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SubscribeLoopTool: Closing the Data-Training Loop for Robust LLM Tool Calls
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to execute complex, multi-step tasks. However, tool learning is hampered by the static synthetic data pipelines where data generation and model training are executed as two separate, non-interactive processes. This approach fails to adaptively focus on a model's specific weaknesses and allows noisy labels to persist, degrading training efficiency. We introduce LoopTool, a fully automated, model-aware data evolution framework that closes this loop by tightly integrating data synthesis and model training. LoopTool iteratively refines both the data and the model through three synergistic modules: (1) Greedy Capability Probing (GCP) diagnoses the model's mastered and failed capabilities; (2) Judgement-Guided Label Verification (JGLV) uses an open-source judge model to find and correct annotation errors, progressively purifying the dataset; and (3) Error-Driven Data Expansion (EDDE) generates new, challenging samples based on identified failures. This closed-loop process operates within a cost-effective, open-source ecosystem, eliminating dependence on expensive closed-source APIs. Experiments show that our 8B model trained with LoopTool significantly surpasses its 32B data generator and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BFCL-v3 and ACEBench benchmarks for its scale. Our work demonstrates that closed-loop, self-refining data pipelines can dramatically enhance the tool-use capabilities of LLMs.
InstaGeo: Compute-Efficient Geospatial Machine Learning from Data to Deployment
Open-access multispectral imagery from missions like Landsat 8-9 and Sentinel-2 has fueled the development of geospatial foundation models (GFMs) for humanitarian and environmental applications. Yet, their deployment remains limited by (i) the absence of automated geospatial data pipelines and (ii) the large size of fine-tuned models. Existing GFMs lack workflows for processing raw satellite imagery, and downstream adaptations often retain the full complexity of the original encoder. We present InstaGeo, an open-source, end-to-end framework that addresses these challenges by integrating: (1) automated data curation to transform raw imagery into model-ready datasets; (2) task-specific model distillation to derive compact, compute-efficient models; and (3) seamless deployment as interactive web-map applications. Using InstaGeo, we reproduced datasets from three published studies and trained models with marginal mIoU differences of -0.73 pp for flood mapping, -0.20 pp for crop segmentation, and +1.79 pp for desert locust prediction. The distilled models are up to 8x smaller than standard fine-tuned counterparts, reducing FLOPs and CO2 emissions with minimal accuracy loss. Leveraging InstaGeo's streamlined data pipeline, we also curated a larger crop segmentation dataset, achieving a state-of-the-art mIoU of 60.65%, a 12 pp improvement over prior baselines. Moreover, InstaGeo enables users to progress from raw data to model deployment within a single working day. By unifying data preparation, model compression, and deployment, InstaGeo transforms research-grade GFMs into practical, low-carbon tools for real-time, large-scale Earth observation. This approach shifts geospatial AI toward data quality and application-driven innovation. Source code, datasets, and model checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/instadeepai/InstaGeo-E2E-Geospatial-ML.git
AutoKaggle: A Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous Data Science Competitions
Data science tasks involving tabular data present complex challenges that require sophisticated problem-solving approaches. We propose AutoKaggle, a powerful and user-centric framework that assists data scientists in completing daily data pipelines through a collaborative multi-agent system. AutoKaggle implements an iterative development process that combines code execution, debugging, and comprehensive unit testing to ensure code correctness and logic consistency. The framework offers highly customizable workflows, allowing users to intervene at each phase, thus integrating automated intelligence with human expertise. Our universal data science toolkit, comprising validated functions for data cleaning, feature engineering, and modeling, forms the foundation of this solution, enhancing productivity by streamlining common tasks. We selected 8 Kaggle competitions to simulate data processing workflows in real-world application scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that AutoKaggle achieves a validation submission rate of 0.85 and a comprehensive score of 0.82 in typical data science pipelines, fully proving its effectiveness and practicality in handling complex data science tasks.
Essential-Web v1.0: 24T tokens of organized web data
Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We present Essential-Web v1.0, a 24-trillion-token dataset in which every document is annotated with a twelve-category taxonomy covering topic, format, content complexity, and quality. Taxonomy labels are produced by EAI-Distill-0.5b, a fine-tuned 0.5b-parameter model that achieves an annotator agreement within 3% of Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct. With nothing more than SQL-style filters, we obtain competitive web-curated datasets in math (-8.0% relative to SOTA), web code (+14.3%), STEM (+24.5%) and medical (+8.6%). Essential-Web v1.0 is available on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EssentialAI/essential-web-v1.0
Mobile-Agent-v3: Foundamental Agents for GUI Automation
This paper introduces GUI-Owl, a foundational GUI agent model that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source end-to-end models on ten GUI benchmarks across desktop and mobile environments, covering grounding, question answering, planning, decision-making, and procedural knowledge. GUI-Owl-7B achieves 66.4 on AndroidWorld and 29.4 on OSWorld. Building on this, we propose Mobile-Agent-v3, a general-purpose GUI agent framework that further improves performance to 73.3 on AndroidWorld and 37.7 on OSWorld, setting a new state-of-the-art for open-source GUI agent frameworks. GUI-Owl incorporates three key innovations: (1) Large-scale Environment Infrastructure: a cloud-based virtual environment spanning Android, Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows, enabling our Self-Evolving GUI Trajectory Production framework. This generates high-quality interaction data via automated query generation and correctness validation, leveraging GUI-Owl to refine trajectories iteratively, forming a self-improving loop. It supports diverse data pipelines and reduces manual annotation. (2) Diverse Foundational Agent Capabilities: by integrating UI grounding, planning, action semantics, and reasoning patterns, GUI-Owl supports end-to-end decision-making and can act as a modular component in multi-agent systems. (3) Scalable Environment RL: we develop a scalable reinforcement learning framework with fully asynchronous training for real-world alignment. We also introduce Trajectory-aware Relative Policy Optimization (TRPO) for online RL, achieving 34.9 on OSWorld. GUI-Owl and Mobile-Agent-v3 are open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.
FLAME-MoE: A Transparent End-to-End Research Platform for Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
Recent large language models such as Gemini-1.5, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-4 increasingly adopt Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, which offer strong efficiency-performance trade-offs by activating only a fraction of the model per token. Yet academic researchers still lack a fully open, end-to-end MoE platform for investigating scaling, routing, and expert behavior. We release FLAME-MoE, a completely open-source research suite composed of seven decoder-only models, ranging from 38M to 1.7B active parameters, whose architecture--64 experts with top-8 gating and 2 shared experts--closely reflects modern production LLMs. All training data pipelines, scripts, logs, and checkpoints are publicly available to enable reproducible experimentation. Across six evaluation tasks, FLAME-MoE improves average accuracy by up to 3.4 points over dense baselines trained with identical FLOPs. Leveraging full training trace transparency, we present initial analyses showing that (i) experts increasingly specialize on distinct token subsets, (ii) co-activation matrices remain sparse, reflecting diverse expert usage, and (iii) routing behavior stabilizes early in training. All code, training logs, and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/cmu-flame/FLAME-MoE.
Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments
We present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address two systemic shortcomings in today's open model ecosystem: data compliance and multilingual representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting robots.txt exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of memorization, we adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. The Apertus models also expand multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over 1800 languages, with ~40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivalling or surpassing open-weight counterparts. Beyond model weights, we release all scientific artifacts from our development cycle with a permissive license, including data preparation scripts, checkpoints, evaluation suites, and training code, enabling transparent audit and extension.
DriftMoE: A Mixture of Experts Approach to Handle Concept Drifts
Learning from non-stationary data streams subject to concept drift requires models that can adapt on-the-fly while remaining resource-efficient. Existing adaptive ensemble methods often rely on coarse-grained adaptation mechanisms or simple voting schemes that fail to optimally leverage specialized knowledge. This paper introduces DriftMoE, an online Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that addresses these limitations through a novel co-training framework. DriftMoE features a compact neural router that is co-trained alongside a pool of incremental Hoeffding tree experts. The key innovation lies in a symbiotic learning loop that enables expert specialization: the router selects the most suitable expert for prediction, the relevant experts update incrementally with the true label, and the router refines its parameters using a multi-hot correctness mask that reinforces every accurate expert. This feedback loop provides the router with a clear training signal while accelerating expert specialization. We evaluate DriftMoE's performance across nine state-of-the-art data stream learning benchmarks spanning abrupt, gradual, and real-world drifts testing two distinct configurations: one where experts specialize on data regimes (multi-class variant), and another where they focus on single-class specialization (task-based variant). Our results demonstrate that DriftMoE achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art stream learning adaptive ensembles, offering a principled and efficient approach to concept drift adaptation. All code, data pipelines, and reproducibility scripts are available in our public GitHub repository: https://github.com/miguel-ceadar/drift-moe.
GUI-Reflection: Empowering Multimodal GUI Models with Self-Reflection Behavior
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in revolutionizing Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation. However, existing GUI models mostly rely on learning from nearly error-free offline trajectories, thus lacking reflection and error recovery capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose GUI-Reflection, a novel framework that explicitly integrates self-reflection and error correction capabilities into end-to-end multimodal GUI models throughout dedicated training stages: GUI-specific pre-training, offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and online reflection tuning. GUI-reflection enables self-reflection behavior emergence with fully automated data generation and learning processes without requiring any human annotation. Specifically, 1) we first propose scalable data pipelines to automatically construct reflection and error correction data from existing successful trajectories. While existing GUI models mainly focus on grounding and UI understanding ability, we propose the GUI-Reflection Task Suite to learn and evaluate reflection-oriented abilities explicitly. 2) Furthermore, we built a diverse and efficient environment for online training and data collection of GUI models on mobile devices. 3) We also present an iterative online reflection tuning algorithm leveraging the proposed environment, enabling the model to continuously enhance its reflection and error correction abilities. Our framework equips GUI agents with self-reflection and correction capabilities, paving the way for more robust, adaptable, and intelligent GUI automation, with all data, models, environments, and tools to be released publicly.
Vakyansh: ASR Toolkit for Low Resource Indic languages
We present Vakyansh, an end to end toolkit for Speech Recognition in Indic languages. India is home to almost 121 languages and around 125 crore speakers. Yet most of the languages are low resource in terms of data and pretrained models. Through Vakyansh, we introduce automatic data pipelines for data creation, model training, model evaluation and deployment. We create 14,000 hours of speech data in 23 Indic languages and train wav2vec 2.0 based pretrained models. These pretrained models are then finetuned to create state of the art speech recognition models for 18 Indic languages which are followed by language models and punctuation restoration models. We open source all these resources with a mission that this will inspire the speech community to develop speech first applications using our ASR models in Indic languages.
Parsed Categoric Encodings with Automunge
The Automunge open source python library platform for tabular data pre-processing automates feature engineering data transformations of numerical encoding and missing data infill to received tidy data on bases fit to properties of columns in a designated train set for consistent and efficient application to subsequent data pipelines such as for inference, where transformations may be applied to distinct columns in "family tree" sets with generations and branches of derivations. Included in the library of transformations are methods to extract structure from bounded categorical string sets by way of automated string parsing, in which comparisons between entries in the set of unique values are parsed to identify character subset overlaps which may be encoded by appended columns of boolean overlap detection activations or by replacing string entries with identified overlap partitions. Further string parsing options, which may also be applied to unbounded categoric sets, include extraction of numeric substring partitions from entries or search functions to identify presence of specified substring partitions. The aggregation of these methods into "family tree" sets of transformations are demonstrated for use to automatically extract structure from categoric string compositions in relation to the set of entries in a column, such as may be applied to prepare categoric string set encodings for machine learning without human intervention.
RAGulator: Lightweight Out-of-Context Detectors for Grounded Text Generation
Real-time detection of out-of-context LLM outputs is crucial for enterprises looking to safely adopt RAG applications. In this work, we train lightweight models to discriminate LLM-generated text that is semantically out-of-context from retrieved text documents. We preprocess a combination of summarisation and semantic textual similarity datasets to construct training data using minimal resources. We find that DeBERTa is not only the best-performing model under this pipeline, but it is also fast and does not require additional text preprocessing or feature engineering. While emerging work demonstrates that generative LLMs can also be fine-tuned and used in complex data pipelines to achieve state-of-the-art performance, we note that speed and resource limits are important considerations for on-premise deployment.
DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion
Recent advancements in music generation have garnered significant attention, yet existing approaches face critical limitations. Some current generative models can only synthesize either the vocal track or the accompaniment track. While some models can generate combined vocal and accompaniment, they typically rely on meticulously designed multi-stage cascading architectures and intricate data pipelines, hindering scalability. Additionally, most systems are restricted to generating short musical segments rather than full-length songs. Furthermore, widely used language model-based methods suffer from slow inference speeds. To address these challenges, we propose DiffRhythm, the first latent diffusion-based song generation model capable of synthesizing complete songs with both vocal and accompaniment for durations of up to 4m45s in only ten seconds, maintaining high musicality and intelligibility. Despite its remarkable capabilities, DiffRhythm is designed to be simple and elegant: it eliminates the need for complex data preparation, employs a straightforward model structure, and requires only lyrics and a style prompt during inference. Additionally, its non-autoregressive structure ensures fast inference speeds. This simplicity guarantees the scalability of DiffRhythm. Moreover, we release the complete training code along with the pre-trained model on large-scale data to promote reproducibility and further research.
Trinity-RFT: A General-Purpose and Unified Framework for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Trinity-RFT is a general-purpose, flexible and scalable framework designed for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of large language models. It is built with a decoupled design, consisting of (1) an RFT-core that unifies and generalizes synchronous/asynchronous, on-policy/off-policy, and online/offline modes of RFT, (2) seamless integration for agent-environment interaction with high efficiency and robustness, and (3) systematic data pipelines optimized for RFT. Trinity-RFT can be easily adapted for diverse application scenarios, and serves as a unified platform for exploring advanced reinforcement learning paradigms. This technical report outlines the vision, features, design and implementations of Trinity-RFT, accompanied by extensive examples demonstrating the utility and user-friendliness of the proposed framework.
Efficient Tabular Data Preprocessing of ML Pipelines
Data preprocessing pipelines, which includes data decoding, cleaning, and transforming, are a crucial component of Machine Learning (ML) training. Thy are computationally intensive and often become a major bottleneck, due to the increasing performance gap between the CPUs used for preprocessing and the GPUs used for model training. Recent studies show that a significant number of CPUs across several machines are required to achieve sufficient throughput to saturate the GPUs, leading to increased resource and energy consumption. When the pipeline involves vocabulary generation, the preprocessing performance scales poorly due to significant row-wise synchronization overhead between different CPU cores and servers. To address this limitation, in this paper we present the design of Piper, a hardware accelerator for tabular data preprocessing, prototype it on FPGAs, and demonstrate its potential for training pipelines of commercial recommender systems. Piper achieves 4.7 sim 71.3times speedup in latency over a 128-core CPU server and outperforms a data-center GPU by 4.8sim 20.3times when using binary input. The impressive performance showcases Piper's potential to increase the efficiency of data preprocessing pipelines and significantly reduce their resource consumption.
KramaBench: A Benchmark for AI Systems on Data-to-Insight Pipelines over Data Lakes
Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.
Augraphy: A Data Augmentation Library for Document Images
This paper introduces Augraphy, a Python library for constructing data augmentation pipelines which produce distortions commonly seen in real-world document image datasets. Augraphy stands apart from other data augmentation tools by providing many different strategies to produce augmented versions of clean document images that appear as if they have been altered by standard office operations, such as printing, scanning, and faxing through old or dirty machines, degradation of ink over time, and handwritten markings. This paper discusses the Augraphy tool, and shows how it can be used both as a data augmentation tool for producing diverse training data for tasks such as document denoising, and also for generating challenging test data to evaluate model robustness on document image modeling tasks.
Modeling Performance of Data Collection Systems for High-Energy Physics
Exponential increases in scientific experimental data are outstripping the rate of progress in silicon technology. As a result, heterogeneous combinations of architectures and process or device technologies are increasingly important to meet the computing demands of future scientific experiments. However, the complexity of heterogeneous computing systems requires systematic modeling to understand performance. We present a model which addresses this need by framing key aspects of data collection pipelines and constraints, and combines them with the important vectors of technology that shape alternatives, computing metrics that allow complex alternatives to be compared. For instance, a data collection pipeline may be characterized by parameters such as sensor sampling rates, amount of data collected, and the overall relevancy of retrieved samples. Alternatives to this pipeline are enabled by hardware development vectors including advancing CMOS, GPUs, neuromorphic computing, and edge computing. By calculating metrics for each alternative such as overall F1 score, power, hardware cost, and energy expended per relevant sample, this model allows alternate data collection systems to be rigorously compared. To demonstrate this model's capability, we apply it to the CMS experiment (and planned HL-LHC upgrade) to evaluate and compare the application of novel technologies in the data acquisition system (DAQ). We demonstrate that improvements to early stages in the DAQ are highly beneficial, greatly reducing the resources required at later stages of processing (such as a 60% power reduction) and increasing the amount of relevant data retrieved from the experiment per unit power (improving from 0.065 to 0.31 samples/kJ) However, we predict further advances will be required in order to meet overall power and cost constraints for the DAQ.
PROMPTEVALS: A Dataset of Assertions and Guardrails for Custom Production Large Language Model Pipelines
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in specialized production data processing pipelines across diverse domains -- such as finance, marketing, and e-commerce. However, when running them in production across many inputs, they often fail to follow instructions or meet developer expectations. To improve reliability in these applications, creating assertions or guardrails for LLM outputs to run alongside the pipelines is essential. Yet, determining the right set of assertions that capture developer requirements for a task is challenging. In this paper, we introduce PROMPTEVALS, a dataset of 2087 LLM pipeline prompts with 12623 corresponding assertion criteria, sourced from developers using our open-source LLM pipeline tools. This dataset is 5x larger than previous collections. Using a hold-out test split of PROMPTEVALS as a benchmark, we evaluated closed- and open-source models in generating relevant assertions. Notably, our fine-tuned Mistral and Llama 3 models outperform GPT-4o by 20.93% on average, offering both reduced latency and improved performance. We believe our dataset can spur further research in LLM reliability, alignment, and prompt engineering.
Interactive Data Harmonization with LLM Agents
Data harmonization is an essential task that entails integrating datasets from diverse sources. Despite years of research in this area, it remains a time-consuming and challenging task due to schema mismatches, varying terminologies, and differences in data collection methodologies. This paper presents the case for agentic data harmonization as a means to both empower experts to harmonize their data and to streamline the process. We introduce Harmonia, a system that combines LLM-based reasoning, an interactive user interface, and a library of data harmonization primitives to automate the synthesis of data harmonization pipelines. We demonstrate Harmonia in a clinical data harmonization scenario, where it helps to interactively create reusable pipelines that map datasets to a standard format. Finally, we discuss challenges and open problems, and suggest research directions for advancing our vision.
Generating Skyline Datasets for Data Science Models
Preparing high-quality datasets required by various data-driven AI and machine learning models has become a cornerstone task in data-driven analysis. Conventional data discovery methods typically integrate datasets towards a single pre-defined quality measure that may lead to bias for downstream tasks. This paper introduces MODis, a framework that discovers datasets by optimizing multiple user-defined, model-performance measures. Given a set of data sources and a model, MODis selects and integrates data sources into a skyline dataset, over which the model is expected to have the desired performance in all the performance measures. We formulate MODis as a multi-goal finite state transducer, and derive three feasible algorithms to generate skyline datasets. Our first algorithm adopts a "reduce-from-universal" strategy, that starts with a universal schema and iteratively prunes unpromising data. Our second algorithm further reduces the cost with a bi-directional strategy that interleaves data augmentation and reduction. We also introduce a diversification algorithm to mitigate the bias in skyline datasets. We experimentally verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our skyline data discovery algorithms, and showcase their applications in optimizing data science pipelines.
Evaluation Metrics for Text Data Augmentation in NLP
Recent surveys on data augmentation for natural language processing have reported different techniques and advancements in the field. Several frameworks, tools, and repositories promote the implementation of text data augmentation pipelines. However, a lack of evaluation criteria and standards for method comparison due to different tasks, metrics, datasets, architectures, and experimental settings makes comparisons meaningless. Also, a lack of methods unification exists and text data augmentation research would benefit from unified metrics to compare different augmentation methods. Thus, academics and the industry endeavor relevant evaluation metrics for text data augmentation techniques. The contribution of this work is to provide a taxonomy of evaluation metrics for text augmentation methods and serve as a direction for a unified benchmark. The proposed taxonomy organizes categories that include tools for implementation and metrics calculation. Finally, with this study, we intend to present opportunities to explore the unification and standardization of text data augmentation metrics.
Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models
Scaling laws predict that the performance of large language models improves with increasing model size and data size. In practice, pre-training has been relying on massive web crawls, using almost all data sources publicly available on the internet so far. However, this pool of natural data does not grow at the same rate as the compute supply. Furthermore, the availability of high-quality texts is even more limited: data filtering pipelines often remove up to 99% of the initial web scrapes to achieve state-of-the-art. To address the "data wall" of pre-training scaling, our work explores ways to transform and recycle data discarded in existing filtering processes. We propose REWIRE, REcycling the Web with guIded REwrite, a method to enrich low-quality documents so that they could become useful for training. This in turn allows us to increase the representation of synthetic data in the final pre-training set. Experiments at 1B, 3B and 7B scales of the DCLM benchmark show that mixing high-quality raw texts and our rewritten texts lead to 1.0, 1.3 and 2.5 percentage points improvement respectively across 22 diverse tasks, compared to training on only filtered web data. Training on the raw-synthetic data mix is also more effective than having access to 2x web data. Through further analysis, we demonstrate that about 82% of the mixed in texts come from transforming lower-quality documents that would otherwise be discarded. REWIRE also outperforms related approaches of generating synthetic data, including Wikipedia-style paraphrasing, question-answer synthesizing and knowledge extraction. These results suggest that recycling web texts holds the potential for being a simple and effective approach for scaling pre-training data.
M3LEO: A Multi-Modal, Multi-Label Earth Observation Dataset Integrating Interferometric SAR and Multispectral Data
Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. While some preprocessed Earth observation datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. In this work, we introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label Earth observation dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery and auxiliary data describing terrain properties such as land use. M3LEO spans approximately 17M 4x4 km data chips from six diverse geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework configured using Hydra to accommodate its use across diverse ML applications in Earth observation. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for seamless integration with our framework. We show that the distribution shift in self-supervised embeddings is substantial across geographic regions, even when controlling for terrain properties. Data: huggingface.co/M3LEO, Code: github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.
EASTER: Efficient and Scalable Text Recognizer
Recent progress in deep learning has led to the development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems which perform remarkably well. Most research has been around recurrent networks as well as complex gated layers which make the overall solution complex and difficult to scale. In this paper, we present an Efficient And Scalable TExt Recognizer (EASTER) to perform optical character recognition on both machine printed and handwritten text. Our model utilises 1-D convolutional layers without any recurrence which enables parallel training with considerably less volume of data. We experimented with multiple variations of our architecture and one of the smallest variant (depth and number of parameter wise) performs comparably to RNN based complex choices. Our 20-layered deepest variant outperforms RNN architectures with a good margin on benchmarking datasets like IIIT-5k and SVT. We also showcase improvements over the current best results on offline handwritten text recognition task. We also present data generation pipelines with augmentation setup to generate synthetic datasets for both handwritten and machine printed text.
EgoWalk: A Multimodal Dataset for Robot Navigation in the Wild
Data-driven navigation algorithms are critically dependent on large-scale, high-quality real-world data collection for successful training and robust performance in realistic and uncontrolled conditions. To enhance the growing family of navigation-related real-world datasets, we introduce EgoWalk - a dataset of 50 hours of human navigation in a diverse set of indoor/outdoor, varied seasons, and location environments. Along with the raw and Imitation Learning-ready data, we introduce several pipelines to automatically create subsidiary datasets for other navigation-related tasks, namely natural language goal annotations and traversability segmentation masks. Diversity studies, use cases, and benchmarks for the proposed dataset are provided to demonstrate its practical applicability. We openly release all data processing pipelines and the description of the hardware platform used for data collection to support future research and development in robot navigation systems.
Denoising as Adaptation: Noise-Space Domain Adaptation for Image Restoration
Although learning-based image restoration methods have made significant progress, they still struggle with limited generalization to real-world scenarios due to the substantial domain gap caused by training on synthetic data. Existing methods address this issue by improving data synthesis pipelines, estimating degradation kernels, employing deep internal learning, and performing domain adaptation and regularization. Previous domain adaptation methods have sought to bridge the domain gap by learning domain-invariant knowledge in either feature or pixel space. However, these techniques often struggle to extend to low-level vision tasks within a stable and compact framework. In this paper, we show that it is possible to perform domain adaptation via the noise space using diffusion models. In particular, by leveraging the unique property of how auxiliary conditional inputs influence the multi-step denoising process, we derive a meaningful diffusion loss that guides the restoration model in progressively aligning both restored synthetic and real-world outputs with a target clean distribution. We refer to this method as denoising as adaptation. To prevent shortcuts during joint training, we present crucial strategies such as channel-shuffling layer and residual-swapping contrastive learning in the diffusion model. They implicitly blur the boundaries between conditioned synthetic and real data and prevent the reliance of the model on easily distinguishable features. Experimental results on three classical image restoration tasks, namely denoising, deblurring, and deraining, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Enhanced Large Language Models for Effective Screening of Depression and Anxiety
Depressive and anxiety disorders are widespread, necessitating timely identification and management. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential solutions, yet high costs and ethical concerns about training data remain challenges. This paper introduces a pipeline for synthesizing clinical interviews, resulting in 1,157 interactive dialogues (PsyInterview), and presents EmoScan, an LLM-based emotional disorder screening system. EmoScan distinguishes between coarse (e.g., anxiety or depressive disorders) and fine disorders (e.g., major depressive disorders) and conducts high-quality interviews. Evaluations showed that EmoScan exceeded the performance of base models and other LLMs like GPT-4 in screening emotional disorders (F1-score=0.7467). It also delivers superior explanations (BERTScore=0.9408) and demonstrates robust generalizability (F1-score of 0.67 on an external dataset). Furthermore, EmoScan outperforms baselines in interviewing skills, as validated by automated ratings and human evaluations. This work highlights the importance of scalable data-generative pipelines for developing effective mental health LLM tools.
UAVs and Neural Networks for search and rescue missions
In this paper, we present a method for detecting objects of interest, including cars, humans, and fire, in aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually during vegetation fires. To achieve this, we use artificial neural networks and create a dataset for supervised learning. We accomplish the assisted labeling of the dataset through the implementation of an object detection pipeline that combines classic image processing techniques with pretrained neural networks. In addition, we develop a data augmentation pipeline to augment the dataset with automatically labeled images. Finally, we evaluate the performance of different neural networks.
Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly
There is a belief that learning to compress well will lead to intelligence. Recently, language modeling has been shown to be equivalent to compression, which offers a compelling rationale for the success of large language models (LLMs): the development of more advanced language models is essentially enhancing compression which facilitates intelligence. Despite such appealing discussions, little empirical evidence is present for the interplay between compression and intelligence. In this work, we examine their relationship in the context of LLMs, treating LLMs as data compressors. Given the abstract concept of "intelligence", we adopt the average downstream benchmark scores as a surrogate, specifically targeting intelligence related to knowledge and commonsense, coding, and mathematical reasoning. Across 12 benchmarks, our study brings together 30 public LLMs that originate from diverse organizations. Remarkably, we find that LLMs' intelligence -- reflected by average benchmark scores -- almost linearly correlates with their ability to compress external text corpora. These results provide concrete evidence supporting the belief that superior compression indicates greater intelligence. Furthermore, our findings suggest that compression efficiency, as an unsupervised metric derived from raw text corpora, serves as a reliable evaluation measure that is linearly associated with the model capabilities. We open-source our compression datasets as well as our data collection pipelines to facilitate future researchers to assess compression properly.
Qianfan-VL: Domain-Enhanced Universal Vision-Language Models
We present Qianfan-VL, a series of multimodal large language models ranging from 3B to 70B parameters, achieving state-of-the-art performance through innovative domain enhancement techniques. Our approach employs multi-stage progressive training and high-precision data synthesis pipelines, which prove to be critical technologies for enhancing domain-specific capabilities while maintaining strong general performance. Qianfan-VL achieves comparable results to leading open-source models on general benchmarks, with state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as CCBench, SEEDBench IMG, ScienceQA, and MMStar. The domain enhancement strategy delivers significant advantages in OCR and document understanding, validated on both public benchmarks (OCRBench 873, DocVQA 94.75%) and in-house evaluations. Notably, Qianfan-VL-8B and 70B variants incorporate long chain-of-thought capabilities, demonstrating superior performance on mathematical reasoning (MathVista 78.6%) and logical inference tasks. All models are trained entirely on Baidu's Kunlun P800 chips, validating the capability of large-scale AI infrastructure to train SOTA-level multimodal models with over 90% scaling efficiency on 5000 chips for a single task. This work establishes an effective methodology for developing domain-enhanced multimodal models suitable for diverse enterprise deployment scenarios.
Voice Conversion Improves Cross-Domain Robustness for Spoken Arabic Dialect Identification
Arabic dialect identification (ADI) systems are essential for large-scale data collection pipelines that enable the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic language varieties. However, the reliability of current ADI systems is limited by poor generalization to out-of-domain speech. In this paper, we present an effective approach based on voice conversion for training ADI models that achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves robustness in cross-domain scenarios. Evaluated on a newly collected real-world test set spanning four different domains, our approach yields consistent improvements of up to +34.1% in accuracy across domains. Furthermore, we present an analysis of our approach and demonstrate that voice conversion helps mitigate the speaker bias in the ADI dataset. We release our robust ADI model and cross-domain evaluation dataset to support the development of inclusive speech technologies for Arabic.
TouchTTS: An Embarrassingly Simple TTS Framework that Everyone Can Touch
It is well known that LLM-based systems are data-hungry. Recent LLM-based TTS works typically employ complex data processing pipelines to obtain high-quality training data. These sophisticated pipelines require excellent models at each stage (e.g., speech denoising, speech enhancement, speaker diarization, and punctuation models), which themselves demand high-quality training data and are rarely open-sourced. Even with state-of-the-art models, issues persist, such as incomplete background noise removal and misalignment between punctuation and actual speech pauses. Moreover, the stringent filtering strategies often retain only 10-30\% of the original data, significantly impeding data scaling efforts. In this work, we leverage a noise-robust audio tokenizer (S3Tokenizer) to design a simplified yet effective TTS data processing pipeline that maintains data quality while substantially reducing data acquisition costs, achieving a data retention rate of over 50\%. Beyond data scaling challenges, LLM-based TTS systems also incur higher deployment costs compared to conventional approaches. Current systems typically use LLMs solely for text-to-token generation, while requiring separate models (e.g., flow matching models) for token-to-waveform generation, which cannot be directly executed by LLM inference engines, further complicating deployment. To address these challenges, we eliminate redundant modules in both LLM and flow components, replacing the flow model backbone with an LLM architecture. Building upon this simplified flow backbone, we propose a unified architecture for both streaming and non-streaming inference, significantly reducing deployment costs. Finally, we explore the feasibility of unifying TTS and ASR tasks using the same data for training, thanks to the simplified pipeline and the S3Tokenizer that reduces the quality requirements for TTS training data.
GIM: Learning Generalizable Image Matcher From Internet Videos
Image matching is a fundamental computer vision problem. While learning-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks, they generalize poorly to in-the-wild images. Such methods typically need to train separate models for different scene types and are impractical when the scene type is unknown in advance. One of the underlying problems is the limited scalability of existing data construction pipelines, which limits the diversity of standard image matching datasets. To address this problem, we propose GIM, a self-training framework for learning a single generalizable model based on any image matching architecture using internet videos, an abundant and diverse data source. Given an architecture, GIM first trains it on standard domain-specific datasets and then combines it with complementary matching methods to create dense labels on nearby frames of novel videos. These labels are filtered by robust fitting, and then enhanced by propagating them to distant frames. The final model is trained on propagated data with strong augmentations. We also propose ZEB, the first zero-shot evaluation benchmark for image matching. By mixing data from diverse domains, ZEB can thoroughly assess the cross-domain generalization performance of different methods. Applying GIM consistently improves the zero-shot performance of 3 state-of-the-art image matching architectures; with 50 hours of YouTube videos, the relative zero-shot performance improves by 8.4%-18.1%. GIM also enables generalization to extreme cross-domain data such as Bird Eye View (BEV) images of projected 3D point clouds (Fig. 1(c)). More importantly, our single zero-shot model consistently outperforms domain-specific baselines when evaluated on downstream tasks inherent to their respective domains. The video presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU_MJLD8LeY.
Generalizable Geometric Image Caption Synthesis
Multimodal large language models have various practical applications that demand strong reasoning abilities. Despite recent advancements, these models still struggle to solve complex geometric problems. A key challenge stems from the lack of high-quality image-text pair datasets for understanding geometric images. Furthermore, most template-based data synthesis pipelines typically fail to generalize to questions beyond their predefined templates. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a complementary process of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) into the data generation pipeline. By adopting RLVR to refine captions for geometric images synthesized from 50 basic geometric relations and using reward signals derived from mathematical problem-solving tasks, our pipeline successfully captures the key features of geometry problem-solving. This enables better task generalization and yields non-trivial improvements. Furthermore, even in out-of-distribution scenarios, the generated dataset enhances the general reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models, yielding accuracy improvements of 2.8%-4.8% in statistics, arithmetic, algebraic, and numerical tasks with non-geometric input images of MathVista and MathVerse, along with 2.4%-3.9% improvements in Art, Design, Tech, and Engineering tasks in MMMU.
Bench2FreeAD: A Benchmark for Vision-based End-to-end Navigation in Unstructured Robotic Environments
Most current end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving algorithms are built on standard vehicles in structured transportation scenarios, lacking exploration of robot navigation for unstructured scenarios such as auxiliary roads, campus roads, and indoor settings. This paper investigates E2E robot navigation in unstructured road environments. First, we introduce two data collection pipelines - one for real-world robot data and another for synthetic data generated using the Isaac Sim simulator, which together produce an unstructured robotics navigation dataset -- FreeWorld Dataset. Second, we fine-tuned an efficient E2E autonomous driving model -- VAD -- using our datasets to validate the performance and adaptability of E2E autonomous driving models in these environments. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning through our datasets significantly enhances the navigation potential of E2E autonomous driving models in unstructured robotic environments. Thus, this paper presents the first dataset targeting E2E robot navigation tasks in unstructured scenarios, and provides a benchmark based on vision-based E2E autonomous driving algorithms to facilitate the development of E2E navigation technology for logistics and service robots. The project is available on Github.
OpenMathInstruct-1: A 1.8 Million Math Instruction Tuning Dataset
Recent work has shown the immense potential of synthetically generated datasets for training large language models (LLMs), especially for acquiring targeted skills. Current large-scale math instruction tuning datasets such as MetaMathQA (Yu et al., 2024) and MAmmoTH (Yue et al., 2024) are constructed using outputs from closed-source LLMs with commercially restrictive licenses. A key reason limiting the use of open-source LLMs in these data generation pipelines has been the wide gap between the mathematical skills of the best closed-source LLMs, such as GPT-4, and the best open-source LLMs. Building on the recent progress in open-source LLMs, our proposed prompting novelty, and some brute-force scaling, we construct OpenMathInstruct-1, a math instruction tuning dataset with 1.8M problem-solution pairs. The dataset is constructed by synthesizing code-interpreter solutions for GSM8K and MATH, two popular math reasoning benchmarks, using the recently released and permissively licensed Mixtral model. Our best model, OpenMath-CodeLlama-70B, trained on a subset of OpenMathInstruct-1, achieves a score of 84.6% on GSM8K and 50.7% on MATH, which is competitive with the best gpt-distilled models. We release our code, models, and the OpenMathInstruct-1 dataset under a commercially permissive license.
On the Robustness of Arabic Speech Dialect Identification
Arabic dialect identification (ADI) tools are an important part of the large-scale data collection pipelines necessary for training speech recognition models. As these pipelines require application of ADI tools to potentially out-of-domain data, we aim to investigate how vulnerable the tools may be to this domain shift. With self-supervised learning (SSL) models as a starting point, we evaluate transfer learning and direct classification from SSL features. We undertake our evaluation under rich conditions, with a goal to develop ADI systems from pretrained models and ultimately evaluate performance on newly collected data. In order to understand what factors contribute to model decisions, we carry out a careful human study of a subset of our data. Our analysis confirms that domain shift is a major challenge for ADI models. We also find that while self-training does alleviate this challenges, it may be insufficient for realistic conditions.
Accelerating Earth Science Discovery via Multi-Agent LLM Systems
This Perspective explores the transformative potential of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the geosciences. Users of geoscientific data repositories face challenges due to the complexity and diversity of data formats, inconsistent metadata practices, and a considerable number of unprocessed datasets. MAS possesses transformative potential for improving scientists' interaction with geoscientific data by enabling intelligent data processing, natural language interfaces, and collaborative problem-solving capabilities. We illustrate this approach with "PANGAEA GPT", a specialized MAS pipeline integrated with the diverse PANGAEA database for Earth and Environmental Science, demonstrating how MAS-driven workflows can effectively manage complex datasets and accelerate scientific discovery. We discuss how MAS can address current data challenges in geosciences, highlight advancements in other scientific fields, and propose future directions for integrating MAS into geoscientific data processing pipelines. In this Perspective, we show how MAS can fundamentally improve data accessibility, promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, and accelerate geoscientific discoveries.
DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection
A critical yet frequently overlooked challenge in the field of deepfake detection is the lack of a standardized, unified, comprehensive benchmark. This issue leads to unfair performance comparisons and potentially misleading results. Specifically, there is a lack of uniformity in data processing pipelines, resulting in inconsistent data inputs for detection models. Additionally, there are noticeable differences in experimental settings, and evaluation strategies and metrics lack standardization. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for deepfake detection, called DeepfakeBench, which offers three key contributions: 1) a unified data management system to ensure consistent input across all detectors, 2) an integrated framework for state-of-the-art methods implementation, and 3) standardized evaluation metrics and protocols to promote transparency and reproducibility. Featuring an extensible, modular-based codebase, DeepfakeBench contains 15 state-of-the-art detection methods, 9 deepfake datasets, a series of deepfake detection evaluation protocols and analysis tools, as well as comprehensive evaluations. Moreover, we provide new insights based on extensive analysis of these evaluations from various perspectives (e.g., data augmentations, backbones). We hope that our efforts could facilitate future research and foster innovation in this increasingly critical domain. All codes, evaluations, and analyses of our benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/SCLBD/DeepfakeBench.
OmniGen2: Exploration to Advanced Multimodal Generation
In this work, we introduce OmniGen2, a versatile and open-source generative model designed to provide a unified solution for diverse generation tasks, including text-to-image, image editing, and in-context generation. Unlike OmniGen v1, OmniGen2 features two distinct decoding pathways for text and image modalities, utilizing unshared parameters and a decoupled image tokenizer. This design enables OmniGen2 to build upon existing multimodal understanding models without the need to re-adapt VAE inputs, thereby preserving the original text generation capabilities. To facilitate the training of OmniGen2, we developed comprehensive data construction pipelines, encompassing image editing and in-context generation data. Additionally, we introduce a reflection mechanism tailored for image generation tasks and curate a dedicated reflection dataset based on OmniGen2. Despite its relatively modest parameter size, OmniGen2 achieves competitive results on multiple task benchmarks, including text-to-image and image editing. To further evaluate in-context generation, also referred to as subject-driven tasks, we introduce a new benchmark named OmniContext. OmniGen2 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models in terms of consistency. We will release our models, training code, datasets, and data construction pipeline to support future research in this field. Project Page: https://vectorspacelab.github.io/OmniGen2; GitHub Link: https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/OmniGen2
Generative Zoo
The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de
A Comprehensive Benchmark for COVID-19 Predictive Modeling Using Electronic Health Records in Intensive Care
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a heavy burden to the healthcare system worldwide and caused huge social disruption and economic loss. Many deep learning models have been proposed to conduct clinical predictive tasks such as mortality prediction for COVID-19 patients in intensive care units using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Despite their initial success in certain clinical applications, there is currently a lack of benchmarking results to achieve a fair comparison so that we can select the optimal model for clinical use. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy between the formulation of traditional prediction tasks and real-world clinical practice in intensive care. To fill these gaps, we propose two clinical prediction tasks, Outcome-specific length-of-stay prediction and Early mortality prediction for COVID-19 patients in intensive care units. The two tasks are adapted from the naive length-of-stay and mortality prediction tasks to accommodate the clinical practice for COVID-19 patients. We propose fair, detailed, open-source data-preprocessing pipelines and evaluate 17 state-of-the-art predictive models on two tasks, including 5 machine learning models, 6 basic deep learning models and 6 deep learning predictive models specifically designed for EHR data. We provide benchmarking results using data from two real-world COVID-19 EHR datasets. One dataset is publicly available without needing any inquiry and another dataset can be accessed on request. We provide fair, reproducible benchmarking results for two tasks. We deploy all experiment results and models on an online platform. We also allow clinicians and researchers to upload their data to the platform and get quick prediction results using our trained models. We hope our efforts can further facilitate deep learning and machine learning research for COVID-19 predictive modeling.
PCB-Vision: A Multiscene RGB-Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset of Printed Circuit Boards
Addressing the critical theme of recycling electronic waste (E-waste), this contribution is dedicated to developing advanced automated data processing pipelines as a basis for decision-making and process control. Aligning with the broader goals of the circular economy and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), our work leverages non-invasive analysis methods utilizing RGB and hyperspectral imaging data to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into the E-waste stream composition for optimizing recycling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce 'PCB-Vision'; a pioneering RGB-hyperspectral printed circuit board (PCB) benchmark dataset, comprising 53 RGB images of high spatial resolution paired with their corresponding high spectral resolution hyperspectral data cubes in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) range. Grounded in open science principles, our dataset provides a comprehensive resource for researchers through high-quality ground truths, focusing on three primary PCB components: integrated circuits (IC), capacitors, and connectors. We provide extensive statistical investigations on the proposed dataset together with the performance of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Residual U-Net, LinkNet, and DeepLabv3+. By openly sharing this multi-scene benchmark dataset along with the baseline codes, we hope to foster transparent, traceable, and comparable developments of advanced data processing across various scientific communities, including, but not limited to, computer vision and remote sensing. Emphasizing our commitment to supporting a collaborative and inclusive scientific community, all materials, including code, data, ground truth, and masks, will be accessible at https://github.com/hifexplo/PCBVision.
ML2B: Multi-Lingual ML Benchmark For AutoML
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in generating machine learning (ML) code, enabling end-to-end pipeline construction from natural language instructions. However, existing benchmarks for ML code generation are mainly restricted to English, overlooking the global and multilingual nature of ML research and practice. To address this gap, we present ML2B, the first benchmark for evaluating multilingual ML code generation. ML2B consists of 30 Kaggle competitions translated into 13 natural languages, covering tabular, text, and image data types, with structured metadata and validated human-reviewed translations. For evaluation, we employ AIDE, an automated framework for end-to-end assessment of data science pipelines, and provide insights into cross-lingual model performance. Our results reveal substantial 15-45% performance degradation on non-English tasks, highlighting critical challenges in multilingual representation learning for code generation. The benchmark, evaluation framework, and comprehensive results are made available through our GitHub repository to facilitate future research in multilingual ML code generation: https://github.com/enaix/ml2b.
Know Or Not: a library for evaluating out-of-knowledge base robustness
While the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have progressed significantly, their use in high-stakes applications have been limited due to risks of hallucination. One key approach in reducing hallucination is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but even in such setups, LLMs may still hallucinate when presented with questions outside of the knowledge base. Such behavior is unacceptable in high-stake applications where LLMs are expected to abstain from answering queries it does not have sufficient context on. In this work, we present a novel methodology for systematically evaluating out-of-knowledge base (OOKB) robustness of LLMs (whether LLMs know or do not know) in the RAG setting, without the need for manual annotation of gold standard answers. We implement our methodology in knowornot, an open-source library that enables users to develop their own customized evaluation data and pipelines for OOKB robustness. knowornot comprises four main features. Firstly, it provides a unified, high-level API that streamlines the process of setting up and running robustness benchmarks. Secondly, its modular architecture emphasizes extensibility and flexibility, allowing users to easily integrate their own LLM clients and RAG settings. Thirdly, its rigorous data modeling design ensures experiment reproducibility, reliability and traceability. Lastly, it implements a comprehensive suite of tools for users to customize their pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of knowornot by developing a challenging benchmark, PolicyBench, which spans four Question-Answer (QA) chatbots on government policies, and analyze its OOKB robustness. The source code of knowornot is available https://github.com/govtech-responsibleai/KnowOrNot.
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems.While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an ``open cookbook'' for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.
Differentiable Data Augmentation with Kornia
In this paper we present a review of the Kornia differentiable data augmentation (DDA) module for both for spatial (2D) and volumetric (3D) tensors. This module leverages differentiable computer vision solutions from Kornia, with an aim of integrating data augmentation (DA) pipelines and strategies to existing PyTorch components (e.g. autograd for differentiability, optim for optimization). In addition, we provide a benchmark comparing different DA frameworks and a short review for a number of approaches that make use of Kornia DDA.
Scaling Up Models and Data with $\texttt{t5x}$ and $\texttt{seqio}$
Recent neural network-based language models have benefited greatly from scaling up the size of training datasets and the number of parameters in the models themselves. Scaling can be complicated due to various factors including the need to distribute computation on supercomputer clusters (e.g., TPUs), prevent bottlenecks when infeeding data, and ensure reproducible results. In this work, we present two software libraries that ease these issues: t5x simplifies the process of building and training large language models at scale while maintaining ease of use, and seqio provides a task-based API for simple creation of fast and reproducible training data and evaluation pipelines. These open-source libraries have been used to train models with hundreds of billions of parameters on datasets with multiple terabytes of training data. Along with the libraries, we release configurations and instructions for T5-like encoder-decoder models as well as GPT-like decoder-only architectures. t5x and seqio are open source and available at https://github.com/google-research/t5x and https://github.com/google/seqio, respectively.
Rock Guitar Tablature Generation via Natural Language Processing
Deep learning has recently empowered and democratized generative modeling of images and text, with additional concurrent works exploring the possibility of generating more complex forms of data, such as audio. However, the high dimensionality, long-range dependencies, and lack of standardized datasets currently makes generative modeling of audio and music very challenging. We propose to model music as a series of discrete notes upon which we can use autoregressive natural language processing techniques for successful generative modeling. While previous works used similar pipelines on data such as sheet music and MIDI, we aim to extend such approaches to the under-studied medium of guitar tablature. Specifically, we develop the first work to our knowledge that models one specific genre as guitar tablature: heavy rock. Unlike other works in guitar tablature generation, we have a freely available public demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/josuelmet/Metal_Music_Interpolator
CoSineVerifier: Tool-Augmented Answer Verification for Computation-Oriented Scientific Questions
Answer verification methods are widely employed in language model training pipelines spanning data curation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While prior work focus on developing unified verifiers applicable across multiple reasoning scenarios, significant challenges remain in computation-oriented scientific domains, such as algebraic equivalence checking and physical constant substitution. In this paper, we introduce \model, a tool-augmented verifier that leverages external executors to perform precise computations and symbolic simplifications. \model enables robust verification that goes beyond simple semantic matching. We propose a novel two-stage pipeline, which begin with cold-start fine-tuning and followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning with tool integration. Extensive experiments conducted on STEM subjects, general QA, and long-form reasoning tasks demonstrates strong generalization of \model. The results shows that the \model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerifyBench-Hard and SCI-Bench. And we also employ our \model in RLVR as a reward model, the results show that it consistently outperforms both rubric-based and model-based verifiers on AIME'24 and AIME'25, demonstrating strong potential to enhance reasoning capabilities of LLM. Our model is released at https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}.
MAVIS: Mathematical Visual Instruction Tuning
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as a significant focus in academia and industry. Despite their proficiency in general multi-modal scenarios, the mathematical problem-solving capabilities in visual contexts remain insufficiently explored. We identify three key areas within MLLMs that need to be improved: visual encoding of math diagrams, diagram-language alignment, and mathematical reasoning skills. This draws forth an urgent demand for large-scale, high-quality data and training pipelines in visual mathematics. In this paper, we propose MAVIS, the first MAthematical VISual instruction tuning paradigm for MLLMs, involving a series of mathematical visual datasets and specialized MLLMs. Targeting the three issues, MAVIS contains three progressive training stages from scratch. First, we curate MAVIS-Caption, consisting of 558K diagram-caption pairs, to fine-tune a math-specific vision encoder (CLIP-Math) through contrastive learning, tailored for improved diagram visual encoding. Second, we utilize MAVIS-Caption to align the CLIP-Math with a large language model (LLM) by a projection layer, enhancing vision-language alignment in mathematical domains. Third, we introduce MAVIS-Instruct, including 900K meticulously collected and annotated visual math problems, which is adopted to finally instruct-tune the MLLM for robust mathematical reasoning skills. In MAVIS-Instruct, we incorporate complete chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for each problem, and minimize textual redundancy, thereby concentrating the model towards the visual elements. Data and Models are released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MAVIS
Pushing the Limits of Simple Pipelines for Few-Shot Learning: External Data and Fine-Tuning Make a Difference
Few-shot learning (FSL) is an important and topical problem in computer vision that has motivated extensive research into numerous methods spanning from sophisticated meta-learning methods to simple transfer learning baselines. We seek to push the limits of a simple-but-effective pipeline for more realistic and practical settings of few-shot image classification. To this end, we explore few-shot learning from the perspective of neural network architecture, as well as a three stage pipeline of network updates under different data supplies, where unsupervised external data is considered for pre-training, base categories are used to simulate few-shot tasks for meta-training, and the scarcely labelled data of an novel task is taken for fine-tuning. We investigate questions such as: (1) How pre-training on external data benefits FSL? (2) How state-of-the-art transformer architectures can be exploited? and (3) How fine-tuning mitigates domain shift? Ultimately, we show that a simple transformer-based pipeline yields surprisingly good performance on standard benchmarks such as Mini-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CDFSL and Meta-Dataset. Our code and demo are available at https://hushell.github.io/pmf.
Adversarial Data Collection: Human-Collaborative Perturbations for Efficient and Robust Robotic Imitation Learning
The pursuit of data efficiency, where quality outweighs quantity, has emerged as a cornerstone in robotic manipulation, especially given the high costs associated with real-world data collection. We propose that maximizing the informational density of individual demonstrations can dramatically reduce reliance on large-scale datasets while improving task performance. To this end, we introduce Adversarial Data Collection, a Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) framework that redefines robotic data acquisition through real-time, bidirectional human-environment interactions. Unlike conventional pipelines that passively record static demonstrations, ADC adopts a collaborative perturbation paradigm: during a single episode, an adversarial operator dynamically alters object states, environmental conditions, and linguistic commands, while the tele-operator adaptively adjusts actions to overcome these evolving challenges. This process compresses diverse failure-recovery behaviors, compositional task variations, and environmental perturbations into minimal demonstrations. Our experiments demonstrate that ADC-trained models achieve superior compositional generalization to unseen task instructions, enhanced robustness to perceptual perturbations, and emergent error recovery capabilities. Strikingly, models trained with merely 20% of the demonstration volume collected through ADC significantly outperform traditional approaches using full datasets. These advances bridge the gap between data-centric learning paradigms and practical robotic deployment, demonstrating that strategic data acquisition, not merely post-hoc processing, is critical for scalable, real-world robot learning. Additionally, we are curating a large-scale ADC-Robotics dataset comprising real-world manipulation tasks with adversarial perturbations. This benchmark will be open-sourced to facilitate advancements in robotic imitation learning.
CASE: Efficient Curricular Data Pre-training for Building Assistive Psychology Expert Models
The limited availability of psychologists necessitates efficient identification of individuals requiring urgent mental healthcare. This study explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines to analyze text data from online mental health forums used for consultations. By analyzing forum posts, these pipelines can flag users who may require immediate professional attention. A crucial challenge in this domain is data privacy and scarcity. To address this, we propose utilizing readily available curricular texts used in institutes specializing in mental health for pre-training the NLP pipelines. This helps us mimic the training process of a psychologist. Our work presents CASE-BERT that flags potential mental health disorders based on forum text. CASE-BERT demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods, achieving an f1 score of 0.91 for Depression and 0.88 for Anxiety, two of the most commonly reported mental health disorders. Our code is publicly available.
Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI
The rapid evolution of agentic AI marks a new phase in artificial intelligence, where Large Language Models (LLMs) no longer merely respond but act, reason, and adapt. This survey traces the paradigm shift in building agentic AI: from Pipeline-based systems, where planning, tool use, and memory are orchestrated by external logic, to the emerging Model-native paradigm, where these capabilities are internalized within the model's parameters. We first position Reinforcement Learning (RL) as the algorithmic engine enabling this paradigm shift. By reframing learning from imitating static data to outcome-driven exploration, RL underpins a unified solution of LLM + RL + Task across language, vision and embodied domains. Building on this, the survey systematically reviews how each capability -- Planning, Tool use, and Memory -- has evolved from externally scripted modules to end-to-end learned behaviors. Furthermore, it examines how this paradigm shift has reshaped major agent applications, specifically the Deep Research agent emphasizing long-horizon reasoning and the GUI agent emphasizing embodied interaction. We conclude by discussing the continued internalization of agentic capabilities like Multi-agent collaboration and Reflection, alongside the evolving roles of the system and model layers in future agentic AI. Together, these developments outline a coherent trajectory toward model-native agentic AI as an integrated learning and interaction framework, marking the transition from constructing systems that apply intelligence to developing models that grow intelligence through experience.
PerceptionLM: Open-Access Data and Models for Detailed Visual Understanding
Vision-language models are integral to computer vision research, yet many high-performing models remain closed-source, obscuring their data, design and training recipe. The research community has responded by using distillation from black-box models to label training data, achieving strong benchmark results, at the cost of measurable scientific progress. However, without knowing the details of the teacher model and its data sources, scientific progress remains difficult to measure. In this paper, we study building a Perception Language Model (PLM) in a fully open and reproducible framework for transparent research in image and video understanding. We analyze standard training pipelines without distillation from proprietary models and explore large-scale synthetic data to identify critical data gaps, particularly in detailed video understanding. To bridge these gaps, we release 2.8M human-labeled instances of fine-grained video question-answer pairs and spatio-temporally grounded video captions. Additionally, we introduce PLM-VideoBench, a suite for evaluating challenging video understanding tasks focusing on the ability to reason about "what", "where", "when", and "how" of a video. We make our work fully reproducible by providing data, training recipes, code & models.
Data Processing for the OpenGPT-X Model Family
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the data preparation pipeline developed for the OpenGPT-X project, a large-scale initiative aimed at creating open and high-performance multilingual large language models (LLMs). The project goal is to deliver models that cover all major European languages, with a particular focus on real-world applications within the European Union. We explain all data processing steps, starting with the data selection and requirement definition to the preparation of the final datasets for model training. We distinguish between curated data and web data, as each of these categories is handled by distinct pipelines, with curated data undergoing minimal filtering and web data requiring extensive filtering and deduplication. This distinction guided the development of specialized algorithmic solutions for both pipelines. In addition to describing the processing methodologies, we provide an in-depth analysis of the datasets, increasing transparency and alignment with European data regulations. Finally, we share key insights and challenges faced during the project, offering recommendations for future endeavors in large-scale multilingual data preparation for LLMs.
RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture
There are two common ways in which developers are incorporating proprietary and domain-specific data when building applications of Large Language Models (LLMs): Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Fine-Tuning. RAG augments the prompt with the external data, while fine-Tuning incorporates the additional knowledge into the model itself. However, the pros and cons of both approaches are not well understood. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for fine-tuning and RAG, and present the tradeoffs of both for multiple popular LLMs, including Llama2-13B, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our pipeline consists of multiple stages, including extracting information from PDFs, generating questions and answers, using them for fine-tuning, and leveraging GPT-4 for evaluating the results. We propose metrics to assess the performance of different stages of the RAG and fine-Tuning pipeline. We conduct an in-depth study on an agricultural dataset. Agriculture as an industry has not seen much penetration of AI, and we study a potentially disruptive application - what if we could provide location-specific insights to a farmer? Our results show the effectiveness of our dataset generation pipeline in capturing geographic-specific knowledge, and the quantitative and qualitative benefits of RAG and fine-tuning. We see an accuracy increase of over 6 p.p. when fine-tuning the model and this is cumulative with RAG, which increases accuracy by 5 p.p. further. In one particular experiment, we also demonstrate that the fine-tuned model leverages information from across geographies to answer specific questions, increasing answer similarity from 47% to 72%. Overall, the results point to how systems built using LLMs can be adapted to respond and incorporate knowledge across a dimension that is critical for a specific industry, paving the way for further applications of LLMs in other industrial domains.
Explainable Data-Driven Optimization: From Context to Decision and Back Again
Data-driven optimization uses contextual information and machine learning algorithms to find solutions to decision problems with uncertain parameters. While a vast body of work is dedicated to interpreting machine learning models in the classification setting, explaining decision pipelines involving learning algorithms remains unaddressed. This lack of interpretability can block the adoption of data-driven solutions as practitioners may not understand or trust the recommended decisions. We bridge this gap by introducing a counterfactual explanation methodology tailored to explain solutions to data-driven problems. We introduce two classes of explanations and develop methods to find nearest explanations of random forest and nearest-neighbor predictors. We demonstrate our approach by explaining key problems in operations management such as inventory management and routing.
Synthetic Data for Model Selection
Recent improvements in synthetic data generation make it possible to produce images that are highly photorealistic and indistinguishable from real ones. Furthermore, synthetic generation pipelines have the potential to generate an unlimited number of images. The combination of high photorealism and scale turn the synthetic data into a promising candidate for potentially improving various machine learning (ML) pipelines. Thus far, a large body of research in this field has focused on using synthetic images for training, by augmenting and enlarging training data. In contrast to using synthetic data for training, in this work we explore whether synthetic data can be beneficial for model selection. Considering the task of image classification, we demonstrate that when data is scarce, synthetic data can be used to replace the held out validation set, thus allowing to train on a larger dataset.
IPProtect: protecting the intellectual property of visual datasets during data valuation
Data trading is essential to accelerate the development of data-driven machine learning pipelines. The central problem in data trading is to estimate the utility of a seller's dataset with respect to a given buyer's machine learning task, also known as data valuation. Typically, data valuation requires one or more participants to share their raw dataset with others, leading to potential risks of intellectual property (IP) violations. In this paper, we tackle the novel task of preemptively protecting the IP of datasets that need to be shared during data valuation. First, we identify and formalize two kinds of novel IP risks in visual datasets: data-item (image) IP and statistical (dataset) IP. Then, we propose a novel algorithm to convert the raw dataset into a sanitized version, that provides resistance to IP violations, while at the same time allowing accurate data valuation. The key idea is to limit the transfer of information from the raw dataset to the sanitized dataset, thereby protecting against potential intellectual property violations. Next, we analyze our method for the likely existence of a solution and immunity against reconstruction attacks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three computer vision datasets demonstrating the advantages of our method in comparison to other baselines.
OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction
A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, existing retargeting pipelines often struggle with the significant embodiment gap between humans and robots, producing physically implausible artifacts like foot-skating and penetration. More importantly, common retargeting methods neglect the rich human-object and human-environment interactions essential for expressive locomotion and loco-manipulation. To address this, we introduce OmniRetarget, an interaction-preserving data generation engine based on an interaction mesh that explicitly models and preserves the crucial spatial and contact relationships between an agent, the terrain, and manipulated objects. By minimizing the Laplacian deformation between the human and robot meshes while enforcing kinematic constraints, OmniRetarget generates kinematically feasible trajectories. Moreover, preserving task-relevant interactions enables efficient data augmentation, from a single demonstration to different robot embodiments, terrains, and object configurations. We comprehensively evaluate OmniRetarget by retargeting motions from OMOMO, LAFAN1, and our in-house MoCap datasets, generating over 8-hour trajectories that achieve better kinematic constraint satisfaction and contact preservation than widely used baselines. Such high-quality data enables proprioceptive RL policies to successfully execute long-horizon (up to 30 seconds) parkour and loco-manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid, trained with only 5 reward terms and simple domain randomization shared by all tasks, without any learning curriculum.
LatinCy: Synthetic Trained Pipelines for Latin NLP
This paper introduces LatinCy, a set of trained general purpose Latin-language "core" pipelines for use with the spaCy natural language processing framework. The models are trained on a large amount of available Latin data, including all five of the Latin Universal Dependency treebanks, which have been preprocessed to be compatible with each other. The result is a set of general models for Latin with good performance on a number of natural language processing tasks (e.g. the top-performing model yields POS tagging, 97.41% accuracy; lemmatization, 94.66% accuracy; morphological tagging 92.76% accuracy). The paper describes the model training, including its training data and parameterization, and presents the advantages to Latin-language researchers of having a spaCy model available for NLP work.
DAComp: Benchmarking Data Agents across the Full Data Intelligence Lifecycle
Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io
A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers
Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.
Ensemble-Instruct: Generating Instruction-Tuning Data with a Heterogeneous Mixture of LMs
Using in-context learning (ICL) for data generation, techniques such as Self-Instruct (Wang et al., 2023) or the follow-up Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023) can train strong conversational agents with only a small amount of human supervision. One limitation of these approaches is that they resort to very large language models (around 175B parameters) that are also proprietary and non-public. Here we explore the application of such techniques to language models that are much smaller (around 10B--40B parameters) and have permissive licenses. We find the Self-Instruct approach to be less effective at these sizes and propose new ICL methods that draw on two main ideas: (a) Categorization and simplification of the ICL templates to make prompt learning easier for the LM, and (b) Ensembling over multiple LM outputs to help select high-quality synthetic examples. Our algorithm leverages the 175 Self-Instruct seed tasks and employs separate pipelines for instructions that require an input and instructions that do not. Empirical investigations with different LMs show that: (1) Our proposed method yields higher-quality instruction tuning data than Self-Instruct, (2) It improves performances of both vanilla and instruction-tuned LMs by significant margins, and (3) Smaller instruction-tuned LMs generate more useful outputs than their larger un-tuned counterparts. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/IBM/ensemble-instruct.
Cross-Domain Evaluation of Transformer-Based Vulnerability Detection on Open & Industry Data
Deep learning solutions for vulnerability detection proposed in academic research are not always accessible to developers, and their applicability in industrial settings is rarely addressed. Transferring such technologies from academia to industry presents challenges related to trustworthiness, legacy systems, limited digital literacy, and the gap between academic and industrial expertise. For deep learning in particular, performance and integration into existing workflows are additional concerns. In this work, we first evaluate the performance of CodeBERT for detecting vulnerable functions in industrial and open-source software. We analyse its cross-domain generalisation when fine-tuned on open-source data and tested on industrial data, and vice versa, also exploring strategies for handling class imbalance. Based on these results, we develop AI-DO(Automating vulnerability detection Integration for Developers' Operations), a Continuous Integration-Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)-integrated recommender system that uses fine-tuned CodeBERT to detect and localise vulnerabilities during code review without disrupting workflows. Finally, we assess the tool's perceived usefulness through a survey with the company's IT professionals. Our results show that models trained on industrial data detect vulnerabilities accurately within the same domain but lose performance on open-source code, while a deep learner fine-tuned on open data, with appropriate undersampling techniques, improves the detection of vulnerabilities.
Beyond Contrastive Learning: Synthetic Data Enables List-wise Training with Multiple Levels of Relevance
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have allowed the augmentation of information retrieval (IR) pipelines with synthetic data in various ways. Yet, the main training paradigm remains: contrastive learning with binary relevance labels and the InfoNCE loss, where one positive document is compared against one or more negatives. This objective treats all documents that are not explicitly annotated as relevant on an equally negative footing, regardless of their actual degree of relevance, thus (a) missing subtle nuances that are useful for ranking and (b) being susceptible to annotation noise. To overcome this limitation, in this work we forgo real training documents and annotations altogether and use open-source LLMs to directly generate synthetic documents that answer real user queries according to several different levels of relevance. This fully synthetic ranking context of graduated relevance, together with an appropriate list-wise loss (Wasserstein distance), enables us to train dense retrievers in a way that better captures the ranking task. Experiments on various IR datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms conventional training with InfoNCE by a large margin. Without using any real documents for training, our dense retriever significantly outperforms the same retriever trained through self-supervision. More importantly, it matches the performance of the same retriever trained on real, labeled training documents of the same dataset, while being more robust to distribution shift and clearly outperforming it when evaluated zero-shot on the BEIR dataset collection.
BigDL 2.0: Seamless Scaling of AI Pipelines from Laptops to Distributed Cluster
Most AI projects start with a Python notebook running on a single laptop; however, one usually needs to go through a mountain of pains to scale it to handle larger dataset (for both experimentation and production deployment). These usually entail many manual and error-prone steps for the data scientists to fully take advantage of the available hardware resources (e.g., SIMD instructions, multi-processing, quantization, memory allocation optimization, data partitioning, distributed computing, etc.). To address this challenge, we have open sourced BigDL 2.0 at https://github.com/intel-analytics/BigDL/ under Apache 2.0 license (combining the original BigDL and Analytics Zoo projects); using BigDL 2.0, users can simply build conventional Python notebooks on their laptops (with possible AutoML support), which can then be transparently accelerated on a single node (with up-to 9.6x speedup in our experiments), and seamlessly scaled out to a large cluster (across several hundreds servers in real-world use cases). BigDL 2.0 has already been adopted by many real-world users (such as Mastercard, Burger King, Inspur, etc.) in production.
ELT-Bench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on ELT Pipelines
Practitioners are increasingly turning to Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) pipelines with the widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses. However, designing these pipelines often involves significant manual work to ensure correctness. Recent advances in AI-based methods, which have shown strong capabilities in data tasks, such as text-to-SQL, present an opportunity to alleviate manual efforts in developing ELT pipelines. Unfortunately, current benchmarks in data engineering only evaluate isolated tasks, such as using data tools and writing data transformation queries, leaving a significant gap in evaluating AI agents for generating end-to-end ELT pipelines. To fill this gap, we introduce ELT-Bench, an end-to-end benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of AI agents to build ELT pipelines. ELT-Bench consists of 100 pipelines, including 835 source tables and 203 data models across various domains. By simulating realistic scenarios involving the integration of diverse data sources and the use of popular data tools, ELT-Bench evaluates AI agents' abilities in handling complex data engineering workflows. AI agents must interact with databases and data tools, write code and SQL queries, and orchestrate every pipeline stage. We evaluate two representative code agent frameworks, Spider-Agent and SWE-Agent, using six popular Large Language Models (LLMs) on ELT-Bench. The highest-performing agent, Spider-Agent Claude-3.7-Sonnet with extended thinking, correctly generates only 3.9% of data models, with an average cost of $4.30 and 89.3 steps per pipeline. Our experimental results demonstrate the challenges of ELT-Bench and highlight the need for a more advanced AI agent to reduce manual effort in ELT workflows. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/ELT-Bench.
HumanVBench: Exploring Human-Centric Video Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs with Synthetic Benchmark Data
In the domain of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), achieving human-centric video understanding remains a formidable challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily emphasize object and action recognition, often neglecting the intricate nuances of human emotions, behaviors, and speech visual alignment within video content. We present HumanVBench, an innovative benchmark meticulously crafted to bridge these gaps in the evaluation of video MLLMs. HumanVBench comprises 17 carefully designed tasks that explore two primary dimensions: inner emotion and outer manifestations, spanning static and dynamic, basic and complex, as well as single-modal and cross-modal aspects. With two advanced automated pipelines for video annotation and distractor-included QA generation, HumanVBench utilizes diverse state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques to streamline benchmark data synthesis and quality assessment, minimizing human annotation dependency tailored to human-centric multimodal attributes. A comprehensive evaluation across 16 SOTA video MLLMs reveals notable limitations in current performance, especially in cross-modal and temporal alignment, underscoring the necessity for further refinement toward achieving more human-like understanding. HumanVBench is open-sourced to facilitate future advancements and real-world applications in video MLLMs.
Wearable data from subjects playing Super Mario, sitting university exams, or performing physical exercise help detect acute mood episodes via self-supervised learning
Personal sensing, leveraging data passively and near-continuously collected with wearables from patients in their ecological environment, is a promising paradigm to monitor mood disorders (MDs), a major determinant of worldwide disease burden. However, collecting and annotating wearable data is very resource-intensive. Studies of this kind can thus typically afford to recruit only a couple dozens of patients. This constitutes one of the major obstacles to applying modern supervised machine learning techniques to MDs detection. In this paper, we overcome this data bottleneck and advance the detection of MDs acute episode vs stable state from wearables data on the back of recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL). This leverages unlabelled data to learn representations during pre-training, subsequently exploited for a supervised task. First, we collected open-access datasets recording with an Empatica E4 spanning different, unrelated to MD monitoring, personal sensing tasks -- from emotion recognition in Super Mario players to stress detection in undergraduates -- and devised a pre-processing pipeline performing on-/off-body detection, sleep-wake detection, segmentation, and (optionally) feature extraction. With 161 E4-recorded subjects, we introduce E4SelfLearning, the largest to date open access collection, and its pre-processing pipeline. Second, we show that SSL confidently outperforms fully-supervised pipelines using either our novel E4-tailored Transformer architecture (E4mer) or classical baseline XGBoost: 81.23% against 75.35% (E4mer) and 72.02% (XGBoost) correctly classified recording segments from 64 (half acute, half stable) patients. Lastly, we illustrate that SSL performance is strongly associated with the specific surrogate task employed for pre-training as well as with unlabelled data availability.
All You Need is RAW: Defending Against Adversarial Attacks with Camera Image Pipelines
Existing neural networks for computer vision tasks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: adding imperceptible perturbations to the input images can fool these methods to make a false prediction on an image that was correctly predicted without the perturbation. Various defense methods have proposed image-to-image mapping methods, either including these perturbations in the training process or removing them in a preprocessing denoising step. In doing so, existing methods often ignore that the natural RGB images in today's datasets are not captured but, in fact, recovered from RAW color filter array captures that are subject to various degradations in the capture. In this work, we exploit this RAW data distribution as an empirical prior for adversarial defense. Specifically, we proposed a model-agnostic adversarial defensive method, which maps the input RGB images to Bayer RAW space and back to output RGB using a learned camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to eliminate potential adversarial patterns. The proposed method acts as an off-the-shelf preprocessing module and, unlike model-specific adversarial training methods, does not require adversarial images to train. As a result, the method generalizes to unseen tasks without additional retraining. Experiments on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet, COCO) for different vision tasks (e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, object detection) validate that the method significantly outperforms existing methods across task domains.
MixEval-X: Any-to-Any Evaluations from Real-World Data Mixtures
Perceiving and generating diverse modalities are crucial for AI models to effectively learn from and engage with real-world signals, necessitating reliable evaluations for their development. We identify two major issues in current evaluations: (1) inconsistent standards, shaped by different communities with varying protocols and maturity levels; and (2) significant query, grading, and generalization biases. To address these, we introduce MixEval-X, the first any-to-any real-world benchmark designed to optimize and standardize evaluations across input and output modalities. We propose multi-modal benchmark mixture and adaptation-rectification pipelines to reconstruct real-world task distributions, ensuring evaluations generalize effectively to real-world use cases. Extensive meta-evaluations show our approach effectively aligns benchmark samples with real-world task distributions and the model rankings correlate strongly with that of crowd-sourced real-world evaluations (up to 0.98). We provide comprehensive leaderboards to rerank existing models and organizations and offer insights to enhance understanding of multi-modal evaluations and inform future research.
Skywork-Math: Data Scaling Laws for Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models -- The Story Goes On
In this paper, we investigate the underlying factors that potentially enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We argue that the data scaling law for math reasoning capabilities in modern LLMs is far from being saturated, highlighting how the model's quality improves with increases in data quantity. To support this claim, we introduce the Skywork-Math model series, supervised fine-tuned (SFT) on common 7B LLMs using our proposed 2.5M-instance Skywork-MathQA dataset. Skywork-Math 7B has achieved impressive accuracies of 51.2% on the competition-level MATH benchmark and 83.9% on the GSM8K benchmark using only SFT data, outperforming an early version of GPT-4 on MATH. The superior performance of Skywork-Math models contributes to our novel two-stage data synthesis and model SFT pipelines, which include three different augmentation methods and a diverse seed problem set, ensuring both the quantity and quality of Skywork-MathQA dataset across varying difficulty levels. Most importantly, we provide several practical takeaways to enhance math reasoning abilities in LLMs for both research and industry applications.
Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agents
Public research results on large-scale supervised finetuning of AI agents remain relatively rare, since the collection of agent training data presents unique challenges. In this work, we argue that the bottleneck is not a lack of underlying data sources, but that a large variety of data is fragmented across heterogeneous formats, tools, and interfaces. To this end, we introduce the agent data protocol (ADP), a light-weight representation language that serves as an "interlingua" between agent datasets in diverse formats and unified agent training pipelines downstream. The design of ADP is expressive enough to capture a large variety of tasks, including API/tool use, browsing, coding, software engineering, and general agentic workflows, while remaining simple to parse and train on without engineering at a per-dataset level. In experiments, we unified a broad collection of 13 existing agent training datasets into ADP format, and converted the standardized ADP data into training-ready formats for multiple agent frameworks. We performed SFT on these data, and demonstrated an average performance gain of ~20% over corresponding base models, and delivers state-of-the-art or near-SOTA performance on standard coding, browsing, tool use, and research benchmarks, without domain-specific tuning. All code and data are released publicly, in the hope that ADP could help lower the barrier to standardized, scalable, and reproducible agent training.
Shuffle-R1: Efficient RL framework for Multimodal Large Language Models via Data-centric Dynamic Shuffle
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies caused by two underexplored issues: Advantage Collapsing, where most advantages in a batch concentrate near zero, and Rollout Silencing, where the proportion of rollouts contributing non-zero gradients diminishes over time. These issues lead to suboptimal gradient updates and hinder long-term learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Shuffle-R1, a simple yet principled framework that improves RL fine-tuning efficiency by dynamically restructuring trajectory sampling and batch composition. It introduces (1) Pairwise Trajectory Sampling, which selects high-contrast trajectories with large advantages to improve gradient signal quality, and (2) Advantage-based Trajectory Shuffle, which increases exposure of valuable rollouts through informed batch reshuffling. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong RL baselines with minimal overhead. These results highlight the importance of data-centric adaptations for more efficient RL training in MLLM.
Synthetic Data Generation Using Large Language Models: Advances in Text and Code
Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked new possibilities for generating synthetic training data in both natural language and code. By producing artificial but task-relevant examples, these models can significantly augment or even replace real-world datasets, especially when labeled data is scarce or sensitive. This paper surveys recent advances in using LLMs to create synthetic text and code, emphasizing prompt-based generation, retrieval-augmented pipelines, and iterative self-refinement. We show how these methods enrich low-resource tasks such as classification and question answering, as well as code-centric applications such as instruction tuning, code translation, and bug repair, by enabling automated verification of functional correctness. Alongside potential benefits like cost-effectiveness, broad coverage, and controllable diversity, we address challenges such as factual inaccuracies in generated text, lack of stylistic realism, and the risk of bias amplification. Proposed mitigations include filtering and weighting outputs and reinforcement learning with execution feedback for code. We conclude with open research directions like automated prompt engineering, cross-modal data synthesis, and robust evaluation frameworks, highlighting the importance of LLM-generated synthetic data in advancing AI while emphasizing ethical and quality safeguards.
Progressive Data Dropout: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Faster Training
The success of the machine learning field has reliably depended on training on large datasets. While effective, this trend comes at an extraordinary cost. This is due to two deeply intertwined factors: the size of models and the size of datasets. While promising research efforts focus on reducing the size of models, the other half of the equation remains fairly mysterious. Indeed, it is surprising that the standard approach to training remains to iterate over and over, uniformly sampling the training dataset. In this paper we explore a series of alternative training paradigms that leverage insights from hard-data-mining and dropout, simple enough to implement and use that can become the new training standard. The proposed Progressive Data Dropout reduces the number of effective epochs to as little as 12.4% of the baseline. This savings actually do not come at any cost for accuracy. Surprisingly, the proposed method improves accuracy by up to 4.82%. Our approach requires no changes to model architecture or optimizer, and can be applied across standard training pipelines, thus posing an excellent opportunity for wide adoption. Code can be found here: https://github.com/bazyagami/LearningWithRevision
Learning Super-Resolution Ultrasound Localization Microscopy from Radio-Frequency Data
Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) enables imaging of vascular structures in the micrometer range by accumulating contrast agent particle locations over time. Precise and efficient target localization accuracy remains an active research topic in the ULM field to further push the boundaries of this promising medical imaging technology. Existing work incorporates Delay-And-Sum (DAS) beamforming into particle localization pipelines, which ultimately determines the ULM image resolution capability. In this paper we propose to feed unprocessed Radio-Frequency (RF) data into a super-resolution network while bypassing DAS beamforming and its limitations. To facilitate this, we demonstrate label projection and inverse point transformation between B-mode and RF coordinate space as required by our approach. We assess our method against state-of-the-art techniques based on a public dataset featuring in silico and in vivo data. Results from our RF-trained network suggest that excluding DAS beamforming offers a great potential to optimize on the ULM resolution performance.
Vision-G1: Towards General Vision Language Reasoning with Multi-Domain Data Curation
Despite their success, current training pipelines for reasoning VLMs focus on a limited range of tasks, such as mathematical and logical reasoning. As a result, these models face difficulties in generalizing their reasoning capabilities to a wide range of domains, primarily due to the scarcity of readily available and verifiable reward data beyond these narrowly defined areas. Moreover, integrating data from multiple domains is challenging, as the compatibility between domain-specific datasets remains uncertain. To address these limitations, we build a comprehensive RL-ready visual reasoning dataset from 46 data sources across 8 dimensions, covering a wide range of tasks such as infographic, mathematical, spatial, cross-image, graphic user interface, medical, common sense and general science. We propose an influence function based data selection and difficulty based filtering strategy to identify high-quality training samples from this dataset. Subsequently, we train the VLM, referred to as Vision-G1, using multi-round RL with a data curriculum to iteratively improve its visual reasoning capabilities. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across various visual reasoning benchmarks, outperforming similar-sized VLMs and even proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Flash. The model, code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/yuh-zha/Vision-G1.
LLM-Assisted Question-Answering on Technical Documents Using Structured Data-Aware Retrieval Augmented Generation
Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of natural language understanding and generation. But they face challenges such as hallucination and outdated knowledge. Fine-tuning is one possible solution, but it is resource-intensive and must be repeated with every data update. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an efficient solution by allowing LLMs to access external knowledge sources. However, traditional RAG pipelines struggle with retrieving information from complex technical documents with structured data such as tables and images. In this work, we propose a RAG pipeline, capable of handling tables and images in documents, for technical documents that support both scanned and searchable formats. Its retrieval process combines vector similarity search with a fine-tuned reranker based on Gemma-2-9b-it. The reranker is trained using RAFT (Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning) on a custom dataset designed to improve context identification for question answering. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed pipeline achieves a high faithfulness score of 94% (RAGas) and 96% (DeepEval), and an answer relevancy score of 87% (RAGas) and 93% (DeepEval). Comparative analysis demonstrates that the proposed architecture is superior to general RAG pipelines in terms of table-based questions and handling questions outside context.
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data
Personalization is critical in AI assistants, particularly in the context of private AI models that work with individual users. A key scenario in this domain involves enabling AI models to access and interpret a user's private data (e.g., conversation history, user-AI interactions, app usage) to understand personal details such as biographical information, preferences, and social connections. However, due to the sensitive nature of such data, there are no publicly available datasets that allow us to assess an AI model's ability to understand users through direct access to personal information. To address this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates diverse, realistic user profiles and private documents simulating human activities. Leveraging this synthetic data, we present PersonaBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI models' performance in understanding personal information derived from simulated private user data. We evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using questions directly related to a user's personal information, supported by the relevant private documents provided to the models. Our results reveal that current retrieval-augmented AI models struggle to answer private questions by extracting personal information from user documents, highlighting the need for improved methodologies to enhance personalization capabilities in AI.
On building machine learning pipelines for Android malware detection: a procedural survey of practices, challenges and opportunities
As the smartphone market leader, Android has been a prominent target for malware attacks. The number of malicious applications (apps) identified for it has increased continually over the past decade, creating an immense challenge for all parties involved. For market holders and researchers, in particular, the large number of samples has made manual malware detection unfeasible, leading to an influx of research that investigate Machine Learning (ML) approaches to automate this process. However, while some of the proposed approaches achieve high performance, rapidly evolving Android malware has made them unable to maintain their accuracy over time. This has created a need in the community to conduct further research, and build more flexible ML pipelines. Doing so, however, is currently hindered by a lack of systematic overview of the existing literature, to learn from and improve upon the existing solutions. Existing survey papers often focus only on parts of the ML process (e.g., data collection or model deployment), while omitting other important stages, such as model evaluation and explanation. In this paper, we address this problem with a review of 42 highly-cited papers, spanning a decade of research (from 2011 to 2021). We introduce a novel procedural taxonomy of the published literature, covering how they have used ML algorithms, what features they have engineered, which dimensionality reduction techniques they have employed, what datasets they have employed for training, and what their evaluation and explanation strategies are. Drawing from this taxonomy, we also identify gaps in knowledge and provide ideas for improvement and future work.
INGENIOUS: Using Informative Data Subsets for Efficient Pre-Training of Language Models
A salient characteristic of pre-trained language models (PTLMs) is a remarkable improvement in their generalization capability and emergence of new capabilities with increasing model capacity and pre-training dataset size. Consequently, we are witnessing the development of enormous models pushing the state-of-the-art. It is, however, imperative to realize that this inevitably leads to prohibitively long training times, extortionate computing costs, and a detrimental environmental impact. Significant efforts are underway to make PTLM training more efficient through innovations in model architectures, training pipelines, and loss function design, with scant attention being paid to optimizing the utility of training data. The key question that we ask is whether it is possible to train PTLMs by employing only highly informative subsets of the training data while maintaining downstream performance? Building upon the recent progress in informative data subset selection, we show how we can employ submodular optimization to select highly representative subsets of the training corpora and demonstrate that the proposed framework can be applied to efficiently train multiple PTLMs (BERT, BioBERT, GPT-2) using only a fraction of data. Further, we perform a rigorous empirical evaluation to show that the resulting models achieve up to sim99% of the performance of the fully-trained models. We made our framework publicly available at https://github.com/Efficient-AI/ingenious.
Implementation of the rROF denoising method in the cWB pipeline for gravitational-wave data analysis
The data collected by the current network of gravitational-wave detectors are largely dominated by instrumental noise. Total variation methods based on L1-norm minimization have recently been proposed as a powerful technique for noise removal in gravitational-wave data. In particular, the regularized Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (rROF) model has proven effective to denoise signals embedded in either simulated Gaussian noise or actual detector noise. Importing the rROF model to existing search pipelines seems therefore worth considering. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of two variants of the rROF algorithm as two separate plug-ins of the coherent Wave Burst (cWB) pipeline designed to conduct searches of unmodelled gravitational-wave burst sources. The first approach is based on a single-step rROF method and the second one employs an iterative rROF procedure. Both approaches are calibrated using actual gravitational-wave events from the first three observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, namely GW1501914, GW151226, GW170817, and GW190521, encompassing different types of compact binary coalescences. Our analysis shows that the iterative version of the rROF denoising algorithm implemented in the cWB pipeline effectively eliminates noise while preserving the waveform signals intact. Therefore, the combined approach yields higher signal-to-noise values than those computed by the cWB pipeline without the rROF denoising step. The incorporation of the iterative rROF algorithm in the cWB pipeline might hence impact the detectability capabilities of the pipeline along with the inference of source properties.
Benchmarking Multimodal AutoML for Tabular Data with Text Fields
We consider the use of automated supervised learning systems for data tables that not only contain numeric/categorical columns, but one or more text fields as well. Here we assemble 18 multimodal data tables that each contain some text fields and stem from a real business application. Our publicly-available benchmark enables researchers to comprehensively evaluate their own methods for supervised learning with numeric, categorical, and text features. To ensure that any single modeling strategy which performs well over all 18 datasets will serve as a practical foundation for multimodal text/tabular AutoML, the diverse datasets in our benchmark vary greatly in: sample size, problem types (a mix of classification and regression tasks), number of features (with the number of text columns ranging from 1 to 28 between datasets), as well as how the predictive signal is decomposed between text vs. numeric/categorical features (and predictive interactions thereof). Over this benchmark, we evaluate various straightforward pipelines to model such data, including standard two-stage approaches where NLP is used to featurize the text such that AutoML for tabular data can then be applied. Compared with human data science teams, the fully automated methodology that performed best on our benchmark (stack ensembling a multimodal Transformer with various tree models) also manages to rank 1st place when fit to the raw text/tabular data in two MachineHack prediction competitions and 2nd place (out of 2380 teams) in Kaggle's Mercari Price Suggestion Challenge.
Training Data Attribution via Approximate Unrolled Differentiation
Many training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to estimate how a model's behavior would change if one or more data points were removed from the training set. Methods based on implicit differentiation, such as influence functions, can be made computationally efficient, but fail to account for underspecification, the implicit bias of the optimization algorithm, or multi-stage training pipelines. By contrast, methods based on unrolling address these issues but face scalability challenges. In this work, we connect the implicit-differentiation-based and unrolling-based approaches and combine their benefits by introducing Source, an approximate unrolling-based TDA method that is computed using an influence-function-like formula. While being computationally efficient compared to unrolling-based approaches, Source is suitable in cases where implicit-differentiation-based approaches struggle, such as in non-converged models and multi-stage training pipelines. Empirically, Source outperforms existing TDA techniques in counterfactual prediction, especially in settings where implicit-differentiation-based approaches fall short.
Adaptation Strategies for Automated Machine Learning on Evolving Data
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems have been shown to efficiently build good models for new datasets. However, it is often not clear how well they can adapt when the data evolves over time. The main goal of this study is to understand the effect of data stream challenges such as concept drift on the performance of AutoML methods, and which adaptation strategies can be employed to make them more robust. To that end, we propose 6 concept drift adaptation strategies and evaluate their effectiveness on different AutoML approaches. We do this for a variety of AutoML approaches for building machine learning pipelines, including those that leverage Bayesian optimization, genetic programming, and random search with automated stacking. These are evaluated empirically on real-world and synthetic data streams with different types of concept drift. Based on this analysis, we propose ways to develop more sophisticated and robust AutoML techniques.
GENIE: Generative Note Information Extraction model for structuring EHR data
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold immense potential for advancing healthcare, offering rich, longitudinal data that combines structured information with valuable insights from unstructured clinical notes. However, the unstructured nature of clinical text poses significant challenges for secondary applications. Traditional methods for structuring EHR free-text data, such as rule-based systems and multi-stage pipelines, are often limited by their time-consuming configurations and inability to adapt across clinical notes from diverse healthcare settings. Few systems provide a comprehensive attribute extraction for terminologies. While giant large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA 405B excel at structuring tasks, they are slow, costly, and impractical for large-scale use. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GENIE, a Generative Note Information Extraction system that leverages LLMs to streamline the structuring of unstructured clinical text into usable data with standardized format. GENIE processes entire paragraphs in a single pass, extracting entities, assertion statuses, locations, modifiers, values, and purposes with high accuracy. Its unified, end-to-end approach simplifies workflows, reduces errors, and eliminates the need for extensive manual intervention. Using a robust data preparation pipeline and fine-tuned small scale LLMs, GENIE achieves competitive performance across multiple information extraction tasks, outperforming traditional tools like cTAKES and MetaMap and can handle extra attributes to be extracted. GENIE strongly enhances real-world applicability and scalability in healthcare systems. By open-sourcing the model and test data, we aim to encourage collaboration and drive further advancements in EHR structurization.
Improved Generation of Synthetic Imaging Data Using Feature-Aligned Diffusion
Synthetic data generation is an important application of machine learning in the field of medical imaging. While existing approaches have successfully applied fine-tuned diffusion models for synthesizing medical images, we explore potential improvements to this pipeline through feature-aligned diffusion. Our approach aligns intermediate features of the diffusion model to the output features of an expert, and our preliminary findings show an improvement of 9% in generation accuracy and ~0.12 in SSIM diversity. Our approach is also synergistic with existing methods, and easily integrated into diffusion training pipelines for improvements. We make our code available at https://github.com/lnairGT/Feature-Aligned-Diffusion.
DiffusionPipe: Training Large Diffusion Models with Efficient Pipelines
Diffusion models have emerged as dominant performers for image generation. To support training large diffusion models, this paper studies pipeline parallel training of diffusion models and proposes DiffusionPipe, a synchronous pipeline training system that advocates innovative pipeline bubble filling technique, catering to structural characteristics of diffusion models. State-of-the-art diffusion models typically include trainable (the backbone) and non-trainable (e.g., frozen input encoders) parts. We first unify optimal stage partitioning and pipeline scheduling of single and multiple backbones in representative diffusion models with a dynamic programming approach. We then propose to fill the computation of non-trainable model parts into idle periods of the pipeline training of the backbones by an efficient greedy algorithm, thus achieving high training throughput. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionPipe can achieve up to 1.41x speedup over pipeline parallel methods and 1.28x speedup over data parallel training on popular diffusion models.
Learning Eigenstructures of Unstructured Data Manifolds
We introduce a novel framework that directly learns a spectral basis for shape and manifold analysis from unstructured data, eliminating the need for traditional operator selection, discretization, and eigensolvers. Grounded in optimal-approximation theory, we train a network to decompose an implicit approximation operator by minimizing the reconstruction error in the learned basis over a chosen distribution of probe functions. For suitable distributions, they can be seen as an approximation of the Laplacian operator and its eigendecomposition, which are fundamental in geometry processing. Furthermore, our method recovers in a unified manner not only the spectral basis, but also the implicit metric's sampling density and the eigenvalues of the underlying operator. Notably, our unsupervised method makes no assumption on the data manifold, such as meshing or manifold dimensionality, allowing it to scale to arbitrary datasets of any dimension. On point clouds lying on surfaces in 3D and high-dimensional image manifolds, our approach yields meaningful spectral bases, that can resemble those of the Laplacian, without explicit construction of an operator. By replacing the traditional operator selection, construction, and eigendecomposition with a learning-based approach, our framework offers a principled, data-driven alternative to conventional pipelines. This opens new possibilities in geometry processing for unstructured data, particularly in high-dimensional spaces.
GRAPHIA: Harnessing Social Graph Data to Enhance LLM-Based Social Simulation
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human-like social behaviors. Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode both local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training. To address this gap, we propose Graphia, the first general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM post-training via reinforcement learning. With GNN-based structural rewards, Graphia trains specialized agents to predict whom to interact with (destination selection) and how to interact (edge generation), followed by designed graph generation pipelines. We evaluate Graphia under two settings: Transductive Dynamic Graph Generation (TDGG), a micro-level task with our proposed node-wise interaction alignment metrics; and Inductive Dynamic Graph Generation (IDGG), a macro-level task with our proposed metrics for aligning emergent network properties. On three real-world networks, Graphia improves micro-level alignment by 6.1% in the composite destination selection score, 12% in edge classification accuracy, and 27.9% in edge content BERTScore over the strongest baseline. For macro-level alignment, it achieves 41.11% higher structural similarity and 32.98% better replication of social phenomena such as power laws and echo chambers. Graphia also supports counterfactual simulation, generating plausible behavioral shifts under platform incentives. Our results show that social graphs can serve as high-quality supervision signals for LLM post-training, closing the gap between agent behaviors and network dynamics for LLM-based simulation. Code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/Graphia.git.
R&D-Agent-Quant: A Multi-Agent Framework for Data-Centric Factors and Model Joint Optimization
Financial markets pose fundamental challenges for asset return prediction due to their high dimensionality, non-stationarity, and persistent volatility. Despite advances in large language models and multi-agent systems, current quantitative research pipelines suffer from limited automation, weak interpretability, and fragmented coordination across key components such as factor mining and model innovation. In this paper, we propose R&D-Agent for Quantitative Finance, in short RD-Agent(Q), the first data-centric multi-agent framework designed to automate the full-stack research and development of quantitative strategies via coordinated factor-model co-optimization. RD-Agent(Q) decomposes the quant process into two iterative stages: a Research stage that dynamically sets goal-aligned prompts, formulates hypotheses based on domain priors, and maps them to concrete tasks, and a Development stage that employs a code-generation agent, Co-STEER, to implement task-specific code, which is then executed in real-market backtests. The two stages are connected through a feedback stage that thoroughly evaluates experimental outcomes and informs subsequent iterations, with a multi-armed bandit scheduler for adaptive direction selection. Empirically, RD-Agent(Q) achieves up to 2X higher annualized returns than classical factor libraries using 70% fewer factors, and outperforms state-of-the-art deep time-series models on real markets. Its joint factor-model optimization delivers a strong balance between predictive accuracy and strategy robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.
Assessing the Use of AutoML for Data-Driven Software Engineering
Background. Due to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for building software applications, companies are struggling to recruit employees with a deep understanding of such technologies. In this scenario, AutoML is soaring as a promising solution to fill the AI/ML skills gap since it promises to automate the building of end-to-end AI/ML pipelines that would normally be engineered by specialized team members. Aims. Despite the growing interest and high expectations, there is a dearth of information about the extent to which AutoML is currently adopted by teams developing AI/ML-enabled systems and how it is perceived by practitioners and researchers. Method. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we present a mixed-method study comprising a benchmark of 12 end-to-end AutoML tools on two SE datasets and a user survey with follow-up interviews to further our understanding of AutoML adoption and perception. Results. We found that AutoML solutions can generate models that outperform those trained and optimized by researchers to perform classification tasks in the SE domain. Also, our findings show that the currently available AutoML solutions do not live up to their names as they do not equally support automation across the stages of the ML development workflow and for all the team members. Conclusions. We derive insights to inform the SE research community on how AutoML can facilitate their activities and tool builders on how to design the next generation of AutoML technologies.
RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people
Large datasets of paired images and text have become increasingly popular for learning generic representations for vision and vision-and-language tasks. Such datasets have been built by querying search engines or collecting HTML alt-text -- since web data is noisy, they require complex filtering pipelines to maintain quality. We explore alternate data sources to collect high quality data with minimal filtering. We introduce RedCaps -- a large-scale dataset of 12M image-text pairs collected from Reddit. Images and captions from Reddit depict and describe a wide variety of objects and scenes. We collect data from a manually curated set of subreddits, which give coarse image labels and allow us to steer the dataset composition without labeling individual instances. We show that captioning models trained on RedCaps produce rich and varied captions preferred by humans, and learn visual representations that transfer to many downstream tasks.
Synthesizing Behaviorally-Grounded Reasoning Chains: A Data-Generation Framework for Personal Finance LLMs
Personalized financial advice requires consideration of user goals, constraints, risk tolerance, and jurisdiction. Prior LLM work has focused on support systems for investors and financial planners. Simultaneously, numerous recent studies examine broader personal finance tasks, including budgeting, debt management, retirement, and estate planning, through agentic pipelines that incur high maintenance costs, yielding less than 25% of their expected financial returns. In this study, we introduce a novel and reproducible framework that integrates relevant financial context with behavioral finance studies to construct supervision data for end-to-end advisors. Using this framework, we create a 19k sample reasoning dataset and conduct a comprehensive fine-tuning of the Qwen-3-8B model on the dataset. Through a held-out test split and a blind LLM-jury study, we demonstrate that through careful data curation and behavioral integration, our 8B model achieves performance comparable to significantly larger baselines (14-32B parameters) across factual accuracy, fluency, and personalization metrics while incurring 80% lower costs than the larger counterparts.
TabStruct: Measuring Structural Fidelity of Tabular Data
Evaluating tabular generators remains a challenging problem, as the unique causal structural prior of heterogeneous tabular data does not lend itself to intuitive human inspection. Recent work has introduced structural fidelity as a tabular-specific evaluation dimension to assess whether synthetic data complies with the causal structures of real data. However, existing benchmarks often neglect the interplay between structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions, thus failing to provide a holistic understanding of model performance. Moreover, they are typically limited to toy datasets, as quantifying existing structural fidelity metrics requires access to ground-truth causal structures, which are rarely available for real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that jointly considers structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions. We introduce a new evaluation metric, global utility, which enables the assessment of structural fidelity even in the absence of ground-truth causal structures. In addition, we present TabStruct, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark offering large-scale quantitative analysis on 13 tabular generators from nine distinct categories, across 29 datasets. Our results demonstrate that global utility provides a task-independent, domain-agnostic lens for tabular generator performance. We release the TabStruct benchmark suite, including all datasets, evaluation pipelines, and raw results. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.
RefineX: Learning to Refine Pre-training Data at Scale from Expert-Guided Programs
The foundational capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are deeply influenced by the quality of their pre-training corpora. However, enhancing data quality at scale remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the trade-off between refinement effectiveness and processing efficiency. While rule-based filtering remains the dominant paradigm, it typically operates at the document level and lacks the granularity needed to refine specific content within documents. Inspired by emerging work such as ProX, we propose RefineX, a novel framework for large-scale, surgical refinement of pre-training data through programmatic editing tasks. RefineX enables efficient and fine-grained data refinement while reliably preserving the diversity and naturalness of raw text. The core strength of RefineX lies in distilling high-quality, expert-guided end-to-end refinement results into minimal edit-based deletion programs. This high-precision distillation pipeline is used to train an efficient and reliable refine model that can systematically improve every instance in the corpus at scale. We evaluate RefineX across from-scratch pre-training at multiple model scales and find that it consistently outperforms models trained on raw, filtered, or alternatively refined data across diverse downstream tasks. On the 750M model, RefineX yields 2.6%-7.2% average gains on lighteval tasks, and achieves comparable performance using significantly fewer training tokens. Further analysis shows that RefineX reliably enhances text quality with both high efficiency and precision, outperforming prior approaches such as end-to-end generation and Prox-C. These results position RefineX as a scalable, effective, and reliable solution for optimizing pre-training data in modern LLM pipelines.
FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All -- Adapting Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language
Pre-training state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) requires vast amounts of clean and diverse text data. While the open development of large high-quality English pre-training datasets has seen substantial recent progress, training performant multilingual LLMs remains a challenge, in large part due to the inherent difficulty of tailoring filtering and deduplication pipelines to a large number of languages. In this work, we introduce a new pre-training dataset curation pipeline based on FineWeb that can be automatically adapted to support any language. We extensively ablate our pipeline design choices on a set of nine diverse languages, guided by a set of meaningful and informative evaluation tasks that were chosen through a novel selection process based on measurable criteria. Ultimately, we show that our pipeline can be used to create non-English corpora that produce more performant models than prior datasets. We additionally introduce a straightforward and principled approach to rebalance datasets that takes into consideration both duplication count and quality, providing an additional performance uplift. Finally, we scale our pipeline to over 1000 languages using almost 100 Common Crawl snapshots to produce FineWeb2, a new 20 terabyte (5 billion document) multilingual dataset which we release along with our pipeline, training, and evaluation codebases.
OmniConsistency: Learning Style-Agnostic Consistency from Paired Stylization Data
Diffusion models have advanced image stylization significantly, yet two core challenges persist: (1) maintaining consistent stylization in complex scenes, particularly identity, composition, and fine details, and (2) preventing style degradation in image-to-image pipelines with style LoRAs. GPT-4o's exceptional stylization consistency highlights the performance gap between open-source methods and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniConsistency, a universal consistency plugin leveraging large-scale Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). OmniConsistency contributes: (1) an in-context consistency learning framework trained on aligned image pairs for robust generalization; (2) a two-stage progressive learning strategy decoupling style learning from consistency preservation to mitigate style degradation; and (3) a fully plug-and-play design compatible with arbitrary style LoRAs under the Flux framework. Extensive experiments show that OmniConsistency significantly enhances visual coherence and aesthetic quality, achieving performance comparable to commercial state-of-the-art model GPT-4o.
F2LLM Technical Report: Matching SOTA Embedding Performance with 6 Million Open-Source Data
We introduce F2LLM - Foundation to Feature Large Language Models, a suite of state-of-the-art embedding models in three sizes: 0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B. Unlike previous top-ranking embedding models that require massive contrastive pretraining, sophisticated training pipelines, and costly synthetic training data, F2LLM is directly finetuned from foundation models on 6 million query-document-negative tuples curated from open-source, non-synthetic datasets, striking a strong balance between training cost, model size, and embedding performance. On the MTEB English leaderboard, F2LLM-4B ranks 2nd among models with approximately 4B parameters and 7th overall, while F2LLM-1.7B ranks 1st among models in the 1B-2B size range. To facilitate future research in the field, we release the models, training dataset, and code, positioning F2LLM as a strong, reproducible, and budget-friendly baseline for future works.
Unitxt: Flexible, Shareable and Reusable Data Preparation and Evaluation for Generative AI
In the dynamic landscape of generative NLP, traditional text processing pipelines limit research flexibility and reproducibility, as they are tailored to specific dataset, task, and model combinations. The escalating complexity, involving system prompts, model-specific formats, instructions, and more, calls for a shift to a structured, modular, and customizable solution. Addressing this need, we present Unitxt, an innovative library for customizable textual data preparation and evaluation tailored to generative language models. Unitxt natively integrates with common libraries like HuggingFace and LM-eval-harness and deconstructs processing flows into modular components, enabling easy customization and sharing between practitioners. These components encompass model-specific formats, task prompts, and many other comprehensive dataset processing definitions. The Unitxt-Catalog centralizes these components, fostering collaboration and exploration in modern textual data workflows. Beyond being a tool, Unitxt is a community-driven platform, empowering users to build, share, and advance their pipelines collaboratively. Join the Unitxt community at https://github.com/IBM/unitxt!
Improving Performance, Robustness, and Fairness of Radiographic AI Models with Finely-Controllable Synthetic Data
Achieving robust performance and fairness across diverse patient populations remains a challenge in developing clinically deployable deep learning models for diagnostic imaging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising strategy to address limitations in dataset scale and diversity. We introduce RoentGen-v2, a text-to-image diffusion model for chest radiographs that enables fine-grained control over both radiographic findings and patient demographic attributes, including sex, age, and race/ethnicity. RoentGen-v2 is the first model to generate clinically plausible images with demographic conditioning, facilitating the creation of a large, demographically balanced synthetic dataset comprising over 565,000 images. We use this large synthetic dataset to evaluate optimal training pipelines for downstream disease classification models. In contrast to prior work that combines real and synthetic data naively, we propose an improved training strategy that leverages synthetic data for supervised pretraining, followed by fine-tuning on real data. Through extensive evaluation on over 137,000 chest radiographs from five institutions, we demonstrate that synthetic pretraining consistently improves model performance, generalization to out-of-distribution settings, and fairness across demographic subgroups. Across datasets, synthetic pretraining led to a 6.5% accuracy increase in the performance of downstream classification models, compared to a modest 2.7% increase when naively combining real and synthetic data. We observe this performance improvement simultaneously with the reduction of the underdiagnosis fairness gap by 19.3%. These results highlight the potential of synthetic imaging to advance equitable and generalizable medical deep learning under real-world data constraints. We open source our code, trained models, and synthetic dataset at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/RoentGen-v2 .
Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: "One Map, Many Trials" in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis
Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-resolution wealth maps that can be leveraged across multiple causal trials. However, because standard training objectives prioritize overall predictive accuracy, these predictions inherently suffer from shrinkage toward the mean, leading to attenuated estimates of causal treatment effects and limiting their utility in policy. Existing debiasing methods, such as Prediction-Powered Inference, can handle this attenuation bias but require additional fresh ground-truth data at the downstream stage of causal inference, which restricts their applicability in data-scarce environments. Here, we introduce and evaluate two correction methods -- linear calibration correction and Tweedie's correction -- that substantially reduce prediction bias without relying on newly collected labeled data. Linear calibration corrects bias through a straightforward linear transformation derived from held-out calibration data, whereas Tweedie's correction leverages empirical Bayes principles to directly address shrinkage-induced biases by exploiting score functions derived from the model's learning patterns. Through analytical exercises and experiments using Demographic and Health Survey data, we demonstrate that the proposed methods meet or outperform existing approaches that either require (a) adjustments to training pipelines or (b) additional labeled data. These approaches may represent a promising avenue for improving the reliability of causal inference when direct outcome measures are limited or unavailable, enabling a "one map, many trials" paradigm where a single upstream data creation team produces predictions usable by many downstream teams across diverse ML pipelines.
FOUND: Foot Optimization with Uncertain Normals for Surface Deformation Using Synthetic Data
Surface reconstruction from multi-view images is a challenging task, with solutions often requiring a large number of sampled images with high overlap. We seek to develop a method for few-view reconstruction, for the case of the human foot. To solve this task, we must extract rich geometric cues from RGB images, before carefully fusing them into a final 3D object. Our FOUND approach tackles this, with 4 main contributions: (i) SynFoot, a synthetic dataset of 50,000 photorealistic foot images, paired with ground truth surface normals and keypoints; (ii) an uncertainty-aware surface normal predictor trained on our synthetic dataset; (iii) an optimization scheme for fitting a generative foot model to a series of images; and (iv) a benchmark dataset of calibrated images and high resolution ground truth geometry. We show that our normal predictor outperforms all off-the-shelf equivalents significantly on real images, and our optimization scheme outperforms state-of-the-art photogrammetry pipelines, especially for a few-view setting. We release our synthetic dataset and baseline 3D scans to the research community.
Demo of the Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System -- LiFE
In the proposed demo, we will present a new software - Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE (https://github.com/kmi-linguistics/life) - an open-source, web-based linguistic data management and analysis application that allows for systematic storage, management, sharing and usage of linguistic data collected from the field. The application allows users to store lexical items, sentences, paragraphs, audio-visual content with rich glossing / annotation; generate interactive and print dictionaries; and also train and use natural language processing tools and models for various purposes using this data. Since its a web-based application, it also allows for seamless collaboration among multiple persons and sharing the data, models, etc with each other. The system uses the Python-based Flask framework and MongoDB in the backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript at the frontend. The interface allows creation of multiple projects that could be shared with the other users. At the backend, the application stores the data in RDF format so as to allow its release as Linked Data over the web using semantic web technologies - as of now it makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon for storing the lexical data and Ligt for storing the interlinear glossed text and then internally linking it to the other linked lexicons and databases such as DBpedia and WordNet. Furthermore it provides support for training the NLP systems using scikit-learn and HuggingFace Transformers libraries as well as make use of any model trained using these libraries - while the user interface itself provides limited options for tuning the system, an externally-trained model could be easily incorporated within the application; similarly the dataset itself could be easily exported into a standard machine-readable format like JSON or CSV that could be consumed by other programs and pipelines.
Splatting Physical Scenes: End-to-End Real-to-Sim from Imperfect Robot Data
Creating accurate, physical simulations directly from real-world robot motion holds great value for safe, scalable, and affordable robot learning, yet remains exceptionally challenging. Real robot data suffers from occlusions, noisy camera poses, dynamic scene elements, which hinder the creation of geometrically accurate and photorealistic digital twins of unseen objects. We introduce a novel real-to-sim framework tackling all these challenges at once. Our key insight is a hybrid scene representation merging the photorealistic rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting with explicit object meshes suitable for physics simulation within a single representation. We propose an end-to-end optimization pipeline that leverages differentiable rendering and differentiable physics within MuJoCo to jointly refine all scene components - from object geometry and appearance to robot poses and physical parameters - directly from raw and imprecise robot trajectories. This unified optimization allows us to simultaneously achieve high-fidelity object mesh reconstruction, generate photorealistic novel views, and perform annotation-free robot pose calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulation and on challenging real-world sequences using an ALOHA 2 bi-manual manipulator, enabling more practical and robust real-to-simulation pipelines.
RedStone: Curating General, Code, Math, and QA Data for Large Language Models
Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on high-quality, meticulously curated datasets is widely recognized as critical for enhancing their performance and generalization capabilities. This study explores the untapped potential of Common Crawl as a comprehensive and flexible resource for pre-training LLMs, addressing both general-purpose language understanding and specialized domain knowledge. We introduce RedStone, an innovative and scalable pipeline engineered to extract and process data from Common Crawl, facilitating the creation of extensive and varied pre-training datasets. Unlike traditional datasets, which often require expensive curation and domain-specific expertise, RedStone leverages the breadth of Common Crawl to deliver datasets tailored to a wide array of domains. In this work, we exemplify its capability by constructing pre-training datasets across multiple fields, including general language understanding, code, mathematics, and question-answering tasks. The flexibility of RedStone allows for easy adaptation to other specialized domains, significantly lowering the barrier to creating valuable domain-specific datasets. Our findings demonstrate that Common Crawl, when harnessed through effective pipelines like RedStone, can serve as a rich, renewable source of pre-training data, unlocking new avenues for domain adaptation and knowledge discovery in LLMs. This work also underscores the importance of innovative data acquisition strategies and highlights the role of web-scale data as a powerful resource in the continued evolution of LLMs. RedStone code and data samples will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/redstone.
Don't Retrieve, Generate: Prompting LLMs for Synthetic Training Data in Dense Retrieval
Training effective dense retrieval models often relies on hard negative (HN) examples mined from the document corpus via methods like BM25 or cross-encoders (CE), processes that can be computationally demanding and require full corpus access. This paper introduces a different approach, an end-to-end pipeline where a Large Language Model (LLM) first generates a query from a passage, and then generates a hard negative example using only that query text. This corpus-free negative generation contrasts with standard mining techniques. We evaluated this LLM Query rightarrow LLM HN approach against traditional LLM Query rightarrow BM25 HN and LLM Query rightarrow CE HN pipelines using E5-Base and GTE-Base models on several BEIR benchmark datasets. Our results show the proposed all-LLM pipeline achieves performance identical to both the BM25 and the computationally intensive CE baselines across nDCG@10, Precision@10, and Recall@100 metrics. This demonstrates that our corpus-free negative generation method matches the effectiveness of complex, corpus-dependent mining techniques, offering a potentially simpler and more efficient pathway for training high-performance retrievers without sacrificing results. We make the dataset including the queries and the hard-negatives for all three methods publicly available https://huggingface.co/collections/chungimungi/arxiv-hard-negatives-68027bbc601ff6cc8eb1f449.
Perplexed by Quality: A Perplexity-based Method for Adult and Harmful Content Detection in Multilingual Heterogeneous Web Data
As demand for large corpora increases with the size of current state-of-the-art language models, using web data as the main part of the pre-training corpus for these models has become a ubiquitous practice. This, in turn, has introduced an important challenge for NLP practitioners, as they are now confronted with the task of developing highly optimized models and pipelines for pre-processing large quantities of textual data, which implies, effectively classifying and filtering multilingual, heterogeneous and noisy data, at web scale. One of the main components of this pre-processing step for the pre-training corpora of large language models, is the removal of adult and harmful content. In this paper we explore different methods for detecting adult and harmful of content in multilingual heterogeneous web data. We first show how traditional methods in harmful content detection, that seemingly perform quite well in small and specialized datasets quickly break down when confronted with heterogeneous noisy web data. We then resort to using a perplexity based approach but with a twist: Instead of using a so-called "clean" corpus to train a small language model and then use perplexity so select the documents with low perplexity, i.e., the documents that resemble this so-called "clean" corpus the most. We train solely with adult and harmful textual data, and then select the documents having a perplexity value above a given threshold. This approach will virtually cluster our documents into two distinct groups, which will greatly facilitate the choice of the threshold for the perplexity and will also allow us to obtain higher precision than with the traditional classification methods for detecting adult and harmful content.
SyGra: A Unified Graph-Based Framework for Scalable Generation, Quality Tagging, and Management of Synthetic Data
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) is critically dependent on the availability of high-quality datasets for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), alignment tasks like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), etc. In this work, we present a comprehensive synthetic data generation framework that facilitates scalable, configurable, and high-fidelity generation of synthetic data tailored for these training paradigms. Our approach employs a modular and configuration-based pipeline capable of modeling complex dialogue flows with minimal manual intervention. This framework uses a dual-stage quality tagging mechanism, combining heuristic rules and LLM-based evaluations, to automatically filter and score data extracted from OASST-formatted conversations, ensuring the curation of high-quality dialogue samples. The resulting datasets are structured under a flexible schema supporting both SFT and DPO use cases, enabling seamless integration into diverse training workflows. Together, these innovations offer a robust solution for generating and managing synthetic conversational data at scale, significantly reducing the overhead of data preparation in LLM training pipelines.
Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts
We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dynamic transferability, we propose to "render" actions into precise visual prompts as domain-agnostic representations that preserve both geometric precision and cross-domain adaptability for complex actions; specifically, we choose visual skeletons for their generality and accessibility. We propose robust pipelines to construct skeletons from two interaction-rich data sources - human-object interactions (HOI) and dexterous robotic manipulation - enabling cross-domain training of action-driven generative models. By integrating visual skeletons into pretrained video generation models via lightweight fine-tuning, we enable precise action control of complex interaction while preserving the learning of cross-domain dynamics. Experiments on EgoVid, RT-1 and DROID demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/VAP/.
Interactive Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Models
We introduce RIPT-VLA, a simple and scalable reinforcement-learning-based interactive post-training paradigm that fine-tunes pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using only sparse binary success rewards. Existing VLA training pipelines rely heavily on offline expert demonstration data and supervised imitation, limiting their ability to adapt to new tasks and environments under low-data regimes. RIPT-VLA addresses this by enabling interactive post-training with a stable policy optimization algorithm based on dynamic rollout sampling and leave-one-out advantage estimation. RIPT-VLA has the following characteristics. First, it applies to various VLA models, resulting in an improvement on the lightweight QueST model by 21.2%, and the 7B OpenVLA-OFT model to an unprecedented 97.5% success rate. Second, it is computationally efficient and data-efficient: with only one demonstration, RIPT-VLA enables an unworkable SFT model (4%) to succeed with a 97% success rate within 15 iterations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the policy learned by RIPT-VLA generalizes across different tasks and scenarios and is robust to the initial state context. These results highlight RIPT-VLA as a practical and effective paradigm for post-training VLA models through minimal supervision.
PurpCode: Reasoning for Safer Code Generation
We introduce PurpCode, the first post-training recipe for training safe code reasoning models towards generating secure code and defending against malicious cyberactivities. PurpCode trains a reasoning model in two stages: (i) Rule Learning, which explicitly teaches the model to reference cybersafety rules to generate vulnerability-free code and to avoid facilitating malicious cyberactivities; and (ii) Reinforcement Learning, which optimizes model safety and preserves model utility through diverse, multi-objective reward mechanisms. To empower the training pipelines with comprehensive cybersafety data, we conduct internal red-teaming to synthesize comprehensive and high-coverage prompts based on real-world tasks for inducing unsafe cyberactivities in the model. Based on PurpCode, we develop a reasoning-based coding model, namely PurpCode-32B, which demonstrates state-of-the-art cybersafety, outperforming various frontier models. Meanwhile, our alignment method decreases the model overrefusal rates in both general and cybersafety-specific scenarios, while preserving model utility in both code generation and common security knowledge.
EnronQA: Towards Personalized RAG over Private Documents
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become one of the most popular methods for bringing knowledge-intensive context to large language models (LLM) because of its ability to bring local context at inference time without the cost or data leakage risks associated with fine-tuning. A clear separation of private information from the LLM training has made RAG the basis for many enterprise LLM workloads as it allows the company to augment LLM's understanding using customers' private documents. Despite its popularity for private documents in enterprise deployments, current RAG benchmarks for validating and optimizing RAG pipelines draw their corpora from public data such as Wikipedia or generic web pages and offer little to no personal context. Seeking to empower more personal and private RAG we release the EnronQA benchmark, a dataset of 103,638 emails with 528,304 question-answer pairs across 150 different user inboxes. EnronQA enables better benchmarking of RAG pipelines over private data and allows for experimentation on the introduction of personalized retrieval settings over realistic data. Finally, we use EnronQA to explore the tradeoff in memorization and retrieval when reasoning over private documents.
Assemblage: Automatic Binary Dataset Construction for Machine Learning
Binary code is pervasive, and binary analysis is a key task in reverse engineering, malware classification, and vulnerability discovery. Unfortunately, while there exist large corpuses of malicious binaries, obtaining high-quality corpuses of benign binaries for modern systems has proven challenging (e.g., due to licensing issues). Consequently, machine learning based pipelines for binary analysis utilize either costly commercial corpuses (e.g., VirusTotal) or open-source binaries (e.g., coreutils) available in limited quantities. To address these issues, we present Assemblage: an extensible cloud-based distributed system that crawls, configures, and builds Windows PE binaries to obtain high-quality binary corpuses suitable for training state-of-the-art models in binary analysis. We have run Assemblage on AWS over the past year, producing 890k Windows PE and 428k Linux ELF binaries across 29 configurations. Assemblage is designed to be both reproducible and extensible, enabling users to publish "recipes" for their datasets, and facilitating the extraction of a wide array of features. We evaluated Assemblage by using its data to train modern learning-based pipelines for compiler provenance and binary function similarity. Our results illustrate the practical need for robust corpuses of high-quality Windows PE binaries in training modern learning-based binary analyses. Assemblage can be downloaded from https://assemblage-dataset.net
