NavigateDiff: Visual Predictors are Zero-Shot Navigation Assistants

Navigating unfamiliar environments presents significant challenges for household robots, requiring the ability to recognize and reason about novel decoration and layout. Existing reinforcement learning methods cannot be directly transferred to new environments, as they typically rely on extensive mapping and exploration, leading to time-consuming and inefficient. To address these challenges, we try to transfer the logical knowledge and the generalization ability of pre-trained foundation models to zero-shot navigation. By integrating a large vision-language model with a diffusion network, our approach named \mname ~constructs a visual predictor that continuously predicts the agent's potential observations in the next step which can assist robots generate robust actions. Furthermore, to adapt the temporal property of navigation, we introduce temporal historical information to ensure that the predicted image is aligned with the navigation scene. We then carefully designed an information fusion framework that embeds the predicted future frames as guidance into goal-reaching policy to solve downstream image navigation tasks. This approach enhances navigation control and generalization across both simulated and real-world environments. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the robustness and versatility of our method, showcasing its potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of robotic navigation in diverse settings.

Soundwave: Less is More for Speech-Text Alignment in LLMs

Existing end-to-end speech large language models (LLMs) usually rely on large-scale annotated data for training, while data-efficient training has not been discussed in depth. We focus on two fundamental problems between speech and text: the representation space gap and sequence length inconsistency. We propose Soundwave, which utilizes an efficient training strategy and a novel architecture to address these issues. Results show that Soundwave outperforms the advanced Qwen2-Audio in speech translation and AIR-Bench speech tasks, using only one-fiftieth of the training data. Further analysis shows that Soundwave still retains its intelligence during conversation. The project is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Soundwave.

Towards Understanding Fine-Tuning Mechanisms of LLMs via Circuit Analysis

Fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper aims to provide an in-depth interpretation of the fine-tuning process through circuit analysis, a popular tool in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI). Unlike previous studies \cite{prakash2024finetuningenhancesexistingmechanisms,chhabra2024neuroplasticity} that focus on tasks where pre-trained models already perform well, we develop a set of mathematical tasks where fine-tuning yields substantial performance gains, which are closer to the practical setting. In our experiments, we identify circuits at various checkpoints during fine-tuning and examine the interplay between circuit analysis, fine-tuning methods, and task complexities. First, we find that while circuits maintain high node similarity before and after fine-tuning, their edges undergo significant changes, which is in contrast to the previous work \cite{prakash2024finetuningenhancesexistingmechanisms,chhabra2024neuroplasticity} that show circuits only add some additional components after fine-tuning. Based on these observations, we develop a circuit-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, which assigns ranks to layers based on edge changes in the circuits. Experimental results demonstrate that our circuit-based LoRA algorithm achieves an average performance improvement of 2.46\% over standard LoRA with similar parameter sizes. Furthermore, we explore how combining circuits from subtasks can enhance fine-tuning in compositional tasks, providing new insights into the design of such tasks and deepening the understanding of circuit dynamics and fine-tuning mechanisms.

Federated Linear Dueling Bandits

Contextual linear dueling bandits have recently garnered significant attention due to their widespread applications in important domains such as recommender systems and large language models. Classical dueling bandit algorithms are typically only applicable to a single agent. However, many applications of dueling bandits involve multiple agents who wish to collaborate for improved performance yet are unwilling to share their data. This motivates us to draw inspirations from federated learning, which involves multiple agents aiming to collaboratively train their neural networks via gradient descent (GD) without sharing their raw data. Previous works have developed federated linear bandit algorithms which rely on closed-form updates of the bandit parameters (e.g., the linear function parameter) to achieve collaboration. However, in linear dueling bandits, the linear function parameter lacks a closed-form expression and its estimation requires minimizing a loss function. This renders these previous methods inapplicable. In this work, we overcome this challenge through an innovative and principled combination of online gradient descent (for minimizing the loss function to estimate the linear function parameters) and federated learning, hence introducing the first federated linear dueling bandit algorithms. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we prove that our algorithms enjoy a sub-linear upper bound on its cumulative regret. We also use empirical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms and the practical benefit of collaboration.

RealCritic: Towards Effectiveness-Driven Evaluation of Language Model Critiques

Critiques are important for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling both self-improvement and constructive feedback for others by identifying flaws and suggesting improvements. However, evaluating the critique capabilities of LLMs presents a significant challenge due to the open-ended nature of the task. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark designed to assess the critique capabilities of LLMs. Unlike existing benchmarks, which typically function in an open-loop fashion, our approach employs a closed-loop methodology that evaluates the quality of corrections generated from critiques. Moreover, the benchmark incorporates features such as self-critique, cross-critique, and iterative critique, which are crucial for distinguishing the abilities of advanced reasoning models from more classical ones. We implement this benchmark using eight challenging reasoning tasks. We have several interesting findings. First, despite demonstrating comparable performance in direct chain-of-thought generation, classical LLMs significantly lag behind the advanced reasoning-based model o1-mini across all critique scenarios. Second, in self-critique and iterative critique settings, classical LLMs may even underperform relative to their baseline capabilities. We hope that this benchmark will serve as a valuable resource to guide future advancements. The code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/tangzhy/RealCritic}.

Enabling Scalable Oversight via Self-Evolving Critic

Despite their remarkable performance, the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a critical challenge in scalable oversight: providing effective feedback for tasks where human evaluation is difficult or where LLMs outperform humans. While there is growing interest in using LLMs for critique, current approaches still rely on human annotations or more powerful models, leaving the issue of enhancing critique capabilities without external supervision unresolved. We introduce SCRIT (Self-evolving CRITic), a framework that enables genuine self-evolution of critique abilities. Technically, SCRIT self-improves by training on synthetic data, generated by a contrastive-based self-critic that uses reference solutions for step-by-step critique, and a self-validation mechanism that ensures critique quality through correction outcomes. Implemented with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, one of the most powerful LLMs, SCRIT achieves up to a 10.3\% improvement on critique-correction and error identification benchmarks. Our analysis reveals that SCRIT's performance scales positively with data and model size, outperforms alternative approaches, and benefits critically from its self-validation component.

RAG-Instruct: Boosting LLMs with Diverse Retrieval-Augmented Instructions

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.

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.

HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs

The breakthrough of OpenAI o1 highlights the potential of enhancing reasoning to improve LLM. Yet, most research in reasoning has focused on mathematical tasks, leaving domains like medicine underexplored. The medical domain, though distinct from mathematics, also demands robust reasoning to provide reliable answers, given the high standards of healthcare. However, verifying medical reasoning is challenging, unlike those in mathematics. To address this, we propose verifiable medical problems with a medical verifier to check the correctness of model outputs. This verifiable nature enables advancements in medical reasoning through a two-stage approach: (1) using the verifier to guide the search for a complex reasoning trajectory for fine-tuning LLMs, (2) applying reinforcement learning (RL) with verifier-based rewards to enhance complex reasoning further. Finally, we introduce HuatuoGPT-o1, a medical LLM capable of complex reasoning, which outperforms general and medical-specific baselines using only 40K verifiable problems. Experiments show complex reasoning improves medical problem-solving and benefits more from RL. We hope our approach inspires advancements in reasoning across medical and other specialized domains.

BlenderLLM: Training Large Language Models for Computer-Aided Design with Self-improvement

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains an underexplored area, despite their remarkable advancements in other domains. In this paper, we present BlenderLLM, a novel framework for training LLMs specifically for CAD tasks leveraging a self-improvement methodology. To support this, we developed a bespoke training dataset, BlendNet, and introduced a comprehensive evaluation suite, CADBench. Our results reveal that existing models demonstrate significant limitations in generating accurate CAD scripts. However, through minimal instruction-based fine-tuning and iterative self-improvement, BlenderLLM significantly surpasses these models in both functionality and accuracy of CAD script generation. This research establishes a strong foundation for the application of LLMs in CAD while demonstrating the transformative potential of self-improving models in advancing CAD automation. We encourage further exploration and adoption of these methodologies to drive innovation in the field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/BlenderLLM