strong generalization: for example, when finetuning GPT-4 with a GPT-2-level supervisor and an auxiliary confidence loss, we can recover close to GPT-3.5-level performance on NLP tasks. Our results suggest that it is feasible to make empirical progress today on a fundamental challenge of aligning superhuman models.

Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine

Generalist foundation models such as GPT-4 have displayed surprising capabilities in a wide variety of domains and tasks. Yet, there is a prevalent assumption that they cannot match specialist capabilities of fine-tuned models. For example, most explorations to date on medical competency benchmarks have leveraged domain-specific training, as exemplified by efforts on BioGPT and Med-PaLM. We build on a prior study of GPT-4's capabilities on medical challenge benchmarks in the absence of special training. Rather than using simple prompting to highlight the model's out-of-the-box capabilities, we perform a systematic exploration of prompt engineering. We find that prompting innovation can unlock deeper specialist capabilities and show that GPT-4 easily tops prior leading results for medical benchmarks. The prompting methods we explore are general purpose, and make no specific use of domain expertise, removing the need for expert-curated content. Our experimental design carefully controls for overfitting during the prompt engineering process. We introduce Medprompt, based on a composition of several prompting strategies. With Medprompt, GPT-4 achieves state-of-the-art results on all nine of the benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite. The method outperforms leading specialist models such as Med-PaLM 2 by a significant margin with an order of magnitude fewer calls to the model. Steering GPT-4 with Medprompt achieves a 27% reduction in error rate on the MedQA dataset over the best methods to date achieved with specialist models and surpasses a score of 90% for the first time. Beyond medical problems, we show the power of Medprompt to generalize to other domains and provide evidence for the broad applicability of the approach via studies of the strategy on exams in electrical engineering, machine learning, philosophy, accounting, law, nursing, and clinical psychology.

Can Models Learn Skill Composition from Examples?

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization -- the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training -- has garnered significant attention. This type of generalization, particularly in scenarios beyond training data, is also of great interest in the study of AI safety and alignment. A recent study introduced the SKILL-MIX evaluation, where models are tasked with composing a short paragraph demonstrating the use of a specified k-tuple of language skills. While small models struggled with composing even with k=3, larger models like GPT-4 performed reasonably well with k=5 and 6. In this paper, we employ a setup akin to SKILL-MIX to evaluate the capacity of smaller models to learn compositional generalization from examples. Utilizing a diverse set of language skills -- including rhetorical, literary, reasoning, theory of mind, and common sense -- GPT-4 was used to generate text samples that exhibit random subsets of k skills. Subsequent fine-tuning of 7B and 13B parameter models on these combined skill texts, for increasing values of k, revealed the following findings: (1) Training on combinations of k=2 and 3 skills results in noticeable improvements in the ability to compose texts with k=4 and 5 skills, despite models never having seen such examples during training. (2) When skill categories are split into training and held-out groups, models significantly improve at composing texts with held-out skills during testing despite having only seen training skills during fine-tuning, illustrating the efficacy of the training approach even with previously unseen skills. This study also suggests that incorporating skill-rich (potentially synthetic) text into training can substantially enhance the compositional capabilities of models.

LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning

We present a fundamental discovery that challenges our understanding of how complex reasoning emerges in large language models. While conventional wisdom suggests that sophisticated reasoning tasks demand extensive training data (>100,000 examples), we demonstrate that complex mathematical reasoning abilities can be effectively elicited with surprisingly few examples. Through comprehensive experiments, our proposed model LIMO demonstrates unprecedented performance in mathematical reasoning. With merely 817 curated training samples, LIMO achieves 57.1% accuracy on AIME and 94.8% on MATH, improving from previous SFT-based models' 6.5% and 59.2% respectively, while only using 1% of the training data required by previous approaches. LIMO demonstrates exceptional out-of-distribution generalization, achieving 40.5% absolute improvement across 10 diverse benchmarks, outperforming models trained on 100x more data, challenging the notion that SFT leads to memorization rather than generalization. Based on these results, we propose the Less-Is-More Reasoning Hypothesis (LIMO Hypothesis): In foundation models where domain knowledge has been comprehensively encoded during pre-training, sophisticated reasoning capabilities can emerge through minimal but precisely orchestrated demonstrations of cognitive processes. This hypothesis posits that the elicitation threshold for complex reasoning is determined by two key factors: (1) the completeness of the model's encoded knowledge foundation during pre-training, and (2) the effectiveness of post-training examples as "cognitive templates" that show the model how to utilize its knowledge base to solve complex reasoning tasks. To facilitate reproducibility and future research in data-efficient reasoning, we release LIMO as a comprehensive open-source suite at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/LIMO.

ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability, however, because the training only relies on the given CoT data. In math problem-solving, for example, there is usually only one annotated reasoning path for each question in the training data. Intuitively, it would be better for the algorithm to learn from multiple annotated reasoning paths given a question. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Reinforced Fine-Tuning (ReFT) to enhance the generalizability of learning LLMs for reasoning, with math problem-solving as an example. ReFT first warmups the model with SFT, and then employs on-line reinforcement learning, specifically the PPO algorithm in this paper, to further fine-tune the model, where an abundance of reasoning paths are automatically sampled given the question and the rewards are naturally derived from the ground-truth answers. Extensive experiments on GSM8K, MathQA, and SVAMP datasets show that ReFT significantly outperforms SFT, and the performance can be potentially further boosted by combining inference-time strategies such as majority voting and re-ranking. Note that ReFT obtains the improvement by learning from the same training questions as SFT, without relying on extra or augmented training questions. This indicates a superior generalization ability for ReFT.

Skills-in-Context Prompting: Unlocking Compositionality in Large Language Models

We consider the problem of eliciting compositional generalization capabilities in large language models (LLMs) with a novel type of prompting strategy. Compositional generalization empowers the LLMs to solve problems that are harder than the ones they have seen (i.e., easy-to-hard generalization), which is a critical reasoning capability of human-like intelligence. However, even the current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with this form of reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose skills-in-context (SKiC) prompting, which instructs LLMs how to compose basic skills to resolve more complex problems. We find that it is crucial to demonstrate both the skills and the compositional examples within the same prompting context. With as few as two examplars, our SKiC prompting initiates strong synergies between skills and their composition capabilities. Notably, it empowers LLMs to solve unseen problems that require innovative skill compositions, achieving near-perfect generalization on a broad range of challenging compositionality tasks. Intriguingly, SKiC prompting unlocks the latent potential of LLMs, enabling them to leverage pre-existing internal skills acquired during earlier pre-training stages, even when these skills are not explicitly presented in the prompting context. This results in the capability of LLMs to solve unseen complex problems by activating and composing internal competencies. With such prominent features, SKiC prompting is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH).

What Algorithms can Transformers Learn? A Study in Length Generalization

Large language models exhibit surprising emergent generalization properties, yet also struggle on many simple reasoning tasks such as arithmetic and parity. This raises the question of if and when Transformer models can learn the true algorithm for solving a task. We study the scope of Transformers' abilities in the specific setting of length generalization on algorithmic tasks. Here, we propose a unifying framework to understand when and how Transformers can exhibit strong length generalization on a given task. Specifically, we leverage RASP (Weiss et al., 2021) -- a programming language designed for the computational model of a Transformer -- and introduce the RASP-Generalization Conjecture: Transformers tend to length generalize on a task if the task can be solved by a short RASP program which works for all input lengths. This simple conjecture remarkably captures most known instances of length generalization on algorithmic tasks. Moreover, we leverage our insights to drastically improve generalization performance on traditionally hard tasks (such as parity and addition). On the theoretical side, we give a simple example where the "min-degree-interpolator" model of learning from Abbe et al. (2023) does not correctly predict Transformers' out-of-distribution behavior, but our conjecture does. Overall, our work provides a novel perspective on the mechanisms of compositional generalization and the algorithmic capabilities of Transformers.

Grokked Transformers are Implicit Reasoners: A Mechanistic Journey to the Edge of Generalization

We study whether transformers can learn to implicitly reason over parametric knowledge, a skill that even the most capable language models struggle with. Focusing on two representative reasoning types, composition and comparison, we consistently find that transformers can learn implicit reasoning, but only through grokking, i.e., extended training far beyond overfitting. The levels of generalization also vary across reasoning types: when faced with out-of-distribution examples, transformers fail to systematically generalize for composition but succeed for comparison. We delve into the model's internals throughout training, conducting analytical experiments that reveal: 1) the mechanism behind grokking, such as the formation of the generalizing circuit and its relation to the relative efficiency of generalizing and memorizing circuits, and 2) the connection between systematicity and the configuration of the generalizing circuit. Our findings guide data and training setup to better induce implicit reasoning and suggest potential improvements to the transformer architecture, such as encouraging cross-layer knowledge sharing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a challenging reasoning task with a large search space, GPT-4-Turbo and Gemini-1.5-Pro based on non-parametric memory fail badly regardless of prompting styles or retrieval augmentation, while a fully grokked transformer can achieve near-perfect accuracy, showcasing the power of parametric memory for complex reasoning.

Data Factors for Better Compositional Generalization

Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization, such as SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) and COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020), expose severe problems in models trained from scratch on these datasets. However, in contrast to this poor performance, state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability. In this work, to reconcile this inconsistency, we conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors, including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. First, we show that increased dataset complexity can lead to better generalization behavior on multiple different generalization challenges. To further understand this improvement, we show two axes of the benefit from more complex datasets: they provide more diverse examples so compositional understanding becomes more effective, and they also prevent ungeneralizable memorization of the examples due to reduced example repetition frequency. Finally, we explore how training examples of different difficulty levels influence generalization differently. On synthetic datasets, simple examples invoke stronger compositionality than hard examples do. On larger-scale real language datasets, while hard examples become more important potentially to ensure decent data coverage, a balanced mixture of simple and hard examples manages to induce the strongest generalizability. The code and data for this work are available at https://github.com/owenzx/data4comp

Neural-Symbolic Collaborative Distillation: Advancing Small Language Models for Complex Reasoning Tasks

In this paper, we propose Neural-Symbolic Collaborative Distillation (NesyCD), a novel knowledge distillation method for learning the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., \textgreater 13B). We argue that complex reasoning tasks are difficult for Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., leq 7B), as these tasks demand not only general cognitive abilities but also specialized knowledge, which is often sparse and difficult for these neural-based SLMs to effectively capture. Therefore, NesyCD distills the general capabilities and specialized knowledge in LLMs using different manners. On the one hand, we distill only general abilities from teacher LLMs into the student SLMs of parameterized neural networks. On the other hand, for the specialized abilities and uncommon knowledge of a complex reasoning task, we employ a symbolic knowledge distillation approach to obtain and store the specialized knowledge within a symbolic knowledge base (KB). By decoupling general and specialized capabilities, the proposed NesyCD can achieve superior performance cost-effectively, utilizing smaller models and blending parameterized neural networks with symbolic KB. Moreover, the specialized KB generalizes well and is comprehended and manipulated by humans. Our experiments show that NesyCD significantly boosts SLMs' complex reasoning performance on in-domain (BBH, GSM8K) and out-of-domain (AGIEval, ARC) datasets. Notably, our approach enabled the LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B to surpass GPT-3.5-turbo in performance and come close to matching LLaMA3-70B, despite the latter having nine times more parameters. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/NesyCD.

Show, Don't Tell: Evaluating Large Language Models Beyond Textual Understanding with ChildPlay

We developed a benchmark set to assess the generalization of state-of-the-art large language models on problems beyond linguistic tasks and evaluate it on a systematic progression of GPT models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini). Using simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Battleship, and a Shape Recognition Game, all encoded in ASCII, we test strategic capabilities and spatial reasoning, core abilities any artificial intelligence would need to master for solving problems in chemistry. To probe generalization, we introduce two new games for spatial logic: LEGO Connect Language (LCL) and Guess-the-SMILES (GtS), a operationally simple chemistry benchmark. Our results show that GPT models provide meaningful responses for several tasks but, generally, perform poorly. A systematic performance progression with increased model capabilities (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o) is only observed for 4 out of the 7 benchmark tasks. All models consistently struggle with Battleship, LCL, and GtS. This suggests that while GPT models can emulate conversational proficiency and basic rule comprehension, they have limited generalization with respect to strategy and spatial reasoning. Particularly poor performance is observed for interpreting molecular graphs when encoded in ASCII. The results provided by our open-source benchmark suite (https://github.com/BlueVelvetSackOfGoldPotatoes/child-play{ChildPlay GitHub Repository}) caution against claims of emergent intelligence in GPT models, which appear more specialized than general.

Benign Overfitting and Grokking in ReLU Networks for XOR Cluster Data

Neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) have exhibited a number of surprising generalization behaviors. First, they can achieve a perfect fit to noisy training data and still generalize near-optimally, showing that overfitting can sometimes be benign. Second, they can undergo a period of classical, harmful overfitting -- achieving a perfect fit to training data with near-random performance on test data -- before transitioning ("grokking") to near-optimal generalization later in training. In this work, we show that both of these phenomena provably occur in two-layer ReLU networks trained by GD on XOR cluster data where a constant fraction of the training labels are flipped. In this setting, we show that after the first step of GD, the network achieves 100% training accuracy, perfectly fitting the noisy labels in the training data, but achieves near-random test accuracy. At a later training step, the network achieves near-optimal test accuracy while still fitting the random labels in the training data, exhibiting a "grokking" phenomenon. This provides the first theoretical result of benign overfitting in neural network classification when the data distribution is not linearly separable. Our proofs rely on analyzing the feature learning process under GD, which reveals that the network implements a non-generalizable linear classifier after one step and gradually learns generalizable features in later steps.

Neural-Symbolic Recursive Machine for Systematic Generalization

Despite the tremendous success, existing machine learning models still fall short of human-like systematic generalization -- learning compositional rules from limited data and applying them to unseen combinations in various domains. We propose Neural-Symbolic Recursive Machine (NSR) to tackle this deficiency. The core representation of NSR is a Grounded Symbol System (GSS) with combinatorial syntax and semantics, which entirely emerges from training data. Akin to the neuroscience studies suggesting separate brain systems for perceptual, syntactic, and semantic processing, NSR implements analogous separate modules of neural perception, syntactic parsing, and semantic reasoning, which are jointly learned by a deduction-abduction algorithm. We prove that NSR is expressive enough to model various sequence-to-sequence tasks. Superior systematic generalization is achieved via the inductive biases of equivariance and recursiveness embedded in NSR. In experiments, NSR achieves state-of-the-art performance in three benchmarks from different domains: SCAN for semantic parsing, PCFG for string manipulation, and HINT for arithmetic reasoning. Specifically, NSR achieves 100% generalization accuracy on SCAN and PCFG and outperforms state-of-the-art models on HINT by about 23%. Our NSR demonstrates stronger generalization than pure neural networks due to its symbolic representation and inductive biases. NSR also demonstrates better transferability than existing neural-symbolic approaches due to less domain-specific knowledge required.

On the generalization capacity of neural networks during generic multimodal reasoning

The advent of the Transformer has led to the development of large language models (LLM), which appear to demonstrate human-like capabilities. To assess the generality of this class of models and a variety of other base neural network architectures to multimodal domains, we evaluated and compared their capacity for multimodal generalization. We introduce a multimodal question-answer benchmark to evaluate three specific types of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance: distractor generalization (generalization in the presence of distractors), systematic compositional generalization (generalization to new task permutations), and productive compositional generalization (generalization to more complex tasks structures). We found that across model architectures (e.g., RNNs, Transformers, Perceivers, etc.), models with multiple attention layers, or models that leveraged cross-attention mechanisms between input domains, fared better. Our positive results demonstrate that for multimodal distractor and systematic generalization, either cross-modal attention or models with deeper attention layers are key architectural features required to integrate multimodal inputs. On the other hand, neither of these architectural features led to productive generalization, suggesting fundamental limitations of existing architectures for specific types of multimodal generalization. These results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of specific architectural components underlying modern neural models for multimodal reasoning. Finally, we provide Generic COG (gCOG), a configurable benchmark with several multimodal generalization splits, for future studies to explore.

On the Generalization Mystery in Deep Learning

The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of comparable size? Furthermore, from among all solutions that fit the training data, how does GD find one that generalizes well (when such a well-generalizing solution exists)? We argue that the answer to both questions lies in the interaction of the gradients of different examples during training. Intuitively, if the per-example gradients are well-aligned, that is, if they are coherent, then one may expect GD to be (algorithmically) stable, and hence generalize well. We formalize this argument with an easy to compute and interpretable metric for coherence, and show that the metric takes on very different values on real and random datasets for several common vision networks. The theory also explains a number of other phenomena in deep learning, such as why some examples are reliably learned earlier than others, why early stopping works, and why it is possible to learn from noisy labels. Moreover, since the theory provides a causal explanation of how GD finds a well-generalizing solution when one exists, it motivates a class of simple modifications to GD that attenuate memorization and improve generalization. Generalization in deep learning is an extremely broad phenomenon, and therefore, it requires an equally general explanation. We conclude with a survey of alternative lines of attack on this problem, and argue that the proposed approach is the most viable one on this basis.

Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions

Humans (e.g., crowdworkers) have a remarkable ability in solving different tasks, by simply reading textual instructions that define them and looking at a few examples. Despite the success of the conventional supervised learning on individual datasets, such models often struggle with generalization across tasks (e.g., a question-answering system cannot solve classification tasks). A long-standing challenge in AI is to build a model that learns a new task by understanding the human-readable instructions that define it. To study this, we introduce NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS, a dataset of 61 distinct tasks, their human-authored instructions, and 193k task instances (input-output pairs). The instructions are obtained from crowdsourcing instructions used to create existing NLP datasets and mapped to a unified schema. Using this meta-dataset, we measure cross-task generalization by training models on seen tasks and measuring generalization to the remaining unseen ones. We adopt generative pre-trained language models to encode task-specific instructions along with input and generate task output. Our results indicate that models benefit from instructions when evaluated in terms of generalization to unseen tasks (19% better for models utilizing instructions). These models, however, are far behind an estimated performance upperbound indicating significant room for more progress in this direction.

AgentRefine: Enhancing Agent Generalization through Refinement Tuning

Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have proved their ability to perform complex tasks like humans. However, there is still a large gap between open-sourced LLMs and commercial models like the GPT series. In this paper, we focus on improving the agent generalization capabilities of LLMs via instruction tuning. We first observe that the existing agent training corpus exhibits satisfactory results on held-in evaluation sets but fails to generalize to held-out sets. These agent-tuning works face severe formatting errors and are frequently stuck in the same mistake for a long while. We analyze that the poor generalization ability comes from overfitting to several manual agent environments and a lack of adaptation to new situations. They struggle with the wrong action steps and can not learn from the experience but just memorize existing observation-action relations. Inspired by the insight, we propose a novel AgentRefine framework for agent-tuning. The core idea is to enable the model to learn to correct its mistakes via observation in the trajectory. Specifically, we propose an agent synthesis framework to encompass a diverse array of environments and tasks and prompt a strong LLM to refine its error action according to the environment feedback. AgentRefine significantly outperforms state-of-the-art agent-tuning work in terms of generalization ability on diverse agent tasks. It also has better robustness facing perturbation and can generate diversified thought in inference. Our findings establish the correlation between agent generalization and self-refinement and provide a new paradigm for future research.

The Pitfalls of Simplicity Bias in Neural Networks

Several works have proposed Simplicity Bias (SB)---the tendency of standard training procedures such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to find simple models---to justify why neural networks generalize well [Arpit et al. 2017, Nakkiran et al. 2019, Soudry et al. 2018]. However, the precise notion of simplicity remains vague. Furthermore, previous settings that use SB to theoretically justify why neural networks generalize well do not simultaneously capture the non-robustness of neural networks---a widely observed phenomenon in practice [Goodfellow et al. 2014, Jo and Bengio 2017]. We attempt to reconcile SB and the superior standard generalization of neural networks with the non-robustness observed in practice by designing datasets that (a) incorporate a precise notion of simplicity, (b) comprise multiple predictive features with varying levels of simplicity, and (c) capture the non-robustness of neural networks trained on real data. Through theory and empirics on these datasets, we make four observations: (i) SB of SGD and variants can be extreme: neural networks can exclusively rely on the simplest feature and remain invariant to all predictive complex features. (ii) The extreme aspect of SB could explain why seemingly benign distribution shifts and small adversarial perturbations significantly degrade model performance. (iii) Contrary to conventional wisdom, SB can also hurt generalization on the same data distribution, as SB persists even when the simplest feature has less predictive power than the more complex features. (iv) Common approaches to improve generalization and robustness---ensembles and adversarial training---can fail in mitigating SB and its pitfalls. Given the role of SB in training neural networks, we hope that the proposed datasets and methods serve as an effective testbed to evaluate novel algorithmic approaches aimed at avoiding the pitfalls of SB.

Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning

The surprising ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform well on complex reasoning with only few-shot chain-of-thought prompts is believed to emerge only in very large-scale models (100+ billion parameters). We show that such abilities can, in fact, be distilled down from GPT-3.5 (ge 175B) to T5 variants (le 11B). We propose model specialization, to specialize the model's ability towards a target task. The hypothesis is that large models (commonly viewed as larger than 100B) have strong modeling power, but are spread on a large spectrum of tasks. Small models (commonly viewed as smaller than 10B) have limited model capacity, but if we concentrate their capacity on a specific target task, the model can achieve a decent improved performance. We use multi-step math reasoning as our testbed because it is a very typical emergent ability. We show two important aspects of model abilities: (1). there exists a very complex balance/ tradeoff between language models' multi-dimensional abilities; (2). by paying the price of decreased generic ability, we can clearly lift up the scaling curve of models smaller than 10B towards a specialized multi-step math reasoning ability. We further give comprehensive discussions about important design choices for better generalization, including the tuning data format, the start model checkpoint, and a new model selection method. We hope our practice and discoveries can serve as an important attempt towards specialized smaller models in the new research paradigm set by LLMs.

Quantifying Generalization Complexity for Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in understanding complex queries and performing sophisticated tasks, their generalization abilities are often deeply entangled with memorization, necessitating more precise evaluation. To address this challenge, we introduce Scylla, a dynamic evaluation framework that quantitatively measures the generalization abilities of LLMs. Scylla disentangles generalization from memorization via assessing model performance on both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data through 20 tasks across 5 levels of complexity. Through extensive experiments, we uncover a non-monotonic relationship between task complexity and the performance gap between ID and OOD data, which we term the generalization valley. Specifically, this phenomenon reveals a critical threshold - referred to as critical complexity - where reliance on non-generalizable behavior peaks, indicating the upper bound of LLMs' generalization capabilities. As model size increases, the critical complexity shifts toward higher levels of task complexity, suggesting that larger models can handle more complex reasoning tasks before over-relying on memorization. Leveraging Scylla and the concept of critical complexity, we benchmark 28LLMs including both open-sourced models such as LLaMA and Qwen families, and close-sourced models like Claude and GPT, providing a more robust evaluation and establishing a clearer understanding of LLMs' generalization capabilities.

How Well Does GPT-4V(ision) Adapt to Distribution Shifts? A Preliminary Investigation

In machine learning, generalization against distribution shifts -- where deployment conditions diverge from the training scenarios -- is crucial, particularly in fields like climate modeling, biomedicine, and autonomous driving. The emergence of foundation models, distinguished by their extensive pretraining and task versatility, has led to an increased interest in their adaptability to distribution shifts. GPT-4V(ision) acts as the most advanced publicly accessible multimodal foundation model, with extensive applications across various domains, including anomaly detection, video understanding, image generation, and medical diagnosis. However, its robustness against data distributions remains largely underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study rigorously evaluates GPT-4V's adaptability and generalization capabilities in dynamic environments, benchmarking against prominent models like CLIP and LLaVA. We delve into GPT-4V's zero-shot generalization across 13 diverse datasets spanning natural, medical, and molecular domains. We further investigate its adaptability to controlled data perturbations and examine the efficacy of in-context learning as a tool to enhance its adaptation. Our findings delineate GPT-4V's capability boundaries in distribution shifts, shedding light on its strengths and limitations across various scenarios. Importantly, this investigation contributes to our understanding of how AI foundation models generalize to distribution shifts, offering pivotal insights into their adaptability and robustness. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jameszhou-gl/gpt-4v-distribution-shift.

Train longer, generalize better: closing the generalization gap in large batch training of neural networks

Background: Deep learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent or one of its variants. These methods update the weights using their gradient, estimated from a small fraction of the training data. It has been observed that when using large batch sizes there is a persistent degradation in generalization performance - known as the "generalization gap" phenomena. Identifying the origin of this gap and closing it had remained an open problem. Contributions: We examine the initial high learning rate training phase. We find that the weight distance from its initialization grows logarithmically with the number of weight updates. We therefore propose a "random walk on random landscape" statistical model which is known to exhibit similar "ultra-slow" diffusion behavior. Following this hypothesis we conducted experiments to show empirically that the "generalization gap" stems from the relatively small number of updates rather than the batch size, and can be completely eliminated by adapting the training regime used. We further investigate different techniques to train models in the large-batch regime and present a novel algorithm named "Ghost Batch Normalization" which enables significant decrease in the generalization gap without increasing the number of updates. To validate our findings we conduct several additional experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Finally, we reassess common practices and beliefs concerning training of deep models and suggest they may not be optimal to achieve good generalization.

AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

General Reasoning Requires Learning to Reason from the Get-go

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive real-world utility, exemplifying artificial useful intelligence (AUI). However, their ability to reason adaptively and robustly -- the hallmarks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- remains fragile. While LLMs seemingly succeed in commonsense reasoning, programming, and mathematics, they struggle to generalize algorithmic understanding across novel contexts. Our experiments with algorithmic tasks in esoteric programming languages reveal that LLM's reasoning overfits to the training data and is limited in its transferability. We hypothesize that the core issue underlying such limited transferability is the coupling of reasoning and knowledge in LLMs. To transition from AUI to AGI, we propose disentangling knowledge and reasoning through three key directions: (1) pretaining to reason using RL from scratch as an alternative to the widely used next-token prediction pretraining, (2) using a curriculum of synthetic tasks to ease the learning of a reasoning prior for RL that can then be transferred to natural language tasks, and (3) learning more generalizable reasoning functions using a small context window to reduce exploiting spurious correlations between tokens. Such a reasoning system coupled with a trained retrieval system and a large external memory bank as a knowledge store can overcome several limitations of existing architectures at learning to reason in novel scenarios.

ReGenesis: LLMs can Grow into Reasoning Generalists via Self-Improvement

Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning trajectories can enhance their reasoning abilities. However, acquiring such high-quality trajectory data typically demands meticulous supervision from humans or superior models, which can be either expensive or license-constrained. In this paper, we explore how far an LLM can improve its reasoning by self-synthesizing reasoning paths as training data without any additional supervision. Existing self-synthesizing methods, such as STaR, suffer from poor generalization to out-of-domain (OOD) reasoning tasks. We hypothesize it is due to that their self-synthesized reasoning paths are too task-specific, lacking general task-agnostic reasoning guidance. To address this, we propose Reasoning Generalist via Self-Improvement (ReGenesis), a method to self-synthesize reasoning paths as post-training data by progressing from abstract to concrete. More specifically, ReGenesis self-synthesizes reasoning paths by converting general reasoning guidelines into task-specific ones, generating reasoning structures, and subsequently transforming these structures into reasoning paths, without the need for human-designed task-specific examples used in existing methods. We show that ReGenesis achieves superior performance on all in-domain and OOD settings tested compared to existing methods. For six OOD tasks specifically, while previous methods exhibited an average performance decrease of approximately 4.6% after post training, ReGenesis delivers around 6.1% performance improvement. We also conduct in-depth analysis of our framework and show ReGenesis is effective across various LLMs and design choices.

Easy-to-Hard Generalization: Scalable Alignment Beyond Human Supervision

Current AI alignment methodologies rely on human-provided demonstrations or judgments, and the learned capabilities of AI systems would be upper-bounded by human capabilities as a result. This raises a challenging research question: How can we keep improving the systems when their capabilities have surpassed the levels of humans? This paper answers this question in the context of tackling hard reasoning tasks (e.g., level 4-5 MATH problems) via learning from human annotations on easier tasks (e.g., level 1-3 MATH problems), which we term as easy-to-hard generalization. Our key insight is that an evaluator (reward model) trained on supervisions for easier tasks can be effectively used for scoring candidate solutions of harder tasks and hence facilitating easy-to-hard generalization over different levels of tasks. Based on this insight, we propose a novel approach to scalable alignment, which firstly trains the process-supervised reward models on easy problems (e.g., level 1-3), and then uses them to evaluate the performance of policy models on hard problems. We show that such easy-to-hard generalization from evaluators can enable easy-to-hard generalizations in generators either through re-ranking or reinforcement learning (RL). Notably, our process-supervised 7b RL model achieves an accuracy of 34.0\% on MATH500, despite only using human supervision on easy problems. Our approach suggests a promising path toward AI systems that advance beyond the frontier of human supervision.

On the Compositional Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Medical Imaging

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold significant potential in the medical field, but their capabilities are often limited by insufficient data in certain medical domains, highlighting the need for understanding what kinds of images can be used by MLLMs for generalization. Current research suggests that multi-task training outperforms single-task as different tasks can benefit each other, but they often overlook the internal relationships within these tasks, providing limited guidance on selecting datasets to enhance specific tasks. To analyze this phenomenon, we attempted to employ compositional generalization (CG)-the ability of models to understand novel combinations by recombining learned elements-as a guiding framework. Since medical images can be precisely defined by Modality, Anatomical area, and Task, naturally providing an environment for exploring CG. Therefore, we assembled 106 medical datasets to create Med-MAT for comprehensive experiments. The experiments confirmed that MLLMs can use CG to understand unseen medical images and identified CG as one of the main drivers of the generalization observed in multi-task training. Additionally, further studies demonstrated that CG effectively supports datasets with limited data and delivers consistent performance across different backbones, highlighting its versatility and broad applicability. Med-MAT is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Med-MAT.

Sequential Training of Neural Networks with Gradient Boosting

This paper presents a novel technique based on gradient boosting to train the final layers of a neural network (NN). Gradient boosting is an additive expansion algorithm in which a series of models are trained sequentially to approximate a given function. A neural network can also be seen as an additive expansion where the scalar product of the responses of the last hidden layer and its weights provide the final output of the network. Instead of training the network as a whole, the proposed algorithm trains the network sequentially in T steps. First, the bias term of the network is initialized with a constant approximation that minimizes the average loss of the data. Then, at each step, a portion of the network, composed of J neurons, is trained to approximate the pseudo-residuals on the training data computed from the previous iterations. Finally, the T partial models and bias are integrated as a single NN with T times J neurons in the hidden layer. Extensive experiments in classification and regression tasks, as well as in combination with deep neural networks, are carried out showing a competitive generalization performance with respect to neural networks trained with different standard solvers, such as Adam, L-BFGS, SGD and deep models. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method design permits to switch off a number of hidden units during test (the units that were last trained) without a significant reduction of its generalization ability. This permits the adaptation of the model to different classification speed requirements on the fly.

Procedural Knowledge in Pretraining Drives Reasoning in Large Language Models

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the other hand, they show surprising reasoning gaps when compared to humans, casting doubt on the robustness of their generalisation strategies. The sheer volume of data used in the design of LLMs has precluded us from applying the method traditionally used to measure generalisation: train-test set separation. To overcome this, we study what kind of generalisation strategies LLMs employ when performing reasoning tasks by investigating the pretraining data they rely on. For two models of different sizes (7B and 35B) and 2.5B of their pretraining tokens, we identify what documents influence the model outputs for three simple mathematical reasoning tasks and contrast this to the data that are influential for answering factual questions. We find that, while the models rely on mostly distinct sets of data for each factual question, a document often has a similar influence across different reasoning questions within the same task, indicating the presence of procedural knowledge. We further find that the answers to factual questions often show up in the most influential data. However, for reasoning questions the answers usually do not show up as highly influential, nor do the answers to the intermediate reasoning steps. When we characterise the top ranked documents for the reasoning questions qualitatively, we confirm that the influential documents often contain procedural knowledge, like demonstrating how to obtain a solution using formulae or code. Our findings indicate that the approach to reasoning the models use is unlike retrieval, and more like a generalisable strategy that synthesises procedural knowledge from documents doing a similar form of reasoning.

Learn to Preserve and Diversify: Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal Regularization for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to avoid the performance degradation of the model when the distribution shift between the limited training data and unseen test data occurs. Recently, foundation models with enormous parameters have been pre-trained with huge datasets, demonstrating strong generalization ability and showing promising direction for solving the DG problem. However, fully Fine-Tuning (FT) the foundation models results in unsatisfactory out-of-distribution accuracy due to the destroyed pre-trained generalized features. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) alleviates the above problem by fine-tuning a small portion of the model parameters while keeping the rest frozen, which achieves better generalization performance compared to FT. Nevertheless, PEFT still suffers from the issue of overfitting to the training domains. To address the above issue, we propose Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal regularization (PEGO) for vision transformers, which effectively preserves the generalization ability of the pre-trained network and learns more diverse knowledge compared with conventional PEFT. Specifically, we inject a group of trainable Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules into the pre-trained model and propose an orthogonal regularization loss to enhance the generalization ability of the model. Our framework achieves SOTA performance on five DG benchmarks, while only requiring training a small number of parameters without adding additional testing cost.

Domain-Specific Risk Minimization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Recent domain generalization (DG) approaches typically use the hypothesis learned on source domains for inference on the unseen target domain. However, such a hypothesis can be arbitrarily far from the optimal one for the target domain, induced by a gap termed ``adaptivity gap''. Without exploiting the domain information from the unseen test samples, adaptivity gap estimation and minimization are intractable, which hinders us to robustify a model to any unknown distribution. In this paper, we first establish a generalization bound that explicitly considers the adaptivity gap. Our bound motivates two strategies to reduce the gap: the first one is ensembling multiple classifiers to enrich the hypothesis space, then we propose effective gap estimation methods for guiding the selection of a better hypothesis for the target. The other method is minimizing the gap directly by adapting model parameters using online target samples. We thus propose Domain-specific Risk Minimization (DRM). During training, DRM models the distributions of different source domains separately; for inference, DRM performs online model steering using the source hypothesis for each arriving target sample. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRM for domain generalization with the following advantages: 1) it significantly outperforms competitive baselines on different distributional shift settings; 2) it achieves either comparable or superior accuracies on all source domains compared to vanilla empirical risk minimization; 3) it remains simple and efficient during training, and 4) it is complementary to invariant learning approaches.

The Generalization Gap in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Despite recent progress in offline learning, these methods are still trained and tested on the same environment. In this paper, we compare the generalization abilities of widely used online and offline learning methods such as online reinforcement learning (RL), offline RL, sequence modeling, and behavioral cloning. Our experiments show that offline learning algorithms perform worse on new environments than online learning ones. We also introduce the first benchmark for evaluating generalization in offline learning, collecting datasets of varying sizes and skill-levels from Procgen (2D video games) and WebShop (e-commerce websites). The datasets contain trajectories for a limited number of game levels or natural language instructions and at test time, the agent has to generalize to new levels or instructions. Our experiments reveal that existing offline learning algorithms struggle to match the performance of online RL on both train and test environments. Behavioral cloning is a strong baseline, outperforming state-of-the-art offline RL and sequence modeling approaches when trained on data from multiple environments and tested on new ones. Finally, we find that increasing the diversity of the data, rather than its size, improves performance on new environments for all offline learning algorithms. Our study demonstrates the limited generalization of current offline learning algorithms highlighting the need for more research in this area.

Towards Exact Computation of Inductive Bias

Much research in machine learning involves finding appropriate inductive biases (e.g. convolutional neural networks, momentum-based optimizers, transformers) to promote generalization on tasks. However, quantification of the amount of inductive bias associated with these architectures and hyperparameters has been limited. We propose a novel method for efficiently computing the inductive bias required for generalization on a task with a fixed training data budget; formally, this corresponds to the amount of information required to specify well-generalizing models within a specific hypothesis space of models. Our approach involves modeling the loss distribution of random hypotheses drawn from a hypothesis space to estimate the required inductive bias for a task relative to these hypotheses. Unlike prior work, our method provides a direct estimate of inductive bias without using bounds and is applicable to diverse hypothesis spaces. Moreover, we derive approximation error bounds for our estimation approach in terms of the number of sampled hypotheses. Consistent with prior results, our empirical results demonstrate that higher dimensional tasks require greater inductive bias. We show that relative to other expressive model classes, neural networks as a model class encode large amounts of inductive bias. Furthermore, our measure quantifies the relative difference in inductive bias between different neural network architectures. Our proposed inductive bias metric provides an information-theoretic interpretation of the benefits of specific model architectures for certain tasks and provides a quantitative guide to developing tasks requiring greater inductive bias, thereby encouraging the development of more powerful inductive biases.

Aligning Machine and Human Visual Representations across Abstraction Levels

Deep neural networks have achieved success across a wide range of applications, including as models of human behavior in vision tasks. However, neural network training and human learning differ in fundamental ways, and neural networks often fail to generalize as robustly as humans do, raising questions regarding the similarity of their underlying representations. What is missing for modern learning systems to exhibit more human-like behavior? We highlight a key misalignment between vision models and humans: whereas human conceptual knowledge is hierarchically organized from fine- to coarse-scale distinctions, model representations do not accurately capture all these levels of abstraction. To address this misalignment, we first train a teacher model to imitate human judgments, then transfer human-like structure from its representations into pretrained state-of-the-art vision foundation models. These human-aligned models more accurately approximate human behavior and uncertainty across a wide range of similarity tasks, including a new dataset of human judgments spanning multiple levels of semantic abstractions. They also perform better on a diverse set of machine learning tasks, increasing generalization and out-of-distribution robustness. Thus, infusing neural networks with additional human knowledge yields a best-of-both-worlds representation that is both more consistent with human cognition and more practically useful, thus paving the way toward more robust, interpretable, and human-like artificial intelligence systems.

To grok or not to grok: Disentangling generalization and memorization on corrupted algorithmic datasets

Robust generalization is a major challenge in deep learning, particularly when the number of trainable parameters is very large. In general, it is very difficult to know if the network has memorized a particular set of examples or understood the underlying rule (or both). Motivated by this challenge, we study an interpretable model where generalizing representations are understood analytically, and are easily distinguishable from the memorizing ones. Namely, we consider multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Transformer architectures trained on modular arithmetic tasks, where (xi cdot 100%) of labels are corrupted (i.e. some results of the modular operations in the training set are incorrect). We show that (i) it is possible for the network to memorize the corrupted labels and achieve 100% generalization at the same time; (ii) the memorizing neurons can be identified and pruned, lowering the accuracy on corrupted data and improving the accuracy on uncorrupted data; (iii) regularization methods such as weight decay, dropout and BatchNorm force the network to ignore the corrupted data during optimization, and achieve 100% accuracy on the uncorrupted dataset; and (iv) the effect of these regularization methods is (``mechanistically'') interpretable: weight decay and dropout force all the neurons to learn generalizing representations, while BatchNorm de-amplifies the output of memorizing neurons and amplifies the output of the generalizing ones. Finally, we show that in the presence of regularization, the training dynamics involves two consecutive stages: first, the network undergoes grokking dynamics reaching high train and test accuracy; second, it unlearns the memorizing representations, where the train accuracy suddenly jumps from 100% to 100 (1-xi)%.

Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI

This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.

Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs learn to generate near-random predictions for individual examples in the "training'' set used for forgetting. Across tasks, however, LMs exhibit extreme variability in whether LM predictions change on examples outside the training set. In some tasks (like entailment classification), forgetting generalizes robustly, and causes models to produce uninformative predictions on new task instances; in other tasks (like physical commonsense reasoning and scientific question answering) forgetting affects only the training examples, and models continue to perform the "forgotten'' task accurately even for examples very similar to those that appeared in the training set. Dataset difficulty is not predictive of whether a behavior can be forgotten; instead, generalization in forgetting is (weakly) predicted by the confidence of LMs' initial task predictions and the variability of LM representations of training data, with low confidence and low variability both associated with greater generalization. Perhaps most surprisingly, random-label forgetting appears to be somewhat insensitive to the contents of the training set: for example, models trained on science questions with random labels continue to answer other science questions accurately, but begin to produce random labels on entailment classification tasks. Finally, we show that even generalizable forgetting is shallow: linear probes trained on LMs' representations can still perform tasks reliably after forgetting. Our results highlight the difficulty and unpredictability of performing targeted skill removal from models via fine-tuning.

Aligning Teacher with Student Preferences for Tailored Training Data Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise as copilots in various tasks. Local deployment of LLMs on edge devices is necessary when handling privacy-sensitive data or latency-sensitive tasks. The computational constraints of such devices make direct deployment of powerful large-scale LLMs impractical, necessitating the Knowledge Distillation from large-scale models to lightweight models. Lots of work has been done to elicit diversity and quality training examples from LLMs, but little attention has been paid to aligning teacher instructional content based on student preferences, akin to "responsive teaching" in pedagogy. Thus, we propose ARTE, dubbed Aligning TeacheR with StudenT PreferencEs, a framework that aligns the teacher model with student preferences to generate tailored training examples for Knowledge Distillation. Specifically, we elicit draft questions and rationales from the teacher model, then collect student preferences on these questions and rationales using students' performance with in-context learning as a proxy, and finally align the teacher model with student preferences. In the end, we repeat the first step with the aligned teacher model to elicit tailored training examples for the student model on the target task. Extensive experiments on academic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ARTE over existing instruction-tuning datasets distilled from powerful LLMs. Moreover, we thoroughly investigate the generalization of ARTE, including the generalization of fine-tuned student models in reasoning ability and the generalization of aligned teacher models to generate tailored training data across tasks and students. In summary, our contributions lie in proposing a novel framework for tailored training example generation, demonstrating its efficacy in experiments, and investigating the generalization of both student & aligned teacher models in ARTE.

Are Hard Examples also Harder to Explain? A Study with Human and Model-Generated Explanations

Recent work on explainable NLP has shown that few-shot prompting can enable large pretrained language models (LLMs) to generate grammatical and factual natural language explanations for data labels. In this work, we study the connection between explainability and sample hardness by investigating the following research question - "Are LLMs and humans equally good at explaining data labels for both easy and hard samples?" We answer this question by first collecting human-written explanations in the form of generalizable commonsense rules on the task of Winograd Schema Challenge (Winogrande dataset). We compare these explanations with those generated by GPT-3 while varying the hardness of the test samples as well as the in-context samples. We observe that (1) GPT-3 explanations are as grammatical as human explanations regardless of the hardness of the test samples, (2) for easy examples, GPT-3 generates highly supportive explanations but human explanations are more generalizable, and (3) for hard examples, human explanations are significantly better than GPT-3 explanations both in terms of label-supportiveness and generalizability judgements. We also find that hardness of the in-context examples impacts the quality of GPT-3 explanations. Finally, we show that the supportiveness and generalizability aspects of human explanations are also impacted by sample hardness, although by a much smaller margin than models. Supporting code and data are available at https://github.com/swarnaHub/ExplanationHardness

Grokking Tickets: Lottery Tickets Accelerate Grokking

Grokking is one of the most surprising puzzles in neural network generalization: a network first reaches a memorization solution with perfect training accuracy and poor generalization, but with further training, it reaches a perfectly generalized solution. We aim to analyze the mechanism of grokking from the lottery ticket hypothesis, identifying the process to find the lottery tickets (good sparse subnetworks) as the key to describing the transitional phase between memorization and generalization. We refer to these subnetworks as ''Grokking tickets'', which is identified via magnitude pruning after perfect generalization. First, using ''Grokking tickets'', we show that the lottery tickets drastically accelerate grokking compared to the dense networks on various configurations (MLP and Transformer, and an arithmetic and image classification tasks). Additionally, to verify that ''Grokking ticket'' are a more critical factor than weight norms, we compared the ''good'' subnetworks with a dense network having the same L1 and L2 norms. Results show that the subnetworks generalize faster than the controlled dense model. In further investigations, we discovered that at an appropriate pruning rate, grokking can be achieved even without weight decay. We also show that speedup does not happen when using tickets identified at the memorization solution or transition between memorization and generalization or when pruning networks at the initialization (Random pruning, Grasp, SNIP, and Synflow). The results indicate that the weight norm of network parameters is not enough to explain the process of grokking, but the importance of finding good subnetworks to describe the transition from memorization to generalization. The implementation code can be accessed via this link: https://github.com/gouki510/Grokking-Tickets.

G-ACIL: Analytic Learning for Exemplar-Free Generalized Class Incremental Learning

Class incremental learning (CIL) trains a network on sequential tasks with separated categories but suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where models quickly lose previously learned knowledge when acquiring new tasks. The generalized CIL (GCIL) aims to address the CIL problem in a more real-world scenario, where incoming data have mixed data categories and unknown sample size distribution, leading to intensified forgetting. Existing attempts for the GCIL either have poor performance, or invade data privacy by saving historical exemplars. To address this, in this paper, we propose an exemplar-free generalized analytic class incremental learning (G-ACIL). The G-ACIL adopts analytic learning (a gradient-free training technique), and delivers an analytical solution (i.e., closed-form) to the GCIL scenario. This solution is derived via decomposing the incoming data into exposed and unexposed classes, allowing an equivalence between the incremental learning and its joint training, i.e., the weight-invariant property. Such an equivalence is theoretically validated through matrix analysis tools, and hence contributes interpretability in GCIL. It is also empirically evidenced by experiments on various datasets and settings of GCIL. The results show that the G-ACIL exhibits leading performance with high robustness compared with existing competitive GCIL methods. Codes will be ready at https://github.com/ZHUANGHP/Analytic-continual-learning.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of GPT-4V on Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Linguistic Collapse: Neural Collapse in (Large) Language Models

Neural collapse (NC) is a phenomenon observed in classification tasks where top-layer representations collapse into their class means, which become equinorm, equiangular and aligned with the classifiers. These behaviors -- associated with generalization and robustness -- would manifest under specific conditions: models are trained towards zero loss, with noise-free labels belonging to balanced classes, which do not outnumber the model's hidden dimension. Recent studies have explored NC in the absence of one or more of these conditions to extend and capitalize on the associated benefits of ideal geometries. Language modeling presents a curious frontier, as training by token prediction constitutes a classification task where none of the conditions exist: the vocabulary is imbalanced and exceeds the embedding dimension; different tokens might correspond to similar contextual embeddings; and large language models (LLMs) in particular are typically only trained for a few epochs. This paper empirically investigates the impact of scaling the architectures and training of causal language models (CLMs) on their progression towards NC. We find that NC properties that develop with scaling are linked to generalization. Moreover, there is evidence of some relationship between NC and generalization independent of scale. Our work therefore underscores the generality of NC as it extends to the novel and more challenging setting of language modeling. Downstream, we seek to inspire further research on the phenomenon to deepen our understanding of LLMs -- and neural networks at large -- and improve existing architectures based on NC-related properties.

AdaNPC: Exploring Non-Parametric Classifier for Test-Time Adaptation

Many recent machine learning tasks focus to develop models that can generalize to unseen distributions. Domain generalization (DG) has become one of the key topics in various fields. Several literatures show that DG can be arbitrarily hard without exploiting target domain information. To address this issue, test-time adaptive (TTA) methods are proposed. Existing TTA methods require offline target data or extra sophisticated optimization procedures during the inference stage. In this work, we adopt Non-Parametric Classifier to perform the test-time Adaptation (AdaNPC). In particular, we construct a memory that contains the feature and label pairs from training domains. During inference, given a test instance, AdaNPC first recalls K closed samples from the memory to vote for the prediction, and then the test feature and predicted label are added to the memory. In this way, the sample distribution in the memory can be gradually changed from the training distribution towards the test distribution with very little extra computation cost. We theoretically justify the rationality behind the proposed method. Besides, we test our model on extensive numerical experiments. AdaNPC significantly outperforms competitive baselines on various DG benchmarks. In particular, when the adaptation target is a series of domains, the adaptation accuracy of AdaNPC is 50% higher than advanced TTA methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yfzhang114/AdaNPC.

Multi-task Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks Enable Stronger Task Generalization

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for graph neural networks (GNNs) has attracted increasing attention from the graph machine learning community in recent years, owing to its capability to learn performant node embeddings without costly label information. One weakness of conventional SSL frameworks for GNNs is that they learn through a single philosophy, such as mutual information maximization or generative reconstruction. When applied to various downstream tasks, these frameworks rarely perform equally well for every task, because one philosophy may not span the extensive knowledge required for all tasks. To enhance the task generalization across tasks, as an important first step forward in exploring fundamental graph models, we introduce PARETOGNN, a multi-task SSL framework for node representation learning over graphs. Specifically, PARETOGNN is self-supervised by manifold pretext tasks observing multiple philosophies. To reconcile different philosophies, we explore a multiple-gradient descent algorithm, such that PARETOGNN actively learns from every pretext task while minimizing potential conflicts. We conduct comprehensive experiments over four downstream tasks (i.e., node classification, node clustering, link prediction, and partition prediction), and our proposal achieves the best overall performance across tasks on 11 widely adopted benchmark datasets. Besides, we observe that learning from multiple philosophies enhances not only the task generalization but also the single task performances, demonstrating that PARETOGNN achieves better task generalization via the disjoint yet complementary knowledge learned from different philosophies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jumxglhf/ParetoGNN.

Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.

Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions?

Despite significant achievements in improving the instruction-following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. Real-world scenarios often require consistency across multiple instructions over time, such as secret privacy, personal preferences, and prioritization, which demand sophisticated abilities to integrate multiple turns and carefully balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. This work presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' capabilities in handling multiple turns of instructions, covering three levels of difficulty: (1) retrieving information from instructions, (2) tracking and reasoning across turns, and (3) resolving conflicts among instructions. We construct MultiTurnInstruct with around 1.1K high-quality multi-turn conversations through the human-in-the-loop approach and result in nine capability categories, including statics and dynamics, reasoning, and multitasking. Our finding reveals an intriguing trade-off between different capabilities. While GPT models demonstrate superior memorization, they show reduced effectiveness in privacy-protection tasks requiring selective information withholding. Larger models exhibit stronger reasoning capabilities but still struggle with resolving conflicting instructions. Importantly, these performance gaps cannot be attributed solely to information loss, as models demonstrate strong BLEU scores on memorization tasks but their attention mechanisms fail to integrate multiple related instructions effectively. These findings highlight critical areas for improvement in complex real-world tasks involving multi-turn instructions.

How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective

OpenAI's Sora highlights the potential of video generation for developing world models that adhere to fundamental physical laws. However, the ability of video generation models to discover such laws purely from visual data without human priors can be questioned. A world model learning the true law should give predictions robust to nuances and correctly extrapolate on unseen scenarios. In this work, we evaluate across three key scenarios: in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and combinatorial generalization. We developed a 2D simulation testbed for object movement and collisions to generate videos deterministically governed by one or more classical mechanics laws. This provides an unlimited supply of data for large-scale experimentation and enables quantitative evaluation of whether the generated videos adhere to physical laws. We trained diffusion-based video generation models to predict object movements based on initial frames. Our scaling experiments show perfect generalization within the distribution, measurable scaling behavior for combinatorial generalization, but failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Further experiments reveal two key insights about the generalization mechanisms of these models: (1) the models fail to abstract general physical rules and instead exhibit "case-based" generalization behavior, i.e., mimicking the closest training example; (2) when generalizing to new cases, models are observed to prioritize different factors when referencing training data: color > size > velocity > shape. Our study suggests that scaling alone is insufficient for video generation models to uncover fundamental physical laws, despite its role in Sora's broader success. See our project page at https://phyworld.github.io

I2D2: Inductive Knowledge Distillation with NeuroLogic and Self-Imitation

Pre-trained language models, despite their rapid advancements powered by scale, still fall short of robust commonsense capabilities. And yet, scale appears to be the winning recipe; after all, the largest models seem to have acquired the largest amount of commonsense capabilities. Or is it? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a seemingly impossible match: can smaller language models with dismal commonsense capabilities (i.e., GPT-2), ever win over models that are orders of magnitude larger and better (i.e., GPT-3), if the smaller models are powered with novel commonsense distillation algorithms? The key intellectual question we ask here is whether it is possible, if at all, to design a learning algorithm that does not benefit from scale, yet leads to a competitive level of commonsense acquisition. In this work, we study the generative models of commonsense knowledge, focusing on the task of generating generics, statements of commonsense facts about everyday concepts, e.g., birds can fly. We introduce a novel commonsense distillation framework, I2D2, that loosely follows the Symbolic Knowledge Distillation of West et al. but breaks the dependence on the extreme-scale models as the teacher model by two innovations: (1) the novel adaptation of NeuroLogic Decoding to enhance the generation quality of the weak, off-the-shelf language models, and (2) self-imitation learning to iteratively learn from the model's own enhanced commonsense acquisition capabilities. Empirical results suggest that scale is not the only way, as novel algorithms can be a promising alternative. Moreover, our study leads to a new corpus of generics, Gen-A-Tomic, that is of the largest and highest quality available to date.

How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameter amounts emerge abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The open-source community has studied on ad-hoc SFT for each ability, while proprietary LLMs are versatile for all abilities. It is important to investigate how to unlock them with multiple abilities via SFT. In this study, we specifically focus on the data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. From a scaling perspective, we investigate the relationship between model abilities and various factors including data amounts, data composition ratio, model parameters, and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that different abilities exhibit different scaling patterns, and larger models generally show superior performance with the same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation improve as data amounts increase consistently, while the general ability is enhanced with about a thousand samples and improves slowly. We find data composition results in various abilities improvements with low data amounts, while conflicts of abilities with high data amounts. Our experiments further show that composition data amount impacts performance, while the influence of composition ratio is insignificant. Regarding the SFT strategies, we evaluate sequential learning multiple abilities are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy learns specialized abilities first and then learns general abilities with a small amount of specialized data to prevent forgetting, offering a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

Unraveling the Key Components of OOD Generalization via Diversification

Supervised learning datasets may contain multiple cues that explain the training set equally well, i.e., learning any of them would lead to the correct predictions on the training data. However, many of them can be spurious, i.e., lose their predictive power under a distribution shift and consequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently developed "diversification" methods (Lee et al., 2023; Pagliardini et al., 2023) approach this problem by finding multiple diverse hypotheses that rely on different features. This paper aims to study this class of methods and identify the key components contributing to their OOD generalization abilities. We show that (1) diversification methods are highly sensitive to the distribution of the unlabeled data used for diversification and can underperform significantly when away from a method-specific sweet spot. (2) Diversification alone is insufficient for OOD generalization. The choice of the used learning algorithm, e.g., the model's architecture and pretraining, is crucial. In standard experiments (classification on Waterbirds and Office-Home datasets), using the second-best choice leads to an up to 20\% absolute drop in accuracy. (3) The optimal choice of learning algorithm depends on the unlabeled data and vice versa i.e. they are co-dependent. (4) Finally, we show that, in practice, the above pitfalls cannot be alleviated by increasing the number of diverse hypotheses, the major feature of diversification methods. These findings provide a clearer understanding of the critical design factors influencing the OOD generalization abilities of diversification methods. They can guide practitioners in how to use the existing methods best and guide researchers in developing new, better ones.

LEVI: Generalizable Fine-tuning via Layer-wise Ensemble of Different Views

Fine-tuning is becoming widely used for leveraging the power of pre-trained foundation models in new downstream tasks. While there are many successes of fine-tuning on various tasks, recent studies have observed challenges in the generalization of fine-tuned models to unseen distributions (i.e., out-of-distribution; OOD). To improve OOD generalization, some previous studies identify the limitations of fine-tuning data and regulate fine-tuning to preserve the general representation learned from pre-training data. However, potential limitations in the pre-training data and models are often ignored. In this paper, we contend that overly relying on the pre-trained representation may hinder fine-tuning from learning essential representations for downstream tasks and thus hurt its OOD generalization. It can be especially catastrophic when new tasks are from different (sub)domains compared to pre-training data. To address the issues in both pre-training and fine-tuning data, we propose a novel generalizable fine-tuning method LEVI (Layer-wise Ensemble of different VIews), where the pre-trained model is adaptively ensembled layer-wise with a small task-specific model, while preserving its efficiencies. By combining two complementing models, LEVI effectively suppresses problematic features in both the fine-tuning data and pre-trained model and preserves useful features for new tasks. Broad experiments with large language and vision models show that LEVI greatly improves fine-tuning generalization via emphasizing different views from fine-tuning data and pre-trained features.

RS-GPT4V: A Unified Multimodal Instruction-Following Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding

The remote sensing image intelligence understanding model is undergoing a new profound paradigm shift which has been promoted by multi-modal large language model (MLLM), i.e. from the paradigm learning a domain model (LaDM) shifts to paradigm learning a pre-trained general foundation model followed by an adaptive domain model (LaGD). Under the new LaGD paradigm, the old datasets, which have led to advances in RSI intelligence understanding in the last decade, are no longer suitable for fire-new tasks. We argued that a new dataset must be designed to lighten tasks with the following features: 1) Generalization: training model to learn shared knowledge among tasks and to adapt to different tasks; 2) Understanding complex scenes: training model to understand the fine-grained attribute of the objects of interest, and to be able to describe the scene with natural language; 3) Reasoning: training model to be able to realize high-level visual reasoning. In this paper, we designed a high-quality, diversified, and unified multimodal instruction-following dataset for RSI understanding produced by GPT-4V and existing datasets, which we called RS-GPT4V. To achieve generalization, we used a (Question, Answer) which was deduced from GPT-4V via instruction-following to unify the tasks such as captioning and localization; To achieve complex scene, we proposed a hierarchical instruction description with local strategy in which the fine-grained attributes of the objects and their spatial relationships are described and global strategy in which all the local information are integrated to yield detailed instruction descript; To achieve reasoning, we designed multiple-turn QA pair to provide the reasoning ability for a model. The empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLMs by RS-GPT4V can describe fine-grained information. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/RS-GPT4V.

LeanAgent: Lifelong Learning for Formal Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been successful in mathematical reasoning tasks such as formal theorem proving when integrated with interactive proof assistants like Lean. Existing approaches involve training or fine-tuning an LLM on a specific dataset to perform well on particular domains, such as undergraduate-level mathematics. These methods struggle with generalizability to advanced mathematics. A fundamental limitation is that these approaches operate on static domains, failing to capture how mathematicians often work across multiple domains and projects simultaneously or cyclically. We present LeanAgent, a novel lifelong learning framework for theorem proving that continuously generalizes to and improves on ever-expanding mathematical knowledge without forgetting previously learned knowledge. LeanAgent introduces several key innovations, including a curriculum learning strategy that optimizes the learning trajectory in terms of mathematical difficulty, a dynamic database for efficient management of evolving mathematical knowledge, and progressive training to balance stability and plasticity. LeanAgent successfully proves 162 theorems previously unproved by humans across 23 diverse Lean repositories, many from advanced mathematics. It performs up to 11times better than the static LLM baseline, proving challenging theorems in domains like abstract algebra and algebraic topology while showcasing a clear progression of learning from basic concepts to advanced topics. In addition, we analyze LeanAgent's superior performance on key lifelong learning metrics. LeanAgent achieves exceptional scores in stability and backward transfer, where learning new tasks improves performance on previously learned tasks. This emphasizes LeanAgent's continuous generalizability and improvement, explaining its superior theorem proving performance.

Fantastic Generalization Measures are Nowhere to be Found

We study the notion of a generalization bound being uniformly tight, meaning that the difference between the bound and the population loss is small for all learning algorithms and all population distributions. Numerous generalization bounds have been proposed in the literature as potential explanations for the ability of neural networks to generalize in the overparameterized setting. However, in their paper ``Fantastic Generalization Measures and Where to Find Them,'' Jiang et al. (2020) examine more than a dozen generalization bounds, and show empirically that none of them are uniformly tight. This raises the question of whether uniformly-tight generalization bounds are at all possible in the overparameterized setting. We consider two types of generalization bounds: (1) bounds that may depend on the training set and the learned hypothesis (e.g., margin bounds). We prove mathematically that no such bound can be uniformly tight in the overparameterized setting; (2) bounds that may in addition also depend on the learning algorithm (e.g., stability bounds). For these bounds, we show a trade-off between the algorithm's performance and the bound's tightness. Namely, if the algorithm achieves good accuracy on certain distributions, then no generalization bound can be uniformly tight for it in the overparameterized setting. We explain how these formal results can, in our view, inform research on generalization bounds for neural networks, while stressing that other interpretations of these results are also possible.

Generalization in Healthcare AI: Evaluation of a Clinical Large Language Model

Advances in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities in healthcare for improved patient care, clinical decision-making, and enhancement of physician and administrator workflows. However, the potential of these models importantly depends on their ability to generalize effectively across clinical environments and populations, a challenge often underestimated in early development. To better understand reasons for these challenges and inform mitigation approaches, we evaluated ClinicLLM, an LLM trained on [HOSPITAL]'s clinical notes, analyzing its performance on 30-day all-cause readmission prediction focusing on variability across hospitals and patient characteristics. We found poorer generalization particularly in hospitals with fewer samples, among patients with government and unspecified insurance, the elderly, and those with high comorbidities. To understand reasons for lack of generalization, we investigated sample sizes for fine-tuning, note content (number of words per note), patient characteristics (comorbidity level, age, insurance type, borough), and health system aspects (hospital, all-cause 30-day readmission, and mortality rates). We used descriptive statistics and supervised classification to identify features. We found that, along with sample size, patient age, number of comorbidities, and the number of words in notes are all important factors related to generalization. Finally, we compared local fine-tuning (hospital specific), instance-based augmented fine-tuning and cluster-based fine-tuning for improving generalization. Among these, local fine-tuning proved most effective, increasing AUC by 0.25% to 11.74% (most helpful in settings with limited data). Overall, this study provides new insights for enhancing the deployment of large language models in the societally important domain of healthcare, and improving their performance for broader populations.

CPL: Critical Plan Step Learning Boosts LLM Generalization in Reasoning Tasks

Post-training, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) using self-play-generated data, has become a new learning paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, scaling RL to develop a general reasoner remains a research challenge, as existing methods focus on task-specific reasoning without adequately addressing generalization across a broader range of tasks. Moreover, unlike traditional RL with limited action space, LLMs operate in an infinite space, making it crucial to search for valuable and diverse strategies to solve problems effectively. To address this, we propose searching within the action space on high-level abstract plans to enhance model generalization and introduce Critical Plan Step Learning (CPL), comprising: 1) searching on plan, using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore diverse plan steps in multi-step reasoning tasks, and 2) learning critical plan steps through Step-level Advantage Preference Optimization (Step-APO), which integrates advantage estimates for step preference obtained via MCTS into Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This combination helps the model effectively learn critical plan steps, enhancing both reasoning capabilities and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, trained exclusively on GSM8K and MATH, not only significantly improves performance on GSM8K (+10.5%) and MATH (+6.5%), but also enhances out-of-domain reasoning benchmarks, such as HumanEval (+12.2%), GPQA (+8.6%), ARC-C (+4.0%), MMLU-STEM (+2.2%), and BBH (+1.8%).

The Generative AI Paradox: "What It Can Create, It May Not Understand"

The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would challenge or exceed the capabilities even of expert humans. At the same time, models still show basic errors in understanding that would not be expected even in non-expert humans. This presents us with an apparent paradox: how do we reconcile seemingly superhuman capabilities with the persistence of errors that few humans would make? In this work, we posit that this tension reflects a divergence in the configuration of intelligence in today's generative models relative to intelligence in humans. Specifically, we propose and test the Generative AI Paradox hypothesis: generative models, having been trained directly to reproduce expert-like outputs, acquire generative capabilities that are not contingent upon -- and can therefore exceed -- their ability to understand those same types of outputs. This contrasts with humans, for whom basic understanding almost always precedes the ability to generate expert-level outputs. We test this hypothesis through controlled experiments analyzing generation vs. understanding in generative models, across both language and image modalities. Our results show that although models can outperform humans in generation, they consistently fall short of human capabilities in measures of understanding, as well as weaker correlation between generation and understanding performance, and more brittleness to adversarial inputs. Our findings support the hypothesis that models' generative capability may not be contingent upon understanding capability, and call for caution in interpreting artificial intelligence by analogy to human intelligence.

General-Purpose In-Context Learning by Meta-Learning Transformers

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock greater capabilities with less manual effort. One particularly ambitious goal of meta-learning is to train general-purpose in-context learning algorithms from scratch, using only black-box models with minimal inductive bias. Such a model takes in training data, and produces test-set predictions across a wide range of problems, without any explicit definition of an inference model, training loss, or optimization algorithm. In this paper we show that Transformers and other black-box models can be meta-trained to act as general-purpose in-context learners. We characterize transitions between algorithms that generalize, algorithms that memorize, and algorithms that fail to meta-train at all, induced by changes in model size, number of tasks, and meta-optimization. We further show that the capabilities of meta-trained algorithms are bottlenecked by the accessible state size (memory) determining the next prediction, unlike standard models which are thought to be bottlenecked by parameter count. Finally, we propose practical interventions such as biasing the training distribution that improve the meta-training and meta-generalization of general-purpose in-context learning algorithms.

What Matters for Model Merging at Scale?

Model merging aims to combine multiple expert models into a more capable single model, offering benefits such as reduced storage and serving costs, improved generalization, and support for decentralized model development. Despite its promise, previous studies have primarily focused on merging a few small models. This leaves many unanswered questions about the effect of scaling model size and how it interplays with other key factors -- like the base model quality and number of expert models -- , to affect the merged model's performance. This work systematically evaluates the utility of model merging at scale, examining the impact of these different factors. We experiment with merging fully fine-tuned models using 4 popular merging methods -- Averaging, Task~Arithmetic, Dare, and TIES -- across model sizes ranging from 1B-64B parameters and merging up to 8 different expert models. We evaluate the merged models on both held-in tasks, i.e., the expert's training tasks, and zero-shot generalization to unseen held-out tasks. Our experiments provide several new insights about model merging at scale and the interplay between different factors. First, we find that merging is more effective when experts are created from strong base models, i.e., models with good zero-shot performance. Second, larger models facilitate easier merging. Third merging consistently improves generalization capabilities. Notably, when merging 8 large expert models, the merged models often generalize better compared to the multitask trained models. Fourth, we can better merge more expert models when working with larger models. Fifth, different merging methods behave very similarly at larger scales. Overall, our findings shed light on some interesting properties of model merging while also highlighting some limitations. We hope that this study will serve as a reference point on large-scale merging for upcoming research.

Learning to Route Among Specialized Experts for Zero-Shot Generalization

Recently, there has been a widespread proliferation of "expert" language models that are specialized to a specific task or domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. How can we recycle large collections of expert language models to improve zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks? In this work, we propose Post-Hoc Adaptive Tokenwise Gating Over an Ocean of Specialized Experts (PHATGOOSE), which learns to route among specialized modules that were produced through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Unlike past methods that learn to route among specialized models, PHATGOOSE explores the possibility that zero-shot generalization will be improved if different experts can be adaptively chosen for each token and at each layer in the model. Crucially, our method is post-hoc - it does not require simultaneous access to the datasets used to create the specialized models and only requires a modest amount of additional compute after each expert model is trained. In experiments covering a range of specialized model collections and zero-shot generalization benchmarks, we find that PHATGOOSE outperforms past methods for post-hoc routing and, in some cases, outperforms explicit multitask training (which requires simultaneous data access). To better understand the routing strategy learned by PHATGOOSE, we perform qualitative experiments to validate that PHATGOOSE's performance stems from its ability to make adaptive per-token and per-module expert choices. We release all of our code to support future work on improving zero-shot generalization by recycling specialized experts.

Provable General Function Class Representation Learning in Multitask Bandits and MDPs

While multitask representation learning has become a popular approach in reinforcement learning (RL) to boost the sample efficiency, the theoretical understanding of why and how it works is still limited. Most previous analytical works could only assume that the representation function is already known to the agent or from linear function class, since analyzing general function class representation encounters non-trivial technical obstacles such as generalization guarantee, formulation of confidence bound in abstract function space, etc. However, linear-case analysis heavily relies on the particularity of linear function class, while real-world practice usually adopts general non-linear representation functions like neural networks. This significantly reduces its applicability. In this work, we extend the analysis to general function class representations. Specifically, we consider an agent playing M contextual bandits (or MDPs) concurrently and extracting a shared representation function phi from a specific function class Phi using our proposed Generalized Functional Upper Confidence Bound algorithm (GFUCB). We theoretically validate the benefit of multitask representation learning within general function class for bandits and linear MDP for the first time. Lastly, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with neural net representation.

Large language models for artificial general intelligence (AGI): A survey of foundational principles and approaches

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.

Online GNN Evaluation Under Test-time Graph Distribution Shifts

Evaluating the performance of a well-trained GNN model on real-world graphs is a pivotal step for reliable GNN online deployment and serving. Due to a lack of test node labels and unknown potential training-test graph data distribution shifts, conventional model evaluation encounters limitations in calculating performance metrics (e.g., test error) and measuring graph data-level discrepancies, particularly when the training graph used for developing GNNs remains unobserved during test time. In this paper, we study a new research problem, online GNN evaluation, which aims to provide valuable insights into the well-trained GNNs's ability to effectively generalize to real-world unlabeled graphs under the test-time graph distribution shifts. Concretely, we develop an effective learning behavior discrepancy score, dubbed LeBeD, to estimate the test-time generalization errors of well-trained GNN models. Through a novel GNN re-training strategy with a parameter-free optimality criterion, the proposed LeBeD comprehensively integrates learning behavior discrepancies from both node prediction and structure reconstruction perspectives. This enables the effective evaluation of the well-trained GNNs' ability to capture test node semantics and structural representations, making it an expressive metric for estimating the generalization error in online GNN evaluation. Extensive experiments on real-world test graphs under diverse graph distribution shifts could verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, revealing its strong correlation with ground-truth test errors on various well-trained GNN models.

Revisiting Graph Neural Networks on Graph-level Tasks: Comprehensive Experiments, Analysis, and Improvements

Graphs are essential data structures for modeling complex interactions in domains such as social networks, molecular structures, and biological systems. Graph-level tasks, which predict properties or classes for the entire graph, are critical for applications, such as molecular property prediction and subgraph counting. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in these tasks, but their evaluations are often limited to narrow datasets, tasks, and inconsistent experimental setups, restricting their generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified evaluation framework for graph-level GNNs. This framework provides a standardized setting to evaluate GNNs across diverse datasets, various graph tasks (e.g., graph classification and regression), and challenging scenarios, including noisy, imbalanced, and few-shot graphs. Additionally, we propose a novel GNN model with enhanced expressivity and generalization capabilities. Specifically, we enhance the expressivity of GNNs through a k-path rooted subgraph approach, enabling the model to effectively count subgraphs (e.g., paths and cycles). Moreover, we introduce a unified graph contrastive learning algorithm for graphs across diverse domains, which adaptively removes unimportant edges to augment graphs, thereby significantly improving generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance against fourteen effective baselines across twenty-seven graph datasets, establishing it as a robust and generalizable model for graph-level tasks.

GeniL: A Multilingual Dataset on Generalizing Language

LLMs are increasingly transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases learned from their training data, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.

LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RL

Enhancing reasoning in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) faces unique challenges from the complex interplay between visual perception and logical reasoning, particularly in compact 3B-parameter architectures where architectural constraints limit reasoning capacity and modality alignment. While rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) excels in text-only domains, its multimodal extension confronts two critical barriers: (1) data limitations due to ambiguous answers and scarce complex reasoning examples, and (2) degraded foundational reasoning induced by multimodal pretraining. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a two-stage framework adapting rule-based RL for multimodal reasoning through Foundational Reasoning Enhancement (FRE) followed by Multimodal Generalization Training (MGT). The FRE stage first strengthens reasoning abilities using text-only data with rule-based RL, then the MGT stage generalizes these reasoning capabilities to multimodal domains. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct-3B demonstrate that \method achieves 4.83\% and 4.5\% average improvements over baselines in multimodal and text-only benchmarks, respectively, with a 3.63\% gain in complex Football Game tasks. These results validate that text-based reasoning enhancement enables effective multimodal generalization, offering a data-efficient paradigm that bypasses costly high-quality multimodal training data.

MIR-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Long-Context Intelligence via Many-Shot In-Context Inductive Reasoning

Inductive Reasoning (IR), the ability to summarize rules from examples and apply on new ones, has long been viewed as a primal ability for general intelligence and widely studied by cognitive science and AI researchers. Many benchmarks have been proposed to measure such ability for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, they focus on few-shot (usually <10) setting and lack evaluation for aggregating many pieces of information from long contexts. On the other hand, the ever-growing context length of LLMs have brought forth the novel paradigm of many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), which addresses new tasks with hundreds to thousands of examples without expensive and inefficient fine-tuning. However, many-shot evaluations are mostly focused on classification (a very limited aspect of IR), and popular long-context LLM tasks such as Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) seldom require complicated intelligence for integrating many pieces of information. To fix the issues from both worlds, we propose MIR-Bench, the first many-shot in-context inductive reasoning benchmark that asks LLM to induce output via input-output examples from underlying functions with diverse data format. Based on MIR-Bench, we study many novel problems for inductive reasoning and many-shot ICL, including robustness against erroneous shots and the effect of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and acquired insightful findings.

Only-IF:Revealing the Decisive Effect of Instruction Diversity on Generalization

Understanding and accurately following instructions is critical for large language models (LLMs) to be effective across diverse tasks. In this work, we rigorously examine the key factors that enable models to generalize to unseen instructions, providing insights to guide the collection of data for instruction-tuning. Through controlled experiments, inspired by the Turing-complete Markov algorithm, we demonstrate that such generalization only emerges when training data is diversified enough across semantic domains. Our findings also reveal that merely diversifying within limited domains fails to ensure robust generalization. In contrast, cross-domain data diversification, even under constrained data budgets, significantly enhances a model's adaptability. We further extend our analysis to real-world scenarios, including fine-tuning of $textbf{specialist} and textbf{generalist}$ models. In both cases, we demonstrate that 1) better performance can be achieved by increasing the diversity of an established dataset while keeping the data size constant, and 2) when scaling up the data, diversifying the semantics of instructions is more effective than simply increasing the quantity of similar data. Our research provides important insights for dataset collation, particularly when optimizing model performance by expanding training data for both specialist and generalist scenarios. We show that careful consideration of data diversification is key: training specialist models with data extending beyond their core domain leads to significant performance improvements, while generalist models benefit from diverse data mixtures that enhance their overall instruction-following capabilities across a wide range of applications. Our results highlight the critical role of strategic diversification and offer clear guidelines for improving data quality.

Self-Specialization: Uncovering Latent Expertise within Large Language Models

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-alignment in which a large language model is, by itself, aligned to follow general instructions through the automatic generation of instructional data using a handful of human-written seeds. Instead of general alignment, in this work, we focus on self-alignment for expert domain specialization (e.g., biomedicine), discovering it to be very effective for improving zero-shot and few-shot performance in target domains of interest. As a preliminary, we first present the benchmark results of existing aligned models within a specialized domain, which reveals the marginal effect that "generic" instruction-following training has on downstream expert domains' performance. To remedy this, we explore self-specialization that leverages domain-specific unlabelled data and a few labeled seeds for the self-alignment process. When augmented with retrieval to reduce hallucination and enhance concurrency of the alignment, self-specialization offers an effective (and efficient) way of "carving out" an expert model out of a "generalist", pre-trained LLM where different domains of expertise are originally combined in a form of "superposition". Our experimental results on a biomedical domain show that our self-specialized model (30B) outperforms its base model, MPT-30B by a large margin and even surpasses larger popular models based on LLaMA-65B, highlighting its potential and practicality for specialization, especially considering its efficiency in terms of data and parameters.