DLPO: Towards a Robust, Efficient, and Generalizable Prompt Optimization Framework from a Deep-Learning Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks, largely driven by well-designed prompts. However, crafting and selecting such prompts often requires considerable human effort, significantly limiting its scalability. To mitigate this, recent studies have explored automated prompt optimization as a promising solution. Despite these efforts, existing methods still face critical challenges in robustness, efficiency, and generalization. To systematically address these challenges, we first conduct an empirical analysis to identify the limitations of current reflection-based prompt optimization paradigm. Building on these insights, we propose 7 innovative approaches inspired by traditional deep learning paradigms for prompt optimization (DLPO), seamlessly integrating these concepts into text-based gradient optimization. Through these advancements, we progressively tackle the aforementioned challenges and validate our methods through extensive experimentation. We hope our study not only provides valuable guidance for future research but also offers a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and potential solutions in prompt optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/sfasfaffa/DLPO.

Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models

Recent advancements in reasoning with large language models (RLLMs), such as OpenAI-O1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated their impressive capabilities in complex domains like mathematics and coding. A central factor in their success lies in the application of long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) characteristics, which enhance reasoning abilities and enable the solution of intricate problems. However, despite these developments, a comprehensive survey on Long CoT is still lacking, limiting our understanding of its distinctions from traditional short chain-of-thought (Short CoT) and complicating ongoing debates on issues like "overthinking" and "test-time scaling." This survey seeks to fill this gap by offering a unified perspective on Long CoT. (1) We first distinguish Long CoT from Short CoT and introduce a novel taxonomy to categorize current reasoning paradigms. (2) Next, we explore the key characteristics of Long CoT: deep reasoning, extensive exploration, and feasible reflection, which enable models to handle more complex tasks and produce more efficient, coherent outcomes compared to the shallower Short CoT. (3) We then investigate key phenomena such as the emergence of Long CoT with these characteristics, including overthinking, and test-time scaling, offering insights into how these processes manifest in practice. (4) Finally, we identify significant research gaps and highlight promising future directions, including the integration of multi-modal reasoning, efficiency improvements, and enhanced knowledge frameworks. By providing a structured overview, this survey aims to inspire future research and further the development of logical reasoning in artificial intelligence.

ECM: A Unified Electronic Circuit Model for Explaining the Emergence of In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Model

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant successes across various applications, where the most noticeable is to a series of emerging capabilities, particularly in the areas of In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). To better understand and control model performance, many studies have begun investigating the underlying causes of these phenomena and their impact on task outcomes. However, existing explanatory frameworks predominantly focus on isolating and explaining ICL and CoT independently, leading to an incomplete understanding of their combined influence on model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Electronic Circuit Model (ECM), which provides a foundation for developing scalable, learnable policies and improving the management of AI-generated content. Specifically, ECM conceptualizes model behavior as an electronic circuit: ICL is represented as semantic magnetic field to providing an additional voltage following Faraday's Law, while CoT is modeled as series resistors to constrain the model output performance following Ohm's Law. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECM effectively predicts and explains LLM performance across a variety of prompting strategies. Furthermore, we apply ECM to advanced reasoning strategy optimization on a series of tasks, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving competitive performance that surpasses nearly 80% of top human competitors.

Flexible Active Safety Motion Control for Robotic Obstacle Avoidance: A CBF-Guided MPC Approach

A flexible active safety motion (FASM) control approach is proposed for the avoidance of dynamic obstacles and the reference tracking in robot manipulators. The distinctive feature of the proposed method lies in its utilization of control barrier functions (CBF) to design flexible CBF-guided safety criteria (CBFSC) with dynamically optimized decay rates, thereby offering flexibility and active safety for robot manipulators in dynamic environments. First, discrete-time CBFs are employed to formulate the novel flexible CBFSC with dynamic decay rates for robot manipulators. Following that, the model predictive control (MPC) philosophy is applied, integrating flexible CBFSC as safety constraints into the receding-horizon optimization problem. Significantly, the decay rates of the designed CBFSC are incorporated as decision variables in the optimization problem, facilitating the dynamic enhancement of flexibility during the obstacle avoidance process. In particular, a novel cost function that integrates a penalty term is designed to dynamically adjust the safety margins of the CBFSC. Finally, experiments are conducted in various scenarios using a Universal Robots 5 (UR5) manipulator to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Contrastive Learning for Local and Global Learning MRI Reconstruction

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important medical imaging modality, while it requires a long acquisition time. To reduce the acquisition time, various methods have been proposed. However, these methods failed to reconstruct images with a clear structure for two main reasons. Firstly, similar patches widely exist in MR images, while most previous deep learning-based methods ignore this property and only adopt CNN to learn local information. Secondly, the existing methods only use clear images to constrain the upper bound of the solution space, while the lower bound is not constrained, so that a better parameter of the network cannot be obtained. To address these problems, we propose a Contrastive Learning for Local and Global Learning MRI Reconstruction Network (CLGNet). Specifically, according to the Fourier theory, each value in the Fourier domain is calculated from all the values in Spatial domain. Therefore, we propose a Spatial and Fourier Layer (SFL) to simultaneously learn the local and global information in Spatial and Fourier domains. Moreover, compared with self-attention and transformer, the SFL has a stronger learning ability and can achieve better performance in less time. Based on the SFL, we design a Spatial and Fourier Residual block as the main component of our model. Meanwhile, to constrain the lower bound and upper bound of the solution space, we introduce contrastive learning, which can pull the result closer to the clear image and push the result further away from the undersampled image. Extensive experimental results on different datasets and acceleration rates demonstrate that the proposed CLGNet achieves new state-of-the-art results.