StepHint: Multi-level Stepwise Hints Enhance Reinforcement Learning to Reason

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for improving the complex reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, current RLVR methods face two significant challenges: the near-miss reward problem, where a small mistake can invalidate an otherwise correct reasoning process, greatly hindering training efficiency; and exploration stagnation, where models tend to focus on solutions within their ``comfort zone,'' lacking the motivation to explore potentially more effective alternatives. To address these challenges, we propose StepHint, a novel RLVR algorithm that utilizes multi-level stepwise hints to help models explore the solution space more effectively. StepHint generates valid reasoning chains from stronger models and partitions these chains into reasoning steps using our proposed adaptive partitioning method. The initial few steps are used as hints, and simultaneously, multiple-level hints (each comprising a different number of steps) are provided to the model. This approach directs the model's exploration toward a promising solution subspace while preserving its flexibility for independent exploration. By providing hints, StepHint mitigates the near-miss reward problem, thereby improving training efficiency. Additionally, the external reasoning pathways help the model develop better reasoning abilities, enabling it to move beyond its ``comfort zone'' and mitigate exploration stagnation. StepHint outperforms competitive RLVR enhancement methods across six mathematical benchmarks, while also demonstrating superior generalization and excelling over baselines on out-of-domain benchmarks.

xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluations

We introduce xbench, a dynamic, profession-aligned evaluation suite designed to bridge the gap between AI agent capabilities and real-world productivity. While existing benchmarks often focus on isolated technical skills, they may not accurately reflect the economic value agents deliver in professional settings. To address this, xbench targets commercially significant domains with evaluation tasks defined by industry professionals. Our framework creates metrics that strongly correlate with productivity value, enables prediction of Technology-Market Fit (TMF), and facilitates tracking of product capabilities over time. As our initial implementations, we present two benchmarks: Recruitment and Marketing. For Recruitment, we collect 50 tasks from real-world headhunting business scenarios to evaluate agents' abilities in company mapping, information retrieval, and talent sourcing. For Marketing, we assess agents' ability to match influencers with advertiser needs, evaluating their performance across 50 advertiser requirements using a curated pool of 836 candidate influencers. We present initial evaluation results for leading contemporary agents, establishing a baseline for these professional domains. Our continuously updated evalsets and evaluations are available at https://xbench.org.

Pangu Embedded: An Efficient Dual-system LLM Reasoner with Metacognition

This work presents Pangu Embedded, an efficient Large Language Model (LLM) reasoner developed on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs), featuring flexible fast and slow thinking capabilities. Pangu Embedded addresses the significant computational costs and inference latency challenges prevalent in existing reasoning-optimized LLMs. We propose a two-stage training framework for its construction. In Stage 1, the model is finetuned via an iterative distillation process, incorporating inter-iteration model merging to effectively aggregate complementary knowledge. This is followed by reinforcement learning on Ascend clusters, optimized by a latency-tolerant scheduler that combines stale synchronous parallelism with prioritized data queues. The RL process is guided by a Multi-source Adaptive Reward System (MARS), which generates dynamic, task-specific reward signals using deterministic metrics and lightweight LLM evaluators for mathematics, coding, and general problem-solving tasks. Stage 2 introduces a dual-system framework, endowing Pangu Embedded with a "fast" mode for routine queries and a deeper "slow" mode for complex inference. This framework offers both manual mode switching for user control and an automatic, complexity-aware mode selection mechanism that dynamically allocates computational resources to balance latency and reasoning depth. Experimental results on benchmarks including AIME 2024, GPQA, and LiveCodeBench demonstrate that Pangu Embedded with 7B parameters, outperforms similar-size models like Qwen3-8B and GLM4-9B. It delivers rapid responses and state-of-the-art reasoning quality within a single, unified model architecture, highlighting a promising direction for developing powerful yet practically deployable LLM reasoners.

Pangu Pro MoE: Mixture of Grouped Experts for Efficient Sparsity

The surgence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) in Large Language Models promises a small price of execution cost for a much larger model parameter count and learning capacity, because only a small fraction of parameters are activated for each input token. However, it is commonly observed that some experts are activated far more often than others, leading to system inefficiency when running the experts on different devices in parallel. Therefore, we introduce Mixture of Grouped Experts (MoGE), which groups the experts during selection and balances the expert workload better than MoE in nature. It constrains tokens to activate an equal number of experts within each predefined expert group. When a model execution is distributed on multiple devices, this architectural design ensures a balanced computational load across devices, significantly enhancing throughput, particularly for the inference phase. Further, we build Pangu Pro MoE on Ascend NPUs, a sparse model based on MoGE with 72 billion total parameters, 16 billion of which are activated for each token. The configuration of Pangu Pro MoE is optimized for Ascend 300I Duo and 800I A2 through extensive system simulation studies. Our experiments indicate that MoGE indeed leads to better expert load balancing and more efficient execution for both model training and inference on Ascend NPUs. The inference performance of Pangu Pro MoE achieves 1148 tokens/s per card and can be further improved to 1528 tokens/s per card by speculative acceleration, outperforming comparable 32B and 72B Dense models. Furthermore, we achieve an excellent cost-to-performance ratio for model inference on Ascend 300I Duo. Our studies show that Ascend NPUs are capable of training Pangu Pro MoE with massive parallelization to make it a leading model within the sub-100B total parameter class, outperforming prominent open-source models like GLM-Z1-32B and Qwen3-32B.

Pangu Light: Weight Re-Initialization for Pruning and Accelerating LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver state-of-the-art capabilities across numerous tasks, but their immense size and inference costs pose significant computational challenges for practical deployment. While structured pruning offers a promising avenue for model compression, existing methods often struggle with the detrimental effects of aggressive, simultaneous width and depth reductions, leading to substantial performance degradation. This paper argues that a critical, often overlooked, aspect in making such aggressive joint pruning viable is the strategic re-initialization and adjustment of remaining weights to improve the model post-pruning training accuracies. We introduce Pangu Light, a framework for LLM acceleration centered around structured pruning coupled with novel weight re-initialization techniques designed to address this ``missing piece''. Our framework systematically targets multiple axes, including model width, depth, attention heads, and RMSNorm, with its effectiveness rooted in novel re-initialization methods like Cross-Layer Attention Pruning (CLAP) and Stabilized LayerNorm Pruning (SLNP) that mitigate performance drops by providing the network a better training starting point. Further enhancing efficiency, Pangu Light incorporates specialized optimizations such as absorbing Post-RMSNorm computations and tailors its strategies to Ascend NPU characteristics. The Pangu Light models consistently exhibit a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, outperforming prominent baseline pruning methods like Nemotron and established LLMs like Qwen3 series. For instance, on Ascend NPUs, Pangu Light-32B's 81.6 average score and 2585 tokens/s throughput exceed Qwen3-32B's 80.9 average score and 2225 tokens/s.

Medical Large Vision Language Models with Multi-Image Visual Ability

Medical large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated promising performance across various single-image question answering (QA) benchmarks, yet their capability in processing multi-image clinical scenarios remains underexplored. Unlike single image based tasks, medical tasks involving multiple images often demand sophisticated visual understanding capabilities, such as temporal reasoning and cross-modal analysis, which are poorly supported by current medical LVLMs. To bridge this critical gap, we present the Med-MIM instruction dataset, comprising 83.2K medical multi-image QA pairs that span four types of multi-image visual abilities (temporal understanding, reasoning, comparison, co-reference). Using this dataset, we fine-tune Mantis and LLaVA-Med, resulting in two specialized medical VLMs: MIM-LLaVA-Med and Med-Mantis, both optimized for multi-image analysis. Additionally, we develop the Med-MIM benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the medical multi-image understanding capabilities of LVLMs. We assess eight popular LVLMs, including our two models, on the Med-MIM benchmark. Experimental results show that both Med-Mantis and MIM-LLaVA-Med achieve superior performance on the held-in and held-out subsets of the Med-MIM benchmark, demonstrating that the Med-MIM instruction dataset effectively enhances LVLMs' multi-image understanding capabilities in the medical domain.

SpatialLLM: From Multi-modality Data to Urban Spatial Intelligence

We propose SpatialLLM, a novel approach advancing spatial intelligence tasks in complex urban scenes. Unlike previous methods requiring geographic analysis tools or domain expertise, SpatialLLM is a unified language model directly addressing various spatial intelligence tasks without any training, fine-tuning, or expert intervention. The core of SpatialLLM lies in constructing detailed and structured scene descriptions from raw spatial data to prompt pre-trained LLMs for scene-based analysis. Extensive experiments show that, with our designs, pretrained LLMs can accurately perceive spatial distribution information and enable zero-shot execution of advanced spatial intelligence tasks, including urban planning, ecological analysis, traffic management, etc. We argue that multi-field knowledge, context length, and reasoning ability are key factors influencing LLM performances in urban analysis. We hope that SpatialLLM will provide a novel viable perspective for urban intelligent analysis and management. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/SpatialLLM.

Pangu Ultra MoE: How to Train Your Big MoE on Ascend NPUs

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

Pangu Ultra: Pushing the Limits of Dense Large Language Models on Ascend NPUs

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

Dolphin: A Large-Scale Automatic Speech Recognition Model for Eastern Languages

This report introduces Dolphin, a large-scale multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that extends the Whisper architecture to support a wider range of languages. Our approach integrates in-house proprietary and open-source datasets to refine and optimize Dolphin's performance. The model is specifically designed to achieve notable recognition accuracy for 40 Eastern languages across East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, while also supporting 22 Chinese dialects. Experimental evaluations show that Dolphin significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art open-source models across various languages. To promote reproducibility and community-driven innovation, we are making our trained models and inference source code publicly available.