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.

What, How, Where, and How Well? A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models

As enthusiasm for scaling computation (data and parameters) in the pretraining era gradually diminished, test-time scaling (TTS), also referred to as ``test-time computing'' has emerged as a prominent research focus. Recent studies demonstrate that TTS can further elicit the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling significant breakthroughs not only in specialized reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, but also in general tasks like open-ended Q&A. However, despite the explosion of recent efforts in this area, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive survey offering a systemic understanding. To fill this gap, we propose a unified, multidimensional framework structured along four core dimensions of TTS research: what to scale, how to scale, where to scale, and how well to scale. Building upon this taxonomy, we conduct an extensive review of methods, application scenarios, and assessment aspects, and present an organized decomposition that highlights the unique functional roles of individual techniques within the broader TTS landscape. From this analysis, we distill the major developmental trajectories of TTS to date and offer hands-on guidelines for practical deployment. Furthermore, we identify several open challenges and offer insights into promising future directions, including further scaling, clarifying the functional essence of techniques, generalizing to more tasks, and more attributions.

Training-Free Text-Guided Image Editing with Visual Autoregressive Model

Text-guided image editing is an essential task that enables users to modify images through natural language descriptions. Recent advances in diffusion models and rectified flows have significantly improved editing quality, primarily relying on inversion techniques to extract structured noise from input images. However, inaccuracies in inversion can propagate errors, leading to unintended modifications and compromising fidelity. Moreover, even with perfect inversion, the entanglement between textual prompts and image features often results in global changes when only local edits are intended. To address these challenges, we propose a novel text-guided image editing framework based on VAR (Visual AutoRegressive modeling), which eliminates the need for explicit inversion while ensuring precise and controlled modifications. Our method introduces a caching mechanism that stores token indices and probability distributions from the original image, capturing the relationship between the source prompt and the image. Using this cache, we design an adaptive fine-grained masking strategy that dynamically identifies and constrains modifications to relevant regions, preventing unintended changes. A token reassembling approach further refines the editing process, enhancing diversity, fidelity, and control. Our framework operates in a training-free manner and achieves high-fidelity editing with faster inference speeds, processing a 1K resolution image in as fast as 1.2 seconds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to, or even surpassing, existing diffusion- and rectified flow-based approaches in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code will be released.

ArticuBot: Learning Universal Articulated Object Manipulation Policy via Large Scale Simulation

This paper presents ArticuBot, in which a single learned policy enables a robotics system to open diverse categories of unseen articulated objects in the real world. This task has long been challenging for robotics due to the large variations in the geometry, size, and articulation types of such objects. Our system, Articubot, consists of three parts: generating a large number of demonstrations in physics-based simulation, distilling all generated demonstrations into a point cloud-based neural policy via imitation learning, and performing zero-shot sim2real transfer to real robotics systems. Utilizing sampling-based grasping and motion planning, our demonstration generalization pipeline is fast and effective, generating a total of 42.3k demonstrations over 322 training articulated objects. For policy learning, we propose a novel hierarchical policy representation, in which the high-level policy learns the sub-goal for the end-effector, and the low-level policy learns how to move the end-effector conditioned on the predicted goal. We demonstrate that this hierarchical approach achieves much better object-level generalization compared to the non-hierarchical version. We further propose a novel weighted displacement model for the high-level policy that grounds the prediction into the existing 3D structure of the scene, outperforming alternative policy representations. We show that our learned policy can zero-shot transfer to three different real robot settings: a fixed table-top Franka arm across two different labs, and an X-Arm on a mobile base, opening multiple unseen articulated objects across two labs, real lounges, and kitchens. Videos and code can be found on our project website: https://articubot.github.io/.

Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge, which generates chain-of-thought (CoT) judgments, has become a widely adopted auto-evaluation method. However, its reliability is compromised by the CoT reasoning's inability to capture comprehensive and deeper details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. Existing methods mainly rely on majority voting or criteria expansion, which is insufficient to address the limitation in CoT. We propose Crowd-based Comparative Evaluation, which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate responses. This process effectively guides LLM-as-a-Judge to provide a more detailed CoT judgment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances evaluation reliability, achieving an average accuracy gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. Moreover, our method produces higher-quality CoTs that facilitate judge distillation and exhibit superior performance in rejection sampling for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), referred to as crowd rejection sampling, thereby enabling more efficient SFT. Our analysis confirms that CoTs generated by ours are more comprehensive and of higher quality, and evaluation accuracy improves as inference scales.

Teaching LLMs According to Their Aptitude: Adaptive Reasoning for Mathematical Problem Solving

Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning with large language models (LLMs) rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) for generalizability or Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) for precise computation. While efforts have been made to combine these methods, they primarily rely on post-selection or predefined strategies, leaving an open question: whether LLMs can autonomously adapt their reasoning strategy based on their inherent capabilities. In this work, we propose TATA (Teaching LLMs According to Their Aptitude), an adaptive framework that enables LLMs to personalize their reasoning strategy spontaneously, aligning it with their intrinsic aptitude. TATA incorporates base-LLM-aware data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to tailor training data to the model's unique abilities. This approach equips LLMs to autonomously determine and apply the appropriate reasoning strategy at test time. We evaluate TATA through extensive experiments on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, using both general-purpose and math-specialized LLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that TATA effectively combines the complementary strengths of CoT and TIR, achieving superior or comparable performance with improved inference efficiency compared to TIR alone. Further analysis underscores the critical role of aptitude-aware data selection in enabling LLMs to make effective and adaptive reasoning decisions and align reasoning strategies with model capabilities.

Articulate AnyMesh: Open-Vocabulary 3D Articulated Objects Modeling

3D articulated objects modeling has long been a challenging problem, since it requires to capture both accurate surface geometries and semantically meaningful and spatially precise structures, parts, and joints. Existing methods heavily depend on training data from a limited set of handcrafted articulated object categories (e.g., cabinets and drawers), which restricts their ability to model a wide range of articulated objects in an open-vocabulary context. To address these limitations, we propose Articulate Anymesh, an automated framework that is able to convert any rigid 3D mesh into its articulated counterpart in an open-vocabulary manner. Given a 3D mesh, our framework utilizes advanced Vision-Language Models and visual prompting techniques to extract semantic information, allowing for both the segmentation of object parts and the construction of functional joints. Our experiments show that Articulate Anymesh can generate large-scale, high-quality 3D articulated objects, including tools, toys, mechanical devices, and vehicles, significantly expanding the coverage of existing 3D articulated object datasets. Additionally, we show that these generated assets can facilitate the acquisition of new articulated object manipulation skills in simulation, which can then be transferred to a real robotic system. Our Github website is https://articulate-anymesh.github.io.

NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models

As a crucial step to enhance LLMs alignment with human intentions, Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has a high demand on dataset quality. However, existing IFT datasets often contain knowledge that is inconsistent with LLMs' internal knowledge learned from the pre-training phase, which can greatly affect the efficacy of IFT. To address this issue, we introduce NILE (iNternal consIstency aLignmEnt) framework, aimed at optimizing IFT datasets to unlock LLMs' capability further. NILE operates by eliciting target pre-trained LLM's internal knowledge corresponding to instruction data. The internal knowledge is leveraged to revise the answer in IFT datasets. Additionally, we propose a novel Internal Consistency Filtering (ICF) method to filter training samples, ensuring its high consistency with LLM's internal knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that NILE-aligned IFT datasets sharply boost LLM performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets, achieving up to 66.6% gain on Arena-Hard and 68.5% on Alpaca-Eval V2. Further analysis confirms that each component of the NILE}framework contributes to these substantial performance improvements, and provides compelling evidence that dataset consistency with pre-trained internal knowledge is pivotal for maximizing LLM potential.

Robust and Transferable Backdoor Attacks Against Deep Image Compression With Selective Frequency Prior

Recent advancements in deep learning-based compression techniques have surpassed traditional methods. However, deep neural networks remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where pre-defined triggers induce malicious behaviors. This paper introduces a novel frequency-based trigger injection model for launching backdoor attacks with multiple triggers on learned image compression models. Inspired by the widely used DCT in compression codecs, triggers are embedded in the DCT domain. We design attack objectives tailored to diverse scenarios, including: 1) degrading compression quality in terms of bit-rate and reconstruction accuracy; 2) targeting task-driven measures like face recognition and semantic segmentation. To improve training efficiency, we propose a dynamic loss function that balances loss terms with fewer hyper-parameters, optimizing attack objectives effectively. For advanced scenarios, we evaluate the attack's resistance to defensive preprocessing and propose a two-stage training schedule with robust frequency selection to enhance resilience. To improve cross-model and cross-domain transferability for downstream tasks, we adjust the classification boundary in the attack loss during training. Experiments show that our trigger injection models, combined with minor modifications to encoder parameters, successfully inject multiple backdoors and their triggers into a single compression model, demonstrating strong performance and versatility. (*Due to the notification of arXiv "The Abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920 characters", the appeared Abstract is shortened. For the full Abstract, please download the Article.)

Architect: Generating Vivid and Interactive 3D Scenes with Hierarchical 2D Inpainting

Creating large-scale interactive 3D environments is essential for the development of Robotics and Embodied AI research. Current methods, including manual design, procedural generation, diffusion-based scene generation, and large language model (LLM) guided scene design, are hindered by limitations such as excessive human effort, reliance on predefined rules or training datasets, and limited 3D spatial reasoning ability. Since pre-trained 2D image generative models better capture scene and object configuration than LLMs, we address these challenges by introducing Architect, a generative framework that creates complex and realistic 3D embodied environments leveraging diffusion-based 2D image inpainting. In detail, we utilize foundation visual perception models to obtain each generated object from the image and leverage pre-trained depth estimation models to lift the generated 2D image to 3D space. Our pipeline is further extended to a hierarchical and iterative inpainting process to continuously generate placement of large furniture and small objects to enrich the scene. This iterative structure brings the flexibility for our method to generate or refine scenes from various starting points, such as text, floor plans, or pre-arranged environments.