ToolFlow: Boosting LLM Tool-Calling Through Natural and Coherent Dialogue Synthesis

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common method to enhance the tool calling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with the training data often being synthesized. The current data synthesis process generally involves sampling a set of tools, formulating a requirement based on these tools, and generating the call statements. However, tools sampled randomly lack relevance, making them difficult to combine and thus reducing the diversity of the data. Additionally, current work overlooks the coherence between turns of dialogues, leading to a gap between the synthesized data and real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a Graph-based Sampling strategy to sample more relevant tool combinations, and a Planned-generation strategy to create plans that guide the synthesis of coherent dialogues. We integrate these two strategies and enable multiple agents to synthesize the dialogue data interactively, resulting in our tool-calling data synthesis pipeline ToolFlow. Data quality assessments demonstrate improvements in the naturalness and coherence of our synthesized dialogues. Finally, we apply SFT on LLaMA-3.1-8B using 8,000 synthetic dialogues generated with ToolFlow. Results show that the model achieves tool-calling performance comparable to or even surpassing GPT-4, while maintaining strong general capabilities.

Roadmap towards Superhuman Speech Understanding using Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs) has prompted efforts to integrate speech and audio data, aiming to create general foundation models capable of processing both textual and non-textual inputs. Recent advances, such as GPT-4o, highlight the potential for end-to-end speech LLMs, which preserves non-semantic information and world knowledge for deeper speech understanding. To guide the development of speech LLMs, we propose a five-level roadmap, ranging from basic automatic speech recognition (ASR) to advanced superhuman models capable of integrating non-semantic information with abstract acoustic knowledge for complex tasks. Moreover, we design a benchmark, SAGI Bechmark, that standardizes critical aspects across various tasks in these five levels, uncovering challenges in using abstract acoustic knowledge and completeness of capability. Our findings reveal gaps in handling paralinguistic cues and abstract acoustic knowledge, and we offer future directions. This paper outlines a roadmap for advancing speech LLMs, introduces a benchmark for evaluation, and provides key insights into their current limitations and potential.

Subtle Errors Matter: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited strong mathematical reasoning and computational prowess, tackling tasks ranging from basic arithmetic to advanced competition-level problems. However, frequently occurring subtle errors, such as miscalculations or incorrect substitutions, limit the models' full mathematical potential. Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve distilling reasoning skills from stronger LLMs or applying preference learning to step-wise response pairs. Although these methods leverage samples of varying granularity to mitigate reasoning errors, they overlook the frequently occurring subtle errors. A major reason is that sampled preference pairs involve differences unrelated to the errors, which may distract the model from focusing on subtle errors. In this work, we propose a novel preference learning framework called eRror-Injected Self-Editing (RISE), which injects predefined subtle errors into partial tokens of correct solutions to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. In detail, RISE uses the model itself to edit a small number of tokens in the solution, injecting designed subtle errors. Then, pairs composed of self-edited solutions and their corresponding correct ones, along with pairs of correct and incorrect solutions obtained through sampling, are used together for subtle error-aware DPO training. Compared with other preference learning methods, RISE further refines the training objective to focus on predefined errors and their tokens, without requiring fine-grained sampling or preference annotation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RISE, with preference learning on Qwen2-7B-Instruct yielding notable improvements of 3.0% on GSM8K and 7.9% on MATH.

Meta-RTL: Reinforcement-Based Meta-Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Commonsense Reasoning

Meta learning has been widely used to exploit rich-resource source tasks to improve the performance of low-resource target tasks. Unfortunately, most existing meta learning approaches treat different source tasks equally, ignoring the relatedness of source tasks to the target task in knowledge transfer. To mitigate this issue, we propose a reinforcement-based multi-source meta-transfer learning framework (Meta-RTL) for low-resource commonsense reasoning. In this framework, we present a reinforcement-based approach to dynamically estimating source task weights that measure the contribution of the corresponding tasks to the target task in the meta-transfer learning. The differences between the general loss of the meta model and task-specific losses of source-specific temporal meta models on sampled target data are fed into the policy network of the reinforcement learning module as rewards. The policy network is built upon LSTMs that capture long-term dependencies on source task weight estimation across meta learning iterations. We evaluate the proposed Meta-RTL using both BERT and ALBERT as the backbone of the meta model on three commonsense reasoning benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Meta-RTL substantially outperforms strong baselines and previous task selection strategies and achieves larger improvements on extremely low-resource settings.

EMOVA: Empowering Language Models to See, Hear and Speak with Vivid Emotions

GPT-4o, an omni-modal model that enables vocal conversations with diverse emotions and tones, marks a milestone for omni-modal foundation models. However, empowering Large Language Models to perceive and generate images, texts, and speeches end-to-end with publicly available data remains challenging in the open-source community. Existing vision-language models rely on external tools for the speech processing, while speech-language models still suffer from limited or even without vision-understanding abilities. To address this gap, we propose EMOVA (EMotionally Omni-present Voice Assistant), to enable Large Language Models with end-to-end speech capabilities while maintaining the leading vision-language performance. With a semantic-acoustic disentangled speech tokenizer, we notice surprisingly that omni-modal alignment can further enhance vision-language and speech abilities compared with the corresponding bi-modal aligned counterparts. Moreover, a lightweight style module is proposed for flexible speech style controls (e.g., emotions and pitches). For the first time, EMOVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the vision-language and speech benchmarks, and meanwhile, supporting omni-modal spoken dialogue with vivid emotions.

DetectiveQA: Evaluating Long-Context Reasoning on Detective Novels

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), long-context information understanding and processing have become a hot topic in academia and industry. However, benchmarks for evaluating the ability of LLMs to handle long-context information do not seem to have kept pace with the development of LLMs. Despite the emergence of various long-context evaluation benchmarks, the types of capability assessed are still limited, without new capability dimensions. In this paper, we introduce DetectiveQA, a narrative reasoning benchmark featured with an average context length of over 100K tokens. DetectiveQA focuses on evaluating the long-context reasoning ability of LLMs, which not only requires a full understanding of context but also requires extracting important evidences from the context and reasoning according to extracted evidences to answer the given questions. This is a new dimension of capability evaluation, which is more in line with the current intelligence level of LLMs. We use detective novels as data sources, which naturally have various reasoning elements. Finally, we manually annotated 600 questions in Chinese and then also provided an English edition of the context information and questions. We evaluate many long-context LLMs on DetectiveQA, including commercial and open-sourced models, and the results indicate that existing long-context LLMs still require significant advancements to effectively process true long-context dependency questions.

ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Calling

Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.

End-to-End Video Question Answering with Frame Scoring Mechanisms and Adaptive Sampling

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has emerged as a challenging frontier in the field of multimedia processing, requiring intricate interactions between visual and textual modalities. Simply uniformly sampling frames or indiscriminately aggregating frame-level visual features often falls short in capturing the nuanced and relevant contexts of videos to well perform VideoQA. To mitigate these issues, we propose VidF4, a novel VideoQA framework equipped with tailored frame selection strategy for effective and efficient VideoQA. We propose three frame-scoring mechanisms that consider both question relevance and inter-frame similarity to evaluate the importance of each frame for a given question on the video. Furthermore, we design a differentiable adaptive frame sampling mechanism to facilitate end-to-end training for the frame selector and answer generator. The experimental results across three widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing VideoQA methods, establishing a new SOTA across NExT-QA (+0.3%), STAR (+0.9%), and TVQA (+1.0%). Furthermore, through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we validate the effectiveness of each design choice.

Farewell to Length Extrapolation, a Training-Free Infinite Context with Finite Attention Scope

The maximum supported context length is a critical bottleneck limiting the practical application of the Large Language Model (LLM). Although existing length extrapolation methods can extend the context of LLMs to millions of tokens, these methods all have an explicit upper bound. In this work, we propose LongCache, a training-free approach that enables LLM to support an infinite context with finite context scope, through full-context cache selection and training-free integration. This effectively frees LLMs from the length extrapolation issue. We validate LongCache on the LongBench and L-Eval and demonstrate its performance is on par with traditional full-attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we have applied LongCache on mainstream LLMs, including LLaMA3 and Mistral-v0.3, enabling them to support context lengths of at least 400K in Needle-In-A-Haystack tests. We will improve the efficiency of LongCache by GPU-aware optimization soon.

Chain-of-Probe: Examing the Necessity and Accuracy of CoT Step-by-Step

Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models (LLMs), where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This phenomenon suggests a potential lack of necessary dependency between the predicted answer and the reasoning process. Consequently, two important questions arise: (1) Is CoT still necessary if the model already has an answer? (2) Can the correctness of the answer serve as valid evidence for the correctness of CoT? To address these questions, we propose a method, namely Chain-of-Probe (CoP), to probe changes in the mind during the model's reasoning. The probing results show that in a significant number of question-answer cases, CoT appears to be unnecessary, and this necessity correlates with the simplicity of the task, defined by reasoning steps required. Furthermore, by analyzing patterns in mind change, we examine the correctness of the model's reasoning. Our validation reveals that many responses, although correct in their final answer, contain errors in their reasoning process. To this end, we propose a strategic approach based on CoP to prioritize answers with correct reasoning among multiple candidates, thereby bolstering the reliability of the model's reasoning.